ANOTHER woke piece on American Indians from High Country News

HCN must also think that Hispanic Heritage Month is American Indian Month, as for the second time in less than a week, it's been woken about American Indian or Indigenous people.

Last Friday, as I just blogged, it was "woken" about American Indian land issues for National Public Lands Day, and it was wrongly woken on its framing, wrongly woken to some degree on recent facts of which American Indians were the main ones at a site, and wrongly woken on assuming the American Indians of today held the same lands 500 or 1,500 or 5,000 years ago.

Tuesday? It got "woken" about the White Sands fossilized footprints discovery. (Note, per the original paper at Science, and per some caveating researchers, it is possible that the seeds squished beneath the footprints and used to date them could have fallen into the ground millennia earlier; one researcher called the land involved "a dynamic landscape."

And, Nick Martin was as wrong as HCN staffers before. The footprints prove pre-Clovis is right. (That said, this is just the latest of several nails in the Clovis coffin.) It does NOT NOT NOT prove that American Indians have been here "from time immemorial," whether Martin claims that, or Vine Deloria with his university PhD. 

A good piece from the Smithsonian, from early 2020, notes specific archaeological exploration of pre-Clovis sites in British Columbia. It doesn't go back 25,000 BP, but it does go back more than 15,000 BP. It also notes that evolutionary population geneticists have provided research evidence that indicated the ancestors of (the first wave of?) American Indians had separated from Paleosiberians by around ... wait for it, wait for it .... 23,000 BP.

Martin's also wrong in a framing issue. Especially as time frames for the "entrada" have been pushed back, he assumes that "we" is who it once was. This opens the door to additional waves of migration. As part of that, it opens the door for a higher likelihood of migrations from the east, across the Atlantic, as well as Beringeria.

That Smithsonian piece discusses this at the end.

As scientists debate the peopling of the Americas, it’s worth noting there could be more than one right answer. “I think current evidence indicates multiple migrations, multiple routes, multiple time periods,” says Torben Rick, an anthropologist at Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History.

Very interesting. If archaeologists have been willing to entertain multiple migrations pre-Clovis but without the ancient footprints, I think this opens that up even more. (That said, besides the 

That, in turn, means that "we" is not always "we." Outside of it being all folks here before 1000 CE and the Norse contact, the "we" is not.

Finally, Martin himself approaches racism when he assumes that White anthropologists who have attacked pre-Clovis claims made in the past by American Indian archaeologists have done so because of racism.

Anybody who knows much of anything about New World archaeology and anthropology knows that Whites have battled each other for decades over the Clovis/pre-Clovis issue.

Then, there's this, at the conclusion:

Scientists and reporters could save themselves a lot of time by simply listening to Indigenous experts next time.

As in, assuming American Indians are always right?

Nope.

HCN really, REALLY does not want me to renew my increasingly-lapsed subscription.

And, per my comments above? Yes, people of any "race" can be racist. (I've seen anti-Black American Indian racism, too.)

These aren't the only pieces of wokeness HCN has done that invoke alleged American Indian wisdom. Some 18 months ago, in relationship to COVID shattering the globalized neoliberal economy, HCN claimed that the wisdom of American Indians who stayed in place could provide special insight. That claim, that they stay in one place, was of course wrong.

Meanwhile, while being "woke" on identity politics, HCN is quite capitalistic after all, or at least refuses to challenge it, on things like its annual photo contest.

And, it's perfectly willing to support a mix of wokeness and capitalism, even when that mix clearly involved many lies and half-truths. I even invented the tag "wrongful wokeness" for all of this. (Being alert to systemic racism, if one wants to use the term "woke," is not itself bad, and certainly, acting well on this knowledge is good. It's when one either tries to exploit this via capitalism combined with bashing as "unwoke" anybody who gets in your way, like Melanin Base Camp and its lies and griftings printed by HCN, or when one gets into reverse racism, which is itself racist, that we have the "wrongful" portion.

That's why, when in the middle of the first wave of COVID last summer, when it offered a one-year digital subscription for just $12, I passed. I've seen plenty since then to convince me this was the right decision.

That's because HCN refuses to admit that these repeated bad editorial decisions on its part are actually bad editorial decisions.