Bob Bennet, Republican Senator from Utah, is being called on by American Indian leaders to apologize for a racist remark he made on the Senate floor. Bennet was discussing drought in the Western U.S..
The subject of the remark was Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.), a member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe of Montana and the only American Indian in the Senate.
“Aside from doing a rain dance and making it rain, we’ll assign that to Senator Campbell, I’m not sure what you can do,” Bennett told a Bush administration official.
Campbell was at the hearing and brushed off the comment. But Geri Small, president of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, said it was no laughing matter. “I think it’s very offensive to tribes and Indian people,” she said on Friday. “I think [Bennett] should apologize. He should apologize to Ben and Indian tribes. I don’t consider it to be a joke.”
Suzan Harjo, founder of the Morningstar Institute, a Washington, D.C., advocacy group, was equally incensed. Also of Cheyenne descent, Harjo considers herself a close friend of Campbell. She said Bennett’s behavior was worse than last year’s gaffe by Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.), who was ousted from his post as Senate majority leader for suggesting America would have been better off with racial segregation.
“It’s very specific about specific Native ceremonies and saying that they don’t count for anything, that they can be laughed about and that it’s a trivial thing,” she said of Bennett’s comments. “It’s minimizing and diminishing the importance of something that’s mightily important.”
When I first read this story, it seemed like a harmless remark to me (which doesn’t reflect well on me). But I think Suzan Harjo has a good point. It would be unimaginable for a Senator to make a remark making light of Jewish religious ceremonies, or Catholic religious ceremonies. Bennett’s remark reflects a long history of bigoted jokes at Indians’ expense (think of how Indians are presented in “Peter Pan”), and he should apologize.
I’m a little torn on this. The remark was indeed racist and tasteless, but I have a problem with the idea that religious ceremonies should be immune from ridicule. Silly is silly, and deeply-held belief in a silly idea doesn’t make the idea sensible — it makes the believer silly. The belief that rain dance ceremonies can cause rain is patently, provably false, and thus laughable; as an atheist and skeptic, I can’t support censorship of any person’s right to make light of any other’s nonsensical religious beliefs.
Of course, Senator Bennet, as a Mormon, ought to be reminded that people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones — there’s an awful lot to point and laugh at in the theology of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. If Senator Campbell had made a similar off-handed joke about, say, magic underwear, I expect Senators Bennet and Hatch, at a minimum, would have been mightily and vocally offended.
No, I disagree. (Eight-year thread necromancy! Well done, Alex.) The joke is not racist, nor does it make light of a native religious practice. I can easily see the same verbal framing being used with a different religion. The problem with drought is lack of rain; there isn’t much of anything the government can do to make it rain; the Senator’s statement was joking about that impotence, not about the specific inefficacy of one particular religious practice. Campbell is a well-known Native American Senator; you could have replaced him with a prominently Catholic Senator and said “aside from praying for rain, we’ll assign that to Senator Ubercatholic, I’m not sure what you can do…” etc. and it would be the same statement, and completely innocuous.
There would be a degree of racism, or at least cultural insensitivity, in assuming that all Indians are the same and in assuming that Campbell’s particular tribal affiliation is one associated with rain dancing. But that one fails as well, because Campbell is Cheyenne and the Cheyenne did (and do) weather dances. Most likely the source of the offending remark didn’t actually KNOW that, but Campbell is also from Colorado and the offending Senator undoubtedly did know that, and the Colorado tribes did weather dances too.
So, racism callout fail, IMHO.
I suggest that few people understand that many such dances are religious in nature, as opposed to social or recreational.
You think it’s unimaginable to say “Maybe you ought to pray for rain”? Or say “Could Fr. Drinan say a Mass for rain?” I don’t. Fr. Drinan was a Roman Catholic priest who held a House seat from Massachusetts for a while when I lived out there (and for a while afterwards).
Now, I personally think trivialization of the concept of prayer in any context is a bad idea. But it happens all the time. I don’t see that one religious group should be privileged over another.
Thinking it over, I think the most troublesome thing about the remark, from my viewpoint anyway, is that it contained the assumption that Senator Campbell must believe in rain dances simply because of his ethnic background. His capsule biography suggests little cultural influence from his often-absent Cheyenne father. He never lived on a reservation or attended an Indian school, and the major cultural influences in his life appear to have been the Portuguese-American Catholic community of Auburn, California, to which his mother belonged and in which he grew up, and his Japanese co-workers at a farm where he picked fruit, who taught him Judo and, probably, some of their language (he attended one of Japan’s most prestigious universities for post-graduate work, suggesting that he must have been fluent in Japanese by his late twenties, but he could also have studied it during his time as an Air Force MP in Korea, or his undergraduate work at San Jose State University). As a Roman Catholic, he would be quite unlikely to participate in a Native American animist religious practice such as the rain dance, and the assumption that he would is essentializing. Making unwarranted assumptions about a person’s religious beliefs based purely on his or her racial background is racist, hence I stand by my and Amp’s callout.
Making unwarranted assumptions about a person’s religious beliefs based purely on his or her racial background is racist
True, but there’s no reason to think that the assumption was unwarranted.
Though Campbell was raised Catholic, his official Congressional and campaign biographies list his religious affiliation as “unspecified” and he has no apparent ties to the Church. In addition, the Cheyenne tribe (not uniquely) has a very wide range of religious practice among its membership, and it would be more common for them to adhere to multiple faith traditions than to pick only one, or to eschew the ancestral tradition.
Regardless of his lack of cultural influence from his father, as an adult Campbell became a major advocate for native issues in Congress and has been on the Cheyenne tribal council of chiefs for many years, all of which was well known to the Senator making the offending remark – because the two men have been friends for almost 20 years. Campbell himself described Bennett as an ally on Indian affairs, saying (in the wake of this kerfuffle back in ’03) “It surprised me a little bit, but I didn’t take personal offense at it. I think actions speak louder than words, and Bob Bennett has always been there for me when I need help on an Indian issue.”
So some insensitivity and impolitic choice of words, quite possibly; racism, nah.
I think it’s more like:
Aside from solving the famine by transforming crackers into meat–we’ll leave that to Senator O’Conner…
which, yeah, is kind of a problem.