Response to Steven Salaita's “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies”

NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 Response to Steven Salaita 145 ERIC CHEYFITZ Response to Steven Salaita’s “Inter/Nationalism from the Holy Land to the New World: Encountering Palestine in American Indian Studies” STEVEN SALAITA’S ESSAY and mine, “The Force of Exceptionalist Narratives in the Israeli–Palestinian Conflict,” certainly intersect, particularly in how we read the way that American and Israeli exceptionalisms buttress each other: how the Puritan “errand in the wilderness” replicates the Jewish trajectory in the Old Testament, for instance. These exceptionalist narratives, as both Salaita and I remark, position Arabs and Indians (to employ two anachronisms) in the place of a “savage” force resisting the “civilizing” project of Euramericans and Jews. And in that sense, however insidious the narratives, they implicitly recognize both Arabs and Indians as being Indigenous (first peoples). Thus Jewish claims to indigeneity (“Jews are the Indians of the Holy Land”), which Salaita engages, are always already contradicted by the Israeli exceptionalist narrative of a late-arriving civilization overcoming a preexisting savagery. In other words, the Israelis can’t have their historical cake and eat it too, except by decoupling the historic inhabitants of Canaan, which the Jews invaded, from the present-day Palestinians. And of course that is a claim one hears certain sectors of the Jewish public make: that the Palestinian people are a post-1948 invention. But in that sense, as Shlomo Sand has pointed out, the Jewish people are equally invented, as are, for that matter, all national identities out of political necessity. The Jews-as-Indians, Palestinians-as-­ Indians arguments that Salaita analyzes point to the contradictions inherent in Jewish–­Israeli claims of indigeneity (the Jews are simultaneously indigenous and settlers) while distracting from the colonial situation on the ground (the modern Jews are decidedly settlers on Palestinian lands), just as a U.S. history that consigns Indians to the past distracts from the ongoing colonialism in Indian Country enforced by federal Indian law. Concomitantly with the essay’s work in comparative colonialisms, a crucial question that Salaita’s essay asks is this: What are the boundaries, if any, of American Indian studies? Those boundaries, of course, have already been extended in NAISA’s very title. The term “Indigenous” brings into the field an ambiguity both promising and dangerous, which threatens the Eric Cheyfitz NAIS 1:2 FALL 2014 146 identities of U.S. Native nations at the same time it creates virtual links between these nations and the “inter/national” (the coinage is Salaita’s) “Indigenous ” community. Because of differing histories of colonial conquest, south of the U.S.–Mexican border “Indigeneity” is a much more flexible term—witness its use to mobilize different social movements in the Bolivian revolution beginning in 2000—than it is north of that border, where it is policed by federal statutes and tribal enrollment rules in both the United States and Canada. Indeed, the Zapatistas have opened up the term to include everyone who identifies with it in the practice of a certain new-left (Indigenous) or anti-neoliberal politics. When Salaita raises the issue of Israeli anxieties about the Palestinians being covered under the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, he implicitly raises the question of what peoples exactly the Declaration does cover. Finally, here are some of the questions implicit in my foregoing comments: Does Salaita’s essay succeed in saving the term “nation”—a Western term— from its regressive history of being tied to the form of the nation-state as it is in U.S. federal Indian law? Here it was and is imposed by courts on Native communities in order to translate these communities into a Western regime of property relations as “domestic dependent nations.” And if the term “nation ” is redeemable, why aren’t nations? Or is it only a certain form of the nation, as Salaita tries to redefine the term, that is viable? And where do we find this form in practice? Or is Salaita only projecting a utopian form of the nation as a critique of the nation-state formation? After all, the nation is typically not a material structure but a way of narrativizing the state. Salaita remarks: “To...

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