The Rough Drafts of Vietnamese-American History

May 17, 2006
The Rough Drafts of Vietnamese-American History
By SETH MYDANS, International Herald Tribune
WESTMINSTER, Calif. — Even on his sickbed, Yen Do pushed himself forward, taking one more stab at mastering English grammar.
"I have returned to grammar 10 times," said Mr. Do, the founder of the country's oldest and largest Vietnamese-language newspaper. "Every year I returned to learn grammar. It became a bad habit."
Now it appears that grammar will elude him. At 64 he is weakening from kidney failure, diabetes and other ailments. Willpower may no longer be enough.
It has been a life created through sheer determination, following the arc of Vietnamese-American history from war to escape to renewal in an alien world.
Mr. Do was among the first refugees to arrive when Saigon fell in 1975 and soon began to publish a newspaper that helped define the refugee experience. With his newspaper, Nguoi Viet Daily News, Mr. Do, a courtly, cerebral man, became the steady, moderating core of this hyperactive refugee community known as Little Saigon.
He was the quintessential émigré editor, trying to bridge old and new cultures and seeming sometimes to infuriate almost everybody with his insistence on tolerance and even-handedness.
Mr. Do has been threatened, harassed and berated by groups who are still consumed by a war that in their minds has never ended.
There are now nearly 200,000 ethnic Vietnamese in Orange County, most of them living around the cluster of towns known as Little Saigon, 45 miles southeast of Los Angeles. Like other communities of immigrant refugees, Little Saigon seethes with feuds and factions.
In the intense early years, five Vietnamese-American journalists were killed in the United States, apparently by a radical anti-communist group. Mr. Do chose not to visit his mother in Vietnam before she died, fearing reprisals from those who oppose any contact with the country they had fled.
"They continue to fight with each other," he said of the Vietnamese refugees in an interview before his illness became critical.
"Many don't know how to deal with each other in peacetime," he said. "We need to educate them step by step to be part of the larger community. But to expect some of them to behave like normal immigrants, no way."
Mr. Do tried to lead by example. When new refugees arrived he sometimes gave them work to tide them over. If a would-be writer brought in a freelance article, he said, he paid for it even if he did not plan to use it.
And in offering benefits to the staff, he said: "I don't consider seniority. The more people are newcomers, the more they need help. It's not all about money."
From its start in 1978 as a four-page weekly, when shellshocked refugee families were flooding into the country, the paper's motto has been "Working together to survive."
In Little Saigon, the Vietnamese past is rooted in place, but an American future is transforming it into something increasingly different from its namesake. Mr. Do is himself an artifact of the past, and in his own family and newspaper he has participated in that transformation.
At its start, the paper was filled with news from home as well as with crucial how-to's about welfare, driver's licenses, insurance, mortgages and parent-teacher conferences. It has swelled into a full-color daily with a circulation of nearly 18,000 that has spawned a magazine, a radio station and the Vietnamese yellow pages.
Mr. Do continued giving away stock options in the paper, reducing rates on death notices for the poor, providing lunches to his staff for just $20 a month, hiring out-of-work artists and writers and even giving thousands of dollars in seed money to those who wanted to start rival publications. Nguoi Viet also rents space in its building to other media operations.
As his health has failed him, his daughter, Anh Do, 39, a journalist trained in American-style objectivity, has played an increasing role at the newspaper he built.
A columnist at The Orange County Register, Ms. Do is also chief financial officer of Nguoi Viet and editor of Nguoi Viet 2, a new English-language weekly section intended for her own generation of Americanized Vietnamese.
"The young generation brings change, that's the happy part of the story," the father said. "They change by refusing to copy the older generation."
His daughter's career has been with American newspapers, which do not share Nguoi Viet's tangled culture of mutual help, flexible rules and the imperatives of long-running friendships and enmities.
"She considers almost everyone the same," Mr. Do said, describing the culture clash. "That's what she has been taught in this society: give and take, fair is fair. I take the community approach. We treat newcomers more gently than oldcomers. That's fair."
His daughter said she relishes the debates she has with her father over the different paths they take toward what she called their "shared goal — to empower our community."
"I often see things in black and white, especially in the beginning," she said. "Now I'm more flexible, but I think it's still important to adapt modern American management to a traditional Vietnamese company."
The son of a funeral flower-shop owner, Mr. Do was caught up in politics in elementary school, "following along" on demonstrations against Vietnam's French colonial rulers.
In his teens he became a leader of the protests until he was arrested, briefly jailed and expelled from high school — a trauma that can still bring tears to his eyes.
He spent the next years educating himself in libraries and was politically active again until he became disillusioned by the manipulation of idealistic students and religious groups.
"Finally, I understood what politics is," he said. "Politics is a game, and I saw no way, no exit. So I told myself never to do politics again. Never, never, never. I would use my strength for social reform."
Journalism offered a home to "vagabonds" like himself, he said, and soon he was a war correspondent, covering some of the most dangerous engagements on the battlefield. In the final weeks, he worked as an assistant to American reporters from papers like The Boston Globe and The Chicago Tribune. His pay was less than 40 cents a day.
And then the North Vietnamese army was at the gates of Saigon, he said, and "I saw my world collapse." He, his wife and three children caught one of the last flights from the country. A fourth child was born in the United States.
In the enforced quiet of his illness, before it finally sapped his strength, Mr. Do said he thought back over his early life and realized how long a road he had traveled. In his thoughts, he said, "I recognize again my teenage spirit, when I taught myself that I could do anything."

FABC in the Sac Bee

All in tune

Move over, book clubbers: This group meets to share -- and keep -- favorite songs

By Chris Macias
Published 2:15 am PST Friday, March 31, 2006

The party in this Tahoe Park home is about to start popping. Taquitos and Togo's sandwiches are ready for grubbing, a mojito bar is on standby. But if you want to come inside and hang, you'd better have a song to share.

