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<div class="header reader-header reader-show-element"> <font
size="-2"><a class="domain reader-domain"
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/elizabeth-warren-dna-native-americans/">https://theintercept.com/2018/10/19/elizabeth-warren-dna-native-americans/</a></font>
<h1 class="reader-title">Native American Sovereignty Is Under
Attack. Here’s How Elizabeth Warren’s DNA Test Hurt Our
Struggle</h1>
<div class="credits reader-credits">Nick EstesNick Estes -
October 19 2018</div>
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<div><u>Half a century</u> 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.”
<p>President Donald Trump, being a bigot, has consistently
taunted Warren — frequently referring to her as “<a
href="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">Pocahontas</a>”
— about her claims with <a
href="https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/411414-trump-denies-offering-1-million-for-warren-dna-test-even-though-he">a
million-dollar wager</a>: Take a DNA test to prove
she’s “an Indian.” It was an obvious ploy, and Warren
took the bait.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://elizabethwarren.com/fact-squad/heritage/">recent
video</a> 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 “<a
href="https://thefunambulist.net/off-reservation-lakota-life-death-rapid-city-south-dakota-nick-estes">drunk
Indians</a>.”</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p><u>The worst irony,</u> 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 <a
href="https://theslot.jezebel.com/our-vote-matters-very-little-kim-tallbear-on-elizabeth-1829783321">defined
by DNA</a>. 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
href="https://www.cherokee.org/News/Stories/20181015_Cherokee-Nation-responds-to-Senator-Warrens-DNA-test">a
statement</a> 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.”</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="right">Falsely claiming Native American
identity is a white American tradition, with a deeply
racist past.</blockquote>
<p>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 “<a
href="https://www.npr.org/2012/04/20/151037079/the-artful-reinvention-of-klansman-asa-earl-carter">Cherokee</a>”
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 “<a
href="https://timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e">Cherokee
heritage.</a>”</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/native-american-dna">excellent
book on the subject</a>.) 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>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 <a
href="https://theintercept.com/2018/09/25/carlisle-indian-industrial-school-indigenous-children-disappeared/">lost
to this system</a>, 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.</p>
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<p><u>While Warren and</u> 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 <a
href="https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/08/31/547705829/judge-rules-that-cherokee-freedmen-have-right-to-tribal-citizenship">recently</a>.)</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Warren’s claims and Trump’s attacks have never been
about upholding Native sovereignty. It’s pure
opportunism. While Trump <a
href="https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-rips-warren-total-fraud-after-cherokee-nation-rejects-her-n920611">applauded</a>
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.</p>
<p>And North Dakota recently <a
href="https://www.aclu.org/blog/voting-rights/supreme-court-enables-mass-disenfranchisement-north-dakotas-native-americans">passed
legislation disenfranchising thousands of Native
American voters</a> 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 <a
href="https://www.indianz.com/News/2018/07/17/we-will-be-waiting-tribes-remain-opposed.asp">planning
to halt</a> the trespass of the Keystone XL pipeline
through our treaty territory, a pipeline that imperils
our water, our sovereignty, and therefore our lives.</p>
<blockquote data-shortcode-type="pullquote"
data-pull="left">While Indigenous nations face
existential threats, Warren’s conflation of her “Native
American ancestry” with Native American identity only
continues a history theft.</blockquote>
<p>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 “<a
href="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_">race-based</a>”
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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
<p>Warren has taken <a
href="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">some
concrete steps</a> 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 <a
href="https://thinkprogress.org/elizabeth-warren-is-not-cherokee-c1ec6c91b696/">making
a formal apology</a>. 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.</p>
<p>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.</p>
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