I have settled my lawsuit with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC). This declaration of fact supposedly ends a story with the tidiness to which storytelling in a linear society aspires. The most interesting stories are never tidy, though. And nothing untidy ever ends.
All public controversies involve vocabularies rich with violent but unacknowledged connotation. My case began with the repetition of termination and now concludes with the terminal noun settlement. Both words are legalistic, but have special resonance in the field of American Indian Studies, the location of my hiring and firing. The United States federal government carried out a policy of termination in the mid-20th century intended to dissolve Native nations into the mass of Americana. And termination, of course, speaks coldly but clearly to the horrors of genocide. ...