It's a Sacramento meeting of, to put it nicely, the "(Bleep) a Book Club." The name has an in-yourface ring to it, a slight diss at Oprah's Book Club, but it's just a smart-aleck way of describing a new kind of listening party. Think of "(Bleep) a Book Club" as a potluck where music is the main course, or a soiree based on favorite songs.

There's no way to be a wallflower here. Each partygoer is required to bring a song on a CD, and before an in-house DJ slides the track into a CD deck and presses "play," you give a short speech about why the song moves you. It's about making fast friends over music, a shared party platter of songs and stories.

"You get to bridge a whole bunch of cultures together," says Mike "DJ Chappeezee" Chappell, one of the in-house DJs for Sacramento's (Bleep) a Book Club meetings.

"Music is almost therapeutic for me; it's the only way I know how to relax. (Bleep) a Book Club is one of the things that keeps you from thinking that nobody in the world understands you."

The (Bleep) a Book Club movement is 2 years old; it started in the Bay Area in early 2004 and spread to such cities as Boston and New York City.

The club reached Sacramento last month, bringing together two dozen music aficionados, record collectors and folks who wanted to bond over beats and melodies. A second round of Sacramento's (Bleep) a Book Club went down in March.

The basic (Bleep) a Book Club format works like this:

• Bring food and/or drink and a song to share.

• Log your name, e-mail and song information on a sign-up sheet.

• Hang with your fellow music hounds.

• When you feel the vibe, hand a CD to the DJ; talk about the song you're about to share.

• Play the song.

• Kick back, mingle and repeat. As a bonus, all songs are loaded in iTunes and logged as a kind of musical minutes for the meeting. Whoever shows up to the next (Bleep) a Book Club event gets those songs on a souvenir disc.

"Instead of 'Pay It Forward,' we say 'Play It Forward,' " says Gabriel Romo, a local artist who organizes Sacramento's (Bleep) a Book Club events. "It's about passing that music on. You give some insight in a kind of way, and then you pass it along. The overall goal is just sharing good music."

"My name is Kenny. What's up? This is my first time here. The song I brought is extremely important to me. It's the first music I ever appreciated. It's Marvin Gaye, from a live album. I think it's perfect music, and that's a category I give to not many artists."

- Kenny Times, 37, presenting "What's Happening Brother" by Marvin Gaye

Respect the music

(Bleep) a Book Club events aren't too hung up on rules. There's no limit to the number of people who can attend, though sessions work best on a more-intimate scale. Any song is welcomed at (Bleep) a Book Club, be it rock, hip-hop or something not so hip, such as one by Hootie & the Blowfish.

But the (Bleep) a Book Club has one overriding rule: Respect the music. A shout of "respect the music!" means to chill and stop gabbing because someone's about to present a song. "Respect the music" also is a reminder that there's no snickering when it comes to someone's song selection. And this is put to the test when Hootie & the Blowfish's "Time" bellows from the speakers. But everyone is cool with the track at this Sac Town edition of (Bleep) a Book Club, and a few heads nod as if the song is a soul-jazz gem by Grant Green.

"No one's musical selection should ever be lampooned," says Oakland's Arnold Chandler, a co-founder of "(Bleep) a Book Club." "It's an open, kind of welcoming social environment. It's not exclusive in any sense."

"I know John Mayer has been this commercial, pop kind of person, but right now he's with the John Mayer Trio. I like that he's not so commercial now - he's doing the blues. The reason why I like it: It's just him talking about how he has everything in his life, but something's missing and he doesn't know what it is."

- Shauntay Davis, 28, presenting "Something's Missing" by the John Mayer Trio

A relaxed event

So grab a space on the futon, mingle, or chill out in a La-Z-Boy chair. The founders of (Bleep) a Book Club envision events that are relaxed, even soulful when everyone's speaking from the heart about their song choices. (Bleep) a Book Club has even been used as an "icebreaker" exercise at a corporate retreat.

"Everyone knows each other by the end of the night, and I've never been to a party before where that happens," says Chandler. "(Here) you're at a party, there's food and a potluck and everyone's having a good time. And at some point everyone gets to be center stage. You get to be the star for something you like, and you get to share it with people."

So when the music and conversation is flowing, the (Bleep) a Book Club sounds something like this:

"I've always been a hip-hop fan and I went backwards in the roots of it," says Romo, while presenting Isaac Hayes' "Hung Up on My Baby," which was later sampled in Geto Boys' "My Mind Playin' Tricks on Me."

"I didn't know these songs I'd heard weren't original. So I went out and got these songs (that the hip-hop tunes sampled from), and it was like that same feeling you have when you hear the song for the first time."

The beat and guitar groove kicks in.

"This is what my pops played in the house on reel-to-reel," says Times, the first-time (Bleep) a Book Club attendee.

"Reel-to-reel?" says Romo. "Wow."

"Every Saturday, my pops used to put this on in the morning and play it for hours," says Times. "They're like symphonies."

"I love Isaac, man," says Romo.

But that's enough chatting for now because another song is on deck. And that's a cue to pay attention.

"Respect the music!"

About the writer:

• The Bee's Chris Macias can be reached at (916) 321-1253 or cmacias@sacbee.com. Back columns: www.sacbee.com/macias.

What the (bleep)

A third installment of the (Bleep) a Book Club in Sacramento has yet to be announced. But there's no need to wait. To learn more about how to start your own (Bleep) a Book Club session, log on to www.fabookclub.com or e-mail arniec1@gmail.com.

