Black cowboys. Oh my, this would suggest that certain faculty members at the University of Wyoming are, well, ignorant, sanctimonious, twits.
One third of all cowboys in the Frontier Era were black or Mexican.
One third.
Of cowboys that drove cattle up to Wyoming on the Texas Trail 25% to 30% were black, meaning that when Hispanics were added in, even a higher percentage were non white, if you will.
This doesn't even consider individuals like Jim Edwards, Lost Springs Wyoming rancher who was also black. We could consider him to be a cowboy, yes, but more than that, he was also a rancher, and a large scale rancher at that. And it doesn't consider areas like the Sagre de Cristo region of Colorado, where nearly all the ranchers were Hispanics . . . and many still are today.
Blacks and Mexicans formed a significant base of cowboys early on. The occupation has never been racially exclusive. It wasn't in the 19th Century and it isn't now.
I have, from time to time, handled a fair number of cases on the Wind River Reservation. The judge there was also a rancher. And yes, he was an Indian.
I've herded cattle many times with working ranch families, including married couples and their teenage daughters.
The point?
Being called a cowboy doesn't imply a race by a long shot and never has. And in the modern context, it doesn't imply a gender either.
And somebody who gets all up tight in a politically correct snit about that is an sanctimonious ignoramus of epic proportions.
What's this about?
Well, the University of Wyoming, for reasons that escape me, recently decided that for marketing purposes they needed to hire Victor & Spoils, a Boulder Colorado (of course) marketing firm to come up with a new catch phrase for UW. V&S came up with "The World needs more Cowboys". UW paid V&S $500,000, so I"m hoping that they got more than that, as if that's what the $500,000 bought, that's pretty darned lame.
Be that as it may, lameness isn't what the faculty flap is about.
Let's go to the Tribune:
“I had lots of different reactions,” said Angela Jaime*, the director of the American Indian Studies department. “I was really disappointed in the university for endorsing such a negative slogan.”
“I was kind of like, ‘Woah, has anyone else heard of this?’” said Christine Boggs, an instructor and the co-chair of the Committee on Women and People of Color at UW. The group sent a letter to university leaders to voice its “grave concerns” about the slogan and requesting that UW “shelve” it in favor of a more diverse tagline.
“Well the concern for me is the ‘boy’ part, right?” said Christine Porter**, a UW professor and vocal opponent of the slogan. “Since the 1950s at least in other parts of the country, it is no longer acceptable ... to use the generic masculine and pretend that includes the feminine.”
She added that the word “cowboy” brings to mind an image of a straight white man and past conflicts with Native Americans.
“As the director of American Indian Studies, it becomes incredibly problematic to try to imagine using any of this promotional material when I’m recruiting Native students,” Jaime said. “The term ‘cowboy’ evokes the play time — the racist play time — of cowboys and Indians, right?”
What a bunch of self important, pretentious, ignorant snobs. All of this faculty ought to go. And permanently.
And probably go to a ranching and agricultural reeducation camp where they are exposed to a strong dose of reality and actual history.
Let's break this down.
“I had lots of different reactions,” said Angela Jaime, the director of the American Indian Studies department. “I was really disappointed in the university for endorsing such a negative slogan.”Has Jaime been on the Reservation's Arapahoe ranch and visited with its Arapahoe cowboys? Perhaps she should.
Agricultural operations on the Wind River Reservation feature a large Native American element. One of the biggest operations on the Reservation, if not the biggest, is owned by a Shoshone family whose name is strongly identified with that Tribe. Another is owned by one of the tribes itself. There are many smaller, Indian, ranching operations on the Wind River Reservation. On a more personal level, I once employed an Indian secretary whose father was. . . a working cowboy off of the Reservation.
She [Christine Porter] added that the word “cowboy” brings to mind an image of a straight white man and past conflicts with Native Americans.
Only for people who get their history from old re-runs of The High Chaparral.
An American Indian. . . cowboy. This isn't as uncommon as some ignorant folks at UW would probably believe. . . and it certainly isn't uncommon now. Indeed, while Indian cowboys made an early appearance after the introduction of cattle and are very much still with us, it's worth noting that native cultures in the West entered the livestock industry with sheep, which were very common in the Southwest amongst Indian tribes well before the United States had any sort of control of the territory. But you'd have to know history to know that.
