Nice White Ladies by Jessie Daniels

Author:Jessie Daniels [Daniels, Jessie]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2021-10-12T00:00:00+00:00

In 2016, when Senator Elizabeth Warren was goaded into taking a DNA test to prove her claims of Native American ancestry, she unwittingly endorsed a way of thinking about race, DNA, and ancestry that reinforces white supremacy. The notion that an individual can discover their tribal affiliation through a DNA test reinforces the white-supremacist notion of “race” as a biological trait tied to a specific gene, discoverable from a cheek swab of saliva. It’s the same idea at the core of the Ancestry.com advertisements on television that encourage people to “discover the heroes in your family.” This simplistic view of how genetic markers work strengthens retrograde notions about “blood quantum” and race.

“Because we are all genetically related, there are no tribe-specific markers, i.e., no Cherokee, Pequot, or Lakota markers,” writes Kim TallBear, a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta. Her research has established that there are no genetic markers of Native ancestry. In her book Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Sense of Genetic Science, TallBear observes that tribal membership is a legal category, not a genetic one. She points out that it is impossible to disentangle individual genetic information from the constellations of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations in which genes are formed. Warren likely grew up hearing stories about her Native American ancestors, like I did. White parents who tell their children about a connection to a mythic Native American past, like my parents did, are perhaps unconsciously using it to lay claim to territory and to a sense of belonging. It is a way of asserting: we are the true First Peoples. And a fictive Native American past is a comforting way of sidestepping the disturbing reality of a white settler colonial ancestry that continues to pay benefits in the present.

Material benefits are part of the allure. The ability to assert a Native American identity on official forms can result in access to additional resources. For instance, in the late nineties, a company owned by the brother-in-law of Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) won more than $7.6 million in no-bid contracts at US military installations in California based on a flimsy claim of Native American identity. At Harvard Law School, Warren was celebrated as the first minority woman to receive tenure. This was based on her own claims of Native American identity on employment forms, although she and Harvard Law have denied that her assertion of Native identity had anything to do with her promotion. Then there are the more intangible benefits to claiming Cherokee identity.

“I believe that there is a retreat from white guilt that is happening here,” writes anthropologist Circe Sturm in her book Becoming Indian: The Struggle over Cherokee Identity. “Whiteness is responsible for indigenous dispossession and the lack of societal connection that characterizes modernity,” she said in an interview. Sturm calls people who claim Cherokee identity without any evidence or prior tribal affiliation “race shifters,” people who are seeking connection to an identity outside whiteness. Sturm

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