7:22 AM PDT
I
am a blue-eyed Okie, looking more Scots and German than Indian, but I
have Choctaw and Cherokee ancestors. For a long time, going by the Scott
Brown test, I thought I was at least an eighth Indian because my
father's mother looked like an Indian, far more Indian than the
Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation now looks. I thought I was more
because her husband looked Indian, and may have been part Indian. The
stories I heard about how her people were kept off the Choctaw rolls
sound like current Republican determination to suppress voting. Stories
about how her people were kept off the Cherokee rolls are recorded in
voluminous testimony in the long-running Glenn-Tucker case, where
cousins of mine in the 1880s testified before the Dawes Commission about
racial makeup of ancestors in the 1830s. I identified with these unseen
ancestors, as I did later when the Turnbo Papers were put online and I
could read about Uncle Joe Coker being chased by Cherokees for having
one too many Cherokee wives. You can identify with shadowy ancestors, as
Elizabeth Warren does, without being dishonest. You can, for many
reasons, want to acknowledge particular parts of your ancestry. Now, no
one is talking about something very ugly that might have pushed Cousin
Liz into persistently identifying herself as she did. In the mid 1990s
the National Endowment for the Humanities demanded that panelists
identify themselves as being of ONE race. You could not check two
boxes.When did that racist policy start? I came close to checking
Indian or would have, perhaps, if the box had not said the Politically
Correct and nonsensical "Native American." As it was, I resigned as a
panelist in a letter in which I explained that the NEH policy was
racist. Since then, thank goodness, many people, including many
celebrities, have talked openly about their dual (or greater) racial
heritage. The President has referred to himself as "a mutt"--referred
endearingly, I thought. I wish I knew how to post a picture of my
grandmother here: even Scott Brown, the infallible discerner of race,
might agree that she was Indian. Maybe he could tell me if she was more
Choctaw than Cherokee. His comments in the debate were not racial, they
were racist. Cousin Liz, go girl!
Grandma Parker.
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