ABSTRACT
This chapter presents Roger Echo-Hawk's thoughts on the concept of race that the academy had long-since discredited, and embarked on a personal and professional journey to giving up race himself. It offers powerful meditation on racialism and a manifesto for creating a world without it. The chapter explains Echo-Hawk's examination on personal identity, social movements, and policy of NAGPRA, Indian law, Red Pride, indigenous archaeology to show how they rely on race and how they should move beyond it. From his experimentation, it is found that the traditional academic embrace of race creates a profound problem for historical storytelling and for sense of historical self-awareness. For this reason, it is qualitatively different to study the doings of adherents to racial Indianhood, as opposed to studying the doings of Indians. Knowing that race deforms both humankind and human history, it seems logical to suggest that the social construction of race as a biological truth needs useful study rather than uncritical perpetuation.
