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Nativism: Capitalist Anti-Native bias
Oct 24, 2007

Focus:Indigenous Rights
Action Request:Think About
Location:United States
Nativism: The ultimate misnomer

I have recently learned about "nativism," an area of study that can only be described as "anti-native."

I have created some formal (but yet unreferenced) writing that to initiate action to rename whatever it is that these people are trying to study.

Nativism, from what I have read, says that local peoples will usually attempt to reject new comers, such as immigrants, because they want to protect themselves. Racism is nearly always linked to the native, and the immigrants are invariably described as innocent victims in the literature. Their point is obvious, and I think the Anglo resistance to Irish immigration is the most famous example. That struggle I think is what made the Kennedy presidency so significant.

What got me about nativism is the name; it is derived from the term native, and I think that there is a gross misuse of the word that can only result in pain for Native Americans, who will be perceived as racists, when in fact it was the Europeans that were, and still are, racist.

Since this is written knowing that many people support unlimited immigration, I try to take a cross section in the other direction, showing that problems are caused more by a disruption of the natural evolution, or development, of communities irrespective of their status as citizens or immigrants.

I also try to show that the word is so badly misused that I have become suspicious that there has been some kind of anti-Native conspiracy behind the use of the word, as I have seen with other terms.

Here is the link to the writing, which may keep growing:
http://docs.google.com/Doc?id=ddk32zv4_484dwd9xb

Of all the different things I have been reading and writing about, the derivation of the word native to describe "nativism" as racially motivated bias actually keeps me up at night.

It is very interesting to me is how so many terms can be commonly used in nearly opposite ways; the term liberal is an excellent example.  It is used so, well, liberally that even President Bush considers himself a liberal, in that he is liberal towards corporations, and against the presumably greedy government and mean-spirited social activists.  The vast majority of people, of course, see liberal as meaning generous or charitable, and hence socialist in nature -- clearly not Bush doctrine.

Another example is the word "capital," which I am now using in a very fundamental sense to show how our society is an extension of the Roman and Egyptian empires, after Mumford.  I say that "for capitalism, a capital is necessary" as a place to accumulate the wealth derived from other peoples' resources often from very far away. 

Globalism, I am trying to show, is revolutionary only in that it creates cooperation between distant capitals, such as New York and Beijing, and creates new ones, such as Dubai, which is becoming a "recreational capital" like Las Vegas, but factors larger.

These words are fun to play with, but on a less fun note, I have added to my capital concepts "family capital," which I initially derived from thinking about the "feminine genital mutilation," or FGM, situation.  I use this term because the FGM seems to be used to ruin girls' sexuality prevent them from leaving the home causing families to lose an "human asset," or capital.  It shows how capital concepts, especially the cruel ones that empires have, may have roots in the initial family structure.  FGM is most widely practiced in the oldest areas of human habitation: Kenya and the nations of the Horn of Africa.

The term "Nativism" is to me an emergency case of confused terminology because the term is critically needed by social science at this very moment to describe tribal native cultures and their ways. 

Native cultures are both more vulnerable and more valuable than ever.  Among things, they have the hereditary keys to symbiotic living with the environment, and they also have the psychological and social knowledge that society needs to re-weave its fabric.  From my reading, most social science knowledge derives from the study of tribal natives: Margret Mead and Ruth Benedict.  Constructivism nearly entirely relies on tribal natives for its cornerstone concept: the "community of knowledge."

To show how inappropriate the use of the term "nativist" is, I am trying to bring attention to a cited example that describes a fight between Chinese and Irish railroad workers.  Just as the Union Railroad met the Pacific Railroad, two workforces got into a battle, in which the Irish apparently beat the Chinese.  Because both these groups were living in constantly moving boxcars, it is hard to imagine either of them being native.  And I think that because the Irish won, giving them the appearance of greater aggressiveness, they were labeled the "natives," and hence predatory racists.

I think that the two rails met in California** , as the Union Railroad had a much easier time crossing the prairies, so that would make the actual scene where the two work gangs fought the land that should have been entitled to Ishi the last of the Yahi, whose tribe that was exterminated by immigrants.  Ishi's biography is one of the saddest stories in literature.

**Note: Scratch that.  I now recall that they met at Promontory Point, Utah, but my mistake provides a good example. I will have to reword it.

The citing of the gang fight in nativist literature shows that nativism most commonly describes conflicts between populations trying to take control of land that was not only stolen from genuine natives, but also stolen from the public domain -- everybody.  This, to me, is shameful all around, and tells me that humanity really needs to rethink its validity, and needs to do this thinking before it is too late.

