https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/elizabeth-warren-dna-test-native-american.html
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/history/2015/10/cherokee_blood_why_do_so_many_americans_believe_they_have_cherokee_ancestry.html
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2018/10/trump-and-warrens-feud-over-racial-heritage-and-dna/573091/
...
Regrettably enough for everyone, the politics of the moment are affected by that legacy, too. On Monday, Senator Elizabeth Warren released a DNA test result that, according to The Boston Globe, “provides ‘strong evidence’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations.” The results, accompanied by a detailed accounting of the testing methods and a massive media rollout, appear intended to debunk insinuations from President Donald Trump that Warren had fabricated Native American ancestry—and they may have been released to clear the air before a 2020 presidential run, too. But considering the history of American racial essentialism and the nature of Trump’s know-nothing bullying, it doesn’t seem likely that Warren’s move will add any clarity at all. Things will only get worse.
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Trump has never apologized for advancing birtherism. Indeed, he’s portrayed himself as a vindicated seeker of truth for proving that Obama was born in the United States; the former president released his long-form birth certificate in April 2011. But as with Warren, the documents were never the point. What became evident early on in the birtherism saga was that much of the energy directed against Obama was simply intended to create partisan misdirection, confusion, and distraction. Those things all aided Trump in his quest for power, degrading the national discourse in the process. In a way, Trump proved true an old adage from the legendary author Toni Morrison: “Know the function, the very serious function of racism, which is distraction,” she instructed an audience at a 1975 lecture.
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But Trump has no interest in those considerations, nor in the negative reactions among Native Americans to his own attacks against Warren. The key takeaway of Trump’s birtherism stint is that he has proven adept at wielding bullying and gaslighting in service of racial gatekeeping, and he isn’t impeded by facts. The age-old game of racial essentialism and blood policing is itself intended to stack the deck in favor of bullies, to always siphon power from the weak, and to require an ever-shifting burden of proof among aggrieved parties that can never be met. Trump will always win this game because it is rigged for him to win.
In choosing to play along, Warren ratifies the tired game. The order of events that will ensue are predictable. Trump will not retire his slurs. Republican operatives beholden to him will continue to ridicule and poke holes in the evidence Warren has presented. There will be no substantiated bets. Everyone will fight a little longer over an ancestor from the 1700s. And the people hurt most by the bullying—by the slurs and a government increasingly fluent in bigotry—will be those who are still carved out, and who have no real say on where in the hierarchy they stand.
What has, I would suggest, transpired here is that Trump's gambit forced the issue of whether Warren could establish any intersectionality bona fides. To say that it's never about the test or the taunt and skipping past to whatever the perceived motive is seems to forget that the test was taken and the taunt was issued. If the alt-right has taken up identity politics for a nebulous white standard of social identity they probably have advocates who could in all seriousness (if perhaps not seriously) claim that the pan-black American body politic already did this in the last few centuries. The racial essentialism sailing past the question of the content of one's character can end up being the order of the day for any and every ethnicity whether white, black or Native American.
That Hollywood has trafficked in romantic mythology about Indians as a pendulum swing from the nadir of 1950s presentations isn't hard to chart but what the pendulum swings tend to ignore is anything resembling history. Years and years ago a Hopi friend once said that he couldn't stand
Dances with Wolves because the movie expected him to believe, as a Hopi, that the tribe he was supposed to root for was a tribe he knew had hunted down and killed people from his tribe for generations. A movie like
Dances with Wolves is not necessarily about the Indians as Indians as about the white guy who assimilates and "goes Native". As South Park pitilessly sniped about James Cameron's
Avatar, Dances with Smurfs was a retread of a storyline that was trite within the industry about the magic white person who joins the Indian village and gets the prince/princess and saves the day. It's likely that
Woman Walks Ahead is just continuing this same tired old formula.
Code Talkers was about the salvation of the white guy who learns to appreciate Indians and an exasperating film. Not that you should waste any time seeing
The Business of Fancydancing as an alternative! Spare yourself!
