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Re: Margaret Noodin, ProfessorPost by:
educatedindian on
April 15, 2022, 12:05:59 amQuote from: WINative on April 06, 2022, 07:11:46 pmI realize universities are protected from hiring non-Natives for positions teaching Native history or programs, and there is no Indian Preference in hiring. That's why Ward Churchill, and Andrea Smith, have been able to continue their work. The best case scenario for any Native community trying to repatriate its languages and cultures, and heal from historical trauma is to have a enrolled Native person would be hired with the proper credentials to assist them and if not Native they would be totally transparent about their background, which we have numerous documentation that Margaret Noodin has not. From misrepresenting how she was raised, to her last name, to her lineage to Grand Portage and Metis, none of this has proven true.
Her tactic now seems to say she never claimed to be enrolled, but not to deny she has Any Native or Ojibwe ancestry. She claims friends have told her to explore her identity, that is not a proxy for go tell the world your Ojibwe until your found out. I would like to see this person placed in Frauds.
Actually Churchill is the one and only case I know of where he was hired solely for being (thought to be) Native, and not for the quality of his work, training, or teaching. And both he and Smith were forced to step down.
How many times do you have to hear you won before you realize you did? This is the third time I've told you.
You've been part of NAFPS for years and you realize who we usually go after. She's not a cult leader, didn't abuse anyone, didn't spread falsehoods about Native traditions. There's zero evidence of harming anyone. Just the opposite, her being forced to step down harms Ojibwes by taking away a language teacher.
You're certainly right that it's far better to have someone who grew up speaking the language teaching it instead of someone who learned it as an adult. But that's just not possible for more than a few NDN tribes in the US or Canada.
I'm writing this paragraph for any outsiders reading this since I know you know it all too well. Boarding schools came damn close to killing Native languages, reduced the speakers to sometimes a few dozen people out of thousands. Even the larger groups like Dineh and Cherokee struggle to hold onto the language. Non Natives often teaching the language is going to be a reality for the near future, for the same reasons the Spanish teachers in Iowa high schools probably won't be Latinos.
Noodin is someone who took the family stories of ancestry at face value without checking them. This is something she shouldn't have done, but there was no intent to harm and no benefit to her.
Calling herself Ojibwe several times so far that we know of instead of "I believe myself to be a descendant" was wrong. But it wasn't systematic, and likely came from her thinking at that moment, "I'm part of the community, and I believe what my family said." She has apologized here and can and should correct her mistakes.
It also has to be a hard experience for her to go through. All her life she believed herself to be a descendant and made it her career to learn the language fluently, doing a lot of good because she also thought she was getting in touch with her roots. And she can and should take pride in the good she's done, just has to relearn to think of herself as an ally and community friend.
WIN, you know what we do when someone we criticized and investigated tries to change and do right, or was found not to be harmful. Noodin is both of these.
The right thing to do is wait for her to contact the several websites where she falsely called herself Ojibwe instead of "I claim to be a descendant." Once the sites have corrections up, this thread should be moved to Archives and marked No Longer a Matter of Concern.
You won. She had to step down, and changes what she said. Happy ending? Not for the shock to her sense of self, and the loss of a needed teacher.
