Honest Injun
It started while I was still an aspiring academic, nearing the end of a Ph.D. program in computer science. My mother was making a living as a stockbroker. She cold-called the chairman of the computer science department in the Denver area. It was a place I’d mentioned as one place I’d like to teach when I graduated. Over the course of several calls, she talked me up to him, and got the usual reply — there were generally about 400 resumes in for every tenure track opening, send a resume, they’d call me, don’t bother to call them.
In the course of the conversation, it came up that she — and therefore I — had Indian blood, both Choctaw and Cherokee according to family tradition, with some reason to believe it since both her parents had been born in the Cherokee and Choctaw Nations before they became Oklahoma. Mom had even received checks from the Cherokee oil money for a while.
In fact, it had even been a source of some trouble in the family, as my other grandfather, born in the Deep South, wasn’t thrilled to have a not-quite-white daughter-in-law. But then, it hadn’t always been something people talked about in Oklahoma, either. As my great aunt had put it to her, one didn’t offer that information lightly, because “to some people it was like being part ni**er”.
Now, in 1960 I just thought it was cool. When my playmates played Cowboys and Indians, I insisted on being an Indian, and cried when the other kids told me the Indians had to always lose. I watched the Westerns everyone watched, I gave show and tell talks about Indians and the Trail of Tears, and when I learned the both tribes had used blowguns, I spent a summer making a nuisance of myself by making toy blowguns and shooting darts with them.
So it wasn’t exactly a surprise that she mentioned being an Indian. She was proud of it, and unlike me, she looked the part: straight, nearly black hair; tan; and high cheekbones.
What was a surprise was the way the department chairman reacted. He was suddenly very interested, not so much in the stocks but in her Ph.D. candidate son. I went from being just another applicant to being a Prize Catch. They wanted to talk to me; they were excited to have me apply to their small but well-known school.
And pretty quickly, I caught on: they had me pegged now, not as a Ph.D. student, but as a Native American Ph.D. student.
Do you have any idea how many Native American Ph.D. candidates there were in computer science that year?
One. Me.
Hell, there were only a few earned Ph.D.’s of any kind being awarded to Native Americans that year, and most of them were in some kind of ethnic studies. A technical native American was golden.
This kind of pissed me off. I thought I was doing decent research, with a chance of being something important. But based on my research alone, I was just another faceless grad student in a multitude. What made me, suddenly, a star candidate was my choice in great grandparents.
Of course, this all comes to mind because of the alarums and excursions over Elizabeth Warren’s belief in her Cherokee ancestry. She’s roughly my contemporary and from the same part of Oklahoma, and in fact our maternal grandmothers shared a last name — we may be distant cousins. And her degree, while a JD instead of a Ph.D., was still a serious degree — this wasn’t my erstwhile colleague from University of Colorado, Ward Churchill, who parlayed being a parlour pink with a middle part into a career, tenure, and fame.
But when it came time to fill out EEO forms, she got to that little box, and checked Native American. I do it too.
I honestly doubt that she thought a lot about it; I wouldn’t have. Once she did it, however, she was a Find. She was a hot property. She meant Penn, and then Harvard, could fill in a box on their reports that said “Yes! We have a Native American!”
She wouldn’t have needed to make much of it, because the EEO mechanism would have done it for her. And if it meant she got hired or promoted over someone else, I’m sure no one ever said “we’re hiring you as a Native American.” No one expected her to wear buckskin and feathers, any more than they would have expected an Italian American to wear striped shirts and sing opera.
Now, of course, it’s become a big issue in her political campaign. I doubt her political beliefs and mine could be much more different, but I have to sympathize with her difficulty in documenting her Cherokee ancestry. My family members into genealogy are having the same problem, somewhat complicated by the discovery that some of the possible Cherokee ancestors were Cherokee freedmen, which is to say freed slaves. Black. (And wouldn’t my other grandfather have loved that bit of family lore?)
So, I don’t blame her for saying she was part Cherokee. She may have been misled, just as, hell, I might have been misled. Her family said it, she believed it, and honestly, not everyone in the world knows their full genealogy. And she’s from Oklahoma, with “Native America” and a war shield, medicine pipe, and feather on the license plate.
I think the real issue isn’t for Warren; it’s for places like Harvard. She wouldn’t have needed to make any big production about it and she would have been claiming a bit of family history to which she believed she was entitled.
The real issue is for Harvard and places like Harvard, and for the governmental regulations that make it imperative for Harvard to actually care about who Warren’s great-grandmother was.
I don’t think Warren deserves to be blamed for believing, as her family told her, that she was part Cherokee. But I think Harvard and the system that led Harvard to care deserve a lot of blame.
By trying to avoid racism, they have managed to make the most important part of Warren’s whole academic career, her life, be her race.
For that, they should be ashamed.
I was born in Oklahoma and have high cheek bones. Our
family had the same folk lore as Elizabeth Warren. I have
never checked the box for Native American based on folk lore.
The students that apply for grants, scholarships and special
funding for Native Americans have to show proof of heritage to
qualify. The same requirement for medical care at facilities set
aside for Native Americans. Why is proof not required teachers, etc.?
My paternal Grandmother had jet black hair with high cheek bones as did
all of her 12 children. That does not qualify me to claim I am part
Native American.
When I was a kid we had friends in our group who were native Americans, a brother and sister. I myself looked so native American people who didn’t know us always assumed I was the girl’s brother.
When I went to college I stubbornly refused to check any box in the race classification for loans.
Greater good. More than me.
By “native American”, you mean they were born here, right?
If not, what do you call people like me and my family and hundreds of millions of others who were born here if not native Americans?
Descendants of pre-Columbians is what I meant. Obviously. I’ll just say PC in the future so as not to introduce any contusions.
Message to Fail – The proper terminology to eliminate this confusion, for at least ten years, has been First Americans.
Thanks Dr. Kill. When I become a juggernaut of faddist idiocy I’ll make some kind of official statement.
I agree with you – I’m a Native American too, born here.
But the racial bean-counters and leftists are all too invested in newspeak, and use deliberately confusing, Orwellian code terms like ‘Native American’ as an exclusionary device to humble the likes of us. They want their little verbal percs, to go along with the dachas and special nomenklatura-shopping to be established when the Revolution gains full autocratic powers.
“Native American” is a term everyone and their sister understands. It is not an attempt to do anything. You are talking like someone from a Leftist ethnic studies class that thinks saying “waitress” steals power from the people.
There is nothing even remotely “Orwellian” about the term. Orwellian refers to hypocrisy taken to the level of a delusion. “Native American” isn’t even hypocritical – it’s common English usage. For someone who claims to despise Orwellian Newspeak, you yourself have just indulged in it. That’s doubleplus Orwellian on my scorecard of semantic gibberish.
I have no major problem with the term “Native American” in written English, but in the spoken language, where you can’t indicate a capital N, it is confusing. For example, I would describe my neighbors as “native Americans,” as opposed to me, a first-generation immigrant, even though they have not a trace of Amerindian blood. (I actually DO, though it is from points decidedly south of the Rio Grande.)
I wouldn’t go so far as to call the term “Native American” Orwellian and, as I say, it doesn’t bother me much. OTOH, there is little doubt in my mind that the language police mandated this term as a sort of attack on Euro-Americans and the supposed wickedness of “Eurocentrism.” Ah well. So it goes.
Vamos usar la terma, “indigenas pre-Columbianos.” En este mannera, podemos eliminar la minima idea de cualquier confusión.
Indeed, you are Native American. If someone wants to refer to American Indians, they should just say American Indians. I went to school on an Indian Reservation (Yes, Indian Reservation, not “Ntive American” Reservation) and I don’t recall one single American Indian calling himself or herself a “Native American”. When on occasion they referred to their race/ethnicity it was as Indian or their particular tribe, with Nez Perce being the most popular one.
I lived in Oklahoma for a few years and met several Indians. They let me know real quick that using the term “Native American” would likely get me a fat lip. The older ones were especially cantankerous about it.
