Does 0.4% chocolate ice cream and 99.6% vanilla not make
vanilla? What Senator Warren does not get is that her ancestors did not pay the
price of being American Indian in the last 200 + years at least. That is why it is bogus for her to claim that
identity. Elizabeth Warren had her DNA tested by a scientist affiliated with
Ancestry.com the analyst who did the actual work placed her unadmixed American Indian
ancestor about eight generations back.
That is 1/256th (0.390%) American Indian. It could be as much as 1/32nd
(3.13%) or as little as 1/1024th
(0.098%). To place that in context compare her to
me. According to ancestry.com I am between
0% and 3% American Indian. Averaging
out to about 1.5% (1/64).
Reading
the report on Warren’s DNA…doing a back of the envelope calculation… that
is hundreds of standard deviations more… statistically a huge difference.
I am no DNA expert just a humble theoretical astrophysicist
but 0.4% while, apparently, statistically significant is not culturally significant.
In simple terms my TINY
average American Indian DNA admixture is about 4 times higher than hers. To pass that on happened because of
generation after generation of people who looked white or looked black sought to
preserve some grain of their American Indian ancestry. They paid a price for it. No matter how much or how little money they
may have had. Be they slave owners or
slaves they would be different from those around them. Different is a dangerous thing to be in any
society. Senator Warren’s ancestors did not
pay that specific price. That is why it
is offensive to some of us that she benefited from programs designed for the
descendants of those who had suffered discrimination because of our ethnicity. That ethnicity in the US has no name. (In Canada my family might be called Metis. In Mexico Mestizo. In the US we were once called mestees or more commonly “half breeds”.)
I have that ancestry come down from my great grandparents who made choices of who to marry, and how to raise their kids. They taught cultural values which are very influenced by American Indian culture. The acceptance I have from my family as a transwoman likely is part of that. That is why I am not going to claim a trace of viking could make me Norwegian.
The Price of the Admixed
I pay a price for the honor of having that bit of admixture.
In many ways it is like being an immigrant in a country that many of my
ancestors lived in since time immemorial.
Bearing enough resemblance to them to look different from the people
here now has had consequences. Driven
further and further west ahead of the “frontier” so they could live in peace. Never white enough or black enough to be
white or black. Never Indian enough for
a lot of Indian nations either, that too has to be
said. Called half breeds and given land
or the right to apply for land in any one of several "half breed reservations" (They really called them that officially) then being terminated from that right. Then
put in boarding school for American Indians only to have the census taker first
write down that all the Indians were white except that one part black one
written in as Mulatto. (Then
corrected latter to all being Indians).
That ancestor named Frank who was sent to boarding school Kansas was a descendant
of an escaped or emancipated slave of a Virginia family. It is from them that I get my blood
connection to Pocahontas. He chose a
wife who was also a very admixed Potawatomi who like his father was descended
of a mixture of French fur traders and Potawatomi and other great lakes area Indians. Last but not least my grandfathers grandmother who named him Hontas. So that her descent in some part from
Virginia tidewater area Indians would be remembered. I can only guess based on her family being
from Southhampton county at last record that they were Nottway
a sometimes enemy of Pocahontas’s people.
But, all had lost their language by that point. Even the barely white passing, slave owning
ancestors may have had something to fear if attitudes changed.
Finally, to the completion of a paper genocide that took
from 1607 to 1940 when their last tribal home the Potawatomi
nation was finally truly split into two bands and descent was determined from rolls of who
was a member at about that date. By that time my ancestors were living in
Kansas, Missouri and Nebraska. We
chiefly identify as black but when we live outside that Missouri river valley we are as
alien as if we had immigrated from Cuba. Treated as unjustly unamerican as people from Puerto Rico.
(I have been told I have some kind of a foreign sounding
accent? Impossible my non Amerindian family has been in the US since before the revolutionary war. I wonder if people perceive how I speak differently based on how I look.)
This lady is not an ancestor of mine. However, Matoaka Whittle Sims gives an
example of just how American Indian someone of those particular Virginia blood
lines could look even as late as the 1860’s. Yes she was regarded as white. With that name and that face there would've been places out west where someone like her would've faced discrimination.
The Price Paid By The Reservation Indian.
Full blooded or nearly full blooded
reservation living American Indians have paid a HUGE PRICE for being who they
are. There are reservations in this
country which have third world conditions.
No electricity, no running water or sewer. Poor education poor diet, and few economic
prospects outside gaming, or mining, or similar. Not all are that way. Too many are. I would not dishonor their
ancestors by claiming that what mine went through was anything like theirs.
In the meanwhile … though I
understand they were poor. Senator Warren’s ancestors were for all the world
just white people. This does not mean
things were easy. “White privilege” does
not mean getting money or being “rich” or being helped in any way. It is not the same as racism. The term is overused to the point of being
almost meaningless. However what Senator
Warren did today was provide a prime example of white privilege. Being able to be a tiny TINY
bit of something other than white and claim to be that thing.
To claim to be such a small part Native as I am is to try
and remember all those here in 1492 and before.
To keep their memory and a bit of their culture alive. To claim it when one is such a small part as
Senator Warren … I might as well claim to be a Viking or a descendant of Julius
Cesar.