But Sherman Alexie has had a point he's made repeatedly in the last twenty years about how the Indians that are so often conjured up by Hollywood and white liberal imagination have nothing at all to do with actual American Indians; for that matter many of the white liberals and progressives who played a role in fabricating the mythological Indian in touch with nature and averse to private property and believing in cosmic social unity were more likely to have played a role in the attempted genocide of those Indians. It's easier to fabricate a history on behalf of those people too few and too beaten down to be able to register any kind of salient protest. The liberal vision of an American Indian as a mascot for the kind of person of color who "should" vote for a liberal political figure is probably never going away. If NPR expresses concern that Native Americans might not be allowed to vote because the state of North Dakota cracks down on using PO Boxes for voter registration the upshot that this could keep Indians from voting for Democrats is easy to get straight from the text. A person doesn't have to assume Republicans in the state of North Dakota are being on the level about how necessary cracking down on voter fraud is to also observe that if the crisis of Native Americans not being able to vote is about the possibility that Democrats will lose more influence then the partisanship is inescapable and probably more salient to the coverage than American Indians.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/10/elizabeth-warren-dna-test/572998/
So ... Warren turns out to be less Cherokee than the fictional character Cheryl Tunt on the television show
Archer would be if she were a real person (as Cheryl recounted her lineage in "Diversity Hire" back in season 1).
The nature of the double bind seemed simple enough. If Warren took the bait and got the test then she conceded legitimacy to any implicit or explicit allegation that she's not really Indian. If she didn't then the matter of how American Indian her lineage really is would be lurking in the background. As it stands, it turns out her lineage is negligible enough that it's moot for two reasons: 1) the amount isn't that big and she has not yet traced things back to a Dawes Act era roster and 2) she's not recognized by the Cherokee as it is last there was reportage on the matter.
Thus the
Archer punchline about Cheryl Tunt being x/64th Cherokee and Lana Kane's response was "a) No, you're not and b) nobody gives a $@#%"
But it may be, in fact that "everyone" cares about this issue and that may be the real problem because the question I'm considering is what do people care about and why. If people want this to exonerate either Elizabeth Warren or Donald Trump rather than regarding these two clowns as embodying racist defaults regarding Native Americans typical of the blue and red then my belief is that the people who want one of these two to be in any way in the right means that the concern isn't about Native Americans at all but about the political theater of the week.
Ever hear or read a claim that we humans have a huge overlap in DNA materials with chimpanzees or even insects? Let that be a deliberately too sweeping explanation of just one of the reasons a DNA test in and of itself is not necessarily going to prove anything about a Native American lineage.
Depending on the tribe there are other reasons. If you're even 75% Native American by DNA but your blood quantum isn't high enough for the membership requirements of the tribe or tribes you might claim to be descended from then you're still not able to say you're American Indian in terms of a recognized member of a federally recognized tribe.
Which gets to the flip side of things, there can be Cherokee who accepted a deal with the United States and Cherokee who did not. If someone were descended from Cherokee who didn't accept the deal they wouldn't necessarily be recognized as Cherokee at this point even if they could cite an oral history going back thirty generations. Conversely the Cherokee had marriage as a political and diplomatic tool, and also owned slaves and that, cumulatively, can help to explain how and why there's a plausible case that there are black Cherokee, which some blues hsitorians think Charley Patton was.
In case you weren't aware of Cherokee slavery practices before there's a fascinating footnote in a monograph on Pacific Northwestern Indian slavery worth quoting.
Indian Slavery in the Pacific Northwest (Northwest Historical Series XVII)
Robert H Ruby and John A Brown
The Arthur H Clark Company, Spokane, Washington
copyright (c) 1993 by Robert H. Ruby and John A. Brown
ISBN 0-87062-225-0
Indian Slavery in the Pacific Northwest from footnote at the bottom of page 35...In early October 1861, at the beginning of the war, part of the Osages, Seminoles, Shawnees and Quapaws signed treaties with the Confederacy as did the Cherokees on October 7, 1861. William G. McLoughlin writes that all southern tribes practiced slavery and, that they allied with the Confederacy, and "seeking desperately to maintain a social status above that of Negroes, had rapidly developed the same attitude toward them as [did] ... white[s]." The United States, which had provided protection of Cherokees, Choctaws, Chicasaws and Creeks, withdrew its troops. Few tribesman retained their loyalties to the Union, most having espoused the Confederate cause. Yet, influenced by the Emancipation Proclamation (January 1, 18863) the Cherokee Nation severed ties with the Confederacy and abolished slavery. The subsequent 13th Amendment, which prohibited slavery in the United States, included persons of African and American and mixed descent. [emphasis added] "The Choctaw Slave Burning: A Crisis in Mission Work Among The Indians," 124-126; Cohen, Handbook of Federal Indian Law, 181-182.