'Tookie Must Die' -- Why Many Blacks Oppose Clemency for Williams

'Tookie Must Die' -- Why Many Blacks Oppose Clemency for Williams

New America Media, Commentary/Analysis, Earl Ofari Hutchinson, Dec 05, 2005

Editor's Note: It's a myth that a large majority of blacks oppose the death penalty, detest police and as jurors won't vote to convict a fellow black. In fact, writes PNS contributing editor Earl Ofari Hutchinson, some of the loudest voices calling for the execution of Stanley "Tookie" Williams come from black communities. Hutchinson is author of "The Crisis of Black and Black."

• Video: pro-Tookie rally
• Video: Screening of a movie on Tookie's life.

LOS ANGELES--The small crowd of clergy, community activists and death penalty opponents that gathered in front of the Los Angeles courthouse recently was no different than other groups that for weeks have kept up the drum beat for California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to grant Stanley "Tookie" Williams clemency.

There was one very loud exception. A young African-American man shouted that Williams was a thug and a murderer and should die. He was not an agitator or a crank. He represented a body of pro-death penalty sentiment among blacks that has seldom been publicly heard during the great Tookie debate.

I was not surprised when I heard this young man's words, for there are many blacks like him who want Williams dead. The instant I went to bat in my columns for clemency for Williams and against the death penalty in general, the e-mails and comments I got flew hot and heavy. Black critics bitterly reviled me for advocating clemency. They were adamant that Williams must pay for his crimes, and for the murder and mayhem the Crips gang, which he helped found, has unleashed on impoverished black communities.

Their hardened attitude toward Williams flew in the face of conventional wisdom that says that blacks are passionate opponents of the death penalty. They aren't.

During the past decade, even as more whites have said they are deeply ambivalent about the death penalty or oppose it, many blacks continue to say that murderers, even black ones, must pay with their lives. A Harris Interactive poll in August 2001 found that nearly half of black respondents supported capital punishment. Three years later, a Gallup Poll found that black support for the death penalty still hovered at close to 50 percent.

The death penalty debate can no longer be neatly pigeonholed into a black verses white racial divide issue, and with good reason. Whites generally are not at risk from black criminals. Other blacks are. They are more likely to be victims of violent crime or to have friends or relatives who have been crime victims than whites.

The Justice Department's annual crime victim surveys have consistently found that blacks are nearly twice as likely to be victims of murder than whites. The leading cause of death among young black males under age 24 is homicide. In nearly all cases, other blacks will kill them.

Blacks are scared stiff and fed up with that continuing surge in murder violence that tears at black communities. A hint of that came in June 1999. A Justice Department survey that year found that blacks in a dozen cities generally applauded the police. This confounded some black leaders who, like many others, assumed that blacks are inveterate cop haters. They aren't. They are against racist and abusive police officers, and expect and demand efficient, fair policing in their communities.

In Los Angeles, New York, Chicago and other cities, community activists have staged anti-murder marches, held vigils and have lobbied city and state officials for tougher gun laws. They have also taken a step that once would have been considered racial treason: They have repeatedly demanded that blacks break their code of silence toward the police and help them identify the young shooters.

Then there's the myth of the "soft" black juror. It goes like this: Black jurors are so hateful of white authority that they will gleefully nullify the law and let a black lawbreaker waltz out of court a free man or woman, even if that person is a killer. This is nonsense. In most big cities, blacks make up a majority or a significant percent of those who sit on juries, and they routinely convict other blacks of crimes, including murder, every day.

It's true that in past years, blacks were the staunchest opponents of capital punishment. They had good cause to be. The death penalty was a blatantly racist weapon wielded by prosecutors, particularly in the South, against blacks convicted of rape and murder on the flimsiest of evidence, as long as their alleged victims were white. The death penalty is still used and handed down in a racist fashion. However, crime fears and rampaging murder rates in many black communities have partially trumped that, and made more blacks than ever regard capital punishment not as a weapon to hammer blacks, but to hammer violent criminals.

Tookie certainly no longer fits the label of the violent predator. He has tireless worked to redeem his life, and those of countless other angry, violence-prone youths. But many blacks have lost friends and loved ones to those gun-toting youths. They are unforgiving and unsparing in their rage at them, and they blame Williams for helping to spawn them. It's unfair to blame one man for the sins of some in the youth generation. But when the body count rises, people look to place blame on someone, and Williams is that someone. It's only a short step from there for them to loudly say that Tookie must die.

Does anyone care about this acquisition?

I'm quoted in this article.

A Relatively Quiet Comment Period For B of A-MBNA
From: American Banker
Thursday, September 1, 2005
By Luke Mullins

