Elizabeth Warren, Pocahontas, and Native American Identity

Categories: Wampum

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Paul Andrew Otto

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Categories: Wampum

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In an effort to stave off political attacks on an issue from earlier campaigns, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass) has released results of a DNA test demonstrating that one of her forebears–at least six generations back–was, indeed, (genetically) Native American.

Politics has a way of simplifying and masking rather than revealing the complexity of historical  and social realities. The following essays point to many of these complexities, which have unfortunately been shoved to the side in the interest of controlling a political narrative and news cycle.

(The first iteration of this post had links to three articles. I’ve added one more since then and may continue to do so without further comment. 18 October 2018)