[News] Native American Sovereignty Is Under Attack. Here’s How Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test Hurt Our Struggle

[Anti-Imperialist News]

https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/elizabeth-warren-dna-native-americans/


  Native American Sovereignty Is Under Attack. Here’s How Elizabeth
  Warren’s DNA Test Hurt Our Struggle

Nick EstesNick Estes - October 19 2018
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_Half a century_ ago, the Standing Rock Dakota scholar Vine Deloria Jr. 
wrote, “Whites claiming Indian blood tend to reinforce mythical beliefs 
about Indians.” Throughout her career, Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., 
has used that mythical belief — what Deloria mocked as the 
“Indian-grandmother complex” — to stake a claim to Native American 
identity, like how her European settler ancestors staked a claim to land 
once called Indian Territory, or what is currently Oklahoma. For Warren, 
her claims are like a moving target. At one time, it was “Cherokee.” Now 
it’s just generic “Native American ancestry.”

President Donald Trump, being a bigot, has consistently taunted Warren — 
frequently referring to her as “Pocahontas 
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/11/03/trumps-pocahontas-jab-at-elizabeth-warren-draws-the-ire-of-native-americans/?utm_term=.5478088be288>” 
— about her claims with a million-dollar wager 
<https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/411414-trump-denies-offering-1-million-for-warren-dna-test-even-though-he>: 
Take a DNA test to prove she’s “an Indian.” It was an obvious ploy, and 
Warren took the bait.

Yet her reaction hurt more than she might realize. Reducing Native 
American identity to “race,” whether through biology or the law, is 
harmful to Native sovereignty and nationhood, despite Warren’s professed 
good intentions. Warren, however, didn’t walk into Trump’s trap with her 
eyes closed. What she didn’t see, however, was how low Trump had set the 
bar when he said “jump” and she tripped on it, landing face first — on 
stolen Native land.

Like many Native people, I am jealous of Warren and white people like 
her. Native plebeians, such as myself, a poor Indian kid born on the 
wrong side of the tracks in Podunk, South Dakota, lack her pedigree and 
life story. She might as well have rare Romanov ancestry, a secret but 
ill-fated royal bloodline, when compared to my proletarian biography.

It was Warren’s self-identified Republican family members — the white 
guys drinking beer telling family stories in a living room — that 
bolstered her Native credentials in a recent video 
<https://elizabethwarren.com/fact-squad/heritage/> defending her “Native 
American ancestry.” I wish I had such relatives to do the same for me, 
but, if my relatives were captured drinking like that on camera, they 
might spend a night in the slammer or get labeled as “drunk Indians 
<https://thefunambulist.net/off-reservation-lakota-life-death-rapid-city-south-dakota-nick-estes>.”

There is an irony here. The white guys drinking beer have become the 
arbiters of Native identity, while those who have survived genocide and 
the theft of an entire continent have become mere background noise to 
the spectacle of powerful elites duking it out for control over land 
that is not rightfully theirs. Such is the history of the United States.

_The worst irony,_ though, is Warren’s appropriation of Native identity 
while simultaneously fetishizing and instrumentalizing it. To Warren, 
Native people are little more than a currency, a million-dollar ticket 
to the White House, a one-up to Trump. That’s how this game has been 
played so far: Trump asked her to prove that she’s “an Indian” (not that 
she has “ancestry”) with a DNA test, something that is, by all accounts, 
impossible. Indianness isn’t defined by DNA 
<https://theslot.jezebel.com/our-vote-matters-very-little-kim-tallbear-on-elizabeth-1829783321>. 
It’s a legal, social, cultural, and historical construct, where 
Indigenous nations self-define the parameters of belonging. Put simply, 
it’s not about who you claim, it’s about who claims you. In response to 
Warren, the Cherokee Nation issued a statement 
<https://www.cherokee.org/News/Stories/20181015_Cherokee-Nation-responds-to-Senator-Warrens-DNA-test> 
saying that “using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the 
Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and 
wrong.”

    Falsely claiming Native American identity is a white American
    tradition, with a deeply racist past.

Falsely claiming Native American identity is a white American tradition, 
with a deeply racist past. Forrest Carter, also known as Asa Earl Carter 
— a Ku Klux Klan leader and the former speechwriter for George Wallace 
(he co-wrote Wallace’s famous 1963 line, “Segregation now, segregation 
tomorrow, segregation forever”) — reinvented himself later in life as a 
“Cherokee 
<https://www.npr.org/2012/04/20/151037079/the-artful-reinvention-of-klansman-asa-earl-carter>” 
writer of the famous children’s book “The Education of Little Tree.” 
Famous white Southern Americans like Miley Cyrus, Johnny Cash, and Bill 
Clinton have also all falsely claimed “Cherokee heritage. 
<https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e>”

I’ll admit, I’m not a geneticist. (And I’d refer anyone interested in 
the political and social aspects of “Native American DNA” to read Kim 
Tallbear’s excellent book on the subject 
<https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/native-american-dna>.) I 
am, however, a historian and I can tell you that proving “Native 
American ancestry” by using Native body parts has a long, racist 
history. Genes are part of the human body, and to use genes to measure a 
degree or percentage of race to make a scientific claim is called race 
science, which discredits the legitimate science of DNA testing.

A century ago, Native people were considered a disappearing people. 
Anthropologists and others flooded Indian reservations intent on 
preserving the last vestiges of a dying race. With them, they brought 
calipers to measure Native skulls from the graves they robbed. Sometimes 
they used captured Indigenous children in boarding schools and prisoners 
of war for racial experiments, displaying their live specimens at 
traveling zoological exhibits. The goal was to prove a racial and 
civilizational superiority by showing just how far white Europeans had 
evolved from primitive conditions.

