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Chapter 14 before predator came: a plea for expanding first nations scholarship as european shadow work David Gabbard As difficult as it may be for non-Indian people to realize the corruption of American institutions, such as universities, or to acknowledge the hypnotic effect of propaganda and hegemony, it may be far more difficult for them to mitigate the shadow side of their own cultural histories. In this chapter a non-Indian scholar stresses how vital it is to do so nonetheless, for until a true realization occurs, the United States of America will likely continue its cultural genocide against Indigenous People, as well as continuing its similar intrusions of colonialism in other parts of the world and on other people. He points out that for this realization to take place, we must recognize First Nations scholarship as a set of practices aimed at helping everyone remember themselves and that efforts to discredit that scholarship and the worldviews that it attempts to recover can keep us in a cycle of genocide that will ultimately consume us. David Gabbard holds the rank of Professor in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at East Carolina University in Greenville, North Carolina. He is the editor of Knowledge and Power in the Global Economy: Politics and the Rhetoric of School Reform, and co-editor (with Kenneth J. Saltman) of Education as Enforcement: The Militarization and Corporatization of Schools. He has also edited a volume in E. Wayne Ross’ Defending Public Schools series entitled Education under the Security State. *** In his latest contribution to First Nations scholarship, Kill the Indian, Save the Man,1 the controversial scholar Ward Churchill strives to correct some of the shortcomings of his earlier work, A Little Matter of Genocide: Holocaust and Denial in the Americas, 1492 to the Present.2 Primarily, he explains, that the earlier work exhibited “too great a concentration upon the raw physicality of killing rather than the more insidious cultural dimensions of the genocide suffered by the peoples indigenous to this hemisphere.”3 To rectify those shortcomings, Churchill turns directly to the work of Raphaël Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide” in 1944 to designate “any policy undertaken with the intent of bringing about david gabbard 2 2 0 the dissolution and ultimate disappearance of a targeted human group, as such.”4 Lemkin would later head a committee of experts on behalf of the United Nations to draft international laws to help define, prevent, and punish genocide. In what would become the Secretariat’s Draft of the present-day Genocide Convention, Lemkin’s committee sought to protect any “racial, national, linguistic, religious, and political groups” threatened by policies aimed at destroying such groups or preventing their preservation and development. Such policies, the committee determined , could seek to achieve their ends through one or more of three means. First, such policies could reflect the patterns of physical genocide, which would include the familiar practices of immediate extermination associated with the holocaust in Nazi Germany as well as “slow death measures” such as subjecting a people to conditions of life which, owing to lack of proper housing, clothing, food, hygiene, and medical care or excessive work or physical exertion are likely to result in the debilitation [and] death of individuals; mutilations and biological experiments imposed for other than curative purposes; deprivation of [the] means of livelihood by confiscation , looting, curtailment of work, and the denial of housing and of supplies otherwise available to the other inhabitants of the territory concerned.5 Biological genocide represented the second category of means identified by Lemkin’s committee, which includes involuntary “sterilization, compulsory abortion, segregation of the sexes and obstacles to marriage.”6 Finally, in the original Secretariat’s Draft, Lemkin’s committee identified cultural genocide as the third means by which one group could seek to eliminate another. As Churchill explains, cultural genocide includes all policies aimed at destroying the specific characteristics by which a target group is defined, or defines itself, thereby forcing them to become something else. Among the acts specified in the original draft are the “forced transfer of children . . . forced and systematic exile of individuals representing the culture of the group . . . prohibition of the use of the national language . . . systematic destruction of books printed in the national language, or religious works, or the prohibition of new publications . . . systematic destruction of national or religious monuments , or their diversion to alien uses [and] destruction or dispersion...

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