I really wanted to find this gif but I couldn’t
Everything about Warren and the white labor aristocratic women who worship her is just so bizarre.
Edit: Like…faking Native American ancestry to get a job at Harvard alone should have immediately disqualified her from basically everything, but we live in a settler colonial hellscape, so the only consequence for her was some humiliation from a handful of fascists. Her supporters probably still assume that this unbelievable racism on her part is just a conspiracy invented by Trump. But then she started her campaign with a fucking DNA test, which has nothing to do with being indigenous (as far as I understand it as a settler). It just goes on and on with these people, one disaster after another, and we haven’t even gotten to tattooing numbers on their fucking forearms. How could they possibly think that was okay? Did none of them stop and wonder about this…?
Her making such a big deal out of the DNA test just showed how much of a joke it was. Blood quantum is pretty controversial among American tribes because colonial subjugation and assimilation has pretty much made DNA tests useless for determining how indigenous someone is. For example, a decent number of escaped black slaves joined up with the tribes in the 1700s-1800s. Some of their descendants aren’t indigenous by blood at all, they may take a test and find out that they are 100 percent African descent. But if your family has spent multiple generations living on the reservation, they shouldn’t be denied membership because the white people running BIA decide they’re not indigenous enough.
This goes the other way around as well. There are black people that don’t have a lick of African ancestry. Not as common as the other way around, but I’ve met people like this. They still identify as a black family. Their family has been living the lives of black Americans, unaware of their indigenous and hispanic ancestry for generations until a couple years ago with the rise of 23andme type tests. Race is real, but it really is widely a social construct. I don’t think it’s reasonable to say my friend’s family isn’t black when they have been living as black people among other black people for generations.
I say all this to say that Elizabeth Warren could have come back with test results that prove that she’s indigenous and it really wouldn’t matter. Her and her family have lived as white people for generations. When it comes to modern American indigenous identities, DNA really doesn’t mean shit
I had lib friends that would do this native American thing. Their parents would lie or maybe have been lied to and say they had a lot of Cherokee in them. So these libs will make it part of their identity until the 23 and me results come in and they realize they’re not that native after all. They take these identities on and off like they were fucking hats. Like, if a full blooded native American came up to me, said he was my dad, gave me all the documents to prove it, and it turned out I was over half Cherokee it wouldn’t make me native American, that’s just not my lived experience. If you think DNA factors into it you may as well break out the calipers and starting measuring your skull to see of you’re allowed to celebrate Kwanzaa.
Unfortunately many native tribes have been pulled into the blood quantum bs too, it’s not just settlers. One of my closest friends grew up on the res, speaks her tribes language , and looks native and even holds tribal membership, but because her dad was white, she was heavily ostracized.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, my half brothers are 1/4 native alaskan, from their dad, but they get treated like family by all the full blooded members of their tribe, even though they’re white as hell, and live in a white city multiple states away. They get free healthcare for life, and when their grandparents and dad die, they’ll get payments for the rest of their lives from the state of Alaska.
I kinda went off topic here, but I hate discussions of blood quantum entirely. Like you say, indigenieity (indigenous-ness? Idk…) is cultural more than anything. Some cultures have integrated the racism of the settlers into their culture though, and it only hurts themselves.
