Three months ago, Donald Trump referred to Sen. Elizabeth Warren as “the Indian.” Three weeks ago, after Warren blasted him in a speech as a “nasty, thin-skinned fraud” and scorched the Republican Party in general, Trump tweeted a slur, calling her “Pocahontas.” After Warren’s appearance on the campaign trail with Hillary Clinton Monday, he did it again:
“Pocahontas is not happy, she’s not happy. She’s the worst. You know, Pocahontas — I’m doing such a disservice to Pocahontas, it’s so unfair to Pocahontas — but this Elizabeth Warren, I call her ‘goofy,’ Elizabeth Warren, she’s one of the worst senators in the entire United States Senate.”
Given Trump’s penchant for racism, which includes other attacks on Indians in the past, it would surprise nobody were he to call the Hillary-endorsing Congresswoman Judy Chu “Mulan.”
The Donnie probably thinks he’s being original. In fact, Indian women are quite familiar with having strangers call them “Pocahontas,” a racist jab that goes back more than a century. My mother was called that as a school kid. And in the several years she worked as a secretary her boss frequently described her to office visitors as “my Pocahontas” and “our little squaw.” Like other women of her generation, she bit her tongue over the insults. Even that wasn’t really enough—she was expected to smile.
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Since 2012, Warren has caught a lot of criticism for having claimed Cherokee ancestry based on what her parents had told her about a great-great-great grandmother. Those criticisms came both from people who previously didn’t give half a damn about American Indians as well as many Indians themselves, including me. The furor arose over her checking the “Native American” box on her job application to Harvard and listing herself as a minority in the Association of American Law Schools Directory of Faculty. Cherokee leaders and several prominent Indian activists of other tribes were not pleased.
They and others wondered publicly whether Warren had used a Native heritage for which no hard evidence could be found to help her get enrolled and later get a job. Nobody has found any evidence of that either. In her 2014 book A Fighting Chance, Warren wrote: "Everyone on our mother’s side — aunts, uncles, and grandparents — talked openly about their Native American ancestry. My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory." She’s not alone among Oklahomans with such stories, some no doubt true, others just family legends. But it doesn’t make Sen. Warren a liar to repeat those stories.
It is no surprise that Trump should choose to insult her with the stereotype of an overly sexualized Indian figure—whose true history is not the happy melting-pot tale that most Americans know only through a Disney film that makes no pretense of being historically accurate. After all, Trump has a habit of mocking Indians.
As Sam Stein wrote Monday:
Trump accused the Native-American-run casinos of being fronts for the mob to get unfair tax breaks and avoid anti-corruption regulations. But he didn’t stop there. He used racial epithets and funded secretive campaigns to drum up opposition to those casinos. Like with Warren, he questioned whether the main operators were actually Native American at all.
The most famous instance of this came during congressional testimony Trump gave in 1993, when he triumphantly declared: “They don’t look like Indians to me and they don’t look like Indians to Indians.”
Warren has suffered similar criticism, with people laughing at her claims of Indian heritage because she is light-skinned, blue-eyed and blond. In other words, she doesn’t fit the stereotype. However, whether Warren’s ancestors include Indians or not, appearance is a terrible way to judge whether someone actually is Indian. In fact, an Indian ancestor of hers could very well have been kept off the Dawes Rolls because of how they looked. That certainly happened to many other Indians.
Those rolls were compiled by the U.S. government from 1893 to 1914 to enumerate Cherokee, Choctaw, Creek, Chickasaw, Oklahoma Seminole, and some Florida Seminole. Nobody has found a Warren ancestor on the Dawes Rolls. That doesn’t mean there isn’t one there.
More than a quarter-million people applied to be included when the Dawes Commission began its work. Fewer than 100,000 actually were enrolled as Indians. People were chosen to be listed on or left off the rolls by white bureaucrats who inspected their appearance. In some cases a brother was included and another brother or sister was not.
One unstated goal of the rolls was to exterminate Indian identity after the period of actual slaughter had ended. Thus, many who legitimately claimed Indian blood were denied a listing out of a desire to reduce the count. As with all the other ethnic cleansing undertaken to eliminate Indians, this one was highly successful.
Even if none of Warren’s ancestors five generations ago were Cherokee, Trump’s calling her “Pocahontas” puts down Indians about whose bloodline there is no doubt. That repeated slur and his other comments about Indians show, once again, just how mangy his dirtbag politics are.