I was recently struck by a conversation I had with a
Dartmouth professor. When the subject of my favorite Presidential candidate
came up, this professor, told me that Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test was, in
effect, exculpatory because it proved that she had Native American heritage.
Such a claim is laughable for two reasons; firstly, because the Indian DNA
which ancestry sites like 23AndMe is, to the best of my understanding, limited
to only a few tribes and individuals and not reflective of the genetic
diversity of Native peoples as a whole. Secondly, her claim that the results of
Warren’s DNA test somehow proved that the Senator was justified in purporting
to be of Indian heritage throughout her career ignores the process by which
tribes determine their own citizenship-and, by extension, who gets to
justifiably claim Indian ancestry.
Every federally recognized tribe in the United States
has the ability to set its own requirements for tribal membership; some tribes
require a certain blood quantum (i.e., the fraction of one’s ancestors, out of
their total ancestors, documented as being of full Indian blood), while others
require members to prove direct descendance from tribal members listed on
historical tribal rolls or censuses. For example, my tribe, the Wampanoag Tribe
of Gay Head (Aquinnah) determines citizenship based on direct descent from
tribal members appearing on the 1870 Census Roll of the town of Gay Head, on
the island of Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts. The ability of tribes to
determine their own requirements for membership has been recognized by the
Supreme Court, most notably in Santa
Clara Pueblo v. Martinez (1978), in which the Court ruled that the Santa
Clara Pueblo, based in New Mexico, was not in violation of the Indian Civil
Rights Act when it denied tribal citizenship to the children of a female tribal
member who had married outside the tribe. In its ruling, the court weakened the
Indian Civil Rights Act, an example of Johnson-era overreach at is finest,
which in effect sought to make self-governing Indian tribes compliant with the
Constitution, thus limiting their ability to in fact be self-governing.
Additionally, the Court ruled that the Santa Clara were exempt from federal
enforcement in regards to their internal affairs, further strengthening the tribal
self-determination set forth first by the Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of
1932 and boosted by the Nixon administration in the 1970s.
In spite of her
claims of Indian ancestry, Senator Warren has never specified which tribe she
purports to be descended from (as an Oklahoman, she has a number of tribes from
which to claim extraction), which indicates little to no connection to any
tribal culture. While culture is by no means a determining factor in granting
tribal citizenship, for her to claim Indian ancestry based purely on family
conjecture demonstrates a lack of even basic knowledge of tribal citizenship
policies and how it relates to one’s ability to self-identify as Indian. While not all Native people can
claim membership in a tribe-either due to a lack of sufficient blood quantum to
be able to enroll with one tribe in spite of a high degree of Indian ancestry
overall, a tribe choosing to disenroll members in an attempt to restrict its
membership requirements, or a host of other factors, Native people who are not
enrolled are generally able to pinpoint a tribe from which they descend and
which they have a degree of familial connection outside of family legends.
Oklahoma is filled with tribes which do not have a particularly high standards
for enrollment (the current principal chief of the Cherokee nation, Bill John
Baker, is only 1/32 Cherokee), so for Warren to be so non-committal about what
tribe she in fact descends from
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