A few days ago, another huge project was finished. Starting in 2012, my Leipzig colleagues Gabriele Pisarz-Ramirez, Anne Grob, Maria Lippold and I prepared a conference on “Selling Ethnicity and Race.” The conference, held in November 2013 at Leipzig University, discussed “the production and performance of ethnic and racial identities as well as the consumption of ‘ethnic’ and racialized products in the complex field between representational politics, economics, and consumerism, […investigating] new emerging ethnic imaginaries and the ways in which they respond to the re-invigoration of ethnic identification and to the increased visibility of nonwhite Americans in the United States.” We invited scholars from the fields of cultural anthropology, history, ethnic studies, cultural studies, and Native American studies from the US and Germany, to discuss these issues.

The anthology collecting some of the contributions has just been released with Wissenschaftlicher Verlag Trier, completing an exciting three-year project

Although, or better, because it was not immediately related to my current research projects in its thematic outline, I loved this project as it forced me to go deep into unfamiliar territory. Working on the introduction to bundle these various approaches and disciplines into a coherent work, we discussed theories of ethnic marketing, forms of capital (e.g., cultural, social), border studies, consumerism, and commodification. Our collected case studies explore examples from Native American, Asian American, and Hispanic communities.

The collection at Amazon.

Table of contents.

Shadow Wolves – the “Indian Scout Syndrome” in Policing

My own contribution to the project drew from my current work on Native American military traditions and warrior imagery, focusing on a case study I had wanted to research since my graduate work at the University of Arizona in 2000. My essay discusses the all-Native Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) unit called the “Shadow Wolves,” stationed at the Tohono O’odham reservation in southern Arizona. To a large extent, the text employs Nancy Leong’s concept of “racial capitalism” to argue that most media representations of the Shadow Wolves cater to popular notions of Indian super-scouts. Newspapers portray the Native officers’ tracking and scouting techniques (known as “cutting for sign”) as their―supposedly inheritable and unique―racial capital.

Scholarship on the Shadow Wolves is scarce; most works focus on border issues, particularly the militarization of the border after 9/11. Only a few of those, and none of the media articles I analyzed, address the political significance behind the ethnic composition of this unit (although all state the fact): The Tohono O’odham assert their sovereignty by insisting on an all-Native unit in exchange for allowing the federal government to permanently station an ICE unit on the reservation.

Over the course of my research on the Shadow Wolves’ expertise, I became intrigued with their record of tracker training courses across the world: they served in Eastern European countries during the expansion of the EU, in Central Asia, and on the Arabian peninsula. Some of these tracker courses seem to be part of EXBS (Export Control and Related Border Security), a US program within an international agreement to counter smuggling and terrorism and to enhance international collaboration of security forces. For my interest in warrior imagery, I would have loved to see the correspondence by which American representatives suggest the use of Shadow Wolf instructors to foreign diplomats, especially the way their tracking expertise is advertised. Unfortunately, it seems that these documents―if they are available at all―are subject to a FOIA request, and the scope of this article didn’t allow for such a rather time-consuming process.