I honestly don't know where the "Cowboys and Indians" concept of Western Expansion came from but it is really grossly exaggerated in the concept of Indian v. Stockmen fights. Stock raising is an economic activity and by and large most economic enterprises attempt to minimize their risks, not run out and engage in them. For that reason, while there are certainly exceptions, most of the history of ranching in the Far West comes after that region had been largely pacified in terms of Indian v. Euro American conflict. Put another way, George Armstrong Custer wasn't leading a band of cowboys into Montana with cattle. Shoot, for that matter the pioneering economic enterprise in that region was gold mining, not livestock raising.
Anyhow, to be fair, you can find some Indian v. Stockmen conflict, but if you do you are looking at areas like Texas or at fairly rare examples elsewhere. While there may have been Stockmen v. Indian conflicts somewhere in Wyoming, I'm at a loss to think of a single example. That doesn't mean that the attitudes of either party were all Faculty Enlightened or something. No, it means that by the time livestock came into most of Wyoming conflicts with the native populations were largely over.
You'd think a university professor would be educated enough to know that.
But then, you'd also think that an educator at a state land grant university located in Wyoming, the only four year public university in the state, would be aware that not only have their historically been Indian cowboys, there still are.
Consider the Arapaho Ranch. And in considering it, consider their website, which relates:
So, does Angela Jaime find that the Arapahoe Ranch's proud indication that it's cattle are "worked and cared for by Native American cowboys" to be offensive? What about its proclamation that this is consistent with:
Eh, Jaime?
Or that its "is the Pride of the Northern Arapaho Nation"?
Well, that's the real world. Not the University of Wyoming in our current times, apparently.
You'd also think that a university professor would be educated enough to know that 1/3d of all cowboys were Mexicans or Blacks. But apparently not.
Nat Love. Former slave, cowboy, and later Pullman Porter. Oh, and a married man as well. Oh, what to do, he's not white but not a homosexual . . .and he allegedly was kidnapped by Indians. What a PC nightmare.
For that matter, you'd think you'd be educated enough to know that up until relatively recently the Mexican presence in working cowboys here remained pretty high. I knew at least one local top hand who was a Mexican and whose family also owned a ranch in Mexico. When he retired locally, he retired to the family ranch in Chihuahua. And most ranchers in the modern era know other ranchers or stockmen somewhere who are either of Hispanic descent or actually Mexican and may have ranching interest in Mexico. I do.
And I won't even go into sheep ranching in depth, which I won't do in part because sheepherders aren't cowboys. But if I did, you'd see there was a point at which various ethnicities, Irish, Mexican, Basque and Peruvian cycled through the industry on the working end. Today, if you find a sheepherder, he's more likely to be Peruvian than anything else.
Okay, what about that (oh my gosh) "straight" part of that.
Well thanks in part to campaigning on the topic, and the American entertainment industry, Americans now believe that homosexuals are a statistically significant portion of the population. They are not. That doesn't mean that they're insignificant as human beings, which would be wholly incorrect, but it does mean that when were discussing the impact of a statement we shouldn't presume a vast slight is being offered. And that matters to this conversation.
Consider this item of awhile back from Gallup.
PRINCETON, N.J. -- The American public estimates on average that 23% of Americans are gay or lesbian, little changed from Americans' 25% estimate in 2011, and only slightly higher than separate 2002 estimates of the gay and lesbian population. These estimates are many times higher than the 3.8% of the adult population who identified themselves as lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender in Gallup Daily tracking in the first four months of this year.
That's pretty small, and that includes people who are lesbian, "gay" (which is technically a subset of the homosexual demographic), bisexual (which is also different) or "transgender" (a category which is still subject to serious debate as to whether or not it is even real).
If, therefore, the image of a cowboy is a straight male (more to that male part in a minute), it's because 96.2% of the American populations is straight. If you are thinking of a cowboy, oilfield worker, laundress, mechanic, court reporter, policeman, criminal, Mini Mart clerk, accountant, lawyer, mail, or whatever, you ought to be thinking of a "straight" individual as they almost all are. If you are thinking of any profession as "gay" or any group of individuals as "gay" you are buying into a false stereotype as it is statistically true that almost all members of any profession, no matter what it is, is straight.
