President of Native American Group Defends Warren

Friday, May 25, 2012

Ashley Klann, GoLocalWorcester Contributor

The President of the New England Native American Institute is personally supporting Elizabeth Warren's claim to 1/32nd Native American Cherokee heritage and says that she is being “unjustly criticized.”

“White people today are very judgmental when it comes to being Native. If you're not mostly Native, then they think you don't have a right to claim any of it. And yet, they have no trouble claiming their own multi-cultural aspects of being Irish, Polish, Russian, Scottish, French, etc.,” said Joyce Heywood, President of the New England Native American Institute (NENAI). “I myself, am a mixture of Abenaki Indian, Greek, English, and Scottish. I am proud of all and culturally speaking, live my life utilizing all of my ethnic heritages.”

While Heywood could not speak on behalf of the organization, which primarily deals with education and cultural promotion, Heywood feels that Warren’s claims to be Native American are justified, even if she cannot prove it.

“She probably can't prove it with documentation; so what, many people with Native eastern U.S. heritage can't. I do believe that she believes she's Native. Otherwise, why would she have been asked to contribute recipes to a Cherokee cookbook by her cousin in 1984?” Heywood said, adding that she has been well aware of the joke surrounding the topic.

From the Campaign

Warren campaign spokesperson, Alethea Harney, reinforced the statement that Warren’s heritage had no effect on her job history. "Elizabeth has been clear that she is proud of her Native American heritage and everyone who hired Elizabeth has been clear that she was hired because she was a great teacher, not because of that heritage,” she said. “It's time to return to issues - like rising student loan debt, job creation, and Wall Street regulation - that will have a real impact on middle class families.”

Overkill

While Heywood of NENAI was comfortable speaking about the issue of heritage surrounding the Senate hopeful Warren, Executive Director of the North American Indian Center of Boston, Inc., Joanne Dunne was less enthusiastic to speak about the issue. “I’ve already done this before,” she said. “I’ve already spoken about this. It’s overkill.”

Cultural Background

Heywood highlighted the issue underlying the scrutiny and ridicule facing the Warren campaign: cultural background.

“I would have to say that I feel Elizabeth Warren is being unjustly criticized regarding her claim to be Cherokee and also for her contributions to a 1984 cookbook, Pow Wow Chow,” she said. “Those things have absolutely no effect on whether she gets my vote. I intend to vote on the issues of today and how I feel each candidate will tackle those issues. If you were to press me further on which candidate shares my core values and who I feel would better represent me, it would indeed be Elizabeth Warren.”

Heywood addressed the jokes and insults concerning Warren’s addition to a cookbook in 1984 and said that those adding to the commentary are just “showing their arrogance and ignorance.”

“When they say things like, ‘...Crab dishes. Can you just see crabs marching across Oklahoma? And do you see her Native American Cherokee ancestors lassoing crab to put in their recipes?’ That statement came from Rush Limbaugh, but is indicative of other comments that are out there,” Heywood said. “If these people had bothered to learn anything about the Cherokee Nation, they would realize that they were originally from what is now Georgia, Tennessee, and the Carolinas, where they would indeed have eaten crabs.”

‘So-Called White Culture’

Heywood also discussed the history woven into Native American culture and the intermarriage that took place between Native and Whites and to have adopted “so-called White Culture.”

“It is very common for any Natives with eastern origins to be a mixture of races and to practice a mixture of cultures,” she said. “You'll notice I used the term ‘so-called White culture’…. That's because today's White culture thinks they brought all of it with them from their homelands. What they fail to realize and to give credit to, is the fact that while the Natives were assimilating the White culture, the Whites were also assimilating Native culture.”

While scrutiny and jokes continue to arise over this issue, the Warren campaign is maintaining that her heritage was not a key issue in her job history or the current campaign for Senate.