Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?Posted in Anthropology, Articles, History, Media Archive, Native Americans/First Nation, Politics/Public Policy, United States, Virginia on 2012-10-29 17:23Z by Steven |
Is Elizabeth Warren an Indian?
The Aporetic
2012-09-27
The question posed above is extremely hard to answer. She doesn’t “look like an indian.” But what do Indians look like?
Just to recap: Elizabeth Warren is running for the Senate in Massachusetts. She’s been widely mocked for claiming herself as “native American” at various points in her career. Warren grew up in what’s now Oklahoma, a vast region which the US government had originally reserved for Indian tribes relocated from the East…
…The racial past of Americans is far more complicated and ambiguous than Americans generally realize. My favorite example is very personal. According to Virginia, the state in which I now reside, I am a black man. Had my family stayed in VA, my father could not have attended white schools and my parents would not have been allowed to marry. It’s absurd, and ridiculous: I’m as white as any white man you’d ever imagine, and no one in my family even knew of this history till about a decade ago. But there it is, a matter of record.
The man responsible, Walter Ashby Plecker, was convinced there were no “real” indians in VA. Instead, he argued, there lived a mongrel race of intermmarried people, the “WIN” tribe (White, Indian, Negro). If you listed yourself as “Indian” on official documents, Plecker would rewrite them, and change “indian” to “colored,” because there were no “real” indians. Had Warren grown up in VA, she would have been unable to prove any connection to Indian ancestors, because Plecker destroyed the records. And yet, the descendants of Indians still live in Virginia today…
Read the entire article here.