Jonathan R. Wynn and Dwanna L. Robertson

Robertson is a citizen of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation,and a PhD candidate
at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst.

The Massachusetts Senate race between incumbent Scott Brown and Harvard Law
Professor Elizabeth Warren took an unexpected sharp turn this week. Shades of
racialized language (reminiscent of the 2008 Presidential campaign) seeped in.
This actually started in April, when Brown’s staffers uncovered that Warren
claimed she was a minority, implicating her as committing ethnic fraud because
she lacked proof of a Native American ancestry.

During their first political debate, Brown went straight at this issue in a
prepared remark, saying, “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a
person of color — And as you can see, she’s not.” With this statement, Brown
contends he can identify Native Americans—and other people of color—just by
looking at them.

It would be humorous—Did she accidentally forget to braid her hair and
wear her moccasins?—if it didn’t have serious undertones cutting at the
heart of race and politics in the U.S.. Brown suggests Warren received special
consideration for claiming she was part Cherokee. “When you are a U.S. Senator,”
he stated, “you have to pass a test and that's one of character and honesty and
truthfulness. I believe and others believe she's failed that test." But
did Warren fail the test?

Native people weighed in with strong opinions. Indigenous author and
filmmaker, Sherman Alexie tweeted
“Warren is as close to her Indian ancestors as I am to my 19th Century Russian
furtrapping great-grandfather.” Northern Cheyenne member and former U.S.
Senator, Ben Nighthorse Campbell thinks
Warren’s claim is inappropriate if she used it to get ahead. Democratic
Congressional candidate Wenona Benally Baldenegro, a member of the Navajo
Nation, says
the controversy distracts from more important issues of “tribal sovereignty,
tribal rights and the very serious issues that our tribal communities face,
today.” The news site Indian
Country has a great discussion about
the topic as well.

Interestingly enough, not one Indigenous person took issue with Warren’s
appearance. Because they know claiming a Native identity involves negotiating an
intricate matrix of cultural, political, and racial criteria. Being
“identifiable” was never the qualifying standard for Indigeneity. Technically,
only enrolled citizens of federally
recognized tribes can legally claim to be American Indian, and those members
and citizens have tribal and/or CDIB
cards to prove it. This begs the question: why isn’t Warren a citizen of the
Cherokee Nation?

The short story is that in 1887, Congress enacted the General Allotment Act
that, in effect, removed communal land from the tribes and portioned it out to
individuals. ‘Eligible’ tribal members were identified to receive parcels of
land for farming and ranching. Local Indian agents decided whether people
qualified as ‘Indian’ or not, eventually alienating hundreds of thousands of
American Indians from their respective tribes: Less than 40 percent of the
applications for membership on Indian Census Rolls were approved.

This isn’t just a problem for Warren. All the information reported by the
U.S. Census Bureau about Native Peoples is collected by self-identification.
According to the Census Bureau, over 4.8 million people identify as American
Indian in 2010; yet, the U.S. Department of Interior reports only 1.9 million
people are enrolled members of federally recognized tribes for the same year.
This means an additional 2.9 million people who identify American Indian as
their race are not citizens of federally recognized tribes. So, do they also
fail the test “of character and honesty and truthfulness?”

Warren responded by talking about how her mother told her she was part
Cherokee.

One political
reporter who has similar familial stories, points out that when you grow up
in Oklahoma City—the onetime heart of Indian Territory before Oklahoma
Statehood—this was not at all uncommon. In a political ad Warren states:

“As a kid, I never asked my mom for documentation when she talked about our
Native American heritage. What kid would? …But I knew my father’s family
didn’t like that she was part Cherokee and part Delaware — so my parents had to
elope.”

Apparently Warren’s mother ”passed that test” enough to be rejected by her
soon to be husband’s family.

