cherokee princess

From when I was born until when I was elementary-aged my dad worked on a few different reservations.  We are as white as white can be, and no one in our family ever pretended any different.  It never crossed my mind to think any differently about the situation, either. However, one of the first questions I'd get from people who did not live near the reservation was whether I had any Native American ancestry.  This was almost always a prelude to someone telling me about their grandparent who was half-blooded [fill in Native American tribe].

Even as a kid, this pattern jumped out to me because it happened so often.  Why did people who had probably never been on a reservation care so much to identify with a specific tribe?  In my experience (from the 80s and early 90s) reservation life was different from life off the reservation in a lot of respects, so it felt a little like trying to gain the benefits of an identity without paying in experience.

I don't remember this firsthand, but there's apparently a joke that gets told among Native people about how every white person's grandmother was a Cherokee princess.  That does fit my experience.  Everyone and their brother seemed to want to tell me about their Native ancestor.  In fact, even if I mention now that I used to live on a reservation to a small group of people it is more or less guaranteed that someone in the group will notify me of their Native American heritage.

This is what has made the evolving story surrounding Elizabeth Warren fascinating to me.  I don't doubt that she fully believed that she could claim Native American ancestry.  I've heard enough people who were convinced of it themselves that it fits the pattern.  Why, just based on family stories, she decided she should assert that as an identity baffles me.  Even if she had a close Native ancestor, she clearly had to know that she was mostly Caucasian and lived a Caucasian life.  She should have especially known that as someone who originally hailed from Oklahoma.  Of all of the unforced errors a [future] politician could commit, this is among the dumbest.

However, as dumb as I think that scandal is, my experience says that Warren doesn't go much further than a lot of other Native American wannabes.  I am certain that a lot of the folks laughing about "Pocahontas" Warren's claims have also asserted their non-existent Native heritage whenever they got the chance.  The reason I'm so sure is that I've probably heard one of them talk about their Cherokee grandparent some time in the past.