-Angela Valenzuela
Wednesday, January 30, 2019
It's time to Reinvest in Texas Teachers
Investing in our state's teachers is long overdue as stated in today's Austin American-Statesman posted below. Also, consider attending the March 11, 2019 Texas state teachers rally to the Capitol in Austin, Texas. While we are at it, school district leaders, lest make it a point to hire a more culturally diverse faculty. It'll make a positive difference in your school for everyone.
-Angela Valenzuela
-Angela Valenzuela
Sunday, January 27, 2019
Reverberations of Memory,Violence, And History: A Conference for theCentennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation
Friends,
Do consider attending this conference taking place January 31-February 1, 2019 at the Bullock Museum located at 1800 Congress Ave., Austin, TX 78701 • Map it
-Angela
Reverberations of Memory,Violence, And History: A Conference for theCentennial of the 1919 Canales Investigation
January 31, 2019 - February 1, 2019
Over ninety years ago, a border native and the only Mexican
American serving in the state legislature, José Tomas ‘JT’ Canales called for
an investigation into state-sanctioned violence unleashed on the predominantly
Mexican-origin community in the state’s southern border.
This two-day conference
held on the centennial of that investigation will dive deep into that
investigation and its ongoing legacies in the state of Texas.
Event Details
The Bullock Museum is pleased to host a FREE two-day conference
exploring the 1919 Canales Investigation and its ongoing legacies in Texas.
Presentations will feature internationally-recognized scholars and researchers
from the United States, Mexico, and the United Kingdom, who will deliver
different perspectives on the history of lynching and other extralegal violence
in Texas, the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, and the U.S. South. Topics of discussion
will include the relationship between Mexican American communities and the
Texas Rangers, women’s anti-lynching activism, histories of racialized state
violence, and the importance of civil rights struggles throughout the twentieth
century, all set within broader considerations of borderlands and transnational
history.
Sessions run 8:30am-5:30pm on Thursday, January 31st and
8:30am-4:30pm on Friday, February 1st. Click here for
preliminary session and presenter details.
Registration is now open for this conference! Click the RSVP link
to register.
The 1919 Canales Investigation Conference is co-sponsored by:
Any views, findings, conclusions, or recommendations expressed in
this forthcoming conference and subsequent edited volume, do not necessarily
represent those of the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Support for the Bullock
Museum's exhibitions and education programs provided by the Texas State History
Museum Foundation.
Saturday, January 19, 2019
How the Loss of Native American Languages Affects our Understanding of the Natural World by Rosalyn R. LaPier
We must do everything to preserve and revitalize Indigenous languages and dialects.
Language extinction should indeed be viewed, as posited below, as serious as the extinction of a plant or animal. Our education system needs to be a core part of the solution. Read on.
-Angela
"Embedded in indigenous languages, in particular, is knowledge about ecosystems, conservation methods, plant life, animal behavior and many other aspects of the natural world."
Language extinction should indeed be viewed, as posited below, as serious as the extinction of a plant or animal. Our education system needs to be a core part of the solution. Read on.
-Angela
 |
Dance is a unique way of passing on cultural stories to a younger generation. Aaron Hawkins/Flickr.com, CC BY-ND |
Associate Professor of Environmental Studies, The University of Montana
Alaska has a “linguistic emergency,” according to the Alaskan Gov. Bill Walker. A report warned earlier this year that all of the state’s 20 Native American languages might cease to exist by the end of this century, if the state did not act.
American policies, particularly in the six decades between the 1870s and 1930s, suppressed Native American languages and culture. It was only after years of activism by indigenous leaders that the Native American Languages Act was passed in 1990, which allowed for the preservation and protection of indigenous languages. Nonetheless, many Native American languages have been on the verge of extinction for the past many years.
Languages carry deep cultural knowledge and insights. So, what does the loss of these languages mean in terms of our understanding of the world.