Many recent megamergers have attracted plenty of opposition, but fewer than a dozen groups filed objections to Bank of America Corp.'s deal for MBNA Corp. in comment letters with the Federal Reserve Board. The 11-letter total is tiny compared to the more than 250 letters filed on Bank of America's 2003 deal to purchase FleetBoston Financial Corp., or the nearly 100 filed on JPMorgan Chase & Co.'s acquisition of Bank One Corp. last year. The MBNA deal was open for comment for two months after it was announced June 30. The letters came largely from community groups, who raised strong reservations about the deal and urged the Fed to hold public hearings to examine its implications. Matthew Lee, the executive director of Inner City Press, said he was concerned the deal could put Bank of America in violation of a rule that bars any bank from raising its share of the domestic deposit market above 10% through a merger or acquisition. He also argued that in the past the Charlotte company made a disproportionately small number of mortgages to minorities, and that B of A did not deserve approval, because it had invested in organizations such as payday lenders. "Bank of America lends to and enables, apparently without standards, high-cost fringe financial institutions as payday lenders, pawnshops, and rent-to-own stores, for example Advance America Cash Advance," Mr. Lee wrote in a July 15 letter. The Greenlining Institute took a different tack by urging B of A to set an example for credit card companies. Vina Ha, a program manager at the group, wrote in an Aug. 26 letter that the industry's inadequate disclosures and high fees must be curbed. "The acquisition has the potential to be highly beneficial to the consumer if B of A takes the lead in establishing credit card 'best practices,' " Mr. Ha wrote. "On the other hand, should B of A conduct business as usual within the credit card industry, a substantial likelihood exists that it's overall reputation could be tarnished." Local interests also raised objections to the plan. Saundra Ross Johnson, the director of the Delaware State Housing Authority, said the deal threatened to choke off funds for first-time homebuyers that MBNA, of Wilmington, had provided through its Community Reinvestment Act program. If the acquisition reduced funding for this program, it "will create a void of mortgage dollars for low- and moderate-income Delaware residents," she wrote in her Aug 30 letter. Rashmi Rangan, the executive director of the Delaware Community Reinvestment Action Council Inc., opposed the acquisition because of reports that 6,000 jobs would be cut as a result of the deal. The nonprofit expressed concern about the potential economic effects of the cuts. "Concern with unemployment and where the 6,000 layoffs will occur appears to be paramount" within the state, Ms. Rangan wrote in an Aug. 19 letter. "MBNA is the largest private employer in Delaware." Joni Halpern, the co-chairwoman of the San Diego Coalition for Fair Banking, said it opposed the deal because B of A has not met the banking needs of certain San Diego communities. "Bank of America deliberately refuses to provide accessible checking accounts and services to low-income communities in San Diego," Ms. Halpern wrote in a letter dated Aug. 15. Mr. Ha of Greenlining said he was surprised by the dearth of comment letters that the Fed and the Federal Reserve Bank of Richmond received. Over all, the deal has not gotten as much attention as other recent ones, he said. "My sense is that it didn't get the same level of media coverage that the Fleet deal got," Mr. Ha said. He also said that traditional consumer finance organizations are relatively new to the credit card industry. "Not everybody has experience working with credit card issues." In an interview, Mr. Lee said he believed there were so few comments because MBNA has few ties to community groups and other organizations through its CRA compliance efforts. "Because it's a credit card bank and because it has a weak CRA record, there are fewer CRA relationships affected by the proposed acquisition," he said. (c) 2005 American Banker and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved. http://www.americanbanker.com http://www.sourcemedia.com

© 2005 American Banker and SourceMedia, Inc. All rights reserved.

What is a Native American?

---

August 21, 2005

The Newest Indians

By JACK HITT

On a crisp morning in March at the Jaycee Fairgrounds near Jasper, Ala., the powwow was stirring. Amid pickups with bumper stickers reading ''Native Pride'' and ''The earth does not belong to us. We belong to the earth,'' small groups gathered to check out the booths selling Indian rugs, dancing sticks, homemade knives and genealogy books. On one side, under her camper's tarp, sat Wynona Morgan, a middle-aged woman wearing a modestly embroidered Indian smock and some jewelry. Morgan had only recently discovered her Indian heritage, but, she said, in some ways she had known who she was for years. ''My grandmother always told me that she came from Indians,'' Morgan told me. She is now a member of one of the groups meeting here in Jasper, the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama, which itself is new, having organized under that name in 1997. The tribe is committed to telling its story, in part through an R.V. campground named Cedar Winds that will eventually expand to include an ''authentic, working Cherokee Indian Village.''

''The only real proof we had that we were Indian was this stub,'' Morgan went on to say. She had brought along a copy of a century-old receipt entitling an ancestor to receive some money from the United States government for being an Indian. With the help of an amateur genealogist named Bryan Hickman, Morgan was able to connect her line to its Indian roots, and she began to raise her son, Jo-Jo, as a Native American. She was particularly proud of Jo-Jo; only a teenager, Jo-Jo had been chosen to serve as honorary headman and lead the grand entry just after the grass dancers performed later that afternoon.

''Sometimes Jo-Jo gets teased for being an Indian at school, but he doesn't care,'' Morgan said. What she didn't say was that the teasing is connected to the fact that neither she nor Jo-Jo look as much like Indians as they do regular Alabama white folks. In fact, every Indian at the powwow looked white. More than half my time with this tribe was spent dealing with their anxiety that I might make this observation.

This ethnic apprehension can be found even among the older tribes, where outmarriage, or exogamy, has created a contemporary population that doesn't look nearly as ''Indian'' as the characters of our movies and HBO westerns. What results from this can get funky. For example, among coastal Indian tribes, who depend upon tourism, it is not uncommon to see them dressed as Plains Indians with full feathered headdresses and other outfits that were never their custom. It is a practice known as ''chiefing,'' and in some tribes it is as regulated as jewelry sales. This is the market force, ethnic-wise: coastal Indians know that they have to look like an outsider's vision of an Indian in order to be accepted by tourists as Indian.

Among the newer tribes, this anxiety can get especially intense. All weekend at the Jaycee Fairgrounds, the Cherokees of Northeast Alabama whom I spoke to were quite nervous that I might pronounce them, as some put it, ''ethnic frauds.'' Hickman, the genealogist, insisted upon knowing if I was ''going to make fun of them.'' In the days leading up to the powwow, he called me repeatedly, his voice filled with panic. Hardly an hour went by over the weekend that the event's spokeswoman, Karen Cooper, didn't sidle up to ask me if there was anything she could do.

Morgan, though, was happy to talk about her relatively new status as an American Indian. She had been attending powwows for years as a white woman, but became official two years ago after her genealogical work was done. ''I hate to put it this way, but I'm a completely new Indian,'' she said. ''I have had to learn everything from the ground up, and I'm learning every day.''

