Wafting Into the Future

Roger Echo-Hawk
February 2009

When the future finally gets here, we’ll probably do race differently. Someday I’ll wake up and it won’t be the same. Putting on my glasses, I’ll get up to have a look around. Very quickly I’ll realize that something seems a little unfamiliar, not quite what it was when I went to sleep.
I can be quick on my feet. On that day I’ll suddenly realize what has happened. The future! I’ll run outside and I’ll see that the future has arrived at last! Hopefully I’ll get dressed before that. But we have a couple of big evergreens in our front yard, so it probably won’t matter.
In the course of my life, several people have said to me that they have ways to predict the future. I don’t have any talents in that area myself, but I guess that for them it must be something like forecasting the weather. Tomorrow it will be sunny with a few afternoon clouds. Like that. I don’t mean to trivialize anyone’s special magic abilities – I guess I just feel envious. I wish I had some good way to foretell what will happen next.
Better yet, if I had the power to change things, I’d like that very much. I wrote a book about that last year at the end of 2008. It was fun to write because I’m just like most people out there. When we all get together and when we see how many people don’t have a clue about what will happen next or what should happen, we just know that we ourselves ought to have the power to change things. We’d know exactly what to do.
What would I do?
Well, at some point I’d do something about race. I might do a few other things first, but I’d get around to fixing race sooner or later. I’d make a big announcement about it. I’d call a press conference or maybe I’d write an email about it to an online group of colleagues called the Closet Chickens.
If I decided to do a press conference, there would be a lot of cameras and microphones and I’d have a big scientific chart to point at when I predict that tomorrow it will be sunny with a few afternoon clouds and by rush-hour everyone will quit doing race and there’ll be some scattered evening showers.
I’d feel happy about it, relieved to find something so useful to do with my superpowers. That night I’d go to bed feeling mighty good and the next day the future would arrive. But I can’t really predict the future, so I don’t know right now whether I’ll have any clothes on when I run outside to see it. I hope so.
Anyway, if I decided to go the email route and write to the Closet Chickens, I’d probably write something pretty much like this:

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Long ago my academic agenda became strongly influenced by my involvement in repatriation issues. I was in college working toward an undergraduate history degree when I got involved in Pawnee efforts to repatriate human remains from institutions in Nebraska and Washington, DC. Trying to identify ancestral Pawnees held in museum collections, I adopted the view that study of Pawnee oral traditions in conjunction with the archeological record would prove helpful in identifying older human remains.  In graduate school I continued with this research agenda.
I decided that archeology had something useful and interesting to say about Pawnee history. Getting involved in repatriation issues, I found it easy to say to myself that I wasn’t against archeology. Instead I was opposed to specific unilateralist aspects of archeological practice that seemed entrenched in the doing of American archeology. Fixing those practices, I thought, would mean that the Pawnees would have a better chance of someday benefiting from archeology. But the academy didn’t seem very open to change.
I was a faithful adherent to racial Indianhood in those days, and I didn’t feel very hopeful during the late 1980s when I tried to picture exactly how archeology could reconfigure itself into something that we racial Indians could relate to. But I was, I suppose you could say, archeologized. I had a respectful attitude toward archeology as an intellectual endeavor despite the awful problems that faced me and my colleagues.
I understood the anti-archeology attitudes of my colleagues, the negative comments, the jokes, the searing commentary that bonded us. We spoke our anger, our disappointment, our frustration. As I saw it, they didn’t want to talk to us. They resented everything we did. They mishandled the quietly respectful requests of our elders, our religious leaders. I still see clearly the resentment in their eyes when they looked at me. They didn’t like me because they saw me as an anti-science, anti-archeology advocate. So yes, we were angry. And yes, they were angry. I guess I did plenty of othering in those days. So did they.
But like I say, I was also archeologized. Archeology said some pretty fascinating stuff about topics that interested me as a scholar. I spent many hours studying the literature. And I thought I could see a way for them to suddenly start listening with more respect to all the hurt that I heard around me in Indian Country. I built in my mind a big fantasy about how those angry archeologists would one day pause to listen to what I had to say. They’d whisper to each other, Hey wait a second, he’s saying something interesting – maybe we ought to listen.
See, I thought I saw a way for all of us to enhance what we know about the past. Oral traditions had history in them. We could see that history through the lens of the archeological record. We would do that together.
I guess I knew I was a foolish daydreamer. Once I talked to my brother about it and I said, What if I get in touch with those archeologists to talk to them; I think they’d be interested in my work on oral traditions – they’ll listen. He said, No, I don’t think you’re right about that. His analysis proved correct.