Environmental knowledge
Embedded in indigenous languages, in particular, is knowledge about ecosystems, conservation methods, plant life, animal behavior and many other aspects of the natural world.
In Hawaiian traditions and belief systems,for example, the tree snails were connected to “the realm of the gods.” Hawaiian royalty revered them, which protected them from overharvesting.
The Bishop Museum in Honolulu holds a shell necklace, or lei, of Queen Lili‘uokalani, the last monarch of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It is made from tree snail shells, which signifies the high rank of female royalty. Wearing a shell was believed to provide “mana,” or spiritual power and a way to understand ancestral knowledge.
Many of these snails are now extinct and those remaining are threatened with extinction. Scientists are working with Hawaiian language experts to learn about the belief systems that once helped protect them and their habitats.
Words in indigenous languages can have cultural meanings, that can be lost during translation. Understanding the subtle differences can often shift one’s perspective about how indigenous people thought about the natural world.
For example, as an indigenous scholar of the environment, I led a team some years ago of language experts, elders and scholars from Montana and Alberta, Canada, to create a list of Blackfeet words, called a lexicon, of museum objects. The elders I worked with noted that the English word “herb,” which was used to describe most plant specimens within museums, did not have the same meaning in Blackfeet.
In English, the word “herb” can have numerous meanings, including a seasoning for food. The closest English word to herb in Blackfeet is “aapíínima’tsis.” The elders explained this word means “a tool that doctors use.”
The hope is that the lexicon and audio files recorded in the Blackfeet language that our research helped create, might assist future scholars access the embedded meanings in languages.
Many Native American communities in the United States are now working to save these cultural insights and revitalize their languages.
In Wisconsin, an Ojibwe language school called “Waadookodaading,”translated literally as “a place where people help each other,” immerses its students in the environmental knowledge embedded in the language.
The Ojibwe believe that theirs is a language of action. And the best way for children to learn is by doing and observing the natural world. Each spring, for example, the students go into the woods to gather maple sap from trees, which is processed into maple syrup and sugar. These students learn about indigenous knowledge of plants, their habitats and uses.
Language loss can be considered as extreme as the extinction of a plant or an animal. Once a language is gone, the traditional knowledge it carries also gets erased from society.
Efforts are now underway worldwide to remind people of this reality. The United Nations has designated 2019 as the “International Year of Indigenous Languages” in order to raise awareness of indigenous languages as holders of “complex systems of knowledge” and encourage nation states to work toward their revitalization.
The loss of indigenous languages is not Alaska’s concern alone. It affects all of us.
Friday, January 18, 2019
Why Do We Keep Using the Word ‘Caucasian’? When a term signifies something that does not exist, we need to examine our use of it
Why Do We Keep Using the Word ‘Caucasian’?
When a term signifies something that does not exist, we need to examine our use of it
By Yolanda Moses
The word “Caucasian” is used in the
U.S. to describe white people, but it doesn’t indicate anything real. It’s the
wrong term to use! My colleague and one of my longtime writing partners, Carol
Mukhopadhyay, has written a wonderful article, “Getting Rid of the Word ‘Caucasian,’” that is
still relevant today for how it challenges us to critically examine the
language that we use. It’s obvious that language shapes how we perceive and see
the world. And we know how powerful the concept of race is and how the use of
words related to the notion of race has shaped what we call the U.S. racial
worldview. So why do we continue using the word “Caucasian”?
To answer that
question, it is helpful to understand where the term came from and its impact
on our society. The term “Caucasian” originated from a growing 18th-century
European science of racial classification. German anatomist Johann Blumenbach
visited the Caucasus Mountains, located between the Caspian and Black seas, and
he must have been enchanted because he labeled the people there “Caucasians”
and proposed that they were created in God’s image as an ideal form of
humanity.