I once went to school with a giant who was 80 feet tall although he preferred to be called a dwarf. He told me that a pedant will kill a conversation faster than taking a 8,8 cm Flak 18, the improved 8,8 cm Flak 36, and later the 8,8 cm Flak 37 to the chest will kill a cat.
Fail Burton, one good swat will kill a mouse.
Fail Burton, my preferred personal weapon of choice is a 105mm BeeHive round. Never bring a popgun to a howitzer fight.
Exactly my experience. Often it’s pronounced “Injun.”
Fail: While I normally like your comments, you are losing this war of words. NA is a construct by the left to again divide the nation. It appeared soon after the African-American BS.
If NA was what American Indians wanted to be called, they, themselves would have begun using it to describe themselves a long time ago.
What I say around my Indian friends who do indeed prefer the term “Indian” and joke about “Indian time” and what I write in a larger forum and what I say in Spain will all be different things.
In this sense I pride myself in losing a war of semantic gibberish. A tree is a tree. The idea that I could point to a tree, call it an aircraft carrier and someone would act like Nomad when confused by Capt. Kirk in a logic feedback loop and have sparks shooting out their eyes in a hopeless misunderstanding of what I was saying lacks merit. Everyone knows exactly who and what I was talking about – it’s rather plain English.
If they want to turn it into a Civil War re-enactor’s paradise where the 2nd Alabama regiment only actually had 4 stripes and not 3 stripes on Saturday’s except for the dress uniform, then more power to them.
As an auditor for a large corporation I attended, in connection with a pending audit, an EEOC training course in DC; being of Irish decent, I am and almost sarcastically white; except in the summer when I take on a shade of red (I wonder if that counts for anything, EEO-wise I mean) that resembles a recently boiled lobster.
At the excruciatingly long (2 day) conference, I stuck out like a white person at an EEO conference – oh wait, wrong metaphor, I mean like a sore thumb of course.
In any case it might be surprising to some that, based on admittedly anecdotally evidence, it seems, the EEOC is not all that diverse, go figure.
I do genealogy as a hobby. I happen to be half Irish from my mother’s side. At least that’s the story she likes to tell. Actually, most of the ancestors I’ve actually researched are either German or English in origin. The Celtic lineage is just one person two generations back. Keep in mind that with every generation of ancestors, the number of contributors to you genome doubles. So, two generations back there were four contributors what I am today — and they are each the carriers of countless generations before them.
Now, the Celts are as put upon a tribe as any you want to name. It seems to have started when the Roman legions began pushing them back against the Atlantic Ocean. What Celtic enclaves you can find in Europe nowadays are all bordering the Atlantic Ocean; they used to cover at least half of western Europe. The history of Irish, Scottish, and Welsh suffering at the hands of the English (whose aristocracy was French and whose rank and file were Angles and Saxons). They treated everybody badly — and were treated just as badly by whomever they came in conflict with. For their part, the French treated everyone they conquered badly too. I’m pretty sure that there are a lot of people with Caucasian ancestry who are the descendant of slaves. Does that mean that everyone deserves a special preference for education, employment, and whatever else the leftist culture deems to be some measure of atonement for the past sins of inhumanity?
Fauxcahontas might have heard family lore that there was a Cherokee in her ancestry, and that might have had some appeal you a younger Elizabeth, just as you say that your pre-Columbian ancestry did. But as she grew and expanded her perspective she, as a JD, should have taken a more skeptical view of the family lore, but she didn’t. She didn’t because the guilt ridden culture of the Politically Correct gave her an incentive to make a claim she couldn’t back up. If the PC police had been honest they would have asked for documentation or determined the validity of her claim themselves. They didn’t do that for two reasons: it is difficult, if not impossible to do, even in cultures that keep written records; and there is an incentive to validate the claim so that all those guilt ridden Caucasians can feel good about themselves.
Oops back again -
There’s another amusing/sad/frustrating EEO story coming out of MA – Mary Lou’s Coffee Shop is being investigated for hiring people who are too attractive. I wonder, does this mean there’s a new protected category for ugly people? The story is so ridiculous it reads like a Seinfeld script; in fact it may have been a Seinfeld script. Not that’s there’s anything wrong with that…
It was a Seinfeld script.
Rush Limbaugh plays a Paul Shanklin parody about “Uglo-American Affirmative Action” on the Internet broadcast during radio breaks. Quite funny and to the point.
Sorry, Charlie…only the best tuna get to be Chicken of the Sea. Or something like that.
The difference between you and Warren is intent to deceive. And that makes all the difference. At least to me.
You didn’t want to be accepted on a marginally, fractional, “one drop” nonsensical identity basis. You wished to be accepted on merit.
The whole spirit and intent of the purported “fairness” quota is not to have a bunch of pasty white, upper middle class charlatans taking positions and “check boxes” for federal fraud dollars.
It was to “level the playing field” for any DISCRIMINATED AGAINST “suspect class” groups. To eliminate the disparate impact of years of being “held back” because of their origins.
Set aside for a moment whether that is remotely true today. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that it was once a good idea for remedying an unfair playing field.
How in the world does taking on the son of a stockbroker who has NEVER been discriminated against in academia or in the working world assist in the mission, the goal or the spirit and intent of the program?
HOW (no pun intended) does Elizabeth Warren’s clear fraudulent use of that check box promote the stated intent? The purported goal.
She knows and you know that it doesn’t.
The notion that she did it to “make contacts and friendships with people who ACTUALLY DESERVED the slot” is complete hogwash. She gamed the system.
Intentionally.
And the system was gaming the government.
And the government was gaming the taxpayer.
Now, lets get back to a little reality. ANY student that applies themselves, regardless of great, great, great grandparents being in a suspect class of ANY type…can get into school and can get hired pretty much anywhere in this country.
The NEED to make silly distinctions and unfair decisions has lessened to the degree that such programs can’t find or distinguish finely enough to make such an antiquated notion work.
If a particular culture is not thriving in the academic or workplace environment in today’s America, it is high time we begin analyzing what is REALLY holding them back as opposed to falling for leftist pap and rounding up the usual suspects for the leftist show trial.
If we want to truly cure the failure to thrive we ought to begin by being honest about the causes. Treating fake diseases with snake oil may have a cathartic effect on the “permanent victims” in leftist society, but it’s a sham to any thinking person.
The first order of business in eliminating victimization in American society is to remove the scam of victimology.
Other than the fact that it’s politically convenient, what evidence do you have that she intended to deceive?
If your family tells you your great grandmother was German, do you inist on examining the records from Ellis Island?
For about $250, you can have your DNA checked (simple swab inside the cheek that is mailed back).My husband thought he was Cherokee too.
He is not based on DNA analysis.
When do you imagine those tests became available?
And who pays for the test? It won’t be the student since we all know they can’t even afford their own birthcontrol. $250 doesn’t sound like much but when it’s for every student who has to prove his race, that’s a lot of taxpayer dimes.
The evidence that she deceives is that not that she deceived about her at most 1/32 Cherokee background. Her active deception is that she has repeated taken the position that she never sought affirmative action status and did not know that the universities were treating her as such, despite contemporaneous publications that said so. Further, since she has been shown to lie about such easily confirmed matters, why do you believe her about what she was told about her family background.
I completely agree with your indictment of the US government’s, and its various public and private lackeys’ (incl. higher education’s), shameful obsession with practicing invidious racial discrimination, it is an indelible stain against this once great nation (thanks again, O’Connor). When will the mountains of truly innocent parties hurt by these shameful practices obtain their “affirmative action”? Its all just one massive externality – those who impose these racial biases (administrators, politicians, HR) are never required to surrender THEIR position, its always someone else – the new entrants without existing connections to the institutions, who suffer under these invidious racial policies…
But turning to your question, I would note that, as always, intent is impossible to prove subjectively without a confession – so look to objective indicia that can show intent.
Here, I think it is telling that the claims of Cherokee origins reportedly ended after an arrival at Harvard with tenure?
What explanation has been offered on that issue, if true?
Have you ever abandoned your claim of native ancestry after acquiring tenure?
Did she? If so, why?