I have spoken to the Coop about working with Chicken Nuggets in those days. One thing has always troubled me about that work. We came up with a plan to produce two separate papers: his research on the archeology; my research on the oral traditions. But as my work proceeded, I kept seeing ever more clearly how the oral traditions needed the chronology and context that archeology could provide, and the archeology needed the lingering voices of long-vanished people from the past. The two had to work together. So I furtively slipped some archeology into my paper.
I recall how Chicken Nuggets responded, seeing my finished labors. He said, I thought you weren’t going to do that, Roger. Hearing his voice, seeing his eyes, I felt embarrassed. I had taken him by surprise in an unpleasant way. Sorry about that, Dr. Nuggets! I stood there wondering: had I risked something that I didn’t understand? Had I done something that everyone else already knew was wrong? Naive again! That’s me, for sure, I said to myself. I felt like I should apologize and go on to figure out exactly why there were good reasons to keep oral traditions segregated from archeology. I trusted Dr. Nuggets, his knowledge; his wisdom. I still do.
Is that how you remember it, Chicken Nuggets?
Maybe if I looked at what I did then, maybe I’d cringe, knowing now what I didn’t know then. Maybe I’d suddenly understand the need for segregating ways of knowing; keeping the twain forever twained.
But I’m stubborn sometimes. I guess I kept going down that road and I did more de-twaining; I wanted to oral-traditionalize archeologists. I thought we should be talking together in tones of mutual respect. Down that road I have wandered at times, and I plan to keep going. One thing I learned from that. Breaking down entrenched segregationist agendas is not easy, but it must be done. I took this lesson with me into my next life, my anti-race life.
As an archeologized adherent to race, I wasn’t very faithful to the established tenets of racial Indianhood. In those days Indians showed (and still show) patriotic loyalty to the Indian race by challenging archeology, by policing it – not by permitting one’s self to get archeologized. My former colleagues in Indian Country occasionally told me, You’ve been archeologized, Roger. They were right. I stood up for epistemological togetherness; not for loyalty to separatist racial Nativeology.
I would never stand up for bonding with adherents to racial whiteness over the segregationist unilateral racist ideology of let’s-you-&-I-be-proud-white-folks-and-do-good-things-for-other-white-folks. I began to feel hesitant about the expectation to stand up for the segregationist unilateral racist ideology of let’s-you-&-I-be-proud-Indian-folks-and-do-good-things-for-other-Indian-folks.
Sure, I did race in those days. Doing race, I did my best to be conscious of racism. Looking back now, having done race most of my life, and having associated closely with people committed to doing it, I feel doubtful that the doing of race can really be done free of racism.
To be sure, I don’t really feel very comfortable with trying to turn racialists away from their racialism. We must find ways to get along as best as we can. I will oppose race by looking for it in myself and by extracting myself from the doings of race. I will keep on thinking my stubborn thoughts and I will look for places to share my thinking – maybe I will hope for others to willingly join me on this road. Come on over here, I’ll say. We’ll do this together, all of us. We’ll be free over here; free of race.