Such a people were also seen as too incompetent to manage their own 
lands and raise their own children. Their land and children were taken 
from them for their own good. The children were placed into the special 
care of white families and the land into the hands of white farmers 
(like Warren’s settler ancestors). Those who could not be killed or 
assimilated were placed under the supervision of the Department of 
Interior, which manages wildlife and public lands, where it was hoped 
that they would just disappear.

In other words, Native people, living or dead, were relegated to a 
tragic past with no place in the future of a white settler nation. Their 
identities and lands were simply absorbed and made into sports mascots 
and names for states and military equipment. Countless Native people 
were lost to this system 
<https://theintercept.com/2018/09/25/carlisle-indian-industrial-school-indigenous-children-disappeared/>, 
torn from their families and their Indigenous nations. Indigenous 
nations are still searching to reclaim their lost relatives — but Warren 
is not one of those people.

_While Warren and_ white people like her are rushing to get DNA tests 
that prove “Native American ancestry,” there is less enthusiasm among 
white people about proving “African ancestry.” That’s the unspoken 
racist undertone of this whole debate, especially since many Black 
Americans have actual connections to Indigenous nations of this 
hemisphere. The “one-drop rule” of African ancestry, a racial calculus 
created to increase the size of slaveowners’ property through biological 
reproduction, was designed to make one Black and nothing more — not 
Indigenous and especially not white. (Even the descendants of Cherokee 
slaves were disallowed tribal citizenship until recently 
<https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/31/547705829/judge-rules-that-cherokee-freedmen-have-right-to-tribal-citizenship>.)

These racial logics simply don’t grant Black and Native people the same 
visibility or authority over their own identities the same way they do 
to a powerful white woman who takes a DNA test. That’s called white 
supremacy.

Warren’s claims and Trump’s attacks have never been about upholding 
Native sovereignty. It’s pure opportunism. While Trump applauded 
<https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-rips-warren-total-fraud-after-cherokee-nation-rejects-her-n920611> 
the Cherokee Nation’s dismissal of Warren’s claims, his self-proclaimed 
policy of “American carnage” has opened billions of acres for offshore 
drilling — threatening circumpolar Indigenous nations as ice sheets melt 
and global temperatures rise — and has opened millions of acres of the 
Bears Ears National Monument, a once-protected Indigenous sacred site in 
the Southwest, for coal and uranium mining.

And North Dakota recently passed legislation disenfranchising thousands 
of Native American voters 
<https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/supreme-court-enables-mass-disenfranchisement-north-dakotas-native-americans> 
in the state, in places like Standing Rock that desperately fought the 
Dakota Access pipeline. Today, Standing Rock and the entire Sioux Nation 
in the Northern Plains are planning to halt 
<https://www.indianz.com/News/2018/07/17/we-will-be-waiting-tribes-remain-opposed.asp> 
the trespass of the Keystone XL pipeline through our treaty territory, a 
pipeline that imperils our water, our sovereignty, and therefore our lives.

    While Indigenous nations face existential threats, Warren’s
    conflation of her “Native American ancestry” with Native American
    identity only continues a history theft.

There are plenty of other examples. Some are even race-based, along the 
lines of the pseudoscience through which Warren tried to hitch her wagon 
to Native Americans. A federal court recently ruled that the Indian 
Child Welfare Act, a four decade-old law created to keep Native families 
intact, is “race-based 
<https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=5&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=2ahUKEwilnObXoo7eAhWSMX0KHVuYAIMQFjAEegQIBBAB&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.washingtonpost.com%2Fnews%2Fmorning-mix%2Fwp%2F2018%2F10%2F10%2Fcourt-strikes-down-native-american-adoption-law-saying-it-discriminates-against-non-native-americans%2F&usg=AOvVaw06-sRSgjUSUWZ1mztCWY6_>” 
legislation and therefore “unconstitutional.” Created to protect 
children who are members of Native nations or whose biological parents 
are members of Native nations, the law, in fact, was designed to prevent 
the disintegration of Native nations: the widespread practice of taking 
Native children and adopting them out to white families or placing them 
into state foster care systems.

While Indigenous nations face existential threats — from losing their 
children, land, and water — Warren’s conflation of her “Native American 
ancestry” with Native American identity only continues a history theft. 
The purposeful distortion and misunderstanding of Native sovereignty and 
identity, whether by Trump or Warren, is a longstanding tradition of 
American imperialism that has facilitated the taking of resources, 
whether they’re Native lands or Native bodies. And we still want our 
stolen relatives and stolen land back, regardless of the settler 
infighting currently taking place.

Warren has taken some concrete steps 
<https://www.congress.gov/member/elizabeth-warren/W000817?q=%7B%22search%22%3A%5B%22warren%22%5D%2C%22subject%22%3A%22Native+Americans%22%2C%22congress%22%3A%5B%22113%22%2C%22114%22%5D%7D> 
in an effort to help Native Americans, but her recent entry into the 
waters of Native identity stands to outweigh any efforts she has 
made for Natives. I’m not holding my breath for her to do the right 
thing — such as making a formal apology 
<https://thinkprogress.org/elizabeth-warren-is-not-cherokee-c1ec6c91b696/>. 
Like Vine Deloria, the Standing Rock Dakota writer whose people are 
currently under threat, I don’t resent white people like Warren. I just 
hope she can accept herself and just leave us alone.

While Warren has become the punchline of a lot of jokes in Indian 
Country — “I’m Cherokee on my white side,” and so on — boiling Native 
American identity and race down to biology, and, more specifically, 
genomics, is racist. It needs to stop.

-- 
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