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The #ElizabethWarren story is a perfect case study of how structural racism, white authority to categorize race, & anti-Indigeneity intersect. Add to that "Native American DNA" testing, which i wrote a book on. This is why i tweet & write on this issue.
it's been fascinating since 2012 when i first found out about her Cherokee claims, how Americans of many political & racial persuasions can only see her story within a frame of US nationalism. my frame is Indigenous authority. this makes more of you uncomfortable than not.
i know many of you are also uncomfortable with critiques of #ElizabethWarren b/c you too have unsubstantiated myths of Cherokee, Blackfoot, etc. ancestry. You prob don't know that "playing Indian" is key strategy since the 18th c. to strengthen American claims to this land.
Playing Indian gets combined since at least the 18th c. with another common American story, that of "the vanishing Native." How convenient! As i write elsewhere, :at the moment of subdual, the Indian becomes ancestor and all the multicultural citizens his rightful inheritors.
whether your playing Indian is an unsubstantiated Cherokee claim or defending a mascot, or a related move--saying mascots or warren and her DNA test "aren't an issue"-- you're complicit. it is common for Americans to either make their own claims or defend others that erase us.
if you think the #ElizabethWarren case is manufactured or is mainly (for Indigenous ppl) about the US empire's electoral politics then you are uninformed. This is ONE high profile case among millions over centuries that combine US anti-Indigenous narratives, policy, & sciences.
p s. twittersphere, I am NOT of the "left." Did you read this thread? My frame is NOT U.S. nationalism or its electoral politics. I am Dakota. That plus global Indigenous resistance are my starting point and my analytical frames. Pay attention. Or just scroll on by.
