Who isn't part Native American?

Elizabeth Warren has taken a lot of heat for saying she has Native American blood.  She never, however, claimed it as her ethnic identity to obtain benefits available to minorities as part of the civil rights effort to make up for past discrimination against them.  Trump calls her Pocahontas as a pejorative.  In response to all the accusations about what her claim meant, she submitted her DNA for analysis.  The result was an estimate that her Native American content could range from 1/64 to 1/1024.  Finally, she just apologized for bringing the matter up.

It is a bad time to deal with matters of ethnic heritage and culture.  There is much outrage about cultural appropriation, in which people from one ethnic group use cultural elements from another.  There are certainly cases where people exploit borrowed and exchanged cultural practices for personal gain in a disrespectful, demeaning way.   But the U.S. is a country built on diversity and massive cultural exchange, and culture is not a matter of exclusive franchises.  To accuse a person of some offense when espousing a cultural practice from a different culture is in itself a bigoted offense.  And the way the idea of cultural appropriation is bandied about makes it almost impossible to talk about cultural matters for a productive purpose.  A preferred term is cultural misappropriation, which limits the accusation to acts of intentional dishonesty and fraud.  Elizabeth Warren's claim was never made for such purposes.

She shares a claim to American Indian ancestry with many people who are not enrolled tribal members.  Such claims became frequent as the civil rights movement gained momentum.  People who had suppressed information about American Indian blood in their families because of racial discrimination began to talk openly about it.  Many were proud of that heritage, but were guarded about it to keep it from being exposed to malicious or belittling attitudes.

I have no American Indian blood, but grew up in a community that had once been a trading center for many tribes and was home base for the Sauk and Mesquakie (Fox) people.  I was surrounded with Native American names and reminders of who lived there before the white invasion.  The most prominent name was the warrior Black Hawk's, largely because he had a war named after him and dictated a book about his life.  My interests led to doing doctoral research and to studying and teaching Native American literature.  

I was asked to be an advisor to a Native American group, the Intertribal League of American Indians, that had formed in the community.  Its original purpose was as a resource for Native Americans who worked in the area to make contacts with other tribal members and support their cultural interests.  Many people whose families claimed Native American ancestry made contact with League members to investigate their heritage.  While genealogy groups could help them trace their families, they came to the League to learn about the historical cultures in their backgrounds.  And the League learned much about Native Americans.

After the Black War of 1832, the Sauk and Mesquakie people were largely driven to reservations, but there was much intermarriage between American Indians and white settlers.  In some cases Native people melded into the population rather than go to a reservation.  The people who joined white families through marriage were absorbed by white culture and some lost contact with their Native relatives. although others never relinquished their family connections.  Most, however, were not listed on tribal rolls, but tended to maintain an interest in their heritage.  Tracing Native American ancestry and heritage is extremely difficult because of the devastation caused by their removals and subjugation. 

People had stories about Native ancestry and sometimes family histories, letters, and artifacts that were passed down. As with Elizabeth Warren, their family histories were vague, however.  What surprised members of the Intertribal League was how many families had suppressed stories about their Native pasts and were encouraged during the civil  rights movement to pursue information about them.

One young woman's family had kept alive tribal traditions in a deliberate effort to keep children aware of their heritage.  The woman's family observed Thanksgiving as a harvest festival in preparation for the coming of winter.  It emphasized survival and generosity as the main focus of that holiday. She recalled a prayer said by family elders and a few words from the tribal language.  What she remembered was that the prayer, usually said by an elderly uncle, repeatedly contained the phrase "weeping, weeping is the earth," and it left her and the other children with a very sad feeling.  She found that the phrase came from a ceremonial song of the tribe she was told was in her ancestry.  In her case, she was able to reconcile family stories with other accounts and put together an informed if brief account of her ancestry.

Other people who have accounts of Indians in their family past are not so fortunate.  They live with family legends that they can't substantiate.  If their DNA reveals Indian blood within a range of ratios, as Elizabeth Warren's did, that may be as much as they will ever know.  When it seemed no longer that American Indian heritage needed to be protected from racist malice, people showed a pride and became active in exploring that heritage.

Ultimately, whether or not we have Native America in our blood, it is hard to escape the fact that we adopted much of their culture.  We certainly did misappropriate their land and learned from them how to manage on that land.  The corn and beans rotation of crops and their fertilization we learned from them.  Much of the food we eat originated with the Indians.  The affordable balloon construction of our houses--frameworks covered by a thin outer shell--was adapted from the construction of teepees, wigwams, and long houses.  When the U.S. founders devised the framework for our nation, they borrowed heavily from the Iroquois Confederacy.  In many ways, we have absorbed American Indian culture as part of the way we live.

The current discussion about diversity ignores the fact that human history is one of people of widely divergent backgrounds exchanging cultures.  Exchange and appropriation are the elements of the freedom, equality, and justice that define our nation's goal.  Resisting and maligning human diversity are obstacles to attaining democracy.  Current partisanship is not a matter of differing opinions about how to achieve democratic goals; it has devolved into camps of people who want democratic benefits for all and those who don't.  And that latter group is strident about the fact that it works for the exclusion of people who are different from them.  Comtemporary "conservatism" wishes to conserve the system of exclusion.

Elizabeth Warren may have only a small amount of American Indian in her blood, but it is something of which she is proud because her recognition of it is the expression of a much greater understanding of what America means.  She did not appropriate that identity as a political scheme, but as an embrace of the process that creates liberty, equality, and justice for all.  Our history of settlement by immigrants is one in which seeking those benefits for themselves the immigrants deprived the American Indians of  them. Those people who understand and revere the culture of the First Americans and want that culture to be respected and valued go beyond appropriating the culture to nurturing those aspects of it which benefit humanity.  That nurturing makes them part Native American, as a matter of pride.