When describing natives in the truest sense, I have found it is necessary to describe them as "tribal natives" to show their social arrangements, and most important, their connection to the land, and in some cases the ocean.

This evolutionary connection to the land is where social scientists can find the values to get past the social and environmental problems that humanity now facing, where nearly every scientist who has looked at our future is predicting a cataclysmic breakdown of the environment, and humanity with it.  This was the motive behind  my empathy studies, where I use evolutionary concepts of empathy to show a psychological human connection to animals that is represented by native spirituality.  My view contradicts the common perception of natives as forest predators.  I have since accumulated information that shows a natural native tendency to a vegetarian diet when the environment allows -- natives consider animals to be their friends and in some cases intermediaries to God.  This idea that goes a long way to explain the rapid success of animal domestication, where two animals, and perhaps three, have become part of humanity: the dog, cat, and horse.  A third animal, the house mouse, also supports the concept in an indirect way.

My personal experiences with natives, be they tribal or simply locals descendant of immigrants, have always been positive and welcoming, with the single exception being certain Southern states.  In those cases, the bias against me is easily explainable in terms of the Northern atrocities during the Civil War, such as the burning of Atlanta, and the influence of the KKK.  From my perspective, the KKK is a colonial organization that is so anti-native as to be barely American despite what Klansmen may say about themselves.  I have also found that Americans will commonly claim native descent if they can, even if it only exists in their imaginations.

Blacks are special in native terms because they are tribal natives brought to the New World who successfully retained their tribal heritages to go on to create, or at least greatly influence, all the world's popular music forms.  Blacks mixed quickly with the local tribal natives (the terminology gets longer) to create the Creole culture.  In Jamaica, tribal Blacks formed the Maroon, or Rasta, mountain culture, which is considered to be genuinely African when compared to African native tribes. 

Blacks and Natives also mixed easily with working class Whites when and where it was allowed, such as in New Orleans before the Louisiana Purchase.  This implies to me that working class Whites may have preserved their own tribal native tendencies during the thousands of years of capital domination.

I am trying to show with Black culture that tribal natives don't necessarily have to be locally native to be genuinely native.  Another example of tribalism is the hippie culture that expresses itself at the Rainbow Gatherings -- tribal nativism can derive from non-native, or colonial, immigration, and still be genuinely native, even according to many "genuine" Natives.

From all this I derive a single divide: capital vs. native tribal.  And to me this divide dates back to the time when our capital culture was invented, the Roman era.   To me, the perversion of the word "liberal" by the "free market" writers makes me suspicious that crucial meanings are being deliberately twisted to lead entire areas of thought in the wrong direction, towards environmental and social catastrophe.

Whether or not the use of the root word "native" in "nativist" has been a deliberate perversion of language for reasons of bias may be impossible to prove, but it's use is dangerously misleading.  I believe the use of the term may increase the hurting of the local poor cultures who are often displaced and hence disintegrated by mass immigrations simply because of misconceptions that this misuse of language may create. 

Since the term is usually used in this way mostly in colleges and universities, young and impressionable social scientists may become biased against local cultures in favor of immigrant populations in policy making environments, believing that locals are predisposed to racism.  From the constructivist perspective, local populations may need protection from immigrant waves.  Each time a local culture is quashed (for any reason), there is a resulting loss of community of knowledge, and hence social and psychological stability which will ultimately cost more in the capital sense than is gained from the perceived benefits of increased human capital through mass immigration.

For much of this writing I am using personal experiences, and for much of my tribal native thinking I am using my imagination as I walk through the forests, as I know that the accumulated native knowledge has been consistently suppressed.  For specific Roman information I am reading Will Durant because I know he is a strong proponent of Roman culture, yet he does not hide its barbarity.  He says that the cruelty of Rome was somehow a necessary component of the creation of our present day classical culture, a conclusion I disagree with.  But because Durant and I disagree on many things, there is no chance of bias on our part; concepts that we do agree on are strengthened by factors.  For that very same reason I try to be careful with Humanist conclusions.  Since I agree with Humanists nearly always, concepts that we share that seem obvious to us may actually be unsupported, and hence unproved assumptions.
Visibility: Everyone
Posted: Wednesday October 24, 2007, 3:22 pm
Tags: native capital indigenous racism capitalism bias nativism [add/edit tags]

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