When Vanishing Chicken speaks of increasing the presence of adherents to racial Indianhood in the academy, he is speaking of sustaining and increasing the doing of race. At this moment in history, as Vanishing Chicken accurately points out, the academy is actively recruiting Indians. In the history of race relations, he seems to suggest, this is the road to a future Age of Enlightenment.
I know what he means because I was once an Indian. And I used to be an academic. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, when I began to take part as an Indian in the academic community, I went to many different conferences, such as WAC 1989, Society of American Archivists, AAA, Organization of American Historians, Plains Conference, Western History Association, etc. When I talked, I talked about repatriation and what I called “ancient Indian history.” I put plenty of race into my work.
And I kept encountering other adherents to racial Indianhood. I didn’t get the feeling that there was much community among the adherents to racial Indianhood; just some familiar faces mixed with a few new faces at each conference. I also had the impression that most racial Indians felt a powerful impulse to get together and compare notes and to say to one another, Yes we should all make some contribution to the twentieth century Indian-racial-bonding-via-organization-founding ephemera, academic-style. I have the impression that groups popped up and vanished as quickly as they appeared.
These groups all have had the following agenda: we do race; let’s be Indians; we also do academic X [insert here the particular academic field]; let’s be Indians doing academic X; we’ll get more Indians into that closet.
Twenty-first century Indian Studies seems here to stay, in contrast to the whirl of twentieth century Indian-organization ephemera. The agenda of Indian Studies is to enhance the control of racially defined sovereign communities over their social and political and cultural dispositions. And the agenda of Indian Studies is also to do race and to challenge white racism. It is to exploit pro-race affirmative action on behalf of the agenda of racial Indianhood.
I predict that racialist Indian Studies will do what committed racialism always does: it will shore up the ideology of race in America in order to ensure its implacable presence in our hearts and in our world for the foreseeable near future. To support this outcome, one must be fully committed to race. One must believe that race is a good thing, that it does something good for humankind.
When an affirmative action pro-race agenda succeeds, it strengthens the precepts of American racialism. It creates a deepening of the iron grip of race on the production of private and social identity systems; it ensures a commitment to the furthering of the promise to keep locked in the embrace of race.
Don’t let go of race; race won’t let go of you.
An odd outcome of logic ensues. Because if the intention of Indian Studies is to encourage a racially defined independence movement, a racial Indian quest for political and cultural freedom from oppressive white America, then surely it is inherently problematic to assume that one can truly find “independence” from American cultural systems by sinking deeper into the doing of a primary American cultural system. Race. In enacting and empowering the hold of American racialism on our social world, and in tightening the embrace of race, can this really lead to independence?
There doesn’t seem to be any doubt about this in the minds of academic adherents to racial Indianhood and their supporters. Doing race will strengthen racial Indian tribal sovereignty. Doing race will help to free Indians from white colonialism.
I guess they must be right about that. I hesitate to feel very certain about my doubts concerning their certainties. The problem is that I can’t see very far into the future to foretell what will happen to racial practice.
It’s just that I don’t like race very much.

Circa 1990, I was not opposed to archeology; I was opposed to its central unilateralist tenets. In 2009, I am not opposed to the idea that there should be some kind of indigeneity in academic intellectualism; I am opposed to the central racialist tenets of racial indigenism. I am not opposed to Indian Studies; I am opposed to the racialism at the heart of pro-race Indian Studies.
I think that the academic community has an obligation to provide a discourse that actually explores what it means to be truly independent of race. One outcome of my thinking on race is to ponder whether non-racial people like me reasonably deserve a social world in which we are not forced to participate in the production of American racialism. But where are the proponents for this option? When I look for them, I keep seeing an academy that remains subservient to the precepts and assumptions of race.
As I see it, to enter the academy is to enter into a specific social compact regarding race. And membership in the academy uniformly requires acceptance of four assumptions that serve as the basic ingredients of racial practice.
First, racial white people are expected to refrain from enacting racial whiteness as a bonding experience with other whites. Second, non-white people are expected to have functioning racial identities. Third, both whites and former whites are expected to overtly practice racial whiteness only for the purposes of affirming non-white forms of racial identity. And finally, non-whites, whites, and former whites are expected to actively facilitate the enactment and affirmation of non-white forms of race and racial bonding.
As a general matter, this is what the doing of race looks like today in the academy. This “look,” I believe, is not optional. This is because it is shaped by the following set of moral judgments, which I term the moral fundamentals of race:

  1. Overt racial bonding is good for non-whites, but not for whites.
  2. Non-whites are expected to unwaveringly treasure and enact their racial identities.
  3. Race-based intellectual productions are desirable so long as one is not producing and advancing white racialism.
  4. It is desirable for white and formerly white academics to support the production and advancement of non-white racialism.
  5. All formerly white academics are expected to embrace white racial identities whenever requested to do so for the benefit of non-white racialism and social criticism.
  6. In the absence of racial diversity, the few academics who are active adherents to racial whiteness are expected to compulsively bond via overt racism (using terms like “nigger” freely, for example), and by bestowing upon one another the covert benefits of white privilege, and by embracing the clandestine perpetuation of structural racism in the academy and throughout American society.

