Why Many Native Americans Are Angry With Elizabeth Warren

If Senator Elizabeth Warren thought that releasing her DNA test results showing Native American ancestry would neutralize a Republican line of attack, she was wrong.

The test — part of her strategic preparations for a likely presidential campaign — did not placate Cheeto-Faced Ferret-Wearing Shit Gibbon, who has mocked Ms. Warren as “Pocahontas” and once promised $1 million to a charity of her choice if a DNA test substantiated her claims of Cherokee and Delaware heritage. And her announcement of the results angered many Native Americans, including the Cherokee Nation, the largest of the country’s three federally recognized Cherokee tribes.

DNA testing cannot show that Ms. Warren is Cherokee or any other tribe, the secretary of state of the Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr., said in a statement. Tribes set their own citizenship requirements, not to mention that DNA tests don’t distinguish among the numerous indigenous groups of North and South America. The test Ms. Warren took did not identify Cherokee ancestry specifically; it found that she most likely had at least one Native American ancestor six to 10 generations ago.

Ms. Warren defended herself by saying she was not claiming to be eligible for membership in the Cherokee Nation — and she isn’t, given that her ancestors do not appear on the Dawes Rolls, early-20th-century government documents that form the basis of the Cherokee citizenship process. She said she was simply corroborating the family stories of Native American lineage that she has often recounted.

But that distinction actually cuts to the heart of why Native Americans are so upset with her. Fundamentally, their anger is about what it means to be Native American — and who gets to decide.

“The American public doesn’t understand the difference” between ancestry and tribal membership, said Kim TallBear, a professor at the University of Alberta who wrote a book titled “Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science.”

While many people see “Native American” as simply a racial category, she said, “we have additional ideas about how to identify when one is Native American that aren’t really consistent with the way most Americans think. Our definitions matter to us.”

And so when someone like Ms. Warren emphasizes undocumented lineage over tribal citizenship criteria, said Dr. TallBear, who is a member of the Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate tribe in South Dakota, “what they’re telling us is they are privileging nonindigenous definitions of being indigenous.”

Membership in a Native American tribe is “very precious to us,” Mr. Hoskin, the Cherokee Nation secretary of state, said in a phone interview. “It’s not just a card that we hold. It’s something that we consider a dear possession, and so we don’t take it lightly.”

This perspective is grounded in a long history of persecution, displacement and massacre. Over many decades of United States history, the government took the land of Native American tribes, including the Cherokee, and pushed them steadily west. President Andrew Jackson forced the Cherokee into their current territory in Oklahoma in the Trail of Tears during 1838 and 1839. Administration after administration signed treaties with tribes and then violated them. It was not until the 1930s that tribes gained the sovereignty they now have on their reservations.

“Those of us who are Cherokee citizens, we know our ancestors in some cases perished along the Trail of Tears,” Mr. Hoskin said.

“Most reasonable people can understand,” in that context, why claims to Native American heritage based on a DNA test are fraught, he added.

Neither Ms. Warren nor anyone on her staff contacted the Cherokee Nation before publicizing the DNA results, Mr. Hoskin said. A spokeswoman for Ms. Warren’s re-election campaign, Kristen Orthman, declined to comment on this point.

Ms. Warren’s announcement was clearly intended to put to rest one of Mr. Trump’s favorite lines of attack. (Mr. Hoskin criticized Mr. Trump, too, for his repeated use of “Pocahontas” as a slur.) Instead, the DNA test brought a barrage of negative headlines and opinion pieces, in liberal-leaning publications like HuffPost as well as conservative-leaning ones like The New York Post.


https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/17/us/politics/elizabeth-warren-dna-test.html

For fuck's sake, she's not claiming tribal membership, she's claiming ancestry, and they're pissed off because (some of, not all of!) the American public doesn't know the difference?

Hell, the Indians I've met in Texas wouldn't give a flying shit about that, and yes, they do call themselves Indians. I had an editor for several years who was adopted into the Lakota tribe but was actually from a different one, so tribal membership is obviously distinct from ancestry.

He's an atheist Republican, by the way. Really hard guy to peg.

By the way, the Pocahontas slur is a dumbed-down version of what Massachusetts Republicans originally dubbed her, which was "Fauxcahontas." Faux as in fake. But that's too smart for Trump, he has to make everything obvious.

And as seen the left pick and choose when they back the dumb concept cultural appropriation.

She was doing this clearly for votes and political gain. Where its clearly backfired with many of the indigenous and rightly so. She has basicaly one very distant relative. 

Can you imagine outrage, if Trump had made such a claim?

Now again I think the idea of cultural appropriation is ridiculous, but muppets like this Senator are real low lifes. Who could care less about the indigeneous and only care about how to make themselves look good to the public

Am glad this blew up in her face.

*THE Ben Reilly* wrote:For fuck's sake, she's not claiming tribal membership, she's claiming ancestry, and they're pissed off because (some of, not all of!) the American public doesn't know the difference?

Hell, the Indians I've met in Texas wouldn't give a flying shit about that, and yes, they do call themselves Indians. I had an editor for several years who was adopted into the Lakota tribe but was actually from a different one, so tribal membership is obviously distinct from ancestry.

He's an atheist Republican, by the way. Really hard guy to peg.

By the way, the Pocahontas slur is a dumbed-down version of what Massachusetts Republicans originally dubbed her, which was "Fauxcahontas." Faux as in fake. But that's too smart for Trump, he has to make everything obvious.

