Death of José Juan Arrom

Cuban Professor and intellectual José Juan Arrom dies.
Source: Cuba Daily News
http://www.cubaheadlines.com/2007/06/26/4089/

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He was of short height but he had an immense personal charisma; he was talkative and kind, always open to exchange with the youth, nervous and restless; that is how I remember Cuban professor and intellectual José Juan Arrom when we first met in the halls of Havana’s Convention Center and in the Casa de las Américas (Americas’ House), attending conferences and presentations on Spanish-American literature.

I had read some of his essays, and linguistic and literary studies on the history of Spanish literature in the West Indies, as well as his penetrating exegeses on the aboriginal contribution to the Caribbean and Latin American cultural heritage.

He was one of Cuba’s most respected and expert philologists of our literature who rubbed shoulders with people of the most exclusive circles of the US academic world as a Yale graduate and professor.

His merits, his tireless diligence, led to be a funding member of the US Academy of the Spanish Language and, also, a member of the Cuban Academy of Language.

Now, after knowing of his death, in his home in Massachusetts, where he lived after retiring as a professor at the University of Yale, where he had a fruitful career, we feel moved, not only because of the intellect that has died, but also, and above all, because he was a human being of an extraordinary kindness and wisdom that we knew and from whom we received advice and encouragement.

He was born in eastern Cuba, in Holguín; he was the son of a Majorcan man and a Cuban woman. Since he was very young, he received his family’s support to develop his intelligence and he studied in Yale, a prestigious institution where he obtained three university degrees on literature and many honors during several decades although he was a very modest and studious man.

He also worked as curator of the Latin American collection in Yale and, without quitting teaching, he wrote a lot and advised many US students on many topics related to Spanish and Spanish-American literature.

Since he was very young in Cuba, he had showed his talent and witticism when he published, since 1941, in the Revista Bimestre Cubana (Cuban Bimonthly Magazine), his article on the “First dramatic expressions in Cuba, 1512-1776”, a line of research that he continued, although he also dedicated a lot of time of his life to the study of the colonial period in the literature of Latin America.

His first book, Studies on Spanish-American literature, was published in Havana in 1950. Later, along with his notebooks, he continued developing his writings on culture in specialized periodicals such as Revista Cubana (Cuban Maganzine), the Handbook of Latin American Studies and the Iberoamerican Magazine, among others.

Many US publications, like Hispania for example, had Arrom as a contributor. His essays were also circulated by other scientific publications such as the Bulletin of Caro y Cuervo Institute, of Colombia; the Journal of Inter-American Studies, the American Notebooks, the Magazine of the Puerto Rican Culture Institute and the Bulletin of the US Academy of the Spanish Language.

The ‘Taíno’ culture, and its presence in Cuban, Dominican and Caribbean literature, as well as his interest in the colonial matters of the viceroyalty of Mexico and in the black presence on the Americas’ folk poetry, were some of the topics that he studied as a philosopher, a sociologist and a culture expert. He also had a fine command of the prose, marked by an explicit communicative eagerness.

Cuban, Spanish and US culture are mourning this great intellectual and those of us who were lucky to have his affection and friendship are feeling his absence with particular emotions.

Source: By Mercedes Santos Moray, CUBANOW
Submitted by editor on Tue, 2007-06-26 16:01.

Happy June 21st and June 24th

Tomorrow, June 21st, is Canada's annual "National Aboriginal Day." In the United States, June 21st has been set as the National Prayer Day for Native Sacred Places (see Indian Country Today).

June 24th marks "el dia del Indio" (Indian Day) in Andean nations such as Peru.

Ottawa to Appeal Expansion of Indigenous "Status"

As expected, the Conservative government of Prime Minister Stephen Harper plans to appeal a recent Canadian provincial high court ruling that struck down a long-standing restriction on legal recognition of indigenous identity.

For more on this see Bill Curry's "Appeal of native ruling likely, Ottawa says," The Globe and Mail, Tuesday, June 19, 2007.

