Unfortunately, that research project was too extensive for me to complete in the small amount of time I had to work on it, so Professor Ron Cochran helped me to clarify what I wanted to focus on in my research project. Thus, on my third try, I finally came up with a research project that I would be able to carry out sufficiently.
My research project was based on measuring the levels of a person’s ethnocentrism compared to that person’s knowledge about another race. I chose to focus on Native American racism and use the MSU student body as my focus group as the Native American student ratio at MSU during the 2001-2002 academic year was 1:8. Therefore, I started with the hypothesis that the more educated one is about other races, namely Native Americans, the less racist one is, namely toward Native Americans. To do this I first researched the issue and then gave a survey consisting of 20 questions: 10 questions measuring how racist a person is, 10 questions measuring the person’s general knowledge about Native Americans. I then put the information from the surveys into the SPSS database, which plotted my results and allowed me to find the frequencies and cross tabulations for my questions.
I have been interested in Native American racism for many years, starting with the first Native American class I took at MSU-B from Jeff Sanders. But, even before that I always had an interest in other cultures. When I transferred to MSU, a Native American studies minor was not offered, but arranged to do a specialized minor in Native American studies. I also became involved with MSU’s Indian Club and I saw and heard about the racism the Native American students experienced here at Rocky. Even as the Native American students discussed the racism they experienced, they in turn were often racist toward me for being “white.” I have been told that I have Ojibwa ancestors, but I cannot verify it, as much of my mother’s heritage has been lost. Just recently my sister, who is attempting to trace my mother’s heritage, came across some records that could prove that not only I do have Ojibwa ancestors, but Crow also. So, even though I may have Native American ancestors in two different tribes, I am still only thought of as “white” by Native Americans and, consequently, very often seen as their “enemy.”
This led me to want to study more about racism and what causes it. A lot of research has been done on racism towards African Americans and races from other countries, especially those people with dark skin. However, I came to find that there has not been a lot of research on racism toward Native Americans. Of course, there has been a lot of documentation of such racism, but no research to find out the cause of it and how it can be stopped. Another problem is that racism toward Native Americans does not come just from other races, but also from Native Americans themselves as some tribes are racist towards other tribes. Therefore, this is not just an issue of light colored skin people not liking dark colored skin people and vice versa; this is an issue of true intolerance of one group of people by another.
Thus, my Native American racism search started by using the search engine Info Trac on MSU’s library website. I entered the keyword Indians+racism and only had three articles as a result, none of them very helpful. So, I tried Native Americans+racism and the search had much better results with abstracts on stories including: Perpetuating the wrong image of Native Americans, Racism poses Indians' biggest challenge, speaker says, and Why Mark Twain murdered Injun Joe - and will never be indicted. Most of the stories were about incidents of racism and the fact that racism does exist, but not about how to stop racism from occurring. Also, I did not have any results about colleges dealing with racism toward Native Americans, so I entered the keywords racism+colleges. My search results were mainly about racism toward African Americans. So, I tried Indian racism+colleges, but still did not have any hopeful search results.
I then tried all my keywords on the search engine Google. Indians+racism, Native Americans+racism, and racism+colleges gave me the same kind of results that I received on Info Trac, with stories such as: The rivers of a wounded heart, Experiencing a lack of money and appropriate skin color: a personal narrative, and The Cleveland "Indians": a case study in American Indian cultural dispossession. However, the search results for Indian racism+colleges brought up a lot of stories about racism in tribal colleges, especially Montana tribal colleges. However, the stories only talked about how to encourage Native American students to be strong and express themselves and grow into strong mature adults, not how to stop the racism that occurs.
Therefore, I knew my research project would be quite helpful in the world of Native American racism, as it does not seem like there are too many ideas out there for ways to stop racism from occurring. There was one article that I felt had a great deal to say about Native American racism, though. Marjane Ambler wrote Without Racism: Indian Students could be both Indian and Students and in it she wrote, “Ignorance contributes as much to racism as ill will, even amongst close neighbors. We tend to tear and ridicule what we don't understand.” I felt this was a very strong statement, which made a lot of sense and needed to be more closely scrutinized.
Finally, I decided on the title of my project: Changing “The Combine’s” Course: Stopping Racism Through Education. In Ken Kesey’s novel, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Next,” Chief Bromden talks about “The Combine,” which was ran by the whites. “The Combine” did not understand him and his family’s way of life, just as they did not understand “the Combine” in return. Thus, it changed his life forever. With that thought and Marjane Ambler’s statement in mind I went forward with my research to try and find a way to stop racism, a way I believe can be achieved by combating ignorance with education.