You seem overly quick to exonerate her based on a familiarity with family lore – but clearly in your situation, others interested in denying your family’s origins (the payors on those royalty checks) found it sufficiently worthy, and your claims are far stronger than mere family lore.
Nothing you’ve raised warrants absolution, in my opinion.
O.K.: “those who impose these racial biases (administrators, politicians, HR) are never required to surrender THEIR position, its always someone else – the new entrants without existing connections to the institutions, who suffer under these invidious racial policies…? Bingo!!
Ever notice that the presidents of the universities who proudly proclaim allegience to AA are all white. And never once has any one of them either fired or asked for volunteers in their staff, members of their board of regents or professorships in the name of AA. I’d like to see the UMichigan and UTexas presidents resign and ask that a black be given their positions in the name of AA and diversity, but that will never happen. Good for thee but not for me is their motto.
Ever notice how white the WH reporters are yet not a peep about the lack of diversity? Or nightly new anchors? Dem pol staffers??? Prog 527s-all white.
AA is only an issue where and when the left thinks there should be one in order to keep blacks on the plantation.
Charlie, it was also professionally convenient. Harvard claimed one so-called “Native American” on its faculty. Who do you suppose it was?
What made her CV stand out from the rest at both Penn and Harvard? The faculty at those places overwhelmingly consist of Ivy League graduates. How does a graduate of Rutgers get in to such faculties? Claiming to be Cherokee is the best way to do so. And why not? It’s not like Penn or Harvard would vet such a candidate to ensure that they’re so-called “Native American”.
In short, I blame the system but Taxjawea/Fauxcahontas also deserves full blame for being a fraud.
Charlie, it was also professionally convenient. Harvard claimed one so-called “Native American” on its faculty. Who do you suppose it was?
Bob, you’re kinda not paying attention. Harvard said they had a “Native American” — and yeah, I hate that trope myself — because the government tells them to, overtly and covertly.
Warren, believing herself to be “Native American”, would have little reason to object.
Dear Charlie: What are YOU saying: That Harvard really, really doesn’t want to ask candidates about their ancestry, and it’s only the mean old feds who make them do it?
Consider Harvard’s response to the federal law known as the Solomon Amendment? Said amendment pulls federal funds from schools that outlaw ROTC training. Did Harvard meekly say, Yes feds, we’ll put an ROTC program in right away, and no more backtalk? Or did they howl and shriek that the world would end if they had to do it? We both know the answer, which is why your claim that poor Harvard is a victim of the feds is so puzzling and so funny. You are well on your way to becoming the Senator McCain of PJ Media, the honest rube who gets taken every time. Or as Lord Birkenhead said of Austen Chamberlain, the British political leader, “Austen always played the game, and he always lost it.”
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
Dear Charlie: What are YOU saying: That Harvard really, really doesn’t want to ask candidates about their ancestry, and it’s only the mean old feds who make them do it?
No, Greg, I’m saying that Elizabeth Warren telling about her ancestry isn’t the problem: but that Harvard and the Government asking — or needing to ask — is.
Intent to deceive can be shown as she miraculously dropped the native american box checking once it would not help her rise anymore.
Oh, but she said she stopped checking that box because there weren’t any invitations forthcoming to a “group something that might happen with people who are like I am” which was the reason she checked the box in the first place. Why, don’t you believe her??
I don’t know about anyone else, but I find my mind is wonderfully focussed when the form I’m filling out has one of those “It is a felony to make a false claim” warnings near the bottom of the page. What flies in my own family – “family lore”, if you will – gets a harder look when something really important comes into play, like my own liberty. I think a woman who was educated enough to get a professorship at Harvard should have had the brains to realize that family tittle-tattle isn’t really “proof” of anything, and should have had the integrity to a) find out if her Native background claims had any truth to them, or b) abstain from pretending to certainty she didn’t have when the moment came to check the appropriate box on the appropriate form.
Dear Charlie: Well short of turning her over to the waterboard boys, we won’t be hearing any confessions from EW. But: she checked the box when she began her academic carerr (no that’s not a typo.) But when she got to Harvard, she stopped checking the box. Not just once, which might have been an error, but permanently. This is suggestive. Even more suggestive is her field: law. Law is not about a search for objective truth as is, say, computer science. Law is all-too-often about bamboozlement and the worship of power. See e.g. the liberal legal establishment on the case against Obamacare.
If you insist on absolute proof, this isn’t going to satisfy you. But consider this: you denounce Harvard for its obsession with racism. You are bang right to do so. But what is “Harvard”? A collection of buildings can’t obsess about race. Only quacks and corner cutters can. Harvard is a tatterdemalion gang of quacks, seasoned with a few honest folks who know dam well what happens to those who fight quackery, and hence go along with the bunk so they can get on with what they think is the real purpose of their academic lives. No wonder Warren was attracted not just to Harvard, but to Harvard Law. A closer match would be hard to imagine. They deserve each other.
A final note: at present it seems likely that EW will lose her Senate race. What do you think she will say if she is defeated? Do you think the word:
RAAAAAACCCCCCIIIIIISSSSTTTT
might come up from her or from her surrogates? I do. Do you?
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
(not from CUNY)
Once again there are a lot of inferences being drawn from little evidence: in this case in particular, it sounds like we’re now saying Warren was being bad because she checked the box, and because she stopped checking the box.
As a matter of fact, I did go to the Ellis Island records and found when my grandfather came over from what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire. I know the boat he took, I have a jpg of the documents. I found the town, I found the cemetery, I found my relatives.
For a scholar, she sure isn’t very curious.
Did you refuse to believe in your ancestry without doing so?
Honest, some people aren’t that interested in genealogy.
“how do you know it was intent to deceive” – there is not one academic at Harvard who has sat on a search committee who can tell you (while passing a polygraph) that the Native American label does not render a highly significant advantage over caucasian applicants. This is the way academia is. People outside academia may not know how the search committee works within academia. As a lawyer, Warren knew the score. Every person applying for a job in modern day academia knows the score, especially the lawyers.
And if she believed her mother about the Cherokee ancestry, where’s the intent to deceive?
What would be the point? There’s no affirmative action for German-Americans.
Exactly right. And by the same argument we shouldn’t blame those who commit Welfare fraud, those who fraudulently claim Food Stamps, those who steal from Medicare or Medicaid, those who commit identity theft or defraud the taxpayers, institutions, or fellow citizens in other ways. Why it’s not the individual who used the law to gain unfair advantage, it was the enablers who are to blame. It’s not the drug user, it’s the drug dealer. It’s not the drinker, it’s the bootlegger. The one cheating the system is merely an innocent bystander caught up in an unfair and unjust system.
Who can actually blame Elizabeth Warren for taking advantage of a system that is so ripe for fraud? Any honest person would have done the same! We need more people like Elizabeth Warren at the highest levels of government so the other scammers, parasites, leeches, and frauds can say “she’s one of us!”.
And when I was a wild kid, having dark hair and high cheekbones, my mother would often say that she was going to take me back to where I came from – the Indians. So my folklore had my mother calling me an Indian. Do I qualify for any of the EEOC programs?
i’m not an archaeologist, or whatever type pro digs up old dead bodies for study, but my field of applied science plays heavily into it. anyway, recently i have been reading about ancient America, before the indians. from the many bodies recently recovered in the totusville, fla. (windover bogs) and the kennewick, wa. man, it appears that there were lots of people here thousands of years before the indians, coast to coast. a scientist accidentally discovered that kennewick man looked to be caucasian by the linear shape of his scull. he and 6 other scientists had to fight a court battle w/ several indian tribes, who use an old treaty to bury any pre-columbus bodies found, to gain access to study him. turns out the scientist was right. ditto for the fla. bodies. good videos on u-tube about it.
so, we have tribes of people claiming to be the original people, who really aren’t. as a matter of fact the fla. mummies still had brain matter, and guess where they came from? europe. all caucasians too, both sets. the fla. mummies were well preserved and a dig actually turned into an ancient cemetery with many bodies buried over a long time.
this is what happens when you give people special rights/treatment in a country that isn’t supposed to have any special people.
