US Senator vows to advocate for rights of native tribes
https://www.fastbaze.com/2018/02/us-senator-vows-to-advocate-for-rights.html
In remarks to the National Congress of American Indians, Warren quickly, and bluntly, invoked President Donald Trump’s derisive nickname for her, recalling that he had called her “Pocahontas” last year at a ceremony honoring Navajo code talkers from World War II.
“The joke, I
guess, is supposed to be on me,” she said of a taunt that stems from
her long-standing claims of American Indian ancestry, which she has been
unable to document.
Warren, speaking
from prepared remarks, did not offer new evidence of what she has said
is her Cherokee and Delaware heritage, conceding, “You won’t find my
family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.”
“And
I want to make something clear: I respect that distinction,” she said
to applause. “I understand that tribal membership is determined by
tribes — and only by tribes.”
Warren,
D-Mass., a former professor at Harvard Law School, listed herself as a
member of a minority group in a law school directory but has not claimed
to be a Native American since being elected to the Senate in 2012.
Beyond
Trump’s ridicule, some American Indian activists have pressured Warren
to be more straightforward about her heritage and to also be a more
aggressive advocate for the tribes, some of which account for the most
impoverished communities in the country.
Such
demands, combined with the attention that Trump commands with his
mockery, prompted her to try to engage in what one supporter of hers
allowed was something of a deck-clearing going into her expected
re-election in November and before a Democratic primary race that will
effectively start at the end of the year.
To
that end, Warren, an Oklahoma native, used a recounting of her roots to
not just tell her family’s ethnic story but to present a tale of Dust
Bowl hardship that has the makings of a stump speech aimed at
inoculating her against charges of being a member of the coastal elite.
“My
mother’s family was part Native American,” she said on what would have
been her mom’s 106th birthday. “And my daddy’s parents were bitterly
opposed to their relationship. So, in 1932, when Mother was 19 and Daddy
had just turned 20, they eloped.”
She
recalled how, after her father had a heart attack and lost his job, her
mother “put on her best dress and walked to the Sears and got a
minimum-wage job” — a job that saved them from foreclosure until her dad
found work as a janitor.
Warren, who also met privately with some tribal leaders while they were in town, offered the group “a promise.”
Each
time, she said, “someone brings up my family’s story, I’m going to use
it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.”
She
vowed to draw attention to health care and environmental inequities on
reservations as well as startling statistics, noting that “more than
half — half — of native women have experienced sexual violence.”
Warren
was plainly hoping to respond to an article last month in The Boston
Globe that raised questions about her commitment to tribal issues.
Yet
her remarks made clear that she also sees political opportunity in her
long-running feud with Trump, a way to demonstrate to Democrats that she
will aggressively confront him.
“She is
taking a perceived liability and not just taking it on, but trying it
out as a weapon against the president,” said Mo Elleithee, a longtime
Democratic strategist.
Warren won applause by pointedly invoking one of Trump’s favorite presidents.
“It
is deeply offensive that this president keeps a portrait of Andrew
Jackson hanging in the Oval Office, honoring a man who did his best to
wipe out native people,” she said.
And
when she brought up Pocahontas, she did not just scorn Trump. She also
set aside the fable and talked about the preadolescent Powhatan girl who
married a Jamestown settler, helped secure a tenuous peace in colonial
Virginia and was ultimately sent to London, where she died at about 21.
“Indigenous
people have been telling the story of Pocahontas — the real Pocahontas —
for four centuries,” Warren said, adding, “And, for almost as long, her
story has been taken away by powerful people who twisted it to serve
their own purposes.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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