Al Jazeera op ed by Alaina Roberts discusses Elizabeth Warren's Cherokee ancestry claims debunked by Cherokee genealogists and the Freedmen of the Five Civilized Tribes.
"Native American" is not just a racial category, it is also a political identity because tribal nations are acknowledged as sovereign governments in the US. When someone claims to be Native American, he or she also claims access to political and economic benefits hard-won by native governments in brutal legal battles over tribal sovereignty.
Also see THIS VIDEO from Al Jazeera on belonging
This is why the Cherokee Nation denounced Warren's DNA test as "inappropriate and wrong" and accused the senator of "undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage".
The piece also calls out the Cherokee for their abuse of Freedmen that we've documented over the past decade:
Yet, the Cherokee Nation have denied one group of people - the descendants of their former slaves - who had this very shared history, generations spent living alongside native people, simply because they did not see them as native "enough".
The fakery of Elizabeth Warren sucks the oxygen from the other stories of Native identity and the loss of citizenship..
READ the entire op ed at the link above...
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