Fifth of July: Antidisestablishmentarians

State of the Stupid, 2023: 

You can build this strawman out of any old resentments and prejudices you have lying around the house or in the garage, without an expensive and time-consuming trip to the Hobby Lobby. 

The genius of Rubio's tweet is in his focusing his hostility on those who see the US as "built on stolen land" as if it wasn't obviously true that Europeans and their descendants had appropriated virtually every bit of North America from its indigenous inhabitants between landfall in Mexico in 1519 and the closing of the frontier in 1890. A gasbag like Ted Cruz would have insisted on adding something about African chattel slavery beginning 1619 to the sentence, but there's not an ounce of fat on Marco's argument: he heads straight for the single most indefensible lie you can tell about the history of the continent and tells you you're "nuts" if you try to argue with it.

As well as possibly "influential" (unlike, say, Senator Rubio), rich (in contrast to Senator Rick Scott), famous (as opposed to infamous like Senator Lindsey Graham), or holding a "fancy degree" (instead of a no-frills plain one like Josh Hawley's Yale J.D., 2006). 

For the Record: Cherokee

A group of citizens of the Cherokee Nation, United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians, and Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians issued an open letter to Senator Elizabeth Warren to which I posted the following response as s sympathetic interloper with a background in cultural anthropology:

“By publicly equating race and biology with Native identity, your DNA test promoted the exact same logic the Right is currently using to try and destroy Native rights.” Although a strong Warren supporter, I have to agree with this statement.

But the Cherokee Nation applied the same discredited race science in denying tribal membership to Black Freedmen for years up to 2017 with arguments like, “only those with Cherokee blood should be citizens and a legal ruling otherwise would be an affront to its sovereignty” https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/09/15/why-the-cherokee-nation-is-ending-its-decades-old-fight-to-deny-citizenship-to-descendants-of-its-former-slaves/

The Nation rightly accepted the district court’s ruling on this in the end, and seems to have had little problem forgiving itself for it. Can’t it try to show the same spirit of forgiveness to Senator Warren, who has worked to understand her error and to learn from it?

I'd add that rather than taking the moment as an opportunity to blame others for failings that I have been and may still be guilty of myself, I'd like to take it as a further opportunity for everybody to achieve a deeper understanding of what's wrong with a DNA-based definition of ethnic identity, of the differences between "race" and ethnic-cultural identity and their importance in people's lives. And to emphasize that anybody, no matter how virtuous, is capable of doing or saying a racist thing and anybody, no matter how benighted, is capable of learning to do better.

For the Record: Two Warren Topics

Cherokee Freedmen, undated, via Mid-Continent Public Library.

Wanted to try giving Roger an answer here:

I have never understood this 'controversy.' At all.

— Roger Matile (@rmatile1) January 19, 2020

Fast-forward to her political career, conservatives unable to believe a woman could be a distinguished legal scholar suggest she's a fake who benefited from affirmative action because her bio said she was Native American. Same schmucks who doubted Obama wrote for Law Review.

— Dopes 'n' Babies (@Yastreblyansky) January 19, 2020

News from Satyagraha

My screenshot from Christopher Bouzy's video, see below.

Wanted to say something about the Saturday incident at the Lincoln Memorial of the kid with the arrogant smirk blocking the path of the Native elder drumming and singing, but wasn't sure what until it occurred to me that this is such an MLK holiday story, with the setup of its being that weekend, when hosts from the now divided Women's March to the anti-abortion fanatics of the "March For Life" come to the capital in tribute to the legacy of peaceful protest associated with Martin Luther King, Jr., if not very often to the legacy of nonviolent civil disobedience: and that the performative utterance of the Omaha Nation's Nathan Phillips represents, precisely, a deployment of Dr. King's weapon of nonviolence against the forces of monocultural tribalism and hatred.

That is—I've seen a lot of contextualizing information—

Hey Twitter, we need to have a talk.

Last night I learned & confirmed the name of the "main student" from the #CovingtonCatholic incident. The kid grinning in front of the Native elder.

Hop in this thread because I'm going to walk you through some deep but important stuff. 1/? pic.twitter.com/5NyXFCwJR9

— Arlen Parsa (@arlenparsa) January 20, 2019

and what I think are the relevant portions of all the video, some of it really well curated—

Warren again

Undated map, via..

Jordan wrote, in comments (read the whole thing).

This whole thing confounds me terribly, because the only operative question, the only one that means anything at all, is Should Warren have done this, and as far as I'm concerned the answer is a blindingly obvious Yes, but according to nearly everyone on the Left and the Right, the answer is No....

In terms of political expediency I don't even know where to start. She got Trump on the defensive, rocking back and sputtering, and I don't understand why people still don't understand how difficult and important that is.

I wonder. My first response was delight, and then I got perturbed by the Cherokee Nation statement, and more of that on NPR in the morning, and then I started working through it, as reported on Tuesday, and got a kind of sour taste in my mouth about the whole thing, and that exhaustion that gets at us all lately all the time, like what's the point. I agree that she absolutely did the right thing, and it's great that the test came out with dispositive evidence, but for one thing it's not going to stop them, the smarter ones have just been moving the goalposts all week.

The latest (a scandal that was raised by Boston radio personality Howie Carr in 2012, so "latest" is likely not the right word—my version, Britlaundered from Breitbart, is that of the Daily Mail, but wingnuts have been trotting it out for a revival all week) is that a couple of the recipes published under Warren's name in the Pow Wow Chow cookbook in 1984 turned out to have been lifted, from old Pierre Franey's New York Times column in 1979, credited to Henri Soule of Le Pavillon, which makes a lot of sense, given that they're both rather elegant recipes featuring crab, and the Cherokee, whose ancestral homeland was the Great Smoky Mountains before they were driven west, can't have had a big cultural affinity with crab, which comes, you know, from the sea.

For the Record: Warren

I was a little perplexed and saddened by this, from the Cherokee Nation to the world, on the subject of Senator Warren's response to the Trumpian challenge ("If a DNA test shows you're an Indian I'll give a million dollars to the charity of your choice), but I figured it couldn't be helped.

It's a valid point the tribal leadership is entitled to make, but it's not helpful, as you say. She was more or less forced to do something like this by Republican ratfucking. The way Obama was forced to indignity of showing the birth certificate as if Trump questions were legit.

— YasGHOUL's Farm (@Yastreblyansky) October 15, 2018

Though not everyone agreed, and that made me kind of sad for a while: