In February, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren issued an apology for her claim on Native American ancestry and the video she subsequently released depicting her DNA test seemingly supporting this claim.
Senator Warren’s apology comes amidst the vitriolic backlash she received from politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well as the Native American community. It also coincides with her recent announcement to run for president.
The video that Warren released was in response to President Donald Trump’s incessant usage of the nickname “Pocahontas,” as she had claimed Native American heritage. Warren’s usage of DNA to reify her indigenous heritage skews the nuance of a Native American identity, making it just as problematic as Trump’s moniker.
The accusations of Warren lying about her indigenous ancestry came to the forefront during her 2012 campaign against incumbent Scott Brown for his Senate seat. During a debate, Brown alleged that that Warren exploited her indigenous ancestry to reap the benefits of affirmative action. Concluding the debate, he urged people to pressure Warren and “Harvard to release their personnel records to make sure that she did not have an advantage that others were entitled to.” Warren has acknowledged that she listed herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory, which prompted Harvard Law School throughout the 1990s to laud Warren as a “Native American” professor. However, in an extensive Boston Globe investigate report, it was shown that Warren was not listed as a minority during her time as an undergraduate, in law school, or when she was teaching at at the University of Texas. The Globe report concludes: “At every step of her remarkable rise in the legal profession the people responsible for hiring her saw her as a white woman.” Brown has still not commented on the report or the implications of these records.
Clearly, this issue should have been put to rest following the 2012 Massachusetts senatorial controversies, but during the 2016 presidential race, Trump took to calling Senator Warren “Pocahontas.” In what seems to be a presidential-hopeful move, Warren’s disclosure of her genetic testing to prove indigenous ancestry—depicted in October 17 this video—included a taped phone call of geneticist Dr. Carlos Bustamante asserting that Warren has “somewhere between one-sixty-fourth and one-one-thousand-and-twenty-fourth” Native American ancestry in her.” This “proof” of her ancestry racializes indigenous identity, equating heritage with the biological constitution of a person.
Native Americans have been persistently confronted with this racializing and biological superseding of their identity. An interview respondent in indigenous sociologist Eva Maria Garrouette’s book on Native American identity summed up the sentiment of many of his community members: “Identity is not just a legal document; it’s a way of life, it’s a way of thinking, a way of living, a way of worship that you can’t instill on someone with a notarized legal document. And I feel that too many times we get into looking at things from a legalistic standpoint and really lose the idea of what it is to be Native.” Indigenous identity is so much more than the composition of genetics: there are 573 federally recognized tribes, each with their own unique set of customs, languages, and regalia. Genetic testing for Native American ancestry blurs those singularities, and instead suggests that indigeneity is predicated on DNA.
News publications have also contributed to the generalization of Native Americans. In reporting on Warren’s genetic testing, major news sources like CNN, The Washington Post, and Fox completely omitted the voices of any Native Americans, and of those that did, they almost all exclusively featured Chuck Hoskin Jr., the Cherokee Nation Secretary of State—the tribe to which Warren claims ancestral ties—like in these articles by Reuters and Huffington Post. They have also missed an important opportunity to highlight the contemporary plight of Native Americans, including the systemic violence perpetrated against indigenous women and the endemic poverty, environmental intrusions, and disproportionate rates of diseases on reservations—Native Americans are 2.7 times more likely to be diagnosed with diabetes than any other demographic in the country.
What people are also missing are the implications associated with Trump’s “Pocahontas” label. During the 2016 presidential campaign, Trump was not immune to name calling as political pundits and social media spectators took to calling him a peach due to his overly-tanned pigmentation. While being called a piece of fruit is perhaps not the most pleasant pseudonym, its benign nature does not even begin to compare to the gendered and racially charged moniker he bestowed upon Warren. Trump’s invocation of Pocahontas refers to the 1996 iconic Disney film, in which Pocahontas is thin, curvy, and scantily clad, contributing to the hypersexualization and objectifcation of indigenous women. Furthermore, the movie claims it is based in history which could not be farther from the truth. The film romanticizes what was actually a forced marriage between the 14-year old Pocahontas and the much older John Smith. Given its inappropriate obscuring of history, it is even sadder that for most of America notions of indigeneity are predicated in the film: no Native Americans do not talk to animals, have trees as their mentors, or fall in love with their white murderers.
While Warren’s apology was an important step in this controversy, the President of the United States must also apologize, as he to is just as responsible for perpetuating damaging representatives of Native Americans. It is long time that this country justly addresses the violence and harm it has incurred upon the Native American community.