Re-Visioning Native America: An Indigenist View of Primitivism and Industrialism
1992; Volume: 19; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-641X
Autores Tópico(s)American Environmental and Regional History
ResumoThose damned lazy Mexicans. You can't get 'em to work. Always takin' siestas during best part of th' day. It's no wonder they end up livin' like dogs, th' way they lay around doin' nothin'. But that's th' way it's always been with them. -- West Texas Farmer, 1985 All this fuss about Indian poverty and unemployment is just a bunch of bullshit. Hell, it's their own fault. You hire 'em to do a job; they work awhile, then just up and drift away. You can't depend on 'em to finish anything they start. There wouldn't be no Indian problem if their nature wasn't to be such a shiftless bunch. -- South Dakota Rancher, 1988 THE RELATIONSHIP OF THE LABOR PROCESS TO THE WAYS OF LIFE OF INDIGENOUS is a central issue in any attempt to conceive a positive alternative to conditions under which they presently live. Although term peoples has global appropriateness, encompassing several thousand distinct cultural-nationalities known to hold aboriginal links with land base they occupy, usage in this article will accrue primarily to two major groups within 48 coterminous states of United States. These are members of various American Indian located within this geographic area, and a significant portion of Mexican/Mexican-American/Chicano population residing within U.S. at any given moment. The latter group is understood to be composed of American Indians from located mostly, but not exclusively, south of Rio Grande, within what are now states of Chihuahua, Sonora, Coahuila, Baja California del Norte, and Tamaulipas, in Mexico.(1) They are distinguished from their more northerly cousins by virtue of having undergone a Spanish-originated -- rather than Anglo-Saxon -- process of colonization.(2) Taken together, these groups make up very poorest strata of North American society, and have done so throughout 20th century.(3) In particular, those Indians whose homelands lie north of Rio Grande represent what may be accurately described as the poorest of poor in U.S. Overall, according to government's own statistics, they experience hardly lowest annual and lifetime per capita incomes of any identifiable ethnic aggregate. Their collective unemployment exceeds 65% each year, year after year; in some locales, such as Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, unemployment rate has hovered in upper 90th percentile for decades. Correspondingly, American Indians suffer highest rates of infant mortality, death by malnutrition and exposure, tuberculosis, and plague (to list but a few causes of death) of any population group on continent. The current life expectancy of average American Indian male is barely 44 and one-half years. Females live an average of three and one-half years longer.(4) These data readily suggest association with contexts rather than with a subsection of what is reputedly the world's most advanced industrial democracy, a matter that has led many critical observers to remark upon existence of a bona fide Third at home in U.S. -- in Indian as domestic dependent nations in reservations, but also including Black ghettos and Spanish-speaking barrios. More accurately, such analysts might reflect upon reality of a nonindustrial and very much ongoing Fourth World, an indigenous world upon which each of other three -- First (capitalist, industrialized), Second (socialist, industrialized), (either capitalist or socialist, and industrializing) -- has been constructed and is now being maintained or developed.(5) It is instructive that people of this Fourth World, or World as it is sometimes called, comprise absolute poorest sector of populations attributed to each of assortment of nation-states making up all three industrial or industrializing venues.(6) In other words, Fourth or Host are as marginalized in settings as they are within U. …
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