This system of thought ensures that the academy will continue to serve as a major pillar of American racialism for the near future. I feel troubled by this assessment because in general, I don’t believe that the academy should promote faith-based belief systems – systems like astrology, religious ideology, and race.
The academy should welcome practitioners of astrology – even astronomers who dabble in astrology. But the academy should resist permitting astrologers from setting the academic agenda for astronomy. The academy should welcome practitioners of religion, but the academy should resist encouraging or discouraging the institutionalization of religious belief, and it should resist pressure from religious ideologues to set the academic agenda. The academy should accept practitioners of race, but it should refrain from deliberately discouraging or encouraging adherence to the belief systems of race.
It makes sense for the academy to study the cultural productions of faith-based belief systems, not palm them off onto students. With astrology; no problem. With religious belief; challenging problems crop up. With race… Under the magic celestial sign of Race: Hallowed be thy name! The academy practices race.
But… but these are not seamlessly comparable situations.
Sovereignty. With regard to racial Indianhood, there are racially defined sovereignties involved. There are sovereign communities that define themselves racially as adherents to the ideology of racial Indianhood.
And racial injustice. There is a legacy of racial injustice at work.
Race-believing Indian governments deserve to have a voice in the production of American archeology. As Vanishing Chicken suggests, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990 has fostered change in the exercise of social power based on race. In Vanishing Chicken’s examples of post-NAGPRA change, these racial sovereigns exert real power. But these exertions of power are not merely based on typical sovereign uses of power; they are also based on the superpowers of race.
When Indian Studies declares its intention to stand for enhancing the political and cultural power of racially identified sovereignties, to what degree is race shaping the agenda? What should the academic community make of this agenda?
When the Christian Right pushes for the teaching of Intelligent Design alongside evolutionary theory, all the academic practitioners of faith-based race feel a meaningful interest, I suspect, in raising some socially useful questions about that. Shouldn’t we ask some socially useful questions about the gathering and exercise of racial power to address issues of sovereignty and culture? Where does the logic behind the exercise of race-based power take us?
As Vanishing Chicken suggests, the growing presence of Indians – encouraged and empowered by NAGPRA – will change the academy. At the end of the 1980s just a few racial Indian academics worked on repatriation issues. Just a few of us, it seemed to me. In 1989 I didn’t think things would change very fast in terms of the unilateralist agenda of American archeology.
But the change happened very fast. When I look today at the Coop and when I read the news of the outer world, I see many self-identified racial Indians in the academy and many of them have gotten involved in repatriation issues. Whether or not these Indians got into academia as a direct result of NAGPRA, things have changed. Change can happen; it can happen very fast.
I think Vanishing Chicken has a very good point. Adherents to racial Indianhood have new power to wield in the academic community, a growing presence. Whatever happens next, the logic of that power is already in the process of changing the academic world.

It’s reasonable to predict that with so many adherents to racial Indianhood helping to reshape the academy, one outcome seems clear. It seems reasonable to see the continuing production of a racialist world. I guess adherents to racial Indianhood tend to count on that future.
But I feel some doubt. I think something has happened. To race. Already. Despite the influx of committed racialists into the academy, racial practice has weakened in a major way.
This has to do with racial whiteness. A transformation of culture during the final decades of the twentieth century reshaped the doing of racial whiteness. Many white people stopped bonding with each other through race. They have gradually become former whites. Most former whites don’t think of themselves as “former whites,” but they are. They don’t go around thinking up their next plan to bond with other white people, saying how they want to focus on the importance of being white.
Here at the beginning of the next millennium, ever-growing numbers of white people do not typically enact racial whiteness in everyday life. Most formerly white people, especially in the academic community, do race only when forced into it by non-white racialists.
I have come to this realization slowly. I believe that the evident fate of racial whiteness means something greatly important for the future of race.