Morgan's sincerity and her profound pleasure at all these discoveries in her ancestral line now influences every waking moment of her life, she said. She confided that she knows that there are fake Indians -- so-called wannabes -- and she says she feels sorry for them. ''I hear some people say that they have a 'Cherokee princess' up the line,'' Morgan said with a laugh. ''I just love that one, because of course the Cherokees didn't have a princess.'' This joke -- about the white person claiming a Cherokee princess -- is heard pretty often these days from any Indian, coast to coast. In the same way that blacks poke fun at white men who can't jump or Jews mock goyim mispronunciations of Yiddish words, it is not meant as much to put down others as to enunciate the authenticity and insider status of the person telling the joke. It is a way to assuage a new kind of ethnic unease that can be felt throughout Indian Country.

The Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama is, according to the University of Oklahoma anthropologist Circe Sturm, one of more than 65 state-recognized tribes, most of which have emerged in the last few decades in the Southeast. State recognition is merely one of many legal mechanisms used to legitimate a Native American tribe. They range from the most difficult -- federal recognition, which is required for running a casino -- to state and local designations and on to unrecognized groups. (The Cherokees alone account for more than 200 of these recently formed unaffiliated tribes.) All of these tribes have emerged at a moment when Native Americans have experienced skyrocketing growth in population. I had traveled to Jasper, among other places, to find out what kind of growing pains this population surge is causing Native Americans.

Soon enough, the shed at the fairgrounds was all commotion as the grass dance began. Jo-Jo was dressed in full regalia, and like all the dancers here, he had made his bustle and other ornaments. The grass dancers were pouring their hearts into it. The crowd was mostly other tribal members, as well as what are called ''hobbyists,'' non-Indian enthusiasts who like to attend public powwows. All of them were thrilled with the performance, and it was hard not to be impressed by the difficult moves and the elaborate costumes. I meant to keep my eye on Jo-Jo, but I was distracted by another handsome teenage boy with light brown hair, the head grass dancer, who didn't seem to have made the full transition to Indian yet. His outfit was a painstaking interplay of beads and feathers and a series of striking variations of white and red shapes sewn onto his vest, which for some reason caught my eye and seduced me into leaving the bleacher seats in order to wander closer to the rail, elbowing my way out in front of even small children to peer more carefully and to make absolutely sure that the tiny red rectangles were -- yes, indeed, no doubt about it -- little Confederate battle flags.

century ago, Native Americans were down to a few hundred thousand people, and the prevailing concern was not about overpopulation but about extinction. Some observers comfortably predicted that America would close the book on its ''vanishing race'' by 1935. But Native Americans didn't disappear, and after the birth of civil rights, when the Red Power movement asserted itself in the 1960's, something unexpected happened in the Indian population count. In four consecutive censuses, which showed other groups growing by 7 to 10 percent, Native American populations soared, growing by more than 50 percent in 1970, by more than 70 percent in 1980 and another third in 1990. The 2000 census reveals an overall doubling, to more than four million. Jack D. Forbes, an emeritus professor of Native American studies at the University of California at Davis, argues that undercounts and other census quirks may mean that the total number of Indians in the United States today is in fact closer to 15 or even 30 million. Using the 2000 census data, Indians can be called America's fastest-growing minority.

The assumption many people make when they hear these huge numbers is that the new Indians are just cashing in on casino money. But tribes with casinos or even casino potential have very restrictive enrollment policies. (If anything, when casinos are involved, the story usually goes heartbreakingly in the other direction. Take the case of Kathy Lewis, whose grandfather was the chief of the Chukchansi tribe, which now runs a casino with another tribe outside Fresno, Calif. Her father worked out a deal with the tribal council that placed him on the lucrative tribe's rolls but cut out his own children. He no longer speaks to his daughter. Impoverished, she lives in a two-room trailer just outside the reservation.)

Instead, the demographic spike in population is a symptom of what sociologists call ''ethnic shifting'' or ''ethnic shopping.'' This phenomenon reflects the way more and more Americans have come to feel comfortable changing out of the identities they were born into and donning new ethnicities in which they feel more at home. There is almost no group in this hemisphere immune to the dramas accompanying so much ethnic innovation. Last year in Montreal, for example, the selection of Tara Hecksher as Irish-Canadian parade queen seemed to many to be inspired. While the young woman's father is Irish, her mother is Nigerian. To look at her face and hair, most people would instinctively categorize her as ''black.'' Certainly the thug that interrupted the parade by tossing a white liquid at her seemed to think that way.

Such agonies of identity abound, but nowhere are they felt more keenly than among Native Americans. There, many of the markers of being Indian -- the personal adornments, the spiritual life, daily tribal culture -- are the subject of intense debate, in some cases even federal regulation. Much of what has defined Indianness has been appropriated by everyone from Hollywood to charlatan spiritual guides and ground into unappealing cliche. As a result, many Indians are trying to define the new modern Native American in terms that can't be so easily commodified. Some argue that this ethnic mobility in and out of Indian Country is connected to a separate phenomenon -- a rush to revitalize native languages. Many tribes have hired linguists or sent members to any of several institutes now devoted to helping Indians retain or recreate some form of their tribal languages.

n the past, ethnicity and race seemed like fixed categories, inherent qualities of self that were not only unchanging but could also be measured, quantified and reduced to small checkable boxes on bureaucratic forms. But American diversity and intermarriage (as well as the perfect match between the Internet and deep genealogical research) have changed this singular certainty into a multiple-choice question. For most of American history, identity was centrally controlled: the census taker decided your identity by quietly writing it down while asking questions at your door. But in 1960, the census was changed to permit Americans to declare their own race or ethnicity. The most significant shift, though, came as recently as the 2000 census. Americans were permitted to declare more than one race or identity. As a result, the old categories become even more fluid.

