who is an Indian, pt. 3

I have followed the Cherokee Freedmen story quite a bit at my old blog. If you’re unfamiliar with what is going on, here’s a quick primer:

The Freedmen are descendants of slaves once held by Cherokees. The tribe originally sided with the Confederacy during the Civil War, so after the war the federal government required them to give full citizenship to their freed slaves. In 1893, the Dawes Rolls formalized the classification, defining most Cherokees with any amount of African blood as Freedmen.

The Freedmen remained citizens of the Cherokee Nation until the 1980s, when the Cherokee government took away their enrollment. In March 2006, the Cherokee Supreme Court ruled that the expulsion was unconstitutional, so a constitutional amendment was voted on and passed by a very large margin to keep Freedmen out of the tribe.

Congress, led by members of the Congressional Black Caucus, responded with a bill that would remove federal recognition from the Cherokees and deny them approximately $300 million in federal funds if they did not reinstate the Freedmen. The legislation passed, but an amendment by Rep. Dan Boren allows the tribe to keep its funding while the issue works its way through the Cherokee courts.

Dan Boren’s amendment was the right thing to do. If the issue can be solved within the Cherokee Nation, it will be much better for the Freedmen, the Cherokees, and the relationship of all Indian tribes with the federal government. Any punitive measure by the United States quite understandably awakens memories of the many terrible crimes done by our government to Native Americans in times past.

However, that should not blind us to the sad truth that the expulsion of the Freedmen repeats many of those same sins once done to the Cherokees. OU English professor Robert Warrior makes the case in an editorial for Indian Country News:

To be blunt, a history of modern slavery is also a history of rape. To be a slave among the Cherokees was to be sexually available to those who controlled your life. By the 1890s, a legal distinction between the Freedmen and those who were Cherokee “by blood” emerged, but in the moral universe such a distinction was hard to make, and even today the claim of those in the Cherokee majority who say they are primarily interested in maintaining their nation for those who can verify that they have Cherokee lineage rings hollow alongside the murky history of violence that Cherokee slaves and their descendants have inhabited. Such claims fail to rise to the level of those earlier Cherokees who understood that the tragic absurdity of reconciling a nation to its history of slavery requires wisdom and compassion, not insulting and ridiculous appeals to faulty membership requirements and the poses of victimhood.

Some have tried to claim the expulsion of the Freedmen has nothing to do with race, pointing to the many recognized Cherokee members with black skin. But as Warrior shows, the lines cannot be drawn so cleanly. The Dawes Rolls themselves are based on outdated 19th Century ideas about race. A thriving Indian culture and people should be looking for ways to be more inclusive, to spread their language and traditions to more people, not force them out.

interfaith dialogue of the day

Via Killing the Buddha, a wonderful video of the Woody Allen interviewing Billy Graham: Part I and Part II.

no clean coal

Now that the cat blogging is out of my system, I can go back to the doom and gloom environmentalism that you all love (I’m assuming).

The recent announcement that regulators nixed development of the Red Rock coal power plant is wonderful news. To understand why, see this ad (PDF) from Architecture 2030. Some excerpts:

Home Depot has funded the planting of 300,000 trees in cities across the US. Each tree will absorb and store about one-third of a ton of carbon dioxide (CO2) over its lifetime. In addition to the coal plants that already exist, there are now 151 new conventional coal-fired power plants in various stages of development in the US today. The CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized (500 MW) coal-fired power plant, in just 10 days of operation, would negate the Home Depot’s entire effort.

Wal-Mart, the largest “private” purchaser of electricity in the world is investing a half billion dollars to reduce the energy consumption and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of their existing buildings by 20% over the next 7 years. “As one of the largest companies in the world, with an expanding global presence, environmental problems are our problems,” said CEO Lee Scott. The CO2 emissions from only one medium-sized coal-fired power plant, in just one month of operation each year, would negate Wal-Mart’s entire effort.

That isn’t to say these and other efforts don’t help. Energy conservation by both corporations and individuals means using less power, so we don’t need as many coal plants to begin with.

But it gives a sense of the scale of the problem. Coal plants provide half of American electricity. To truly reduce emissions, we need a huge overhaul of our energy infrastructure. It’s not impossible, but it requires serious effort. Right now we are not making that effort.

Thomas Friedman said it well in a recent speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival:

I am not a skeptic about global warming. It’s happening. I am a total skeptic that we are really doing anything about it. I think we are in the middle of a huge green bubble … You’ll pardon me when I hear people say, “We’re in the midst of a green revolution.” Oh, green revolution.

Did you ever study a revolution in history? You ever seen a revolution in history where nobody got hurt? That’s the green revolution. In the green revolution, nobody gets hurt—we’re all winners … Exxon’s green. They give $100 million to Stanford … Dick Cheney’s green. He’s for alternative fuels, yeah. He’s for liquefied coal. Dick Cheney’s green. We are all green now. Welcome to the green revolution, where nobody gets hurt.

… And that’s why we are having a green party, not a green revolution. Do not kid yourself for one second.

cat blogging

The New York Times reports on a study which finds that cats need to physically move around an obstacle, not just see it, to build long term memories that it is there. Which is interesting, but I’m really only mentioning it because of this:

They had cats step their forelegs over a three-inch barrier, then distracted the animal while the barrier was lowered. When the cat moved again, it raised its rear legs as if the barrier were still there.