So let that be a little history lesson. The Cherokee at one point sided with the Confederacy but then voluntarily ended slavery. In case you come across any guys saying the Emancipation Proclamation was a political stunt speech that had no impact, well, the kinds of guys who want to believe that are probably going to be suspected of wanting to believe a few other things, too. It is also worth noting that all the Pacific Northwestern Indian tribes practiced slavery as well. Attempts to argue that these tribes took up slavery after contact with whites would have to account for why every recorded Native American dialect has words for slaves. If PNW tribes did somehow gain their familiarity with slavery from the whites they adopted it so quickly and thoroughly it was reflected in the languages ... though it seems more plausible to believe the American Indians practiced slavery across the continent--the caveat that has been raised is that the American Indian mode of slavery was substantially more opportunistic (stories of PNW Indian nations enslaving Spaniards and Russians have been documented, if memory serves) and there were tribes in which slaves could potentially work their way back into free person status.
None of which is stuff that matters to people who are aiming to take a side with Warren or Trump, in all likelihood.
It may be a bit hard to convey to people with no Native ancestry how idiotic and racist both of these clowns come across as being on the issue of Native American ancestry. Just half my lineage is Native American and I have not claimed to be strictly Native American nor strictly Caucasian because that's just not my background. I have come to realize as I have gotten older that the average white American has been trained to think of one of the two sides in the American Civil War as actually being the good guys. That's an absurd and unscrupulous notion to consider. Just because the North fought to preserve the Union doesn't mean they really set out to abolish slavery and just because the Confederacy was defending states' rights or economic policies does not mean that ultimately they were not fighting to preserve an ideologically balkanized conception of race-based slavery peculiar to slavery practices in the West over the last three centuries. In other words, get it out of your mind that either of these teams were ever the "good guys" and you can step back a bit and see that it's possible for people to be bad guys while thinking themselves the good guys.
Or as my Native American relatives put it, the American Civil War was where the white racist assholes in the North fought the white racist assholes in the South about the question of how to treat black people and after a temporary settlement on that was reached all of America agreed the best thing to do next would be to kill off the Indians.
World War I? That was where the Germans were the bad guys in contrast the English and the French because the Germans had the bad manners of trying to colonize and annex nations full of white people rather than trying to conquer and subjugate nations of black and Asian people like the civilized white societies had been doing for centuries. That's another perspective on World War I that, as I've gotten older, I realize is not necessarily the perspective that people with completely white lineages may have heard within the United States. The English and the French certainly want to view themselves as the good guys but if the Germans were the bad guys in World War I and later in World War II they were the abject failures in colonialist and imperialist terms. If all it takes to be the bad guy is failing to annex a quarter or a third of the world for centuries then being the good guys in the way the British and French and Spanish empires were allegedly the good guys in civilizational terms can seem like a very dubious honor indeed.
What might that have to do with President Trump and Warren? Well, let me try to put it this way, it's possible for people to be as progressive as anything possible on relations between blacks and whites yet regressive and bloodthirsty on the matter of other ethnic groups. Teddy Roosevelt could meet with Booker T. Washington and still have a comparatively grimmer view about the value of American Indians. This is a point which I'm afraid progressives in general but white progressives in particular are apt to forget. The temptation among white reactionaries and progressives to scapegoat each other for a shared legacy of racism seems to be too strong to be avoided. Yet the racism can play out in different ways. If from the right the impulse to insult American Indians as uncivilized shows up the impulse on the part of basically white progressives to take solace in a frequently fictitious American Indian whose values and mores have virtually nothing to do with actual tribal customs and practices and a great deal more to do with the utopian aims of progressives has led them to fabricate the suitable magic Indians in touch with nature and the cosmos that are needed as an ideal from the past to strive toward as a future. Now this is hardly better in the end than a comparable gambit on the part of neo-Nazis to recover a purer and truer race as embodied in a long lost but theoretically recoverable past. This kind of idealized past Native American can also be a salve for those who don't actually care all that much about Native Americans in the present except as a possible demographic to gain votes from.