Canada: New Developments in Indigenous Status

The past week in Canada has seen the promise of some major new transformations in the current position of Aboriginal peoples. For those readers not too familiar with the Canadian situation, it is important to note that there are two basic "classes" of Aboriginals: (1) those officially registered as "status Indians" who have legal rights to residence on reserves, with individual reserves referred to as "First Nations"--the Assembly of First Nations (AFN) is tied to this backdrop; and, (2) people who self-identify as Aboriginal, but who are "non-status" because they had a mother or grandmother who married a non-native--the Congress of Aboriginal People, which rarely receives anywhere as much media attention as the AFN, is tied to this population.

In Canada, the law had descent reckoned through the paternal line, even when this went against particular aboriginal societies' custom of reckoning descent through the maternal line. As a result, a vast number of Aboriginals lost the right to reside on reserves, and most ended up in cities. In the meantime, Aboriginal men were entitled to marry non-native women, and those women obtained the right to reside on reserve, so that some persons with "status" may not even be Aboriginal. This double-pronged erosion of reserve-based nations may be coming to a final end. (The Indian Missions of Trinidad were regulated by an even more severe version of this system--where all "mixed race" offspring were officially de-Indianized and lost rights to collective lands that had been granted to their parents and grandparents. Both Trinidad and Canada were governed by the British for a period of time.)

On Saturday, June 16, 2007, Bill Curry writing in The Globe and Mail ("Indian status can be traced through mother, court rules"), tells us the following:

The B.C. [British Columbia] Supreme Court has wiped out one of the most contentious aspects of the federal Indian Act, striking down part of Ottawa's definition of a status Indian and opening the door to hundreds of thousands of new applications for native services.

The court rejected part of the existing legal definition on the grounds that it discriminates against Canadians who trace their aboriginal roots through their female relatives rather than their father or grandfather.

The ruling alters the federal law that has long created two classes of aboriginals in Canada: the 767,000 who fit the definition of status Indian and the several hundred thousand more who don't.

The 2001 census found 976,000 Canadians who self-identified as aboriginal and more than 1.3 million who said they had aboriginal ancestry.

Many aboriginals who failed in their requests for status will now have a much better chance of success, said Beverley Jacobs, the president of the Native Women's Association of Canada.

"This opens the floodgates," she said. "I don't think we could have asked for a better judgment."

Aboriginals with status qualify for prescription drug coverage and can apply for postsecondary assistance.

The Federal Government of Canada disingenuously claimed that it previously addressed the issue of patriarchal discrimination in the Indian Act by passing Bill C-31 in 1985. What was the "major change" of that Bill? It simply pushed the cut-off line to second generation offspring of unions between natives and others, and still reckoned descent along paternal lines. That minor change did however return status to 175,000 individuals. This latest court ruling has the effect of nullifying Section 6 of the Indian Act, that section which pertains to who can claim to be an "Indian" (the subject of an upcoming seminar in Montreal).

In the same week, the Federal Government committed itself to setting up, in conjunction with the Assembly of First Nations, an impartial tribunal for resolving the more than 800 land claim cases that remain unresolved in Canada, that on average have been the subject to legal disputes lasting 20 years, with some much longer than that (see The Globe and Mail, June 13, 2007, "New land-claims process in works"). This would mean that the Federal Government could no longer act as defendant, judge, and jury all at the same time. While there is no way of predicting future rulings on so many cases, if one were to assume that there will be much more land added to the current land base of First Nations reserves, but also many more persons with status as outlined above, the net effect might be bigger numbers on all fronts, but not necessarily more land per person. If, on the other hand, the current size of the reserve land base were to remain roughly the same, but the numbers of persons with status vastly increased, it could serve to effectively crush reserves under their own weight. The situation where a boon becomes bane is not all that uncommon in Canada, as in the case of select reserves suffering from high rates of alcoholism and substance abuse suddenly finding themselves awash in cash from settled claims or other compensation packages, precisely at the time that those particular Aboriginals can least handle the new resources, and where the temptation to squander is higher than it might otherwise be.