btw, there is speculation that indians are rushing to bury anything being dug up, to save their tax free casino profits i imagine. also, some of the old indian stories out west tell of how they destroyed the white men they encountered when they first arriving here. guess that makes the white man the native American now.
check it out for yourselves.
daveinga, that would be the 1990 NAGPRA–Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. I remember that particular circus quite well. I’m pretty sure none of it would have transpired had not this yahoo, publicity-whore anthropologist in question not run around holding press conferences proclaiming that Kennewick Man was caucasian and “looked just like Jean Luc Picard!” That’s what kicked the hornet’s nest. If he’d stayed quiet, Kennewick Man’s bones could have been quietly studied.
yeah, scientists wanting to study ancient specimens of humanity to figure out who we are and where we came from is a problem. however, the fact remains, caucasians were here thousands of years before the pyramids were built. that we have found so many ancient european mummies, even with the snatch and grab going on, tells one they were numerous, and that they were somehow displaced or replaced by those who immigrated here later, and so forth. keep grabbing and burying in secret and we may never know the whole truth, which is the plan methinks.
contrary to what our founding documents proclaim, we have become a country 1/2 full of those wanting special privileges, whether it be by birth, or because of some atrocity that happened long, long ago. and our founding fathers were right, the best way to destroy us is to open the treasury to every halfwit who can climb a fence, swim, or claim some phony entitlement.
I appreciated your article Charlie. It shed some light on the complex history of Oklahoma. In fact probably most of the old families in central and eastern Oklahoma have some Indian ancestry. But technically one is only an Indian if one is enrolled in a recognized tribe and the tribes set the requirements for membership. Physical appearance has nothing to do with it, either a person has a tribal census number or they don’t.
Things are more clear cut in New Mexico where I am from. There are established reservations and any child born to reservation residents automatically get census numbers. Children born to off reservation tribal members also are able to get census numbers as well even if only one parent is Indian.
I realize that what I have laid out has nothing to do with the politics of the situation but, there is nothing wrong with enrolled tribal members taking advantage of the individual treaties that a particular tribe has with the federal government.
Elizabeth Warren?? A whole other story for sure.
There’s probably a joke about “native-born Native Americans” in here…
Heh. Back when I used to live most of the time in Toronto while working for IBM, I was flying home for a weekend and the US Customs folks, apparently being bored or something, decided to give me the third degree. After 45 minutes of asking me where I was going, what I was doing, how long I planned to be in the United States, I finally burst out with “For God’s sake, look at my passport. I was born in Alamosa, Colorado. I live in Durham, North Carolina. I’m a Choctaw. I’m not only a native american, I’m a Native American native american!”
“My mother told me so” is such a stupid lame brain excuse it’s beyond imagining from a Harvard professor. On the other hand, some of the people coming out of Harvard seem to indicate that intelligence and knowledge is not a requirement for professorship.
My grandfather, named Daniel Boone Xxxxx, told my mother that his great grandmother was the daughter of Daniel Boone and a Shawnee girl. My grandfather was born in 1857 and died in 1942, with only a grade school education. My great grandmother believed this story so deeply she named her first born son Daniel Boone, in addition her sister also believed this story and named her first son, Daniel Boone, though he later changed his name to Daniel Green Xxxxx. My mother and I spent the greater part of 30 years trying to prove this story. My great grandmother died in 1868, but my grandfather never forgot for whom he was named.
In 1976 Lawrence Elliott wrote a biogeography of Daniel Boone, “The Long Hunter” pub by Reader’s Digest Press. On page 125, Chief Black Fish gave a Shawnee girl to Daniel to cook, and sew beads on his clothes; Daniel brought her game and treated her well. Elliott’s source was the Draper Paper’s in the Univ. of WI archives.
Meantime, after my great grandmother died, great grandfather married a Choctaw girl. She applied for tribal membership for herself and her children. They are all on the 1900 census in OK in Choctaw territory, and they identified themselves as Indian. However, the Bureau of Indian Affairs turned them down for tribal membership, because: “Even though her father looked like an Indian, spoke no English, lived all his life in a Choctaw village, had witnesses who identified him as Choctaw, there was no proof as he had refused to register.” In other words, even though it walked like a duck, quacked like a duck, looked like a duck, it must be something different according to the government.
I have Choctaw cousins that didn’t make it through college on “affirmative action” programs, or get preferred hiring, but this fake did? Sickening.
Kay, can you point me to anything that says Warren made it through college on affirmative action programs? Or do you just know this because she’s a Democrat?
Dear Charlie: You write:
“Kay, can you point me to anything that says Warren made it through college on affirmative action programs?”
No other member of the Harvard Law faculty has their JD from Rutgers. In all the Ivy League law schools, EW and one fellow from the University of Iowa are the only ones with a non-Ivy JD. If that isn’t affirmative action, John McCain is Prez, and you are his press secretary.
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
Greg, can you point me to any evidence Warren made it through college on her “Native American” ancestry?
So CM, do you believe that EW, Cornell West, Dear Leader, Angela Davis, et all made it into the Ivies and other top flight schools all by themselves? And if so then why do we have AA and diversity programs for school admissions? Why then is race a criteria for admission if not for AA reasons?
So having Indian ancestry depends on the government?
No! It depends on what your grandmother told you
How do you know what your ancestry is?
On mother’s side, we’ve traced it back as far as we can go through official records; most government records were destroyed in WWII. We’ve traced back to family still in the Baltic countries that still have some family records, pictures and cemetery headstones dating back to the 1800s. On my father’s side we can trace records back through Canada to Scotland to the mid-1800s.
The surest proof of Indian ancestry is a tribal census number or having a parent or grandparent with a tribal census number. Simple as that.
This column, Elizabeth Warren, and Obama’s ‘I was born in Africa’ line have brought to light a heretofore unknown loophole available to us good hard-working Americans with traditional values: All we have to do is to start checking off one of the ‘protected class’ checkboxes on forms and then we too can become the beneficiary of the largess that will follow.
Need an edge to get that next job? No Problem!
Need to avoid being laid off from that job? No Problem!
Want to avoid disciplinary action? No Problem!
Can’t afford to send your kids to college? No Problem!
Want an edge getting that government contract? No Problem!
Our traditional values and upbringing tell us checking that box is wrong but it is clear from watching Obama and Warren that there will be no repercussions if you are found out. Just claim the ‘Warren Defense’: “Hey, my Grandmother told me so!”
There’s a difference between casual views of other cultures that result in a kind of cachet, and the act of institutionalizing that cachet.
One leads to Washington Redskins logos and the other to reversed, kindlier, friendly versions of apartheid or Jim Crow where people are asked to sit on the front of the bus – today.
The problem is that the latter is a language and there is no guarantee that language will be “nice” tomorrow.
Racism is not an isolated, anecdotal event but a formalized language that leads to an event, and it is dangerous to speak it; the more casual and blithe it is in a political and social context, the more persuasive, sad and dangerous it is.
The problem is that these rules, this language, don’t have a moral compass – they are not like the Passover angels of death that recognizes special markings or skin. The logic that celebrates a black man or Jew today can be used to insult a black man or immolate a Jew tomorrow – or yesterday.
I think you’ve got a really good point here, and one that the people using the “if she were really Cherokee she’d be a tribal registry” argument need to understand.
As I said, and the editors bowdlerized, when my mother was a kid they didn’t talk about Indian ancestry much because it was “like being part [derogatory euphemism for being of African ancestry]“. And that was in Oklahoma. Hell, watch The FBI Story, done in 1959; watch for the part where Jimmy Stewart, stalwart FBI agent, is sent to the Cherokee part of Oklahoma in the 30′s when the oil money started coming in. It is, um, less than complimentary.
When the Dawes Rolls were being set up, there were two purposes: to dissolve tribal governments and to push the Nations into a model of land ownership more matching the US model. There were people who objected to that whole idea; Chad Smith’s ancestor Redbird Smith was one. A lot of those people refused to be on the Dawes Roll.
When the Dawes Rolls were being set up, there were plenty of people still alive who had actually made the walk as children; some of them also resisted being put on a government list of Indians.
If you were Jewish and remembered the Holocaust, might you be a little suspicious of being put on the government list of real Jews?