When I went through college I occasionally got suggestions that I should milk the Indian angle for college tuition for all it was worth. Short version, I'm not sure if I "could" have done it under the circumstances I was in and in any case I didn't WANT to do it. As I saw it, to leverage a tribal connection or descent in ANY fashion simply for the sake of getting a cheaper way through college was unethical if it was not predicated on an active relationship or participatory role in the tribe in question. In absence of that, there was no foundation in scruple or ethics as I understood them to mention more than that my lineage is a mixture of Native American and Caucasian or vice versa but that, on the whole, to use the jargon of the day, I would "read" as white.
And one of the troubles with the fact that a person can "read" as white is part of what people of color have been writing and tlaking about, that a whole bundle of assumptions, judgments and social protocols kick in on the basis of how you "read". There are numerous moments in day to day life where law enforcement defaults to ignoring someone if they are white for things they are not likely to ignore someone for if they are any hue but "white".
Being left alone as someone whom law enforcement trusts is on the level and just bein ga normal citizen is what people of color have been saying they want, at the risk of keeping things too simple.
I was reading a few years back that Native Americans are statistically most likely to get killed by law enforcement relative to the size of their population as a presence in the United States. African Americans are far more likely to be subject to law enforcement violence, as reported by the summary study I read a few years ago, but Native Americans were most likely to get killed.
From Naitve American relatives I would sometimes hear complaints that every other ethnic group has had some kind of benefit from affirmative action policies. There's a United Negro College Fund. Asians got help in schools. Migrant workers from South American countries could end up taking the agricultural jobs that in earlier eras Indians and blacks might have been getting. It was not lost on me that it was possible ... to put it delicately, that American Indians could have racial animosity against Latino populations. African American and Asian populations don't always get along so well ... but it can seem that one of the social risks of the age of Trump is that in the battle of liberal and conservative things are cast in figuratively and somewhat literally black and white terms on the part of ... very often white powerholders in both parties. The possibility that there can be what Ta-nehisi Coates called the organic black conservative, the conservative who is a social conservative and not in the pocket of the GOP, is something that Coates can grant in theory and find somewhat necessary in practice ... even if that's not his convictions on politics ... but it sometimes seems as though the DNC has worked on the assumption that all people of color must, of necessity, vote for the DNC rather than the grand old party of white supremacists.
That might not necessarily be how it plays out.
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-convenient-indian-how-liberals-get-native-americans-wrong/#!
...The narrative here is so timeworn as to be banal: every epoch of American history has featured the callous removal of indigenous obstacles to the expansion of corporate capitalism. A march on Washington earlier this month made the symbology plain: circling the Washington Monument were a phalanx of white teepees, erected by indigenous protesters and allies who descended on the National Mall for a four-day long protest against the Trump administration and its policies. The tableau presented by nearly every news outlet was stark: this was American Indians versus the federal government; Big Chiefs versus Big Oil; spirituality versus capitalism. But the optics of the protest have been misleading.
Indians have simply functioned far too long and incoherently as ciphers for anti-establishment and anticapitalist idealism, and not just for white liberals. The phenomenon has been a national tradition of sorts at least since the Boston Tea Party, when the aggrieved subjects of a fledgling nation donned Mohawk disguises to toss their pecuniary burdens into the sea. Twenty-first-century Tea Partiers similarly protested Obama’s tax plan while garbed in homemade headdresses, warpaint, and signs that read “On Warpath Against More Taxes!,” “Paleface Taxes Too High,” and “Let Little Brave Keep Wampum” (this last directive affixed strategically to the shirt of a protester’s young child). Indians have been irresistible victim-symbols for anybody who wants to join a struggle against colonial-capitalist aggression.
But Indians have always been held to unfair standards of representation — expected to function as foils for not just our hopes but our deepest fears as Americans. While liberals have understandably partnered with the indigenous cause at Standing Rock, conservative pundits leaped at the chance to condemn Native Americans for their inveterate decision to stand as outsiders of polite society.
In a recent Forbes article, David Blackmon derides the “deadbeat protesters” for their “illegal” and “shameful conduct,” leading to the costly cleanup of the demonstration camps — a twisted irony given the potential ecological devastation that the protesters tried valiantly to curb. Seizing on the unfortunate fact that several dogs were left behind after the evacuation, Fox News took an uncanny turn as PETA-style animal defenders, tacitly censuring the protesters for the “extremely sad” condition of the mange-ridden and frostbitten animals.
