How Much Red Blood Is Enough?
In October of 2018, at my husbands 30 year Stanford University reunion, he and I attended a forum by political pundits and long time Republican-, turned-Independent in disgust, Steve Schmidt, who said “All politicians lie or fudge the truth to game the system”. He highlighted, of all things, the fact that Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren applied for a professorship over 20 years ago at Harvard and took advantage of quota laws when she checked the Woman and Native American boxes on her application and got the job. Who checks American Indian blood percentages on the hiring team anyways? Can’t any lawyer argue how much DNA is enough to claim ethnic heritage in an arbitrarily constructed system? What color skin is red, yellow, black or white?
The reality is that our government created an agency over 200 years ago that morphed into the Bureau of Indian Affairs in 1824 to strip Indigenous peoples’ rights to their ancestral nomadic lands. It set up reservations to corral First Peoples in arbitrary government determined bands. A system rife with dishonest and corrupt agents rejected thousands of Indigenous peoples claims to legal repatriation of their lands from our fledgling nation for racist and economic reasons.
These original inhabitants of the North American Continent were often genetically mixed with neighboring tribes and in my family’s case, European colonists immigrating in the mid -seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. The 1804 journals of Lewis and Clark called the tribes “little red children” and deemed them inferior to whites just as they deemed African slaves at the time.(See my blog on Sacajawea.)
A few years ago Elizabeth Warren said in her autobiography, A Fighting Chance, that she didn’t want to run for President of the United States. What woman would in this misogynistic world, where the outfits a woman in power wears are often more note worthy to the press and populace than the substance of her words or actions? According to this book, Warren came to the writing field with a hazy family history of colonialism, much like my own. A whispered story about a Native American grandmother, passed down from daughter to daughter.
I have engaged in a 35-year quest to discover the truth behind a turn of the century family story my Mother shared with me. Her Mother told her that her husbands grandmother visited his mother who was clothed in Indian garb over a hundred years ago. The eastern Washington neighbors slurs referring to my mothers paternal grandmother as “Fortune’s Squaw” a derogatory sexual term were whispered to me by my mother.
Several years ago I uncovered on Ancestry.com a century- old governmental form on which my relatives sought tribal repatriation. The word “Rejected” was stamped across my ancestors names. I learned of my great grandmother Easter Elizabeth’s insistence in the early 1900’s to enroll her young family on the “Dawes Commission Rolls” a sham commission created by the US government to list all US citizens claiming any native heritage and to limit the size of the tribes for economic reasons.
I’ve read about the systemic fraud in the Bureau of Indian Affairs to disrupt and dismantle Indian tribes by outright murder, war and disease, the forced removal of children to government schools where they were barred from using their native languages, broken treaty’s and land acquisitions when natural resources were discovered on tribal lands. These brutal disruptions have fractured but not destroyed these descendants.
When people are disenfranchised like women or people of color they often have a different perspective on what is fair or legal. When centuries of colonialism breed anger and distrust in nation states all over the globe it often creates a dystopia. The people stop trusting that things are going to be ok and begin to chip away at the powers that be as dissidents in their art, writing and conversations with family and peers.
Easter may have been naive or hopeful that after being the third or fourth generation of women in her family line to marry white she could claim some restitution from a recent, in her families opinion, theft of ancestral lands in the mid 1800’s, by registering her family in 1900 in the rolls.
A few hundred years ago people building this nation may have seen the westward expansion as a new chapter in civic duty. There may not have been such a deep seated hatred of interracial marriage all over the country. Pockets of the country may have seen a dearth of healthy and hardy women able to birth and rear children successfully, the one thing our species is hardwired for.
It was the turn of the century photo of my distant 5th generations back great grandparents, Alabetha, an obviously older native woman with the father of her 10 children, Aaron, a British immigrant who sported a long grey beard, much like one of my older brothers or ZZ Top, found on Ancestry.com that got me excited. It seems my long lost relatives had been gathering data much like I had over the years and one of them had an old box of granny’s photos and pulled it out and uploaded it to Ancestry.
I first came across Alabetha’s name 35 years ago in the great Mormon Ancestral Library in Salt Lake City, Utah on a business sales trip I planned to coincide with a forea into genealogical research. My uncle (I believed to be my Moms only brother) a long time reporter and editor at the San Francisco Examiner, who’s own travels east to the Midwest to research his ancestral past had hit a dead end, encouraged me.
He told me their dads sister Ena, who’s name I was told means “coming moon”in Choctaw, had come to his fathers funeral just after Thanksgiving 1950 and said she would tell him the story of their mother Easter’s origins but that it was really sad. Keeping in family fashion of tight lipped discussions of the past she left after the funeral and never shared the story. What could the sadness have been?
