Circe Dawn Sturm
National Endowment for the Humanities
Resident Scholar 2003-2004
Claiming Redness: The Racial and Cultural Politics of Becoming Cherokee
In 2000, the U.S. Census revealed a phenomenal increase
in the total American Indian population, a growth of 647 percent over
forty years. This startling jump cannot be explained by natural processes
such as birth and death rates. Instead, it appears to be dominated by
what Circe Sturm calls “racial shifters,” individuals who
have changed their racial identity from white to Native American. A disproportionate
number of these racial shifters, Sturm has found, are Cherokee.
In Claiming Redness: The Racial and Cultural Politics
of Becoming Cherokee, Sturm investigates the motivations and rationales
behind this choice to move from a powerful unmarked social position to a less
powerful
one. She is focusing on “shifters” who base their Native American
identity on a belief in ancestral blood ties that have been denied, sometimes
for generations.
“I want to understand the deeper social and cultural
values that lie behind this racial movement and why so many Americans, from so
many walks of life, are now finding such deep personal and collective meaning
in the process of claiming redness,” Sturm states. “This is something
people were not so willing to do forty years ago, and the fact that they do so
now, I believe, reveals much about contemporary race relations in the United
States.”
Sturm finds that this unexpected social movement also
exposes serious questions about “our vocabularies of difference,” and
contends that words like race, culture, and ethnicity are
now “imprecise
and even redundant.” In an era of neo-liberalism professing a multicultural
neutrality, these terms can serve to gloss over unique historical and political
forms of oppression and have become, in fact, “power evasive.”
“What I am arguing is that neo-liberalism offers
a thinly veiled racism of a new variety, one in which such claims can be made
without being questioned, one whose very emphasis on culture, class, individualism,
and choice paves the way for race shifting by denying the persistence of racism
as well as the meaningfulness of race at all.”
Affiliation at time of fellowship: Associate Professor, Department
of Anthropology and Native American Studies, University of Oklahoma