You’re right – this is a double-edged sword and swords are known to be sharp. That’s why they have handles. This racialist talk from the political Left doesn’t have a handle. Once you’ve established that someone is an “other,” innately and by blood, you’ve established the basis of an argument where they can be a bad “other” or “good.” “Noble” today and be shiftless and lazy tomorrow. This is why I’ve always laughed at photos of native-Americans that speak about the grace and nobility of their faces – it is a cultural conceit – fine for naming hockey teams and movies, dangerous in the political arena. In fact no human beings known to man have ever cornered the market by blood when it comes to love and hate, jealously and murder, kindness and insight – they sure as hell haven’t done so by having high cheekbones or low.
We all understand these tropes in film, literature, what have you. We all “know” people in turbans are more spiritual – it can be harmless and usually is on the level of kimosabe stuff, winning some and losing some from Tarzan to Mr. Moto to the Lone Ranger to “Dances With Wolves.” But when you institutionalize these beliefs into law, institutionalize stereotypes from novels, they are extremely dangerous. There are oceans of difference between the word “anecdotal” and “institutionalize” – one can have the most tenuous of connections – the other can and has put people in camps of different sorts.
If all the Nazis had ever done is enable myths about Jews without acting on those myths, 6 million people would have lived. You cannot do anything about racism, it is a human trait, but you can do something about making laws around race and therefore keeping myths in the cinema where one can make counter-myths should one choose to. We used to have the helpless woman in cinema and now women take out guards in films 6 at a time. As long as there is no law saying women can take out guards 6 at a time, we’ll be just fine.
Well, I agree with the general point that taking cognizance of race in Government decisions is what’s pernicious here, if you think someone who survived the Trail of Tears wouldn’t be justified to be afraid of what the government might do to someone of Cherokee ancestry (or Choctaw for that matter) you probably need to read more widely on the topic.
The main difference here is that Warren, as a Barred Juris Doctor of high standing, has a more rigorous standard to meet than you or I. She must, for example, understand the difference between innuendo, hearsay, and established fact. And yet, she knowingly had herself represented as something for which she had no proof except “family stories.” And she did this for a good couple of decades, knowing there were “benefits” for claiming this status. Even if she received no tangible benefit for having done so, under the law it makes no difference.
It’s no crime to believe in family lore though it is advisable to be a bit skeptical. To use no more than that lore to claim preferential treatment as compensation for wrongs one never personally experienced is problematical. To then keep repeating that lore when it has been proven false is downright stupid.
What Ms. Warren’s family may have told her when she was a child isn’t the point. They did not fill out the forms for her, she self-identified as Native American. The institutions that hired her and required no additional documentation of her “special status” are also to blame. She used this to her advantage for more than two decades and thinks she does not have to respond to questions now. She’s working harder to keep the lie alive than she is to get to the truth.
Well, if Warren’t claim was a casual thing and she never took advantage of it, it would be no big thing.
But the evidence is that she took advantage of it to advance her career.
Even then, if there was an iota of evidence that she had ever lived as an Indian or even supported Indian culture in any way, one might cut her some slack.
Again, there not only is no evidence, the evidence is COUNTER.
So yes she should be blamed. She’s a scam artist.
For me the real crime is why Warren thinks having Indian blood in any way matters or is a positive – as a casual myth it’s no big deal but carrying it too far is nuts – it’s using the same logic and language as someone who says Indian blood is a stigma. Warren apparently believes blood confers some kind of qualities. Match this up with the sad racialism and the politicization of that racialism in the Dem Party and it’s disturbing. Everyone can take their “one drop” and shove it.
So yes she should be blamed. She’s a scam artist.
Only in the second degree. She checked the box, but it was the racial bean-counters in those university administrations who took that ‘X’ and turned it into gold for their Departments, with no verification whatever. They got points for having an exotic creature on the rolls, and she got, with plausible deniability, a Position based on nothing (wink, nudge) but her exemplary scholarship.
I don’t think Warren deserves to be blamed for believing, as her family told her, that she was part Cherokee. But I think Harvard and the system that led Harvard to care deserve a lot of blame.
I pegged Elizabeth Warren as marginally stable, marginally trustworthy, a long time ago. When her name comes up as potential US Senator, I shudder.
It wouldn’t be on the basis of Harvard’s (and most other schools) ridiculous “minority” hiring practices that I would turn her down for Mass. Senator, although the length of time Warren’s claim stood out there and was repeated is certainly a black mark against her, not a feather in her cap.
For the record, Affirmative Action crapola is a main reason we have so many morons in public office, individuals whose success is a function of something other than merit.
I am 100% “native American”. I was born to “native American” parents as were they. For at least five generations my lineage goes back to ancestors who were all American citizens who gave birth to their progeny in America. Therefore, I am by no definition anything other than a “native American”. That is, by no definition other than a beauracratic nonsensical and technically untrue definition. So when I check the box on some forms, as I frequently do, that indicates that I am a “native American” I am being totally truthful. If the form was to ask me if I were an “aboriginal American” then I would be truthful and check “no”. Why must I feel compelled to play this beauracratically inspired insane game? If the government or corporation were to ask me if the color of the grass in my front yard was purple and expect that my answer should be “yes” because they had determined for their own twisted purposes that the natural color of grass is purple then I wonder upon what legal grounds they could prosecute me on if I replied that by all accepted norms my front yard grass is green and not purple? Where are we in America when we allow our system to dictate that we must give an incorrect answer to a simple question in order to be correct by the system’s definition and, thus, free from the liability of fraud? By no logical stretch of the imagination or accepted norms of the English language does “native American” mean exclusively “aboriginal American”. I am a proud native American. In the words of the great Sitting Bull, “screw ‘um”.
We need color-coded bracelets so we can establish a race-class system. They can chisel the particulars of the food chain into the Washington Monument so we all know where we stand.
How about color-coded patches and stars sewn on our clothes?
Then we can give out punches to the stomach or hugs and flowers each according to our wont.
Where are we in America when we allow our system to dictate that we must give an incorrect answer to a simple question in order to be correct by the system’s definition and, thus, free from the liability of fraud?
I usually skip the categories, leave all the fricken’ boxes blank. I did check “caucasian” on the census, just to keep the idiots off my back, since so many decisions are influenced by 10 year census results, like re-districting/gerrymandering. (itself subject to corruption and influence from cretins like George Soros)
Do you know how stupid this is today, all these groups calling “racism” when most of them aren’t even races at all, but ethnic groups ?
The utter vitriol being spit at a womyn of color AND of authentic American ancestry is shocking, but nonetheless expected of the crazy right wing. In all honesty, I loathe to call our nation “America”. That name honors an Italian man who “discovered” this great land. But what kills me is the UNDERLYING story: this is really a story about how Republicans hate minorities! Here we have Ms. Warren, clearly of Indian ancestry (I think from the Delaware tribe, like Joe Biden), and we have her opposition mocking her, indirectly arguning to the public: “look, she’s injun. She doesn’t have the natural ability to govern. She’s probably drunk on Lysol as we speak.” This is the real tragedy here. Again, we see a political party using a minority group that they don’t care about for political advantage. Amazing…..
LovelyEarth: Did you know that white women (what is a “womyn”?) are ‘women of *every* color’? After all, white is the sum of all other colors.. spectrum-ally speaking of course.
Is your comment intended to be real or a sarcastic parody of a liberal’s comment?… Just curious as that really is a distinction without a difference.
If “real”, then obviously your powers of observation are limited. People are not spitting vitriol at women or American Indians – rather at Ms. Warren and the bigoted, divisive and destructive affirmative action action programs that have distorted our institutions for decades now.
Elizabeth Warren is not part of a minority.
She’s a lily-white blonde who managed to dig up something in her remote ancestry to justify earning affirmative-action bonus points.
Even liberals should be appalled at how an affirmative-action program can be scammed like that. Affirmative action was never intended to help lily-white blonde women.
It’s “listerine’, not “lysol”.
You people do recognize a joke comment when you see it, right? Any serious reply is a waste of time.
