Why Bother Telling

Why bother? Why bother, seems to be the attitude many have regarding the Elizabeth Warren "controversy" in Massachusetts regarding her Native American heritage.

Ms. Warren, rather reluctantly, claims Cherokee heritage based on "family history" and "things my grandmother told me".

Historical records, birth certificates, marriage licences apparently don't exist to prove this. It is based on oral family history.

Her opponent in the Senate election, Scott Brown, is using this contrived controversy against Ms. Warren; claiming she is making up her heritage, that she has allegedly benefited from it professionally.

He alleges Warren was promoted and hired because she claims 1/32 Cherokee lineage.

There have been countless stories, some written by Native Americans, criticizing Warren and other Native American "wannabees". The criticism revolve around people claiming Native American heritage, because it now is somehow popular or cool to be Indian.

Oh really? Every week, it seems like, I get pleas from a North Dakota Sioux charity, for food and clothing for one of the poorest areas on the planet. My last job, in 2005 when I retired, was next to a Native American racheria, where poverty was rampant, the children ran the streets in the middle of the night, the suicide rate was the highest in California.

Native Americans still are ranked at the bottom of the socio-economic ladder. It still is not cool to be Indian.

And why would it be so hard for Warren to "prove" she is part Native American? Why don't the documents exist?

In the 1890s the Dawes Act attempted a census of Cherokees in Oklahoma and surrounding states. My great-great grandmother, who was married to a Cherokee, had two daughters. Her husband had been hung by Confederate soldiers years before, making her a long term and bitter widow.

According to family history, she was halfway up the courthouse steps to register her daughters as half-breeds , in Oklahoma, when she said, "I would rather they be called niggers than Indians", turned around and walked away. Thus, she forfeited her daughters' "rights" to be Native Americans.

At what were those "rights" in 1890? Let's list a few: 1. The right to be massacred at Wounded Knee (that had recently happened). 2. The right to be banned from virtually every job in the United States. 3. The right in most states to be labeled "colored" and discriminated against legally. 4. The right be banned from public accommodations in all southern states (including Oklahoma). 5. The right to be banned from white hospitals, and be forced to have their babies at home (or in a field somewhere). 6. The right to be incarcerated in reservations, where people were treated like animals. 7. The right to have their children taken away, to learn the "white man's ways", and never see them again. 8. And, the right to have a common law marriage, because in 1890 virtually no states in the United States allowed inter-racial marriage: my great-great grandmother "married" her Cherokee in Texas, that outlawed inter-racial marriage. And he was hung for it!

So, right there, no documentation of their marriage; just a few faded photographs, showing two squaws holding my great-great grandmother's hand.

But my families' history, the oral memories, tell a story of reluctant admission of Cherokee blood.

It is historical record that millions of Native Americans avoided disclosing their heritage up until only recently. And they did it for damn good reasons: they could not get married, they could not use a public restroom, they could not get into schools, they could not get jobs, they could not even have their children in a hospital.

Until the Civil Rights Act of 1964, in many states, a fraction of colored blood, made you 100% colored. People hid their mixed heritage for good reason!

I could go on, but you get the picture.

What amazes me, is I have not read anywhere in the controversy on Ms. Warren, awareness of these "rights" that half breed Indians "enjoyed" in the 1890s.

There are millions of Americans today, who are 1/8 to 1/32 Native American, who don't have a clue about their family history. And this is by design. Up until only a few years ago, families hid history from their children.

My father told me the whole story only a few years ago. I knew I had some Native American in me, from talk I overheard at family gatherings. But I never saw anything, no pictures, no genealogy. It was only about 10 years ago, that my father, rather reluctantly, showed me the pictures and the genealogy.

This is the historical fact: Native Americans were brutalized for all of the 19th century, and most of the 20th. A Wintu could not have her child in a Redding hospital until after 1926. A Native American could not marry a white person until after 1964 in most deep south states. It wasn't until after the war that inter-racial marriages were legal in California.

So don't tell me, Mr. Brown, that Ms. Warren is a liar, or a manipulator, given the historical record.

All Americans, if they give a damn about justice, should hang their heads with shame when faced with what Native Americans have been victimized by over the past 300 years; lands were stolen, genocide was practiced, it is not a pretty picture. Read about the "Trail of Tears" if you dare, to see genocide and theft.

Most of the Cherokees who walked and died on that "Trail" were white; Indians like me, part Cherokee. (The "Chief", John Ross, who led that tragic exodus, was 1/16 Cherokee (exactly like me)!

And that rotten treatment is still playing out in the Senate race in Massachusetts.