These dizzying rhetorical moves are at least as old as America, where Indians have always been Janus-faced symbols for our shifting fortunes and values. It should be no surprise that the indigenous motif has resurfaced in the wake of our revivified crises of faith and capitalism following the election of a corporate mogul by the poorest, angriest sectors of our nation.
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Our unwillingness to see these histories clearly prevents us from more balanced acts of contemporary witness and coalition. We have barely acknowledged the fact that many Native Americans and their tribes did not board charter buses to North Dakota, but have instead hitched their own wagons to the new administration, eager to see if the president’s commitments to self-determination will extend to Indian sovereignty. Tribal leaders from the Navajo Nation, the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, and the Tlingit-Haida of Alaska have all voiced enthusiasm for the administration’s stated goals of energy development, job creation, and educational reform. Several Oklahoma nations have requested meetings with the new president to discuss ways to work toward their common objectives.
Trump’s own history of casino ownership has proven especially appealing for tribes keen to launch their own gaming enterprises, such as the Mashpee Wampanoag of Massachusetts, who have struggled to develop their first casino since winning a protracted federal recognition battle in 2007. In a statement posted on the tribe’s website, Chairman Cedric Cromwell announced, “The president has vowed to put America first. We are poised to assist the president in turning his words into action.” Jason Giles, member of the Muscogee Creek Nation in Oklahoma and executive director of the National Indian Gaming Association, likewise announced, “We’re going into this with open arms.”
These open arms have managed to shrug off Trump’s abundant incendiary remarks about Native Americans, including repeated references to Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren as “Pocahontas.” More insidiously, Trump’s advisors have announced a plan to privatize oil and mineral extraction on reservation lands, which would essentially eradicate nearly a century of federally protected tribal sovereignty. Such a move promises a legal firestorm far more sweeping and enduring than the DAPL conflict. And yet, despite obvious opportunities for exploitation, the increased competitiveness could actually benefit many tribes’ coffers.
A potential reason tribal residents might find this an improvement is simply that federal protections of natural resources could also be invoked as a reason American Indians are not given the right to develop natural resources. If you end up in a situation where a family has traditional lands on a reservation that are regarded as federally protected old growth or rain forest then even though in theory you'd have legal rights to the land you don't really have legal right to use the land for the things that people might find most useful about the land. In that sense, there could be any number of tribes like the aforementioned who would find the Trump administration's approach preferable to decades of not being allowed to do things that had been done previous to environmental protection clauses that, however understandable as long term ecological policies, could be seen as stifling the possibilities for tribal development and economic activity.
If Warren and her supporters thought that establishing
any Native American lineage was going to be advantageous to her they fell for an obvious trap. As to the racism of the current executive, well, if he's more virulently racist in practice and theory than Teddy Roosevelt or Woodrow Wilson we'll be able to chronicle that, too ...
probably never in a song quite the way Blind Willie Johnson did about Wilson.
It could be cynically reported that tribal sovereignty matters to the United States right up to the point that it doesn't. That the American Indian Probate Reform Act was signed into law in 2004 and that this law gave tribes the power to actually enforce their own probate processes may need to be kept in mind.
Nor should we just assume that tribal sovereignty issues would only be about strictly Native American concerns. I was reading an article a while back about how some companies have tried gifting their patents to tribes as a way to work loopholes in patent review processes.
https://abovethelaw.com/2017/09/a-new-patent-loophole-paying-off-a-native-american-tribe-to-exploit-its-sovereign-immunity/
It’s no secret that large corporate rightholders are constantly seeking ways to protect and extend their monopolies using various legal tactics. In a new strategy that made quite a few headlines recently, a pharmaceutical company transferred its patents on a drug to a Native American tribe to shield the patents from validity challenges by claiming sovereign immunity.
Here’s the background: Since the America Invents Act was passed in 2011, patent challengers can bring inter partes review (IPR) actions before the United States Patent and Trademark Office’s Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB). This process makes the process of challenging and invalidating patents faster and far less expensive than challenges in federal district court. Patent holders hate this streamlined approach because it makes challenges easier, particularly for resource-strapped entities. In fact, patent holders are currently challenging the IPR process, asserting that it violates the Constitution as a taking of personal property rights without a jury; the Supreme Court of the United States has agreed to hear the case, Oil States Energy Services LLC v. Greene’s Energy Group LLC, this Term.