In early 2008 I read Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win.  A beautifully written assessment by a leading thinker on race.  In this book, Steele – who believes in bioracialism – favored the view that Obama could either appeal to whites or appeal to blacks, but not to both groups.  I didn’t think Obama had much of a chance at that point, though he had caught on already.  I thought a majority of southern whites would reject him on the basis of race, and that a significant number of other adherents to racial whiteness would feel suspicious of Obama on the basis of race, and that many voters would find it convenient to label him as too liberal.  To a significant degree, I was wrong.  So was Steele.
Shelby Steele and Roger Echo-Hawk both misread the nature of racial whiteness. I think the Obama election signifies that a lot of former whites don’t really have any reason to feel very white anymore, and this election offered a good chance to say that.  This reality is already having a huge and unacknowledged impact on our society.
It is the ongoing fate of racial whiteness that is presently reshaping the racial essence of American society, and this fate has moved beyond white guilt and is already into what is now being called “postracialism.”  This is a non-discourse that accepts race as a bio-reality, but just finds it boring and pointless to talk about.  Committed racialists, refusing to see this new reality, are unknowingly moving full speed ahead with being tolerated in an open-minded way, gently ignored, and centrifuged off into the outer fringes of American life.
The quest of Critical Race Theorists to locate and reveal an Invisible Empire of White Privilege is not only misguided, it is a sure ticket to the fringes. Formerly white people do not secretly bond with each other via racial whiteness; formerly white people do not surreptitiously enact white privilege; formerly white people hold only a superficial adherence to the idea of racial whiteness.
And formerly white people have learned a terrible lesson from history: race enslaves; race jim crows; race holocausts; history will hold you accountable. These are some of the outcomes of the fervent doing of race in the world.
This is the present-day doing of race. If you don’t know about this, you’re living in the past. And in terms of the future, another truth also seems important.
Race tells a lie about the nature of humankind.
And in the midst of doing race, each day some academic scholar turns to another and speaks this truth about race. But outside the academy, most whites and former whites don’t know this yet.
When they discover the truth about race, what will they do?

These realities ought to suffice as a basis for rethinking race in the academy. But what about Indian Studies? What about the national racial Indian agenda of strengthening racial Indian tribes?
When I study the situation, I think I see that racialism acts to replace historical tribal sovereign systems with racial identity systems that are fully bound up in sustaining the American race project. The primary outcome of the enactment of racial Indianhood is to keep alive the American social systems that spring from the cultural ideology of race. Enactment of racial Indianhood tightly binds racial Indian sovereigns into the lingering national systems of American racialism. Race demands adherence to national racial Americanism even while excluding racially defined Indian sovereigns from formal governmental participation in the American federal system.
Doing race, academic Indian Studies acts to keep these realities of American racialism alive. Rather than study the actual role of race in keeping American Indian sovereignties locked into being American, Indian Studies academicians simply do race. And academic Indian Studies forces former adherents of racial whiteness into doing race by expecting them to help racial Indians. In the end, they join together in sustaining the American project of race as the basis of American life. This is what academic Indian Studies does, I believe.
To be sure, I find it a little difficult to feel sorry for former whites who find themselves coerced by Indians into doing race. They tell themselves that they are doing social justice. So rather than insist on the dignity of not doing race anymore, they choose to give up race on their own time. Going to work for the academy, they must go along with what the academy requires. And social justice requires former practitioners of racial whiteness to help those other committed racialists to practice their racialism.
Or does it?
I think whites and former whites in the academy have a duty to refrain from encouraging or discouraging Indians with regard to adherence to racial identity. In terms of social justice, I suggest that helping Indians to do race is a sure-fire way to keep them bound up in being Americans, and to force them to do race instead of seeking forms of cultural independence from America. Is it ethical for academic former whites to help keep adherents to racial Indianhood bound to race?
I don’t know, Chickens. What do you think?