Yes, there are people who are not, and that no doubt includes some ranchers and cowboys, but most people are.
Indeed, the greatest modern triumph of "progressives" is creating the illusion that a statistically insignificant demographic is significant so that the argument that laws and social norms ought to be changed to accommodate them partially on that basis. That's a stunning success, if perhaps one that should be questioned. It certainly ought to be questioned here in this context.
In contrast, to use a really bad comparison which is used as its easy to find, JAMA estimated that 12.7 % of the American population are alcoholics (which I'll note is not meant to suggest the comparisons here are anything other than statistical, clearly same sex attraction is vastly different from alcoholism and I don't mean to suggest they are the same in any fashion, which would be very insulting to homosexuals), up from about 6% in a prior estimate.*** That may be due to a change in the statistical definition, but at any rate its statistically significant and over three times the number of individuals who are regarded as being in the category of sexually attracted outside the norm. Indeed, it wasn't all that long ago that having a sexual attraction outside of the normal norm was regarded as deviant (by deviating) and a mental illness in no small part due to its comparative rarity. The change in that is still noted to be rather unscientific in nature and open to question in terms of its process, which is not to say that in most instances there's be any valid social reason to consider it a mental illness. That doesn't mean, however, that laws and social customs should have been changed to accommodate this statistically small demographic simply because it exists, any more than a person would argue that laws should be altered to accommodate the much larger populations with other behaviors which are outside of the biological norm without there being some good reason beyond the simple fact that it occurs.
Which is to say that people like Porter who are having a snit because the world cowboy brings to mind statistically normal males, to them, is to say that people like Porter have a problem with reality. Most males, and females, are normal in their attractions. Only a very small percentage are not. To recognize that fact is to recognize reality, not to identify some horrific slight.
Which brings us to the male/female part.
The Jordan Motor Car Company's legendary Somewhere West of Laramie advertisement, which was inspired by Jordan actually seeing a mounted female west of Laramie. Somewhere on the campus in Laramie now, such a site would cause faculty members to have a seizure.
Women have been involved in ranching since ranching was involved in ranching. In Christine Porter's view, the word "cowboy" may bring up an all male enterprise, and in reality it is largely male even today, but in reality, like it or not, most physical jobs are male. That has everything to do with male/female physical morphology and male/female natural psychology. In the current era, and in particular as amplified by our last President, it may be popular for the over-educated ignorant to believe that there are no differences between men and women, but in reality there most definitely are. That doesn't matter much in the Overheated Under-thinking Faculty Lounge, but it reality it does.
Which his why that even in an era when the last bastions of all male professions, combat soldiers, have been opened up to women unwisely there are still very few women in those roles. But we should also be honest, even in those roles, such as even in traditionally female roles, the other gender does fill in and does take a role by necessity on occasion.
In agriculture, there have always been female agriculturalist for a couple of reasons. For one reason, women in farming goes back to the dawn of farming. Women in animal husbandry does not seem to go back to animal husbandry antiquity, however, which is likely because almost all agricultural animals are big and dangerous and hence it was a male role. That's the reality of it.
But the added reality of it is that women married to men who engage in animal husbandry have taken a role in that in modern times also by necessity. If a person doesn't know that, that's because they just flat out weren't looking. It's not hard at all to find examples of women and girls herding cattle. And on any modern operation its not hard at all to find women from their early teens to their late sixties doing the same. Indeed, at least one very promising Wyoming rancher politician, who was also a woman (gasp!), and who is closely related to our current Governor, had her career cut short in a horse accident.****
Women cowboys were not only something that was known, but something celebrated in literature and art at least as far back as the early 20th Century. There was an entire genera of books based on women ranchers. Women cowboys were a really common early 20th Century literary and artistic motif.
Girl of the Gold West card, which was related to a novel by that name, that became a series of early movies. The theme of a cow punching female ranching protagonist was a very early one in 20th Century American literature and, quite frankly, the female central character was shown as a lot more natural active than a lot of female centric novels today. This gal would have been more likely to pistol whip Gray than bother with his fifty dubious shades.
So what does all this tell us?
Well, probably a lot more than most are willing to admit.