I once had someone seriously tell me they were descended from Cato the Elder. Apparently her entire family believed it and routinely told it to people.
I am descended from Vlad Dracul. I look just like him. And there’s a carving of a guy at the Great Temple of Ramses II at Abu Simbel that’s my twin. And Amy Winehouse is there too.
Hey, sometimes it’s hard to distinguish between serious gliberal newspeak and hilarious parody.
Well done, Lovely Earth!
“The Delaware Tribe…”
/major guffaw
Not Lysol, AquaNet hairspray. You punch a hole in the top of the can with a nail to bleed off the gas, then you punch another hole on the other side of the top of the can and decant the liquid.
The way to end discrimination is to stop discriminating.
I just sent an email to a wise Latina about that – am anxiously awaiting response.
Eizabeth Warren is a fake and a fraud who took advanatage of a system designed to help people who have been disadvantaged due to discrimination. Warren was never the victim of discrimination. She was in fact the sly recipient of preferental treatent when she claimed family rumor as fact.
My maternal great-grandmother was Cherokee, having married the reservation doctor in Oklahoma, who went to the same medical school as I. My paternal great-grandmother was also Cherokee. Because of endemic racism of the day, my family never registered as Native Americans, which suddenly makes me very proud of my accomplishments, without having the cloud of racial-preference or Noble Savage hanging over me. Having put myself in the lowest class, Caucasian male, I have succeeded despite bias and repression of my gender and sex by the likes of Fauxcohontas Warren and Chief Flapping Lips Biden. Political Correctness, Diversity, Racial Preference…are all blind man descriptions of the elephant that is Marxist Socialism, Democrat words.
Chief Flapping Lips Biden made many faux pas while working for our faux prez.
I think it is a joke that someone who is allegedly 1/32 native american can call themselves legally a minority. By that definition we are probably all minorities.
Agreed. I believe EW’s family lore. I’m sure she has 1/32 native american blood but sheesh, it’s so diluted, who cares? I am descended from Robert the Bruce… along with 2 million other people, so what? Am I a princess or something now? It’s interesting, that’s all, no more than that.
dcanner, it’s the government who cares. I don’t think the should but they do.
Lizzie indulges in class warfare, parrots the progressive mantra.
Says (elsewhere) she never wanted to work in Washington DC (oops).
“There is nobody in this country who got rich on his own”
Yup, for those who rule by and benefit from identity politics, it’s a good idea to get the identity part accurate. If the tribe has proposed a remedy for this situation, I’d like to hear more about that.
Don’t blame her for believing her family?!
Where’d she learn how to lie?
How do we know she’s not lying about that, too?
Let’s cut her as much slack as she’d cut the rest of us–none.
That is a really great point!!
No it’s not.
Why not, Charlie?
Why are you defending her so vociferously?
Why is it not? Because it’s not a lie if you believe it’s true. (Look it up.)
Why am I defending her? Because having had the same experience, I know that innocent pride in one’s Injun ancestry could lead to this with no m alicious intent.
Why are you (both) calling her a liar? Because it’s politically convenient?
Charlie Martin, I commend you for your empathy. To gain mine you must explain, when she needed to be Native American it was part of her biography, being scrubbed out upon gaining tenure. Those who have suffered under the “Non-Quota,” Quota system might desire a strong explanation. By the way, did you get the Native American position? Or did you pass on principle?
That is the question.
The lady doth protest too much, methinks. So does the author.
It’s certainly within the realm of possibility Elisabeth Warren initially claimed an Indian heritage out of naivete, but that excuse expired long ago. She has a real-live JD degree now and should have at least a vague idea of what constitutes evidence and proof. Yes, affirmative action makes it easy for lying opportunists to take advantage of the system at the expense of the honest and should be abolished. That does not diminish one bit the fact that Warren is a lying opportunist.
Both my mother and father were born and raised in Italy, which makes me 100% Italian American. I guess that makes me a minority too, since Italian Americans don’t make up the majority in this nation. So how come when I went to college I wasn’t elegible for a bunch of scholarships and grants? And when I was looking for my first job, why wasn’t there a little box that I could check that said “Italian American Minority?” Yet there was nothing. Now if I was a black Italian American, why that would be a whole different story, wouldn’t it? Then there would be lots of boxes to check and lots of scholarships and grants coming my way.
Wasn’t there a guy I used to listen to while growing up in the 1960s who said that a person should be judged by the content of his character and not by the color of his skin? Words, only words, unless of course you’re a Kenyan living in Hawaii who had a white mother and a black father. Wow, I’m sure there would be a lot of boxes to check off coming from a family like that.
“Both my mother and father were born and raised in Italy, which makes me 100% Italian American.”
By God, if that doesn’t make you a “Latino,”nothing does!
Sorry Charlie. Real men don’t play the game on easy. Just because they ask doesn’t mean you have to tell, not if you want to have any self-respect. Mixed race kids have a wonderful opportunity to take their advantage and quietly tell the bean counters to take a hike, I’ll do fine without your set aside.
On the other hand, if you prefer to take foul shots from halfway out then go ahead. There are plenty others like you, you’ve got good cover. Just don’t cry foul when we identify it for what it is: unfair.
I don’t blame her for saying she was part Cherokee.
Yeah – she’s a victim
Yup, she’s part Cherokee alright! Just ask her; it’s her cheekbones
I once sent in a cheek swab DNA sample to the National Geographic Genome project. The results showed that my male ancestors were living in the Nile Valley about 5,000 years ago. I am of Russian/Polish Jewish descent, and my subsequent research showed that my genotype is fairly common among Jews. So I have solid DNA evidence of African ancestry, and many Jews would if they had the same DNA test. Do I have a legal basis for checking the African-American box on application forms? Are there any Civil Rights lawyers out there?
It is the duty of every conservative in and about Massachusetts to mock Elizabeth Warren mercilessly. Even if the brown campaign pulls a Gentleman John McCain and asks you to stop. You need to cover every flat surface in MA with posters showing Elizabeth Warren Photoshopped into ridiculous fake Indian costumes and saying things like “Vote for Fakeajawea” or “Fauxcahontas for US Senate”. No one in the Bay State should be able to look at her picture or pronounce her name without uncontrollable laughter.
She does have an opponent in the September primary, a woman named Marisa DeFranco, who is running to Fakeajawea’s left (and you didn’t think there was room did you?). http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/27/us/politics/democrat-challenges-elizabeth-warren-in-massachusetts.html
If DeFranco wins the primary, so much the better, a lot of Democrat money will have been squandered, and she will have become known over the din of the presidential campaign.
It is the duty of every conservative in and about Massachusetts to mock Elizabeth Warren mercilessly.
Whether it’s just or not.
Justice? No. This is war. There will be justice when there is peace, and the last liberal sleeps in the dust with her fathers. We must ask ourselves WWMDD?
What Would Mauren Dowd Do?
Wouldn’t she mock a conservative, similarly situated until your eyes bled to read it. Why lay off Princess Shitting Bull?
“Princess Shitting Bull” Oh Walter! What a delight!!!
Yeah. Whether it’s just or not. Isn’t that one of the tenets of Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals? Make them play by their own rules? And aren’t these rules about ethnic correctness merely weapons that the left uses to bludgeon anybody not on their side? Warren is a batshit crazy leftist who would wage war on anyone deemed politically incorrect. Well guess what? Two sides can play that game. She didn’t check that box by accident. She did it coldly and calculatingly – when it came time for personal advantage. And she needs to be called out for the selfish, manipulative leftist that she is.
If she was that much of a hot-shot lawyer, it might have seemd curious why somebody from Rutgers would go from just another Rutgers grad to Penn and then Harvard. That doesn’t happen without something else going on.
Damn palefaces, always speak with forked tongue, specially their women. Then they call it democracy and blame it on the government.
It is exactly because she is from Oklahoma that Warren should have known better. People in Oklahoma know what it means to be an Indian — Charlie, you’re column almost says so. Your mother didn’t get royalties from Chocataw oil rights because she had high cheek bones and straight black hair. And the whole issue of freedmen. If Warren had grown up in Boston or Philadelphia, and her grandmother from Oklahoma told her she was part Cherokee or Sac or whatever, Warren would not have had much to measure it against. But in Oklahoma, it means something.