I guess there is one thing I want to know. Is enactment of racial Indianhood really a form of bonding that will free Indians? Or does racial ideology merely produce a set of chains, willingly donned?
Most present-day philosophers in federal Indian law seem to presume that the race-based Indian sovereignty movement will forever have a future in a forever race-driven American system.  As the racial environment noticeably evolves into something else, what will they do? Indian Studies, content with re-examining and re-examining and re-examining white racism, shows little interest in the fate of race.  As the racial environment noticeably evolves into something else, what will they do?
I guess it’s obvious that no one has any plans to do anything just yet. The empowerment of race bestowed upon racial Indians by NAGPRA has helped to keep Indians focused on the alleged benefits of doing race, the American way.
To be sure, it could well be that this and other forms of racial empowerment will prove powerful enough for Indians to achieve whatever they wish to achieve. Maybe that’s what the future will bring. That day will come and everyone will run out of their houses everywhere to see it!
But here is, I believe, a more predictable future legacy of NAGPRA: racial Indians will use the law to willingly bind themselves to the production of American racialism; the law will help Indians to bond more fervently as Indians; NAGPRA will further codify race into the mainstream of the racial Indian sovereignty movement, forcing that movement ever deeper into the embrace of American racialism; NAGPRA will link the fate of racial Indians forever to the fate of race as a social project in America; and finally, Indians will use their enhanced racial superpowers to incessantly pressure formerly white people to keep reattaching themselves to the social production of American racialism.
In terms of race, is NAGPRA a good thing?
Racial Indian academics clearly believe that race is a good thing and that the racialism in NAGPRA is a good thing. I have come to believe something else. At least, I have some doubts. It seems important, this issue. It deserves careful evaluation.
But based on the extant and growing literature of racial Indian indigeneity, and after spending years talking to Indians about the problems of race, I see no reason to believe that adherents to racial Indianhood intend to address these issues in any meaningful way.
And the academy in general, I see now, cannot fill the vacuum. It’s not their job. The academic community must refrain from discouraging or encouraging faith-based belief systems.
As I have already suggested, formerly white academic supporters of racial indigenism have a complicated role to play in these matters. They have an arguable formal obligation to keep out of this debate in terms of influencing personal and social identities, but they also have an obligation to help the academy ponder what should be done when faith-based racialism intends to shape the academic agenda.
What would academic racial indigenism be without the precepts of race to guide its thinking? I don’t know the answer. Will it turn out to be something awful, something unwanted? Being free of race, we will do something else. I trust that it will be something better than race.
As I have outlined earlier, being free of race seems a fundamental prerequisite for the eventual production of a truly successful sovereign Indian independence movement. And here’s an authentic ongoing injustice for doers of social justice: racial sovereignties (Indian tribes) are racially excluded from participating in the hypocritical American political system. In democracy-loving America, race-based Indian sovereignties are excluded from participatory democracy on the basis of race. Indian tribes have no official role in the American federal system, as do states.
Indian tribes say they value their sovereignty. To enhance that sovereignty, what if this must be done by rejecting race? If this is true, what does it mean for former whites to help Indians to stay Indian? Well, I guess if I’m right about all this, if adherents to racial Indianhood keep adhering to race at the expense of their tribal sovereignty, then I shouldn’t feel sorry for them. Rather than choose the dignity of not doing race, Indians ought to feel free to practice their racialism.
It’s just... I feel sad to realize that racial indigenism does not really stand for freedom. To know that it stands instead for standing up for race. To be sure, I’m not much of a patriotic nationalist; I’m anti-race because I see race as a bad idea.
I feel extremely dubious about the idea that race is morally good for humankind. Fervent racialism always means fervent racism. The ability to grasp and wield social power provides the only real limit upon the capability of racists to do harm in the name of their preferred racial identity belief system.
In the future, I hope we choose not to do race someday.

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I know these are not easy issues. The path to follow into a race-free future doesn’t seem very clear to me. I don’t know what freedom from race will look like. In fact, when I get up in the morning I have trouble knowing what kind of future has just arrived. I get dressed while asking questions that don’t have simple answers.
I see plenty of academics who know the truth about race but still do it every day. The Closet Chickens are academics; the Chickens do race. It seems reasonable to presume that by binding the Coop and the academy to the fate of American racial systems, the day will come when there will be no turning back. And racial Indians, with the approving help of Chickendom, will find themselves being inexorably wafted along into the unswerving future fate of race.
That little breeze we feel right now under our wings, feathered ones, maybe it feels like just another mild moment in the ever-changing weather of the social world. A friendly sensation maybe. A drifting sense of what it’s like to have the power to fly. I often feel like just drifting along. With everyone else.
It would be nice. Warm even. I smile to think of it. And yes, I sometimes feel doubtful. But I guess I don’t ever really feel very doubtful. I have no wish to abandon my non-racial anti-race path in life. Indulging a few doubts at times is useful to me, an interesting way to pass the time.
Anyway, featherologists, I most often suspect that the new pro-race world that has come upon us in the wake of NAGPRA will probably not change very fast, whatever wafting happens next.
But maybe things will change quickly; maybe my hope for others to willingly join me on the anti-race road is not a foolish daydream. Come on over here, I’ll say. We’ll do this together, all of us.
We’ll be free over here, we’ll say to each other in that future. And tomorrow we might see a few afternoon clouds, but it will be sunny.
We’ll be free of race.

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