Some time ago the Washington Post Columnist/Snot Catherine Rampell posed the question of why Conservatives hate universities. I started a reply post at that time and then shelved it, but this is an ample demonstration of why that seems to be the case. Here article started off:
More than ever, higher education has become critical to snagging a stable job, moving up the income ladder and succeeding in the global economy.*****
Yet more than ever, higher education has also become a political football and object of derision.
It isn't that they hate higher education. It's that higher education is no longer really very educated, in many departments. Instead, it's become a refuge from reality and indeed from education itself. It's become an object of political football, and hence derision, as in many instances its a mere expression of politics, and often left wing radical politics, in and of itself, having not very much to do with actual education.
The faculty reacting at the University of Wyoming are showing themselves to be blisteringly ignorant. They are ignorant of history and of nature. And they're so ignorant that, as long as they are on public support, which is what is the case, they will remain so,and in fact be completely useless.
And in fact, they're fitting into an agenda that seeks to really radically reshape the world in contravention to nature, and they find large aspects of nature and history to be intolerable.
Consider, for example, if you are white male, which is the second largest demographic in the United States (right behind white females, the largest American demographic). For some reason, you are basically defined as bad by these people no matter what you have personally done, and simply because your demographic has been statistically significant for a long time. Nobody would do that with any other American ethnicity. Consider Jaime once again:
Indeed, what's this say to women in agriculture? And what's it say to a white guy who may be heavily into agriculture but fail to meet the other assumed definitions people like Porter and Jaime have? There's no reason to believe, except perhaps from their prospective, that there aren't gay men or women who are just as much a cowboy as the image they apparently are limited to through too many hours of watching television or movies. I'll note that I once represented a fellow who had been insulted in a legal context because he was a homosexual; he was also a decorated combat Marine and very proud of that. Do people like that fit into Porter and Jaime's world?
All cultures define themselves. A culture without any hero's are archetypes is simply replaced by one that does. A culture that destroys natural heroes, i.e., ones associated with nature in some ways, won't last. At best, what Porter, Jaime and Boggs represent is not a bold new reconstructed world in which everyone defines their reality, but the end stage of a Western culture too effete and weak to admire anything at all. A culture like that, if it persists, won't last long. . .or at all.
But you don't have to sit around accepting its demise.
__________________________________________________________________________________
* Jaime had bonafides in that she's an enrolled member of two Pacific Coast Native American tribes. . . or maybe not. While she's very well educated, a person has to ask the dread question here if being a member of one Native American tribe is as good as being a member of another, to which the answer should be no.
If that seems odd, what is meant is this. Members of Pacific Coast Indian tribes, ethnically, bear no more resemblance to Plains tribes than Irishmen do to Ukrainians. Yes, they're both Europeans, in the latter example, but there's a lot of differences. And hence the odd point. Even asserting that there's such a thing as "Indians", by an institution, is to make a racial categorization that itself risk being racist. I don't know much about Pacific Coast tribes, but maybe there were few who were cowboys (I really don't know), but there are Plains Indians who were and are cowboys and there are also Floridian Indians who are cowboys. That's part of their heritage. To make bold assertions about what an Indian can and cannot be, and what cowboys must be ethnically, is, well, risking racism.
**Porter has a biology degree but a quick look at her University of Wyoming biography reveals a character who would seem to fit into the university "progressive" mold, which is one of the reason that universities are increasingly loosing credit with more than one sector of the American public. It's easy to be a progressive on the faculty.
***Some argue, and indeed it seems generally presumed, that the number of alcoholics has in fact doubled. That's questionable, however. It may be that the number of people recognized as alcoholics has simply doubled. Indeed, having lived long enough to see the change in how this is viewed, I suspect that's the case.
Likewise, the number of people identified as homosexual and other categories deviating from straight has undoubtedly increased from a lower percentage to 3.8% In part that is no doubt because people were highly reluctant to self identify in that fashion up until recently, and no doubt quite a few still are reluctant. At the same time, however, there's an odd element of trendiness in some quarters in identifying in this fashion which causes some identifications in some demographics that are likely false. That's also true, oddly enough, with alcoholism. The errors this creates are likely insignificant in the overall percentages, however.
****Mary Mead.
*****Legacy Princeton educated Rampell probably doesn't realize it, but while there's a large element of truth to this, in the modern American economy this is not actually universally true. Technical educates are once again quite productive, while the occupation that Rampell occupies, columnist, a species of journalism, is in real trouble.