How much easier (though scarier) life might be if we all got ethnic identification cards so that when encountering a very light-skinned person claiming to be black, you could reply, ''O.K., show me your federal identification card guaranteeing the proper amount of African blood to qualify you as an African-American.'' Here's the thing: you could ask an Indian that question. Some Native Americans carry what is called, awkwardly, a white card, officially known as a C.D.I.B., a Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood. This card certifies a Native American's ''blood quantum'' and can be issued only after a tribe has been cleared by a federal subagency.

The practice of measuring Indian blood dates to the period just after the Civil War when the American government decided to shift its genocide policy against the Indians from elimination at gunpoint to the gentler idea of breeding them out of existence. It wasn't a new plan. Regarding Indians, Thomas Jefferson wrote that ''the ultimate point of rest and happiness for them is to let our settlements and theirs meet and blend together, to intermix, and become one people.'' When this idea was pursued bureaucratically under President Ulysses S. Grant, Americans were introduced to such phrases as ''half breed'' and ''full blood'' as scientific terms. In a diabolical stroke, the government granted more rewards and privileges the less Indian you were. For instance, when reservation lands were being broken up into individual land grants, full-blooded Indians were ruled ''incompetent'' because they didn't have enough civilized blood in them and their lands were administered for them by proxy agents. On the other hand, the land was given outright to Indians who were half white or three-quarters white. Here was the long-term catch: as Indians married among whites and gained more privileges, their blood fraction would get smaller, so that in time Indians would reproduce themselves out of existence.

Compounding this federal reward for intermarriage was the generally amicable tradition most tribes had of welcoming in outsiders. From the earliest days of European settlement, whites were amicably embraced by Indian tribes. For instance, the leader of the Cherokee Nation during the forced exile of 1838-39 -- the Trail of Tears -- was John Ross, often described as being seven-eighths Scottish.

A lot of Indians haven't looked ''Indian'' for quite a while, especially in the eastern half of the country, where there is a longer history of contact with Europeans. That fact might not have been the source of much anxiety in the past, but in the post-Civil Rights era, the connotations of the word ''white'' began to shift at the same time that the cultural conversation progressed from the plight of ''Negroes'' to the civil rights of ''blacks.'' Suddenly ''white'' acquired a whiff of racism. This association may well account for the rise of more respectable ethnic descriptions like ''Irish-American'' or ''Norwegian-American,'' terms that neatly leapfrog your identity from Old World to New without any hint of the Civil War in between. According to the work of Ruth Frankenberg and other scholars, some white people associate whiteness with ''mayonnaise'' and ''paleness'' and ''spiritual emptiness.'' So whatever is happening in Indian Country is being aggravated by an unexpected ethnic pressure next door: people who could be considered white but who can legitimately (or illegitimately) find an Indian ancestor now prefer to fashion their claim of identity around a different description of self. And in a nation defined by ethnic anxiety, what greater salve is there than to become a member of the one people who have been here all along?

The reaction from lifelong Indians runs the gamut. It is easy to find Native Americans who denounce many of these new Indians as members of the wannabe tribe. But it is also easy to find Indians like Clem Iron Wing, an elder among the Sioux, who sees this flood of new ethnic claims as magnificent, a surge of Indians ''trying to come home.'' Those Indians who ridicule Iron Wing's lax sense of tribal membership have retrofitted the old genocidal system of blood quantum -- measuring racial purity by blood -- into the new standard for real Indianness, a choice rich with paradox. The Native American scholar C. Matthew Snipp has written that the relationship between Native Americans and the agency that issues the C.D.I.B. card is ''not too different than the relationship that exists for championship collies and the American Kennel Club.''

ut on Chicaugon Lake on a warm afternoon in Michigan, dozens of families splashed around in the water, having good summer fun. Inside the nearby picnic shed, a few dozen folks assembled for an Ojibwe language camp. The camp was off to an awkward start. The adults stood at uncomfortable attention. The teenagers, off to one side, smoked and lobbed withering looks everywhere. The little ones raced about, crazed that they couldn't join the children in the lake.

The leader was Wendy Geniusz, a young blonde whose cute cheeky smile seemed to reflect her father's Polish background (as did that killer surname). She has been raised among the Ojibwe all her life. Her mother, Mary, is the granddaughter of a Canadian Indian who gave up her native claim after marrying a Presbyterian Scot. But Mary knew this grandmother, and about 25 years ago, when she started having her children, she decided that she could no longer indulge what she saw as the luxury of her multiple backgrounds. She needed to create a coherent environment for her children.

After finding a spiritual guide to lead her back to the world of her grandmother, Mary raised her children among the Ojibwe. Wendy Geniusz was born an Indian. She is known by her birth name, Makoons, and she has attended local powwows since she can remember. Geniusz's days begin, as they have for the past five years, with a tobacco offering and prayer. She is married to an Ojibwe man, Errol Geniusz (having taken her last name), and she intends to raise her children speaking Ojibwe in her home; she mastered the language at the University of Minnesota, where her Ph.D. topic is ''Decolonization of Ojibwe Plant Knowledge.'' She teaches the language to other members of the tribe.

One of the exercises this morning was to get people to ask one another basic questions in Ojibwe. About 10 kids, all around 11 or 12, were horsing around as Geniusz struggled to guide them through the paces. It was rough going. Two kids in particular were jumping on each other. One looked classically Indian; the other was a blond. The black-haired boy teasingly referred to the other as ''whitey.'' There were a few anxious looks among the adults, yet here on the Upper Peninsula, no one corrected the black-haired boy, in part because he is the great grandson of the tribal elder who was in attendance to lend the language camp a sense of history (and to resolve the occasional grammar stumper). Later that morning, when the teasing continued, the blond kid broke into a rap from ''Scary Movie 3'': ''I'm a white boy, but my neck is red/I put Miracle Whip on my Wonder Bread.'' The anxiety that was a constant at the Alabama powwow was present here, too, but it was acknowledged not with panic but with jokes and stories.

