October 16, 2018
With 21 days until the critical midterm elections, the news continues to give us cause for white hot rage. Although polls continue to show Democrats with a 70% chance of re-taking the House, the Republicans have displayed ruthless determination to thwart the will of the people, using every method at their disposal. This is the context through which we should view Senator Elizabeth Warren’s release yesterday of DNA test results “proving” her Native American ancestry (Source: “Warren Releases Results of DNA Test,” by Annie Linskey, The Boston Globe, 10/15/18). Warren’s gambit to silence Trump’s continued racist taunts was not only futile, but dangerous.
By releasing her results as “proof” of Native American heritage, Warren implied that membership in a tribe could be determined by DNA, rather than being a political and legal decision made by the tribes themselves, based on their own extensive records, (Source: “Why So Many Native Americans Are Upset That Elizabeth Warren Tried Proving Her Ancestry with DNA,” by Molly Olmstead, Slate.com, 10/15/18).
Native Americans are right to be concerned, given the fact that at every turn, their legal rights are being undermined by hostile state and federal governments. Last week, a federal court in Texas ruled that the Indian Child Welfare Act was an unconstitutional racial preference violative of the Fifth Amendment guarantee of equal protection (Source: “Court strikes down Native American adoption law, saying it discriminates against non-Native Americans,” by Meagan Flynn, The Washington Post, 10/10/18).
The ICWA was passed by Congress in 1978 to address the well-documented U.S. history of seeking to destroy Native American tribes by taking children from their families. The children were placed in non-Native homes or “boarding schools” in order to force them to assimilate to white American culture and abandon their own. At the time of the law’s passage, 25-35% of Native children were separated from their families, and 85-90% were placed in non-Native homes (Source: ibid). Even today, 40 years after the law’s passage, Native children are disproportionately removed from their families, proof that the threat of erasure has not lessened.
In addition to continuing to attack on the sovereignty and cultural heritage of Native Americans, in North Dakota, the state government prevailed in its persistent effort to disenfranchise the Native Americans in their state. Last week, the Supreme Court declined to overturn North Dakota’s requirement that voter i.d.s have street addresses, despite the fact that most Native Americans in the state have P.O. boxes. The court was heedless of the fact that the law targets Native Americans with surgical precision and ignored the confusion that will result from the state having one set of requirements in place for the primary and another for the general election.
This is just one example of the widespread voter suppression tactics Republicans are using throughout the country to prohibit political participation by Black, Native American and Latinx citizens. In Georgia, Brian Kemp is refusing to process 53,000 overwhelmingly African American registrations and refusing calls to recuse himself from overseeing the election in which he is running statewide. In Florida, just yesterday, the state Supreme Court thwarted outgoing Governor Rick Scott’s plan to nullify the likely election results by appointing three judges to the state’s highest court on his last day in office. There is an unholy alliance between unpopular right wing elected officials and conservative federal judges whose goal is to deprive us of political power and will stop at nothing to accomplish it. It will take everything we’ve got to defeat them. We have twenty-one days. Don’t get mad, get moving.
#Onethingeveryday
#VOTE