I am so proud of that little part of me that connects me with the earliest nomadic peoples roaming this continent. I honor this part of my families painful past and question the motives and dishonesty of a government that “rejected” subsequent aunts and uncles from claiming their true inheritance. Hundreds of years ago my Choctaw grandmother from one of the 5 Federated Tribes probably did as her elders requested and married a young English settler in Alabama and had a slue of kids that forged west enabling this fledgling nation to expand.
The frustrating thing about the rejection of tribal status by Bureau of Indian Affairs agents is that if the Ancestry data is correct Alabetha and her children may have been marched off their land after her husband died and were not inclined to return a few years later to a dishonest census taker to reclaim the title to it and possibly lose their lives. We know the history. Move the native people West to make room for the European settlers. We know the travesty of governmental systems hell bent on land acquisition but it still hurts to read her grandchildren’s 100 year old rejection forms by what some disenfranchised deem a dishonest government.
Fast forward to 21st century politics and listen to the big hub bub by Donald Trump and conservative Republicans about Warren’s heritage since she ran for the Senate years ago in Massachusetts and won. His big beef with her probably stems from her tireless work on economic reforms in the last ten years. Possibly for her help closing down many asset generating businesses like technical colleges that force students to pay for classes but rarely graduated anyone due to fraudulent lending practices. Most students ran out of money or dropped out before earning degrees and remained deeply in debt with no way to discharge their high interest loans.
Repeatedly we witness the outcry of Republican rebukes on Warren for checking that box claiming descent from one of this nations first people. She obviously upset the status quo and racist factions in this country because we can see how that little slip of paper shown on nightly news services across this nation tried to discredit her in her senatorial and presidential runs.
I admit I was never so bold to check that box on government forms over the years but I wanted to, even if merely to claim my blood heritage, which by the way is 97% United Kingdom and only 1% New World DNA. Does that small percentage of New World blood negate the fact that I descend from this country’s first peoples? Genetics are hardwired into the fabric of our existence. As the years went by I wondered why Native American heritage was the only one you had to prove with arbitrarily created blood percentages. DNA proof of genetic mixing and the new system of self identification for all manner of things may finally get rid of this box altogether yet the need for funding is still present. I honor the little piece of New World blood in me as I assume others do as well. The new standard is how do you identify with your ancestry to check that box? Are your friends and family in a tribe do you identify with policies to help further your tribe? Clarification is imperative to protect tribes from losing much needed autonomy and federal funding.
Uncovering family histories has helped people all over the globe fill in the blanks on their families past. My foray into Ancestry also uncovered another family secret that even my honest to a fault zealot converted catholic mother may have kept from her kids. The deeply embarrassing fact that her parents split in 1935 because her mother, a Christian Scientist, had had an affair discovered by a private eye her dad hired. The son of said private eye harassed my uncle at school one day in the 1930’s and he wanted to punch him.
I recently found two different public census sources around Seattle that list a third child of my grandmother who’s age would put his birth right around the time of the divorce but, I was never told by either my mom or uncle about a sibling. I don’t know what to make of it. Why does this child share their last name in these sources if it was just a neighbors kid or visiting relative? My mother obviously wanted to sanitize her traumatic childhood or keep an unhappy memory buried. One day I may discover the truth.
This “whitewashing” or covering up of genetic history to sanitize our pasts has done a great disservice to our nation. I like Warren knew of the stories but couldn’t prove I had New World DNA until science allowed me to prove what was otherwise an old family wives tale.
I want to reclaim my rightful heritage and honor those heart souls that tie me to this land with a cosmic DNA thread. I want the tribes of this nation to stop following the arbitrary percentage of native blood rules now that there is science backing us up and employ an honorary tribal status to those of us who honor and want to reclaim what is legally ours not for money or land but to right the wrongs of this government and maybe in so doing gain a new autonomy from the injustice of the past.
Warren and I honor our grandmothers as do so many Tribal peoples. Let us rejoice in the knowing that this nation was built on the backs of hardworking men and women from all nations and tribes and that history is often told by the victors. We must be honored not ashamed of the choices our ancestors made to forge alliances and try to work together to build something new.
Sadly human history repeats itself over and over by one nation state toppling another. It’s not our job to judge what happened in the past but to learn from it and try to figure out how to use diplomacy to gain independence and resources for growth. Our global economy can now help indigenous people everywhere gain a leg up and help themselves create the kind of economic systems they deem productive for their nations. Let us learn from the mistakes and successes of our ancestors and try to build a more balanced world.