I've said this for years, they prefer being called Indians. The pc people should butt out.

Didge wrote:And as seen the left pick and choose when they back the dumb concept cultural appropriation.

She was doing this clearly for votes and political gain. Where its clearly backfired with many of the indigenous and rightly so. She has basicaly one very distant relative. 

Can you imagine outrage, if Trump had made such a claim?

Now again I think the idea of cultural appropriation is ridiculous, but muppets like this Senator are real low lifes. Who could care less about the indigeneous and only care about how to make themselves look good to the public

Am glad this blew up in her face.

A more plausible and obvious possible claim for the Dumpster to try for, could be for a "rumoured" possible distant familial link to one of the Russian Czars from a couple of centuries back...

Something more for his deranged supporters to cheer for -- his possible links to distant cousin Vlad'..

*THE Ben Reilly* wrote:For fuck's sake, she's not claiming tribal membership, she's claiming ancestry, and they're pissed off because (some of, not all of!) the American public doesn't know the difference?

Hell, the Indians I've met in Texas wouldn't give a flying shit about that, and yes, they do call themselves Indians. I had an editor for several years who was adopted into the Lakota tribe but was actually from a different one, so tribal membership is obviously distinct from ancestry.

He's an atheist Republican, by the way. Really hard guy to peg.

By the way, the Pocahontas slur is a dumbed-down version of what Massachusetts Republicans originally dubbed her, which was "Fauxcahontas." Faux as in fake. But that's too smart for Trump, he has to make everything obvious.

Spot on. Elizabeth Warren is not claiming something from Indians, she is claiming something for herself, that already belongs to her. Trump, a second generation German, and his Slavic wife, should be fending off accusations of his own immigrant status.

Original Quill wrote:

*THE Ben Reilly* wrote:For fuck's sake, she's not claiming tribal membership, she's claiming ancestry, and they're pissed off because (some of, not all of!) the American public doesn't know the difference?

Hell, the Indians I've met in Texas wouldn't give a flying shit about that, and yes, they do call themselves Indians. I had an editor for several years who was adopted into the Lakota tribe but was actually from a different one, so tribal membership is obviously distinct from ancestry.

He's an atheist Republican, by the way. Really hard guy to peg.

By the way, the Pocahontas slur is a dumbed-down version of what Massachusetts Republicans originally dubbed her, which was "Fauxcahontas." Faux as in fake. But that's too smart for Trump, he has to make everything obvious.

Spot on.  Elizabeth Warren is not claiming something from Indians, she is claiming something for herself, that already belongs to her.  Trump, a second generation German, and his Slavic wife, should be fending off accusations of his own immigrant status.

It was clearly politically motivated and hence why the reaction from many of the indigenous community, rightly took her to task over this.

Warren already owns her own heritage. It exists...end of...

My grandfather, Norman, came from Childress, Tex.; my grandmother, Shirley, came from Alexandria, La. Norman always speculated that his family descended from German-speaking Czechs — which would stand to reason, as Texas is home to a lively Czech population. Shirley was certain her mother had been at least partially Native American. Neither story was outlandish enough to be dismissed upon first airing. These were the stories I heard growing up — threads in tapestry. All the same, none of it was true.

The era of Ancestry.com and 23andMe has brought about a new kind of self-discovery and has supplied unprecedented ease in researching family legends. Those services, and a few other similar ones, are how my family figured out our own handed-down history was unfounded. The bright light of modern empiricism doesn’t always reveal welcome truths, and we haven’t quite worked out how to deal with these disparities in stories, science and social realities yet, or spent much time predicting their social and political consequences. For a high-profile object lesson in this odd quandary, consider the case of Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.).

This week, Warren released a video and DNA report elaborating on her Native American heritage. Warren’s DNA results suggested, according to one Stanford professor, that she probably had a Native American ancestor between six and 10 generations ago — a small amount, in other words. But throughout the 1990s, and as late as 2004, Warren was listed in various publications as a Native American, “minority” and “woman of color.” Warren consistently identified herself as white on personnel forms early in her career, but, two years into her teaching post at the University of Pennsylvania, she authorized administrators to switch her ethnic designation from “white” to “Native American.” Similarly, Warren only listed her ethnicity as Native American nearly five months after she began her tenured position at Harvard Law School.

Warren’s background has been a point of political contention for some time, with former senatorial opponent Scott Brown and Cheeto-Faced Ferret-Wearing Shit Gibbon each accusing her of embellishing her ancestry — most notoriously with Trump’s use of the epithet “Pocahontas.” But as Nathan J. Robinson pointed out in the left-wing magazine Current Affairs, you don’t need to read Warren’s history of identifying and being identified as Native American in bad faith to realize there is a legitimate issue there. Native American advocates, including Kim TallBear, Adrienne Keene and the Cherokee Nation itself have criticized Warren’s efforts to justify her claims of Native American identity with nothing but a DNA test and family lore. Being Native American is about more than a mail-in DNA work-up — which, as Masha Gessen acutely observed in the New Yorker, are dubious indicators at any rate — it’s about culture, language, kinship ties, community and much more.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warrens-dna-test-is-about-more-than-politics/2018/10/18/85bd1368-d248-11e8-8c22-fa2ef74bd6d6_story.html?utm_term=.fbe28d820d37