And in fact, they're fitting into an agenda that seeks to really radically reshape the world in contravention to nature, and they find large aspects of nature and history to be intolerable.
Consider, for example, if you are white male, which is the second largest demographic in the United States (right behind white females, the largest American demographic). For some reason, you are basically defined as bad by these people no matter what you have personally done, and simply because your demographic has been statistically significant for a long time. Nobody would do that with any other American ethnicity. Consider Jaime once again:
“Come up with a different slogan that doesn’t evoke some sort of a white guy in a cowboy hat and tight Wrangler jeans and cowboy boots,” Jaime said. “Rather than trying to quote-unquote redefine a word. There are lots of words we can already use that are really positive.”
So what's this say to the Arapahoe cowboys in the Arapahoe Ranch? Apparently that they're genuine rural lifestyle doesn't count to a professor who hails from California, enrolled tribal member of Pacific Coast native peoples though they may be.
Indeed, what's this say to women in agriculture? And what's it say to a white guy who may be heavily into agriculture but fail to meet the other assumed definitions people like Porter and Jaime have? There's no reason to believe, except perhaps from their prospective, that there aren't gay men or women who are just as much a cowboy as the image they apparently are limited to through too many hours of watching television or movies. I'll note that I once represented a fellow who had been insulted in a legal context because he was a homosexual; he was also a decorated combat Marine and very proud of that. Do people like that fit into Porter and Jaime's world?
All cultures define themselves. A culture without any hero's are archetypes is simply replaced by one that does. A culture that destroys natural heroes, i.e., ones associated with nature in some ways, won't last. At best, what Porter, Jaime and Boggs represent is not a bold new reconstructed world in which everyone defines their reality, but the end stage of a Western culture too effete and weak to admire anything at all. A culture like that, if it persists, won't last long. . .or at all.
But you don't have to sit around accepting its demise.
Breakin' Through, a University of Wyoming statute depicting a woman riding a bronc. Oh my, we can't have such horrific racist male depictions can we.
__________________________________________________________________________________
* Jaime had bonafides in that she's an enrolled member of two Pacific Coast Native American tribes. . . or maybe not. While she's very well educated, a person has to ask the dread question here if being a member of one Native American tribe is as good as being a member of another, to which the answer should be no.
If that seems odd, what is meant is this. Members of Pacific Coast Indian tribes, ethnically, bear no more resemblance to Plains tribes than Irishmen do to Ukrainians. Yes, they're both Europeans, in the latter example, but there's a lot of differences. And hence the odd point. Even asserting that there's such a thing as "Indians", by an institution, is to make a racial categorization that itself risk being racist. I don't know much about Pacific Coast tribes, but maybe there were few who were cowboys (I really don't know), but there are Plains Indians who were and are cowboys and there are also Floridian Indians who are cowboys. That's part of their heritage. To make bold assertions about what an Indian can and cannot be, and what cowboys must be ethnically, is, well, risking racism.
**Porter has a biology degree but a quick look at her University of Wyoming biography reveals a character who would seem to fit into the university "progressive" mold, which is one of the reason that universities are increasingly loosing credit with more than one sector of the American public. It's easy to be a progressive on the faculty.
***Some argue, and indeed it seems generally presumed, that the number of alcoholics has in fact doubled. That's questionable, however. It may be that the number of people recognized as alcoholics has simply doubled. Indeed, having lived long enough to see the change in how this is viewed, I suspect that's the case.
Likewise, the number of people identified as homosexual and other categories deviating from straight has undoubtedly increased from a lower percentage to 3.8% In part that is no doubt because people were highly reluctant to self identify in that fashion up until recently, and no doubt quite a few still are reluctant. At the same time, however, there's an odd element of trendiness in some quarters in identifying in this fashion which causes some identifications in some demographics that are likely false. That's also true, oddly enough, with alcoholism. The errors this creates are likely insignificant in the overall percentages, however.
****Mary Mead.
*****Legacy Princeton educated Rampell probably doesn't realize it, but while there's a large element of truth to this, in the modern American economy this is not actually universally true. Technical educates are once again quite productive, while the occupation that Rampell occupies, columnist, a species of journalism, is in real trouble.
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