Native America

So I log onto Facebook this morning and see a couple different blurbs about Elizabeth Warren’s Native American brou ha ha.  Really?  This is still a story?  Of course it is.  Scott Brown doesn’t have much to stand on politically.  The only thing he can do to make himself look good is to make up something about how awful his opponent is.

But I don’t want to write about Scott Brown.  If that story is good enough for you to decide who deserves to be senator, I doubt anything I have to tell you is going to sway your mind.  I am, however, annoyed by the very existence of this story.

Supposedly I have some Native American sitting on a branch in my French Canadian family tree.  It’s too far up the branches and long ago to know specific details… but considering the proclivity for philandering in my ancestry, I have no doubts that is true.  None whatsoever.   Granted, I never tried to claim myself as a minority to get a job.  I remember once when I was young and didn’t read the instructions that checking one box for ethnicity was the requirement and thinking, hey that’s cool – you can claim anything in your genetic makeup.   After lessons in elementary school where we all had projects to celebrate where our grandparents and great-grandparents came from, my logic pattern was that’s what you do in the adult world.  Only in the adult world, claiming ethnicity isn’t about having a class party where you bring in a dish you look up in a cookbook to represent the country someone you never met ran away from to come here and become an American.

Thing is, in class, we didn’t talk too much about how those European refugees didn’t much like the ethnicity of Americans.  So they did some pretty awful things.  Really awful things to make that majority a minority.  We do like that John Smith romance though… because the annihilation of races wasn’t the true motive of the white man.  It was love for the brown-skinned woman.  And if that’s the case… maybe they had some babies… and maybe those babies had babies… and I don’t know… isn’t it possible that they are white, blonde, blue-eyed women now?

Is it exploitative to claim that?  Is it morally wrong?  I suppose if one wants to claim the benefits.  And I know there are strict rules of heritage to make some of those claims.  But what about the claim of being an American?  Isn’t Cherokee blood an even more authentic  connection to the land mass of the United States?  Isn’t it more patriotic to acknowledge a blurry part of our history and demonstrate some pride in being not as white as one appears?

As I go back and scroll through Facebook again, the other repetitive post this Friday is to remember those who died to make this a free country.  Yeah.  Let’s do that.