American Indian Culture and Research Journal

I have no issue and took no issue in these pages with the case law on which Federal District Judge H. Russel Holland based his grant of Exxon’s motion for summary judgment on native claims for noneconomic injury in relation to the infamous oil spill of the Exxon Valdez (Order No. 190 in the U.S. District Court of Alaska, 23 March 1994) [henceforth #1901. Whereas I take exception with some minor issues in the judge’s response, here and in the original article in these pages I focus on his egregious mistakes. As minor issues go, a casual reading of my article demonstrates that I did not identify the precise amount that attorneys for commercial fishermen or the claimants shall collect from judgments against Exxon, nor did I identify the precise amount that native claimants or their attorneys shall receive from their settlement with Exxon. The more serious mistakes are his unwarranted assertions about differences between natives and nonnatives. I take the judge at his word that he arrived at his misconceptions independently of Bohannon’s similar errors. Let me once again assess Judge Holland’s bent for generalizing in the absence of evidence. To be courteous, his generalizations might be framed as hypotheses. To be accurate, his generalizations are unwarranted assertions. It was the unwarranted nature of his assertions, rich throughout his decision and consonant with similar assertions made by Exxon's anthropological expert, that drew comment from me in "Ethnicity, Not Culture? . . ."