Others Are Wannabees; Warren's a Fauxcahontas

Fair disclosure: I was hoping that the question of whether Massachusetts senatorial candidate Elizabeth Warren is some tiny part Cherokee would go away. Who really cares? The claim's been made that one of her ancestors was among the soldiers who drove traditional Cherokees out of their land. If you go back two or three hundred years, who doesn't have ancestors who were on different sides of some battle or other?

However, as Becket Adams explains, the question's not going away...because Warren's not just another person, like our elderly friend Oogesti, who looks White but wants to be something more interesting. She does look White, and she does "Wannabee" more interesting, but she wants to be a sort of princess--what Adams is calling a "Fauxcahontas." She wants to be listed as Harvard's first "woman of color."

Rhetorical question: Should Harvard list as its "first woman of color" someone whose actual color is blonde?

http://www.theblaze.com/stories/fauxcahontas-plot-thickens-fordham-law-review-named-elizabeth-warren-first-woman-of-color/

I'm sitting here at the computer center in the cotton dress I wore at the "National Powwow" to celebrate the opening of the Museum of the American Indian. It's red; it brings out the faint red tones in my pale-olive complexion. The Powwow took place in late summer, when I had a bit of a tan. People asked whether I was in one of the acts. I wasn't. A slight majority of my ancestors were Irish, and I told people that, although at least two other ancestors were Cherokee.

Why is it so hard for some people to accept that, even if we have friends and relatives in the Cherokee Nation, our cultural identity may still be some shade of White? What's wrong with being Irish, or English, or even (in the case of Elizabeth Warren) Swedish? Aren't those cultures interesting too? Isn't being embarrassed by your actual close relatives sort of grade-seven-ish?

Warren says she identified herself as Cherokee in hopes of being invited to luncheons with other people like her, and those invitations didn't come. Is it possible that other people like her might find her more interesting if she weren't acting ashamed of being what she so obviously is? Personally, perhaps because I enjoyed Astrid Lindgren and My Friend Flicka so much as a child, perhaps because there are no Swedish people in my home town, I've always thought the Swedish culture was interesting.

So I have to say this to Elizabeth Warren, because I am one of those people who are ethnically like her. What's that first Native American phrase we all learned? "All My Relatives." Some people end a prayer by asking a blessing for all their relatives. Then there are people who need, for their own emotional health as well as their public credibility, to recognize and accept all their relatives...the way President Obama did when writing Dreams of My Father. I think Warren is one of them. I may never have a vote for her, but I'd think more of her as a person if she'd come to terms with all of her relatives.