Finally, an interesting and decently-written article in the campus newspaper: A question of identity, concerning the controversy surrounding KU professor Ray Pierotti’s claim of native Comanche heritage. This isn’t just a matter of a person embellishing their familial history to sound more interesting, like a girl I know who showed up at a multicultural affair and said she was Scottish (yeah, like two hundred years ago). His academic career is heavily steeped in the context of this identity. He not only gets funding and grants using claims of native status - his classroom curriculum revolves around a story that may not actually exist.

Now there’s a back and forth discussion over whether or not Pierotti can claim this cultural identity. His supporters offer valid points, saying that the blood quantum rules by which we define native identity are flawed: they doom tribal communities to extinction in the next few generation, what with tribal members marrying outside the community, and families spreading further apart and losing track of their own histories. They also argue that Pierotti has contributed so much to the native community - obtaining grants for the Indigenous Nations Center, mentoring students, vocally campaigning for native causes - that he’s basically Indian, even if he’s not a card-carrying member.

But Pierotti has a lot of detractors within the native community, with very real qualms. Tribes are the determining authority on membership, and by bypassing the tribal authority, Pierotti’s claim diminishes their sovereignity. In fact, people’s suspicions first arose when several Comanche students asked him questions about his family, where they were from, etc. Community building questions, which he couldn’t answer. It’s kind of like a stranger crashing your family dinner, pretending to be your long lost uncle. I can see why natives would be suspicious of identity-crashers invading their communities, already strained under the weight of a history of injustice.

The other issue, of course, is exploitation. Is he, as his brother alleges in a fairly brutal email, faking being native to benefit from affirmative action? I’m not quite sure about that. I think if his motive were purely greed, why would he be so vocal about it, instead of keeping under the radar to avoid suspicion? Why invest all that effort in bettering the native community? Similarly, if he was motivated purely by interest in the community itself, he certainly could have done a lot of his work without the fraud. One of my favorite professors, the late Bud Hirsch, contributed greatly to local native community groups, and he never professed to be anything but a literature loving Chicago native (identity confirmed by his accent and love of Bears).

My theory: maybe he started out with purely financial motives. Jobless and increasingly desperate, he seized upon this long-shot plan to land a tenured job. It worked so well that he gradually convinced himself he really was Comanche. In that manner he could rationalize away the initial lie, and gain a cool new identity in the process. He could make a name for himself in the community, and be something much greater than just a low-level professor at a Midwestern state university.

Whether he really is Comanche or not, I am certainly inclined to think that the guy is nuts. When I saw who the article was about, I had to laugh. I actually met Pierotti during a Native American Lit seminar that Prof. Hirsch taught; Pierotti sat in on a few sessions. Here was this kind of grizzled, rugged cowboy man sitting at the table, wedged in the tiny conference room amongst the rest of us bratty college students. Pierotti didn’t contribute much to the discussions from what I can remember. He did have on him a rather alarmingly big knife, sheathed but prominently on display at his hip. On campus. I didn’t think weapons were even allowed on campus, but maybe they make exceptions for native persons (though, as far as I know, none of the other native professors go around wielding giant knives). In general, we all thought he seemed a little, um, off.

Doing some more research into Pierotti’s background, I’ve found he is no stranger to controversy - or lawsuits. He and his wife have filed lawsuits against the university; she claimed to have been denied tenure on the grounds of sexism, he claimed to be discriminated against because of his ethnicity (I’m not exactly sure what the nature of this alleged discrimination was). He’s been vocal about promoting equal opportunity hiring on campus, and actively opposed the hiring of a professor I know, solely because there were other non-white male candidates for that position (well, unless they were faking it too, hehe).

And then there’s this article from the Journal World, back in 2000, describing a bizarre incident that took place after Pierotti’s wife was denied tenure. Pierotti had to take medical leave for part of a semester due to an eye surgery. Instead of arranging for someone else in the department or a TA to cover his classes, his wife simply covered for him. Letting someone not employed by the University, and thus not bound to the rules and regulations imposed on University instructors, for some reason didn’t fly with the administration. Imagine that! And would you let someone you recently fired sit at the front desk of your office, or handle important paperwork?

There are a lot more layers to peel from this onion of madness, to be sure. I’ll update with new developments.

p.s. - Here’s a bit of fun Lawrence history for you. While looking up his wife’s name on the LJWorld database, I found this letter to the editor she wrote in defense of the Borders tree protestors. The Borders tree, for those of you not from here, was this giant tree in a parking lot next to a Borders. The tree had been suffering from Dutch elm disease and was certainly dying, if not fully dead, at the time developers planned to cut it down. That didn’t stop area hippies from organizing sit-ins and candlelight vigils to save the tree. Now a good number of the supporters were using the tree’s felling as a symbol of protest against town sprawl, and I certainly sympathize. But frankly, all this fuss about saving an already dead tree probably did the anti-sprawl cause more harm than good. (I personally think that Lawrence hippies wanted to feel important, like they were saving the rainforests. Why should West Coast hippies hog all the endangered trees?)