If she is smart enough to teach at Harvard law, she is smart enough to know about Indians in Oklahoma. Especially since she grew up there.
My neice married a full blooded Indian, does that make me tet Aunt and thus can claim some status?
There is something very wrong with a system that gives special privileges to a person because of an infinitesimal amount of minority blood. Many have heard family lore about some distinguished ancestor. My mother, just before she died at age 95, claimed she was an Indian princess The family chalked it up to senility and laughed about it.
There is something very wrong with a system that gives special privileges to a person because of an infinitesimal amount of minority blood.
Precisely.
I keep looking for the check box that stipulates: Scottish, Irish, English, Canadian, Latvian, Lithuanian, Polish, Russian, American and I haven’t found one yet
There is something very wrong with a system that gives special privileges to a person because of any amount of any kind of blood, DNA, or what-have-you. Whatever it was that happened to being simply “Americans” — no hyphen — is what has happened to our once-great nation.
While the system was there to be played, she made a deliberate decision to play it.
According to some critics, her scholarship was and is apparently paltry and what there is of it, deficient, so her claim to be a “minority” very likely boosted her chances, and got her hired.
While the system was there to be played, she made a deliberate decision to play it.
You know that how?
Dear Charlie: Once more, EW’s checking the box at the beginning of her career and then unchecking it once she arrived at Harvard is suggestive. Her stated reason for checking the box:
I thought it might introduce me to other people like me
is either a) idiotic if honest or b) disingenuity in the service of her campaign
Given that she’s a lawyer b) becomes irresistible.
The Obama people, idiotic as they are, know quite well that EW is a poor performer when she has to account for herself. Proof? They designed the new federal Consumer Protection Bureau around EW, to fit her skills. Did they then nominate her as director? No. Why not? It was their judgment that EW would blow up when faced with a hostile Senate committee, even one with a Democratic majority.
Do you disagree with the Obama administration’s judgment of EW’s potential under fire? If not, why? If you agree with it, how can you resist the conclusion that EW has worked the affirmative action crutch to the limit for her whole life?
Sincerely yours,
Gregory Koster
Again, the key bit of information, is why did she STOP checking the native american box once she rose so high that it would no longer help her get jobs.
That’s the circumstantial evidence that it was an ethnicity of convenience.
Same reason Obama did when he began his run to the Presidency. He put Windex onto Kenya.
OK, if you won’t post all the wonderful things that obama has done, let me post the link:
http://www.westernjournalism.com/obamas-rather-impressive-list-of-accomplishments/
HERE IS OBAMA’S LIST OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS! It is being added to daily
I can’t wait for him to post his achievements onto the records of John Smith and Roger Sherman. But wait: Obama’s grandparents are from Kansas. Think there’s any chance he’s related to Bonnie and Clyde, the Dalton Gang, Pretty Boy Floyd, or Billy the Kid
Or maybe Dwight Eisenhower?
Whoops… the he’ll need to go into the Presidential records and make a change to Eisenhower’s to read: With Kansas heritage, President Obama has used many of Eisenhower’s experiences to shape his administration’s military actions, like success in North Africa.
More likely Pecos Bill.
Each year for eight years, Warren apparently filled out and turned in a questionnaire to a legal directory identifying her as a Cherokee/minority and, when challenged, said she did so, “so that she could meet people “just like her.””
Ironically, Harvard’s mid-17th century charter says that it was established to ”educate English and Indian youth.”
Harvard has a very active organization for Native Americans, whose leaders say that they have some sort of activity going on around campus on virtually every day of the week, yet those same leaders say that they have never seem Warren at even one of those get-togethers.
Case closed.
Dartmouth’s Native American policies are similar and it makes provisions for Native American students to easily matriculate. Their athletic teams were even called “Indians” until the EEOC rampage. A student dressed in symbolic attire with a head dress and war paint would ride the sidelines on a palomino.
Now they have the a noble evergreen tree as it’s mascot – go Big Green.
Similarly at Stanford, whose teams were known as “Indians” until 1971 and now the Stanford Cardinal have their own evergreen tree as their mascot.
Thank goodness their are no more Romans around to protest the USC Trojan
And animal rights activists still let UNReno to have a wolf as it’s mascot
Two people received special advantage through a remedy intended for those deprived through bias-which neither of the individuals in question had experienced. Now one defends the other. No surprise there.
Fine, let’s say that Warren’s actions were benign as far as Harvard and the world of academia go. However, she is now a fraud trying to become a U.S. Senator. Maybe she’d fit right in but I think she’s got enough of a free ride based on her grandmother’s say so.
Hanging you hat on an issue like this is just one reason LW is having a hard time of it.So much for claiming “law” professors are smart.
The other side of this coin is George Zimmerman, who was excommunicated from his Hispanic (let alone black) heritage by the MSM. Because it was convenient.
I thought it was suppose to be a great-great-great grandmother.
Just read a little while ago the Cherokee voted to kick OUT the descendants of the “freedmen” so if you are related in that regard, you are now persona non grata. The Cherokee have their standards and those usurping the relationship because of ties to former slaves were tossed under the wagon train.
I have AB neg blood, which makes me a very small minority as only about 0.6% of Americans have that blood type. This makes me much more of a minority than blacks and Hispanics and even true American Indians. So, most all the rest of you should be giving me all sorts of “affirmative action” preferences. I know my “rights”.
But Charlie … her grandmother is a bald faced liar … and since she also knew that family members actually rounded up Indians for the relocation marches and chose not to pass on that family history she is completely to blame as is Warren who used grandma’s lies to pad her career …
I’m German/Irish. Where’s MY check?
This whole story has just felt strange to me.
My great great grandmother was a black woman, who passed for white in later life. By the rules, I suppose this makes me 1/16th black (although not 1/16th African). Twice what Elizabeth Warren’s family lore claims. And no, this is not family lore, and I don’t have to pull out a cookbook as evidence. I have names, dates, census records, marriage records. This aspect of my ancestry is pretty clear.
It literally did not occur to me, before this Elizabeth Warren nonsense started, that so little black ancestry might be taken by *anyone* as a legitimate basis for checking the box and getting the benefits. Nor that my presence in a graduate program or as a professor would add to a “richly diverse experience” for others, which is the current legal basis for affirmative action.
Now I’m wondering whether I cheated myself. A “woman of color” as a mathematics doctoral student would be almost as big a prize as a “woman of color” who’s a law professor.
It feels both wistful and very, very strange.
“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” (Martin Luther King)
We now live in a country where people are judged by the content of their DNA.
Maybe the author feels justified in letting Elizabeth Warren off the hook….and placing the scam on the shoulders of Harvard and Penn…and I can understand that…given that this entire fraud has been institutionalized…Much like the War on Poverty was….and is.
However, Elizabeth Warren has manufactured her “defense”….”My Mother told me so”….Remember Flip Wilson? “The devil made me do it”?….Well, anyhow, we can’t question Elizabeth Warren’s mother…and she knows it. We have to take her word for it….that whatever Mom says, goes….don’t we?
One question for Elizabeth Warren….did your Mother tell you that in 1997, you ceased being a “Native American”? She must have, because you ceased declaring it…and, you wouldn’t cross your Mother, now would you? The only way that Elizabeth Warren would have ceased declaring herself to be Native American, would have been because “her mother told her so”….To do otherwise would have been a monumental betrayal of her mother’s trust, and heritage…wouldn’t it?
OMG,WTF, whenever I hear any reports about this (and I hear them all on the Roger Hedgecock Show) I get even more disgusted. It was one of her ancestors that was a member of the armed militia that forced the Cherokee tribe into forced relocation from their home known as the “Trail of tears” and she claims to be what, 1/34th Cherokee Indian? I’m more Cherokee than she is and I’m also 1/4th Blackfeet. The difference is I’m black and I’m not claiming any special dispensation due to my status as a racial minority and a military war veteran.