“’That memory of that obstacle lasts for as long as that cat stands there,’” Mr. McVea said, though because of the difficulties of herding cats, the longest they were able to distract one was 10 minutes.”

So somewhere out there is a lowly lab assistant whose job is to distract cats. I am jealous of the person who can now put “cat distracter” on a resume.

don’t blame the oil companies

Rising gas prices, global warming, the War in Iraq … it’s a popular sport these days blaming oil companies for all our ills. While the energy industry is by no means squeaky clean (see: Enron), it is both unfair and fruitless to blame corporations for doing what they were designed to do: make money. Gas prices aren’t controlled directly by Shell and ConocoPhillips, but when they do rise, those companies are naturally going to make record profits because, well, we keep buying more gas.

A recent Reuters article states:

Big oil companies did not conspire to raise U.S. gasoline prices last summer, as it was high crude oil costs and supply problems that caused the spike in pump prices, government investigators said on Thursday.

The Federal Trade Commission said that about 75 percent of the rise in gasoline prices was due to a seasonal increase in summer driving, higher oil costs and more expensive ethanol that was blended into gasoline.

The other 25 percent of the price increase stemmed from lower gasoline production as refiners moved to using ethanol as the main clean-burning fuel additive and lingering damage from hurricanes Katrina and Rita that reduced refining capacity.

The truth is, gas prices are going to keep going up in both the near and far future. The long-term trends require it. It’s not simply that supply in the easiest to develop oil fields is reaching its limits. Demand is increasing everywhere too, spurred by the rapidly rising economies of China and India.

Even if there was a way to ensure a future of cheap gas, it would also ensure disaster for all life on this planet if we keep pumping carbon in the atmosphere at the rate we are today.

But again, I don’t blame the oil companies for doing what they were designed to do. That’s capitalism.

The real problem is a failure of regulation. While capitalism is a marvelous engine for moving societies to ever greater prosperity and growth, it is the job of our elected leaders and government agencies to step in where the market fails. They must take responsibility for the long-term quality of life issues and environmental consequences that are not considered in quarterly profit reports.

They are not doing their jobs.

According to the Washington Post, “The FTA has proposed spending about $1.4 billion on new transit projects next fiscal year, compared with $42 billion that states will receive for highway maintenance and construction”.

Sure, more people drive than ride mass transit, but how much of that is out of necessity instead of desire? If we spent more on transit, building new infrastructure and improving what we have, then more people would use it, especially with gas becoming ever more expensive. But if we underfund transit, people will be forced to drive, so the FTA can say no one is using transit, so they can … underfund it even more!

For a local example, the light rail tracks around the historic Union Station in Oklahoma City are being threatened by construction of a $360 million, ten lane expansion of I-40.

What about those places where population density is not high enough to support transit? Well, Congress hasn’t increased the CAFE standards that mandate auto fuel efficiency for 17 years.

Different energy bills passed in the Senate and House include some improvements, but it’s yet to be seen what will make it out of committee for the final bill. We need to put pressure on our government, both in Washington and locally, to do much more. If we don’t plan and advocate for a better future, then it is our fault too.

are Christians oppressed?

In my first post, I linked to a recent Daily column by Ray Martin that criticizes universities for discriminating against evangelical Christians.

The relationship between Christians and the university is an important subject, and I’m glad Ray started this conversation.

Unfortunately, his column begins on a dishonest premise. He mentions a student at Missouri State University who was accused of discriminating against gays after she refused to sign a letter in support of adoption by same-sex couples. But he leaves out what happened next:

The university quickly settled Brooker’s lawsuit by removing the discrimination charge from her record and paying for her to go to graduate school. The university president also called for an independent investigation by two outside scholars, the deans of social work at Indiana University and the University of Tennessee.

So instead of discriminating against a Christian, we see that in this case the system worked to protect her rights and make sure it did not happen again.

The second half of Ray’s article is similarly inflammatory and contains another major fact error. It is not true that “the majority of Americans at least claim to be evangelical Christians.” Ray does not say where he found that statistic, but two different studies show evangelicals to make up 26 to 29 percent of the population.

I admit this is a hard statistic to determine, because evangelical is one of the most abused words in the English language. Does it mean anyone who practices evangelism? Is it just another synonym for conservative Christian? What is the difference between an evangelical and a fundamentalist?

These are complicated questions, but one thing is clear. The world does not break down into a simple dichotomy of evangelicals versus “naturalists.” Many Christians believe in evolution, and many scientists are religious. Ray seems to confuse tolerance with forcing science classes to pander to his particular beliefs.

I don’t want to be unfair to Ray. Anti-Christian bigotry does exist, as shown by the first comment on his column. “Jason” writes, “That or maybe Evangelicals are stupid and professors aren’t dumb enough to miss that fact?”

Evangelicals are not more or less dumb than any other group. And as Jason demonstrates quite well, being a secular humanist does not automatically make you smart.

But while Christians, like anyone else, have the right for their beliefs to be tolerated, they do not have the right for those beliefs to go unchallenged. We come to college to be exposed to new ideas. It may be uncomfortable to face ideas you don’t agree with, but it is not oppression.