By now most people have already seen the news about Trump’s continued insensitivity towards Indians and really human decency. Coverage below:
- The video is available from many sources (including the New York Times, NPR, and even The Daily Show).
It was of course a reprehensible comment, similar to his views on Indians at a Congressional hearing from before he ran for President. While it is not surprising in other words, it still is reprehensible. But for me the most problematic part was not his statement on Elizabeth Warren, it was instead that the whole event took place in the shadow of a portrait of Andrew Jackson, Trump’s favorite former President and someone who deserves to be seen as immoral and not deserving of praise.
But, and this is the hard part but something that Trevor Noah’s video above does as well, it is worth noting that Warren’s claim to be Native American was and is also problematic (though it does not excuse Trump’s behavior in any way). Rachel Dolezal was called out and shamed in ways that Warren has been spared by the left and my own view is that this is because many of us like Warren’s politics and because Indian issues continue to be marginalized. I’ll end by just copying below what I wrote about Warren’s claim in 2012 on this blog:
I have resisted posting anything about the Elizabeth Warren controversy regarding her having claimed to have been Native American for a while. In part, I did so because the connection to poverty law is somewhat limited, but it is a topic that I think deserves attention and is relevant to law professors, regardless of their particular specialty. Another reason for my being unable to resist saying something about it is that in addition to poverty law, I teach Indian law. But, let me add so that there is no question, I am non-Indian, though I did grow up in part on the Navajo Nation.
Preliminaries aside, I am troubled both by Warren’s claim/explanation and by the way fellow progressives have rushed to defend her or pretend such a claim shouldn’t matter. As Kevin Noble Maillard noted in the N.Y. Times:
Looked at from the inside, however, the Warren controversy is all new. When the Brown campaign accused Elizabeth Warren of touting herself as American Indian to advance her career, this was news to Native law professors. We have a good eye for welcoming faculty to the community and identifying promising scholars. We know where people teach, what they have published and we honor them when they die. Harvard Law School named its first Native American tenured professor? Really? In our small indigenous faculty town, we would have heard about it already.
There are of course many who give good reasons for questioning the attention the right has given to this topic and Brian Leiter in particular has engaged in a rigorous defense of Warren (see here, here, and here). But my view is best captured by two op-eds published by Indian Country Today:
- Suzan Shown Harjo, What’s the Deal With Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee?, Indian Country Today, May 15, 2012.
- Steve Russel, Elizabeth Warren: Box-Checking for Fun and Profit, Indian Country Today, May 16, 2012.
To claim you are Indian without having a tie that goes beyond “family lore” – ie no proof of tribal membership or other ready proof – is questionable. Of course for some people, particularly members of tribes that were terminated, their identity could well remain Indian and appropriately so, even if they do not have ready proof such as a census card. But that doesn’t appear to be the case here. So even though I largely agree with her politics, I am troubled by her self-identification based on what appears to be a very limited connection to Indian communities. (It goes without saying that being phenotypically white does not mean you cannot be Indian.) Vine Deloria Jr. had a great discussion of this topic in Custer Died for Your Sins and considering the limited number of Native Americans who are law professors and the continued marginalization of Indian law in most law schools, I think it is fair to look into this aspect of her career. And so far her answers do little to support what sounds like either (a) best case scenario: careless indifference to the significance of tribal identity or (b) worst case scenario: box checking for career gain. Even if the best case scenario is what happened (who doesn’t want to have people to go to lunch with — one of her explanations, along with high cheekbones, believe it or not, for saying she was Indian), I do think progressives have been quick to rush to her defense because of her politics in ways that would not have been the same had she been a conservative politician. (Finally, I do not think saying she earned her promotions and lateral offers on the merits, independent of her having self-identified as Indian, is responsive nor something worth debating.)
Poverty Law 