There is nothing honest about this. I don’t know the opinions of my half-breed first cousins in the Raleigh NC area, but my paternal grandmother and grandfather would probably beat some sense into this lying harlot about her ethnic claims after getting past the disgust. The phrase “forked tongue” has meaning and my redskin forebears knew what they were talking about!
Actually, it was one of my ancestors — Major Jacob Martin of the Georgia Militia — that commanded the unit that walked the Cherokee across. Someone not an idiot would be able to figure out that this is a really silly argument.
I wish there were more of them.
Of the many names suggested for very, very white Ms. Warren, Fauxcahontas is pretty good, but Lieawatha is better.
And a Boston newspaper is calling her both nicknames. Whoa!
Nobody here is criticizing Warren because she is a Democrat nor has that been brought up-except by you. She is being criticized because she took a benefit reserved for people who had been unfairly deprived through bias, a bias which she had not experienced.Kind of like the son of a well off stockbroker being singled out for special access.
Nonsense. People are criticizing her because she believed her parents’ account of her ancestry. But there are a whole helluva lot of people who seem to be able to tell that she was consciously fraudulently using this; that, I suspect, has much more to do with it’s political convenience.
Especially amusing, in a somewhat sour way, is the notion that her no longer leaving the box checked proves she used it fraudulently. We’re up to the point in the conversation that her having checked the box and not having checked the box proves her guilt.
People are criticizing her because she believed her parents’ account of her ancestry.
I actually don’t think that’s so, Charlie. People were criticizing her before anyone realized that her ancestress probably wasn’t Cherokee, on the grounds that claiming to be a “woman of color” – or allowing your institution to tout you as one – based on such a small amount of minority ancestry is fundamentally dishonest.
(There are nuances here, obviously, but I don’t think most people, when facing the checkbox, are thinking that 1/32nd or 1/16th is enough to claim to be a minority. Otherwise a lot more boxes would get checked.)
but the people that participate in the system are equally to blame. What is a riot without rioters? What is a preference system without its protected class? Even if that generation was never victimized…
Some academic critics have said that Warren’s record of scholarship is very thin, and that the quality of her work is not very good. Warren is a graduate of Rutgers, whereas Harvard only selects faculty from top ten schools, and Warren is apparently the only current Harvard faculty member who graduated from anything less than a top ten school. So, if her law school was second or third tier, and her scholarly output was not top notch either, why was Warren chosen by Harvard?
The obvious answer is that it was her self-described “Cherokee/minority status” which persuaded Harvard–under pressure to diversify—to hire her and give her tenure, so as to be able to claim and demonstrate (as it told the Federal government in required diversity reports, and as it proclaimed in the Harvard Crimson) that it was indeed “diversifying.”
Warren’s an idiot: she argues that rich factories move their goods across roads taxpayers pay for and so should pay more. Those roads are there for everyone to use – the idea rich people are hogging them somehow is a moron’s argument. In cases businesses do use more of an infrastructure that cost taxpayers extra, they do pay.
“You moved your goods to market on roads the rest of us paid for.” Her argument then is that the more successful a person is because there are roads, police and firemen, the more you should pay. So because there are roads she argues that “nobody in this country got rich on their own.” She’s a goofy demagogue that hasn’t a clue except how to manipulate political correctness in this country. If she was Cortes she would’ve been enslaved by Aztecs on the beach.
I’m Native English but it doesn’t quite work the same here in Britain.
Warren should not have claimed her heritage to get special privilege but family lore is common. Doing my husband’s family geneology, his maternal grandmother had died very young and little record of her is known other than her death certificate with some info but never have been able to tie any of the names to tribal rolls. There are diaries that state that “Clarence married that Indian woman…” and was not flattering and we still do not know about this young woman with 3 small children who seems to be forever forgotten whether she was part Indian or not.Living in OK for many years and spending time doing other research at the Gilcrease Museum there, there is a lot of pride of being a part of the civilized tribes who settled in OK and with Ms. Warren this may be the case. I certainly hope Brown wins but they have been a little hard on Warren. There are lots of surprises doing geneology and much of “family lore” is just that – lore. God made lots of different people and cultures and since we are all God’s children, we must therefore be equal in all ways. Preserving cultures are important and keeping their history with pride (even the less than lovely ancestors) is something all should have an interest in. We include adopted children as it isn’t DNA that binds people but caring.
The fact that ‘we are all God’s children” is irrelevant to the fact that this well heeled fraud knowingly used a program intended for victims of bias to advance her own financial and career prospects.
Diversity rule came about because of de facto and de jure exclusion rules, I guess you conveniently forgot that, huh?
Like you forgot to buy a new calendar?
But when it came time to fill out EEO forms, she got to that little box, and checked Native American. I do it too.
Nobody is forcing her or you to check that little box. You both do it for the advantage it gives you.
I’m the same percentage of Cherokee as Liz Warren claimed. It’s documented in an extensive family genealogy that was done 30+ years ago. But I would NEVER consider claiming to be American Indian on any official form, and I doubt any of my relatives would either. I believe she was taking an unfair advantage of the system. It’s entirely possible that other applicants were also part American Indian (perhaps more than her 1/32nd), but didn’t have the gall to make that claim.
Besides, what is more to the point here is that she dropped the claim years later. Why did she do that? I have not seen a plausible explanation for that.
And if she ‘felt’ like she was culturally entitled to claim American Indian heritage, why did she make no effort to associate with others who were Cherokee? Unless you consider that submitting a plagiarized recipe to a cookbook is ‘associating’. ["How to cook like a 1/32nd Cherokee Indian: First, steal a recipe..."]
All this babbling about geneology, and whose Great – to the nth power – grandfather/mother was what, reminded me of a quote of Robert Heinlein that he attributed to Lazarus Long, one of his reoccurring characters.
“This sad little lizard told me he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh, people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.”
[W3]
Lovely – I’ve been preoccupied with life and I’m just back to the ‘book’!
The first thing I did was check in on PJ Media and bumped right into Charlie Martin’s ‘Honest Injun’.
Some of the best writing on the subject – by all of the contributors – and then I saw it – ‘thoughts poured out by non-other than Lovely Earth’!
Lovely I have tried to follow you through the many tangents that you pursue in your PJ Media sojourns – and this one seems to be one of your best wanderings yet!
I can’t even begin to deal with your spitting and the ‘shocking’ authentic American stuff – let’s get on to your confusion about Amerigo Vespucci.
Amerigo Vespucci was an Italian explorer, navigator, cartographer, and merchant.
He captained two major voyages which explored the east coast of South America from 1499 to 1502. The name “America” was derived from his first name.
Do you see Lovely that the east coast of South America is not ‘this great land’ !
Amerigo explored the coast of Venezuela, but wrote in his book he “discovered” North America. In 1839 the English Explorers Society proved he lied in his book.—-
I have done my best to associate your ignorance about history with the Republican hatred of minorities – so far not having a lot of luck on that one!
Now we deal with Ms. Warren – and the why – in your opinion that she is clearly of Indian ancestry!
Come on Lovely ’because her grandmother told her she was part Indian’ – this has nothing to do with her ability to govern – any more than it effects her ability to bring forth flames by rubbing two sticks together.
I think your indirect association of Ms. Warren with Delaware Indian Joe is a classic – you are trying to bail out the squaw by tying her to a ‘babbling buck’!
Besides she would live a lot longer by drinking anti-freeze than she would by ingesting Lysol.
Keep working at being a good ‘commu-crat’ Lovely – Oby really needs you!
Ancestry and tribe identification stirs folks up, as we can see above. We also know Americans do what they want individually, a lot of it. We can make use of this.
American troops and civilians working in places such as South Asia where family and tribe are powerful rungs on The Ladder of Loyalties can use their own backgrounds to help in the push to cooperate. Individuals wearing name tags could have a metal pin or something at the end of the name, with a number on it, like a suffix to the name. The number would be the number of nationalities/tribes etc. in the person’s ancestry, as identified by the person.
An astute Iraqi may be able to identify ethnic background by name, such as identifying “Jones” as a British name, or even a Welsh name. However, if talking to Kappelman 4, Nelson 7 and Jones 13, tribalism would have some heavy lifting.