Response to Campisi and Starna

When I submitted "A Case of Identity: Ethnogenesis of the New Houma Indians" to Ethnohistory, my only concern was that its publication might provoke an ad hominem reaction from supporters of the United Houma Nation, Inc.'s (UHN's) bid for federal recognition. However, although mindful of that possibility, it never occurred to me that any respondents would center their attack on allegations of the type raised by Campisi and Starns. Rather than focusing on the truly interesting issues surrounding the ethnic history of the people represented by the UHN, Campisi and Starns have undertaken what can only be characterized as an attempt at professional character assassination that is both poisonous and defamatory.

Campisi and Starns properly report their longstanding involvement with the efforts of the UHN to gain federal recognition. They also reproach me for failing to report that I was an expert witness for the defense in a suit brought by the UHN in a federal court. That action, which ended with a summary judgment against the UHN more than five years ago, involved an indigenous land rights claim with respect to a particular small parcel in southern Louisiana and had nothing to do with the still-pending petition before the Bureau of Acknowledgment Research (BAR). Although one might guess as much from the footnote attached to their paragraph on this issue, it should be explicitly noted that Dr. Starns provided testimony on behalf of the UHN in that same court case. Presumably Dr. Starns does not believe that his involvement in that case diminishes his objectivity with respect to the matters treated in my article, yet he clearly intends for readers to conclude that I am tarnished because I testified for the opposing side.

Campisi and Starns make much of the fact that, in writing my article, I had access to both the BAR's proposed finding against recognition and the UHN's rebuttal. Both are public documents that contain an enormous amount of information pertinent to the question of Houma identity, and it is confounding that any researcher would be chastised for having and using them. Without saying it in so many words, Campisi and Starns then proceed to lay out a rather transparent claim that I have committed some form of academic fraud because some of my evidence replicates evidence presented in the BAR's Proposed Finding and because some of my conclusions dovetail with the reasoning found there.

Some readers of this journal may be unaware of the extensive research that is carried out by professional staff of the BAR as background for a decision about acknowledgement. In evaluating a request for federal recognition, BAR anthropologists, historians, and genealogists undertake a quite wide-ranging investigation involving site visits; examining church, court, and military records; and reviewing other published and unpublished ethnographic and documentary sources. Inevitably, any researcher who was studying the history of the Houma would consult and cite many of the same sources that were examined by the BAR; it could hardly be otherwise. Indeed, one of my purposes, as should have been clear from the central references to BAR work in my introductory paragraphs, was to bring to light some of the intriguing findings of BAR researchers that would otherwise have been unavailable to a wide scholarly audience. Yet Campisi and Starns attempt to paint a picture of an article that merely piggybacks on misguided conclusions of BAR staff while consciously overlooking countervailing information. To give one example, in the second of their fourteen "parallels," Campisi and Starns point out that my characterization of the "Cajun" cultural characteristics of the modern Houma is similar to that of Holly Reckord in the BAR's Proposed Finding. They neglect to mention that parallel characterizations have been written by other authors, including Max Stanton (1971) and Ann Fischer (1968), who was one of the strongest academic supporters of the Houma's rights.

Campisi and Starns' admonition (parallel 5) that I failed to note that Henry Bourgeois was "a well-known bigot hostile to the Houmas" is bizarre in light of the fact that I introduced the sentence that they are criticizing in my article with...