And the label has
stuck to this day. According to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach went on to name four
other “races,” each considered “physically and morally ‘degenerate’ forms of
‘God’s original creation.’” He categorized Africans, excluding light-skinned
North Africans, as “Ethiopians” or “black.” He divided non-Caucasian Asians into
two separate races: the “Mongolian” or “yellow” race of Japan and China, and
the “Malayan” or “brown” race, which included Aboriginal Australians and
Pacific Islanders. And he called Native Americans the “red” race.
Blumenbach’s system of racial
classification was adopted in the United States to justify racial
discrimination — particularly
slavery. Popular race science and evolutionary theories generally posited that
there were separate races, that differences in behavior were tied to skin
color, and that there were scientific ways to measure race. One way racial
differences were defined was through craniometrics, which measured skull size
to determine the intelligence of each racial group. As you can imagine, this
flawed application of the scientific method resulted in race scientists
developing a flawed system of racial classification that ranked the five races from
most primitive (black and brown races), to more advanced (the Asian races), to
the most advanced (the white, or Caucasian, races). Even though the five-race
topology was later disproven, “Caucasian” still has currency in the U.S.
One reason we
keep using the term “Caucasian” is that the U.S. legal system made use of
Blumenbach’s taxonomy. As early as 1790 the first naturalization law was
passed, preventing foreigners who were not white from becoming citizens. But
according to Mukhopadhyay, Blumenbach’s category of “Caucasian” posed a problem
because his classification of white also included some North Africans,
Armenians, Persians, Arabs, and North Indians. The definition of Caucasian
had to be reinvented to focus the ideological category of whiteness on northern
and western Europe. The term, even though its exact definition changed over
time, was used to shape legal policy and the nature of our society.
A second reason
the term has had staying power is that, as new immigrants began to stream into
the country in the 20th century, political leaders and scientists supported
a new racial science called eugenics that
built on 19th-century notions of race. Eugenicists divided Caucasians into four
ranked subraces: Nordic, Alpine, Mediterranean, and Jew (Semitic). I’m sure you
will not be surprised to learn that the Nordics were ranked highest
intellectually and morally. These rankings were used by our government to
design and execute discriminatory immigration laws that preserved the political
dominance of Nordics, who were largely Protestant Christians.
Today, the word
“Caucasian” is still used in many official government documents, and it
continues to carry a kind of scientific weight. For example, it is found in
social science and medical research, and is used by some colleges and
universities in their data collection and distribution of student, staff, and
faculty statistics. In Mukhopadhyay’s research, she sampled government websites
and official documents and was surprised to learn how many government offices,
including the U.S. Census Bureau, still use the word.
So“Caucasian” became entrenched in our
legal, governmental, scientific, and social lives. And although the U.S.
government reluctantly denounced or at least played down racial science after
the atrocities of Adolf Hitler’s regime were fully exposed at the end of WWII,
the term has not been discarded.
What can we do to
change it? We need to acknowledge that the word “Caucasian” is still around and
that its continued use is problematic. We should use terms that are more
accurate, such as “European-American.” Doing so would at least be consistent
with the use of descriptive terms like “African-American,” “Mexican-American,”
and others that signify both a geographical and an American ancestry.
The bottom line
is that it is time for a modern — and
accurate — terminology. The
use of an outdated and disproven term that falsely purports to describe a separate
race of people has no place in the U.S.
Yolanda Moses is
a professor of anthropology and a former associate vice chancellor for
diversity, equity, and excellence at the University of California, Riverside.
Her research focuses on the broad question of the origins of social inequality
in complex societies. Moses has explored gender and class disparities in the
Caribbean, East Africa, and the United States. More recently, her research has
focused on issues of diversity and change in universities and colleges in the
United States, India, Europe, and South Africa. She has co-authored two books
about race: Race: Are We So Different?, written
with Alan Goodman and Joseph Jones, and How Real Is Race?: A Sourcebook on
Race, Culture, and Biology, with Carol Mukhopadhyay and
Rosemary Henze. In 2017 she received a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in
Cultural Competence at the University of Sydney, in Australia. Moses is a
former president of the American Anthropological Association.