Two generic pharmaceutical companies brought a challenge to the patents on Restasis, a drug used to treat dry-eye, through the inter partes review system in December 2016. Then, earlier this month, Allergan, the pharmaceutical company that holds Restasis, transferred its six patents associated with the drug to the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. The tribe has agreed to exclusively license the patent back to Allergan, which will continue to produce the drug. Allergan paid the tribe $13.75 million dollars, plus will continue to pay an additional $15 million each year of the patents’ validity.
Now, paying $15 million dollars a year to St. Regis Mohawk Tribe just to hold the patents on paper seems like a lot of money. And it is. But it’s only a fraction of what Allergan stands to lose if its patents on the drug are invalidated. Restasis pulls in well over $1 billion dollars a year; according to one report, “Restasis’s net revenues totaled $393.1 million globally in the fourth quarter [of 2016], with sales mostly in the U.S.” So, paying the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe $15 million dollars and keep raking in over $1 billion a year for the drug makes a lot of sense for a company like Allergan.
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In yet another effort to game the system, ever-creative legal minds have found a way to theoretically bypass PTAB scrutiny by placing patents in the hands of Native American tribes in exchange for royalties, using sovereign immunity to evade PTAB jurisdiction. For example, Irish pharmaceutical company Allergan PLC recently transferred the patents to its popular eye drug Restasis to the Saint Regis Mohawk tribe in the State of New York, with an exclusive grant-back license to Allergan for an upfront fee and ongoing royalty. Allergan has been quite forthcoming that its rationale for doing so has been to “ strengthen the defense” of its Restasis patents in IPRs in the PTAB.
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While hiding behind the shield of sovereign immunity is an intriguing strategy, state versus tribal sovereign immunity are very, very different things. Native American tribes are subject to sovereign immunity through congressional action, while the states enjoy sovereign immunity under the 11th Amendment of the U.S Constitution. Amending the Constitution is far less likely than an act of Congress, and I wouldn’t bet on a patent protection strategy that is subject to congressional whim. In fact, Congress has opened an investigation into the Allergan transfer, and Senator Claire McCaskill has already submitted (albeit hastily) a bill in the Senate to prohibit transfers to Native American tribes that are structured to take advantage of tribal sovereign immunity. [emphasis added] Given the tumultuous times in Washington, D.C. as of late, it’s good to remember: What Congress giveth, Congress can take away.
So even making an appeal to the potential damage to tribal sovereignty in the Trump era can fall prey to a potential error, assuming that tribal sovereignty itself can't be gamed by corporations who have tried to gift their intellectual property to tribes to keep it from being subjected to elements of traditional patent review. When even tribal sovereignty can be exploited by companies with an interest in using that as a potential safeguard against patent review or patent contest procedures they might otherwise have to deal with tribal sovereignty can't be distilled down to "anything the Native American tribes think is okay should therefore be okay". Increased cooperation is likely the way to go but some of the legal issues get complex enough that it can seem as though eventually treating all the Native American tribes like they're like the states in federalism (as it's been espoused) might be a way to go if anyone seriously believes federalism is how things actually work now. I doubt it, I admit.
All of this is to say that the recent political theater between Warren and Trump about Native American lineage is probably just that, political theater. As much as I don't care for Trump and wish he hadn't become 45 there's not really anything particularly praiseworthy about the way Warren fell for the double bind or defenses made on Warren's behalf that somehow Trump or his supporters should regard her as Native American in a way that merits a charitable donation. Proving "any" Native American lineage isn't the same as proving a Native American lineage substantial enough to be recognized by a tribe.
If what we're getting in this latest bit of political theater sticks to the level of tokenism whether in racist insults or in invocations of Native American identity as a tacit, implicit or explicit invocation of an intersectional appeal on the part of a Senator with presidential interests then either of these two modes of public discourse come across as ghastly. Progressives can be racists and we've had evidence of this dating back to the likes of Wilson and a Roosevelt. The idea that in acquiescing to Trump's taunts Warren got sucked into the game is a point to raise but the same point probably needs to be made about making that point. Neither Trump nor Warren has to be regarded as admirable in this political moment by Native Americans or people of Native American descent. If you think "the point" is that one of these two has to be more wrong than the other in the way that Native American anything is being used as a rhetorical football in political theater then you should step back and consider that you, too, are part of this problem. If one of these two politicians has to be right in how they have spoken or invoked Native American tropes that seems to be what's wrong.
