“You mean the Indian?” said Donald Trump, when asked about Elizabeth Warren’s criticisms of him.
This was an attempt to demean the Senator, but it really wasn’t meant as a racial epithet. It was a reference to Warren’s claim of Cherokee ancestry, which is hardly uncommon for people born in Oklahoma. But her opponent when she first ran for the Senate, Scott Brown, tried to turn that claim into some sort of inappropriate affirmative action that had supposedly helped Warren in her career. This was a ridiculous assertion, and the voters of Massachusetts saw through it. Like Brown, Trump was trying to ridicule Warren’s assertion of Native American roots.
Despite the fact that Native Americans have been cheated, killed in vast numbers and generally reviled in this country’s early history, many otherwise white families are proud if they can point to some Native American ancestry. In many cases, these claims are not all that well-supported, in fact.
My own family is a case in point. My grandfather was a very handsome man, with a passing resemblance to Errol Flynn when he was young. He was proud of his Anglo Saxon roots and supposedly he was at one time offered an earldom in Great Britain if he would renounce his American citizenship and pay some back taxes on some estate. Of course he refused, being a patriotic American with a lower middle class income. On the other hand, my grandfather had a brother, who was known as Indian Charlie. Charlie claimed to be half Blackfoot Indian. Growing up, I thought I was part Native American and it fueled my imagination. In the Boy Scouts, I was a patrol leader of the Blackfoot Patrol, purely a coincidence, but I loved that coincidence. I still don’t know the truth about my ancestry, and honestly I’m not that interested in finding out.
My other grandfather was also proud of his Anglo-Saxon roots. He was a very intelligent guy with a Ph.D. from Cal Tech earned during the 1930s. He went back to school because he couldn’t get a job during the Depression. He had some great stories, including the time he and other graduate students had lunch with Albert Einstein. He was also the biggest racist I have yet to meet in my life. Once, I confessed to him that I was attracted to a Japanese-American girl in my high school. He informed me that if I married her, my kids and my wife would have to eat in the garage, if I came to visit. He actually said that to me. I think about it now, and I still can’t believe it.
My Anglo-Saxon grandfather, it turns out, was pure Norwegian. One of my cousins ferreted out our ancestry, and apparently my great-grandfather dropped his last name, and Anglicized his middle name without bothering to tell his descendants. This is a typical story in this land where we don’t really keep track of our ancestors.
I live now in Grundy county, TN, a beautiful place on the Cumberland Plateau, which is unfortunately the poorest county in TN. I have toured the local high school, which is actually quite modern and nice. There is a wall there where they show the graduating classes going back decades, long before the current high school was built. The earliest classes were almost pure Native American. Generically, they would be called Cherokee, but one of my associates here is a chief of a local tribe, and from what he says the Cherokee were really as association of many tribes. Supposedly, Andrew Jackson moved all the Cherokee out of Tennessee during the Trail of Tears in 1830, but clearly he missed a few.
The children of Grundy county now look mostly white, but you can see some ethnic remnants in the black straight hair and the prominent cheekbones. When I first moved to TN, I had a girlfriend who said that she was Choctaw/Cherokee on one side of her family and pure Irish on the other. It would risking ethnic stereotyping to say that that is an explosive combination, so I will just say that she was sometimes trying in the extreme.
When the Pilgrims landed, this continent was already occupied. Most of those original inhabitants died, many by genocidal wars, but even more from diseases brought from Europe. Although Native Americans were considered barbarians and forcibly restricted to reservations, we have never been able to really dismiss them. Native Americans, no doubt, have suffered severe, terrible discrimination from European Americans, but buried in our national psyche there is a fascination and admiration for these aboriginal people that can’t be extinguished.