''People usually think I'm white,'' Geniusz explained. ''Like recently, my sister and I took a bunch of clothing to an Indian rummage sale, and they thought we were just some white kids bringing clothes down.'' On the other hand, she recalled attending a recent national Indian conference at which each tribe was asked to stand up and say hello. ''I was with the Chicaguan Chippewa, and they said I should get up and say hello because I spoke more Ojibwe. So I got up and said something very simple, like 'Boozhoo giinawaa,' or 'Hello, all of you.' And afterward, I had all these people coming up and hugging me and telling me that they had thought I was just some little white girl. When I speak, people get a little startled, and then they accept me.''

Circe Sturm, whose book on new Indian tribes, ''Claiming Redness,'' is due next year, suggests that ''one big difference between older recognized tribes and the newer tribes is that the newer groups are marked by a nervous disavowal of whiteness. You will often hear them talk about their 'Indian hair' or their 'Indian cheekbones.' They often solemnly conclude their conversations by saying, 'For all purposes, I consider myself Indian.' The older tribes acknowledge their whiteness. Oklahoma Cherokees talk about 'white Cherokees' and often make a joke about it.''

Ethnicity is a tricky thing because it is commonly understood as something fixed and essential rather than what it more likely is: an unarticulated negotiation between what you call yourself and what other people are willing to call you back. Geniusz has lived her life culturally among the Ojibwe and is recognized by them as an Indian. Her easy comfort at calling herself an Indian comes in part because everyone in her area recognizes the essential Indian life she has led. Her physically European features are, in this part of Michigan at least, understood as only marginally curious.

The way the ethnic negotiation works depends on what part of the country you are located in. Native Americans recognize that there exists a kind of spectrum. At one end there are Indians living on a well-established Western reservation in a tribe that is branded as seriously authentic -- Hopi, say -- where many in the tribe retain the classic Indian physical characteristics. Moving along, you encounter various tribes that have intermarried a lot -- like the Ojibwe -- yet whose members still feel a powerful sense of authenticity. But once you visit tribes of newcomers, where few members knew their Indian ancestors personally, you begin to sense a clawing anxiety of identity. At the far end are hobbyists, those Indian groupies who hang around powwows, hoping to find a native branch in their family tree. They enjoy wearing the traditional tribal garb and are, as the University of Michigan history professor Philip Deloria titled his book, ''Playing Indian.'' Most hobbyists do it for fun, although some are just criminals, like Ronald A. Roberts, who pleaded guilty to federal charges after trying to establish a casino with his forged genealogical documents, or David Smith, who was jailed for holding a ''healing ceremony'' for a 12-year-old girl that included fondling her.

Just where in that spectrum, between land-based tribes in the West and playful hobbyists, you might locate a bright dividing line of authenticity is an open question. It is territory that is currently being remapped. It is why the population of Indians is surging and why there is such fervent debate among Indians as to just who should be able to make the claim. It becomes a kind of nature-versus-nurture argument. Do genetics make you Indian or does culture? Or can either one?

It is in the context of such continued questions that the renewed interest in language takes on more urgent meaning. According to Laura Redish, the director of a resource clearinghouse for language revival called Native Languages of the Americas, there are roughly 150 native languages that are currently spoken in North America or that have disappeared recently enough that they could still be revived. She estimates that in the last 10 years, some 80 to 90 percent of the tribes associated with these languages have put together some kind of program of revival.

''Language has a different kind of importance now than it did only 20 or 30 years ago,'' says Ofelia Zepeda, the director of the American Indian Language Development Institute in Arizona, whose program in revitalizing languages works with about 20 tribes each year. ''Language is one of those things that you take for granted, but now it has a different dimension. It is a conscious act.''

s the sun angled down over Lake Chicaugon, Wendy Geniusz's language camp magically came together. The sullen teenagers were still smoking, but like the little kids were now tuned in. Everyone gathered around separate picnic tables set for a meal, and they were calling out the names of table utensils in Ojibwe. One of Geniusz's assistants, a very handsome native speaker with a long black ponytail named James Vukelich, stood up and announced: ''If you want to learn how to pick people up in Ojibwe, come over here. If you don't know what that means, stay where you are.'' Suddenly, the teenagers were all scrambling over to Vukelich's corner. Once the teenagers had decided that talking the ancestral language was as cool a thing as mastering smoke rings, the next three days of Ojibwe Language Camp were smooth sailing.

Geniusz is a proselytizer for language revival. She has interviewed tribal elders, put together CD-ROM's of language basics and created coloring books for kids. She attends Indian language revival conferences and exchanges tips with other tribal members, like Lone Wolf Jackson, an officer with one of the Mohegan tribes in Connecticut who is pushing his tribe to revive its language.

''I don't think we'll ever see the day when Mohegans are walking down the street speaking Mohegan to each other,'' Jackson told me when I met up with him at a conference on language revitalization. ''But I do think we can learn enough to conduct a religious service or a funeral in our own language. And that would be profoundly important.''

If you passed Jackson on the street, you would think he was black. And he is, on his father's side. But he was raised by the other side of his family, his mother and grandmother, who are Mohegan Indians.

''One of the motives behind the assimilation program was to get Indians to act like everyone else and not retain any cultural distinctiveness,'' Philip Deloria says. The revival of Indian language may be the new front in resisting total assimilation. ''For Indians to make a new argument of sovereignty, it will rely on a renewal of Indian distinctiveness.''

Laura Redish sees language revival at the heart of the new anxiety of identity: ''It also takes a commitment to learn a language. I've noticed that urban mixed bloods, especially, want to learn -- to not be wannabes. And language shows they are serious about connecting to who they are.''