Brown’s core assertion, wrapped in charges of a lack of character and
dishonesty, is that Warren received special treatment for her race. This is what
is known in political circles as a “dog
whistle”: a sound only the base of a party can hear and, in this context, it
is an effort by the Brown campaign to energize whites who feel they don’t get
special treatment for their race and they suspect others do. (A well-worn
reading in Introduction to Sociology classes is Peggy MacIntosh’s “The Invisible Backpack,”
as it is a great introduction into how whiteness has plenty of its own hidden
privileges.)

The Boston media has uncovered evidence that from 1986 to 1995 Harvard Law
School promoted the fact that Warren was a “diversity hire.” There is some
evidence proving her heritage: The New England Genealogical Society uncovered
evidence that her great-great-great grandmother said she was Cherokee in a 1894
marriage license, but then stated it did not have such evidence.

One of the easy ways to examine whether or not Warren received preferential
treatment is to see if she has a good record, regardless of her race. It’s a
rather easy thing to do, in fact. Her publication
record is online and it is so long it almost broke my browser.

(Scott Brown and his supporters also attempt to portray Warren as an elitist
by continually referring to her as “Professor” with a clear inflection, and
despite the fact that a large portion of her scholarship has been about
middle-class debt and consumer advocacy. That’s a topic for another blog post.)

The ugliness of the race has spilled over into the media and out onto the
streets. In May, blogger Michelle Malkin wrote
an article perpetuating stereotypes of American Indians by using extremely
offensive names when referring to Warren, including “Sacaja-whiner,”
“Pinocchio-hontas”' and ”Chief Full-of-Lies.” The Native American Journalists
Association condemned
Malkin’s piece as disrespectful and belittling to Native peoples and tribal
nations. And then, on September 22, Brown staffers gleefully taunted Warren
campaign volunteers with stereotypical “war chants” and waving their arms in a
”tomahawk chop.”

These actions were politically dumb and racist, and Brown has distanced
himself from them but has not apologized for those campaign workers.
Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Bill John Baker called the
event racist. By the way: Would Baker pass Brown’s test? (A little noted
fact about the recently assassinated Ambassador to Libya, Chris Stevens, is that
he was a member
of the Chinook Nation. Would he pass the test?)

Co-author of this post and UMass Graduate Student, Dwanna Robertson, is a
member of the Muscogee/Creek Nation, and writes a thoughtful
plea for critical reflexivity about First Nation folk during the fall
season: Halloween is often a chance to reinforce racist stereotypes with
costumes like ”Native American/Pocahottie”
are no exception. In 2011 there was a fantastic ”We’re a
Culture, Not a Costume” campaign by an Ohio University student group.
(Image from S.T.A.R.S.
website)

Back to Brown’s assertion idea that our eyes can tell us a person’s race.
Sociologist Mary Campbell has been working on misclassification of
race based upon skin tone, finding not only that American Indians experience
a high level of misidentification, but that in the process they also experience
higher levels of psychological distress.

Although it was mostly constructed as a lark, the website, All Look Same, offers the chance for site
visitors to confront their own misidentification with a test for you to guess if
a picture is of a Korean, Chinese or Japanese person. Dyske Suematsu, created
the site because he was often surprised that people confused his Japanese
heritage and thought it would be interesting and humorous to see if people,
Asians and non-Asians alike, could tell the groups apart. He thought it would be
a way to celebrate similarities and differences, and he received positive and
negative feedback over it.

There is, however, a real challenge when it comes to speaking of how
indigenous folk look. It is not just that it's a bad idea to think facial
features are satisfactory markers of race. It is that the emphasis on perception
also indicates a complete misunderstanding of U.S. History: People who claim
First Nation Heritage are of a mixed ethnic background due to generations of
attempted racial extermination, cultural oppression, and a breaking of tribal
links to land and community.

Not all Europeans look alike. Not all Africans look alike. And with over 816
culturally diverse tribal groups, not all North American Indigenous people look
alike. Brown’s confusion over why a descendent of Delaware and Cherokee might
not appear to be what a white person thinks what a Delaware and Cherokee should
look like demonstrates not a perceptual error, but rather a lack of
understanding of history and the social construction of race.