Pocahontas to You Too

So we now get “prove it” to claims that we have Native American Blood...and get called names like Pocahontas or Injun Joe I suppose.

Like Elizabeth Warren I have a pile of evidence that I have native blood. And like a lot of partial Native Americans, they share a commonality.

1. Hidden heritage. Up until the 1950s Native Americans were legally discriminated against. It wasn’t until 1947 when I was born, that mixed race marriages (and colored race blood had to only be one drop) were no longer forbidden in many states. Discrimination against Native Americans extended even to the military, Code Talkers was one way they could serve, but many could not. Native Americans could not vote until 1920! So what did my family do, it hid the heritage; and passed for white. Hiding Native American blood is what everyone did.

2. Conflict in mixed marriages. My parents eloped just like Elizabeth Warrens because my mother’s family, white, didn’t like my father who was from “the other side of the tracks”...that is the way it was in 1944. So what happened to the children, silence is what happened. I was not told about my mixed blood until I was 58! I didn’t even know I was Cherokee with a murdered great great grandfather until I looked it up in Texas list of executions...and found my great great grandfather’s name. Hanging is a pretty pure evidence!

3. Ha...ha...ha syndrome...I tell the story and white friends just laugh...”right”....”so what”. The racism just flows out of them without thinking. I get the “big deal”, you are mostly white. All of that. It is just a big joke to them. Pocahontas???? 

4. Historical facts: There was a U.N. certified genocide in the Americas. Tens of millions were simply murdered for their land, culture was destroyed, game was killed and land was destroyed to wipe out an entire race of human beings. And all of it to spread democracy across the land. And who wants to admit to that? 

5. “Oh get a life”....this is the worst. I was a Stanford Indian...I wore the uniform, I battled on the football field for a great University as an “Indian”...and, at first, in the early 1970s, I was upset when the Indian racist mascot was abolished in favor of Cardinal. And then I found out I was part Native American and everything changed. But I still get from alums; “Once and Indian always an Indian”....

6. Prove it: Did you know that for European DNA there are so much of it that matching is easy in tests. African Americans and Native Americans not so easy since there were so few of them in the America’s relatively speaking...and many of the strands were killed off...fancy that! 

So it is not unusual to get no DNA proof, even though the old pictures you look at of your great great grandmother shows an Native American without question. Did you know that DNA proof is not a lock for Native Americans? Now you do.

7. Racism and Prejudice....the United States was established on it...and admitting it....means admitting to genocide...It took forcing Germans to go through concentration camps to get it in 1945...and concentration camps were right next to many Germany towns not just in Poland as we have been wrongly taught...THEY KNEW IT JUST LIKE YOU KNOW IT, but they didn’t dare admit it; not my fault right?

All you have to do is look at old newspapers from the gold rush era, and you get story after story of brutal attacks and murder of dozens of native Americans for stealing a cow. The ratio was about 1 dead white man to 1000 Native Californians. The population dropped for 150,000 in 1850 to about 20,000 in 1870, and not from disease by the way. 

Racism and prejudice still exists and nobody likes to talk about it..and Trump uses it for political advantage just like the son of a bitch Andrew Jackson whose portrait happened to be over Trump’s shoulder when he embarrassed the old war heroes yesterday with his venom. 

So Pocahontas to you too.