From a small country lane in Connecticut, Stephanie Fielding rambled down a few dirt roads to a small clearing beside a rushing river. Her great-great-great-aunt Fidelia Fielding died in 1908, and a memorial stone dominates the sloping cemetery here. Fidelia was the last speaker of Mohegan. Today, Stephanie Fielding is devoted to reviving the language that Fidelia Fielding spoke. She travels from library to library scouring books and ancient missionary letters and documents. She is putting together her ancestral language, brick by brick, word by word.

You might mistake Stephanie Fielding for just another nice-looking lady with reddish hair and, judging from that name, British extraction. But she is a member of the wealthiest Indian tribe in America -- the Connecticut Mohegans, whose members divide the revenue from two lucrative casinos. Fielding is 59, and she has devoted the rest of her life to reviving her great-great-great-aunt's language. This June, she received her master's degree in linguistics from M.I.T. Like so many people devoted to language restoration, she admires the example of Hebrew, a language that essentially died more than two millennia ago, surviving only as a sacred text. It wasn't until the 19th century that a Zionist linguist took on the painstaking work of confecting a modern, slangy, day-to-day tongue out of the hallowed idiom of Moses. Fielding is trying to do the same, and then some. She doesn't begin with a body of Scripture, like the revivers of Hebrew had, but with not much more than some missionaries' notes and transcripts of long-dead speakers. Most of Fielding's work at M.I.T. has focused on creating a kind of linguistic algorithm that will permit her to take many of the accepted proto-Algonquian words and generate an authentic Mohegan vocabulary. Her tribe has commissioned her to put together a dictionary and a grammar to give the next generation a voice from the past.

Because it is time-consuming and difficult to learn any language, the commitment it takes to attend one of Wendy Geniusz's camps or to sign on with Fielding's work or to participate in any of the widespread Native American language revivals weeds out the easy hobbyists and leaves a cohort of Indians whose authenticity -- regardless of genealogy or blood quantum -- may one day be hard to question.

''Language is an important vehicle of transmission of culture,'' says Angela Gonzales, a Hopi Indian and an assistant professor of sociology at Cornell University. ''Some tribes resist letting any outsiders even speak their language. But that's why language is important. It's a great vehicle for the storage of important inaccessible cultural material.'' Since it is no longer enough for a man passing you on the street to look Indian, maybe the next generation will note in passing that that guy certainly sounded Indian. In 50 years, many of the tribes now being dissed as wannabes will have age, tradition and solemnity on their side. Who will be around to question their authenticity? Far more likely is the possibility that the reshaping of American identity, among Indians as well as other ethnicities, will simply be accepted as the way it always was and always was meant to be.

Kathleen Hinckley, the executive director of the Association of Professional Genealogists, explains that she constantly gets calls from people asking her to ''find an Indian'' in the family tree. But she also says that such requests were part of a much larger surge of genealogical interest. Her membership of professional genealogists has leapt from 1,000 to 1,700 in the last five years. Genealogists will tell you the phone always rings most on Monday, the day after a Sunday family reunion when some aging great-aunt finally confesses that her grandmother was a Chippewa or a Jew or from one of the noble clans of Scots, sending another anxious young American into the domains of ancestry.com or Hinckley's organization or into city-hall records to find the answer to the question What is my true past?

As an academic term, ethnic identity has long been associated with images of immigrant neighborhoods and ghettos -- dense collections of Jews or Italians, Irish or Germans who maintained the old ways, married among themselves and maybe even kept up the old language. But today's scattered, more mobile generations have less access to such stable reservoirs of ethnic identity, which may account for this rise in ethnic shopping and the need to lay claim through participation in ethnic festivals or religious conversion or powwows to an identity that better suits the itch of our increasingly intermarried, interracial, intertribal America.

Our Trillion Dollar War

The Trillion-Dollar War

By LINDA BILMES

Cambridge, Mass.

THE human cost of the more than 2,000 American military personnel killed and 14,500 wounded so far in Iraq and Afghanistan is all too apparent. But the financial toll is still largely hidden from public view and, like the suffering of those who have lost loved ones, will persist long after the fighting is over.

The cost goes well beyond the more than $250 billion already spent on military operations and reconstruction. Basic running costs of the current conflicts are $6 billion a month - a figure that reflects the Pentagon's unprecedented reliance on expensive private contractors. Other factors keeping costs high include inducements for recruits and for military personnel serving second and third deployments, extra pay for reservists and members of the National Guard, as well as more than $2 billion a year in additional foreign aid to Jordan, Pakistan, Turkey and others to reward their cooperation in Iraq and Afghanistan. The bill for repairing and replacing military hardware is $20 billion a year, according to figures from the Congressional Budget Office.

But the biggest long-term costs are disability and health payments for returning troops, which will be incurred even if hostilities were to stop tomorrow. The United States currently pays more than $2 billion in disability claims per year for 159,000 veterans of the 1991 gulf war, even though that conflict lasted only five weeks, with 148 dead and 467 wounded. Even assuming that the 525,000 American troops who have so far served in Iraq and Afghanistan will require treatment only on the same scale as their predecessors from the gulf war, these payments are likely to run at $7 billion a year for the next 45 years.

All of this spending will need to be financed by adding to the federal debt. Extra interest payments will total $200 billion or more even if the borrowing is repaid quickly. Conflict in the Middle East has also played a part in doubling the price of oil from $30 a barrel just prior to the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 to $60 a barrel today. Each $5 increase in the price of oil reduces our national income by about $17 billion a year.

Even by this simple yardstick, if the American military presence in the region lasts another five years, the total outlay for the war could stretch to more than $1.3 trillion, or $11,300 for every household in the United States.

Linda Bilmes, an assistant secretary at the Department of Commerce from 1999 to 2001, teaches budgeting and public finance at the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.