Native Americans across the country are criticizing Senator Elizabeth Warren’s decision to use a DNA test to assert her Native American heritage. Chuck Hoskin Jr., secretary of state of the Cherokee Nation, said, “Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong.” We host a roundtable discussion of Native American activists and journalists to respond to Warren’s DNA test and the subsequent media coverage.
Elizabeth Warren has said her mother told her family had ties to the Cherokee and Delaware tribes. But Native Americans across the country are criticizing Warren’s decision to use a DNA test to assert her heritage. Chuck Hoskin Jr., secretary of state for the Cherokee Nation, said, quote, “Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong.”
Tara Houska talking:
What I see are some non-Native folks arguing over what Native identity is, and Native people just being almost entirely left out of the conversation. So we saw that Lindsey Graham now is running around saying, you know, that “I have more Indian blood than she does; I should open a casino.” It kind of shows just how problematic Senator Warren’s decision to use this DNA test as her smoking gun—”Now, see? I’m Native. I said I was”—when in fact, common genetic markers and geographic location does not tell you anything about which tribe you might be part of or that you might have descendancy from. She couldn’t actually locate an ancestor, having done a genealogy study, who is a Native person. It’s kind of this one drop rule, that she’s reinforcing all these understandings of race being something by blood and there being this difference between different ethnicities.
I think she’s kind of walking back her words because she got this really harsh statement by Cherokee Nation, who is saying that this is really disrespectful and has nothing to do with their sovereign right to determine membership. I don’t think that she’s very regretful about this. I think that she has just kind of bowled her way forward on this issue.
And, you know, yeah, it’s a sovereign right of tribal nations to determine who is a member. It is relationships of kinship, of community, of a lived experience. It’s all kinds of different factors that sometimes can include blood quantum, but blood quantum is something that was created by the colonial government, not by tribal nations. And it’s this kind of myth that’s been perpetuated by the United States and by many, many Americans who claim to be, quote-unquote, “part Cherokee” and continue these problematic ideas of who Native people are and were.
– “I want a casino and a million bucks.” Republican Senator Lindsey Graham
it’s incredibly disrespectful and, you know, just really shows how Warren’s behavior, although it’s less crude than some of the comments that have made by Donald Trump about, you know, Pocahontas and demeaning women—it’s this historic figure and making that into somehow a slur—her behavior is less crude, but it’s still problematic, and it’s still a complete misunderstanding of what Native identity actually is, and it perpetuates this myth that so many people hold. I mean, you live on the East Coast, and you hear almost everyone having this story of being “part Cherokee on their mother’s side,” when there are real Cherokee people who still live today. And we should respect that and understand who Native people really are.
Mark Trahant talking:
the DNA test itself is just another use of a colonial narrative, basically. The ultimate goal of a DNA test is to prove that Indians are immigrants like everybody else. And again, it takes away from the idea that there’s a tribal community with a governing institution that’s been around before the United States. And there are reasons that tribes are around with 10,000-year histories in North America.
Kim TallBear, who has written quite a bit about this, has talked about that, that it’s basically coming up with a narrative that says use—figure out where folks came from originally and trying to figure that out rather than to connect with the stories. I mean, Shoshone-Bannock, for example, one of the things that just I love about my own people is that if you look at the history of North America, we once hunted mastodon. And you think about that as an arc of history that goes back many generations, that is much deeper than a test that you can use.
campaigns are about stories and what story you’re going to tell about yourself. And here we are less than three weeks away from an extraordinary election, and we’re talking about this instead of the extraordinary election. I think, just from a strategic point of view, that makes no sense.
Gyasi Ross talking:
I had a few reactions. Number one is one concerning the media generally. And it would be nice to have, quote-unquote, “Native stories,” Native-themed stories, that weren’t centered on white people. That’s something that’s very common, whether you’re talking about Hollywood—Dances with Wolves, Little Big Man—Elizabeth Warren. Every single time we see Natives in mass media, it’s in response to white people doing something really, really stupid or saving our communities. And that’s a false narrative. And so, it would be nice to see our communities, that are actually pushing for an amazing recovery, relationship to economics, in relationship to education, in relationship to language, actually have that centered around a story, as opposed to around a white person and the Native people being collateral to that white person.
Also, a reaction is that, you know, Elizabeth Warren, obviously, she wants to be an ally, but she doesn’t want to be an accomplice, meaning that she is still willing to make Native people political fodder for her own political survival. As Mark pointed out, you have Native women that are running historic numbers and doing historic things in this particular 2019 election—Sharice Davids in Kansas, Deb Haaland in New Mexico, Paulette Jordan running for governor of Idaho. But yet, with all of these amazing Native women’s stories, this white woman wants to center this Indian narrative, this Native narrative in politics, around her, as opposed to going out and campaigning for them two weeks in advance of the 2018 elections. And to—excuse me—and to me, that does make me question her judgment. We definitely, rightfully, condemn Donald Trump for his emotionality and his tempestuousness and unpredictability, but she does a Maury Povich-like spectacle revealing her DNA results as opposed to doing the actual work of a leader.
I believe that Deb Haaland and Sharice Davids will co-occupy that title as the first Native congresspeople in the House. And that’s going to be an amazing celebration and wonderful, wonderful event for United States politics and United States history generally. But for Congresswoman Haaland, that is a typically gracious and amazingly brilliant response. And absolutely, I’m sure she does celebrate, just like all of us—cool, if you want to be into the fold socially, that’s a beautiful thing. You want to find out why—you know, this is the year of the Native woman, and Elizabeth Warren evidently wanted to upgrade herself, you know, Beyoncé-style.
But that doesn’t mean that it requires these Maury Povich-like theatrics in which they do it and disrupt a flow, where Native women are rightfully getting a lot of attention politically and a lot of resources politically, and do this, as opposed to doing the work. It’s an incredibly gracious and generous response from Congresswoman Haaland, but that doesn’t mean that the timing is correct, number one, nor that it wasn’t something that she necessarily thought out or her people thought out properly.
– Trump saying he’ll give her a million dollars if she takes a DNA test, and now saying, “I never said anything like that”?
Trump’s a pig. I mean, he’s a liar. So, that shouldn’t surprise us. I think both of them, for making Native ancestry into a spectacle, into a three-ring circus, in which non-Natives—and specifically white people, by the way—feel completely emboldened to posit their opinions and actually challenge Native people about Native ancestry—Elizabeth Warren and Donald Trump both opened that door. And so, I believe that both of them should donate a million dollars to the National Indian Women’s Resource Center, you know, because both of them helped create this spectacle, and both of them have an obligation to Native women, I believe.
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Tara Houska
national campaign director for Honor the Earth. She is Ojibwe from Couchiching First Nation.
Mark Trahant
editor of Indian Country Today. He’s a member of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes.
Gyasi Ross
author, speaker, lawyer and storyteller. He is a member of the Blackfeet Nation and host of the podcast Breakdances with Wolves.
— source democracynow.org | Oct 18, 2018