“‘Pocahontas is now the face of your party,’ Trump said in the meeting, sources told CNN.”
From the Hill, just so I’m not directly linking CNN.
If you don’t know the non-Disney Pocahontas story, Wikipedia has a pretty good entry.
So… where to start on this one. I guess we start at the top and dive down.
Question #1: Are we really going to live in a world where the President of the United States mean tweets like he’s the male version of Regina George, a burn book tucked in his backpack as he walks the halls of the West Wing?
Question #2: Do people understand who Pocahontas was or how she’s been machined over time by Disney and various others into the fetish embodiment of the sexual version of wanting to dominate and colonize Native cultures?
Question #3: As civil rights start the long slide backward, is the elected and certainly self-indulged “leader” of the United States going to allow an issue as important as Native and Tribal identity to be reduced to his petty cheap shots at a senator that stood up to him?
Question #4: When are we going to admit that 90% of the problem that GoP elder statesmen (and I mean MEN) have had for the last 8-and-a-half years is that they lost to brown people and women? Can we move past the fact that on some level their whiteness took a prestige bump and go back to having a democracy?
Now, answers. Not THE answers, of course. Unlike some people in this world, I do not presume to know the absolute truth and I’m not insistent that my opinions on things become facts– regular or alternative facts– simply because I will them into being. But here are some thought-out answers.
#1. Apparently we are. I had hope at one point that Paul Ryan, a fellow Miami University alum and I still believe a intelligent, decent and well-meaning human being, was going to stand up to some of what I think we can only view at this point as immaturity or dangerous mean-spirit from our President. But that’s not happening, and just like numerous times before, the overwhelming force of the GoP Senate majority silenced a (only part the will remind you) Native woman who was trying to quote the wife of the African American civil rights leader who we have a National Holiday for and hence even GoP Senators know by name.
Any Republican who let that happen in the Senate (during black history month no less) is, in my opinion, a huge piece of shit. And I say that with all due actual respect. I think people like John McCain, for example, are due tremendous respect and I would at every opportunity salute Senator McCain for what he’s given to his country and continues to give. I just don’t live in a world where respecting someone precludes me calling them a piece of shit, because I live in a world where my current President can say whatever he wants without a sense of decorum so I’m going to play along and see where it gets me, since it won him the role of leader of the free world. Sounds like a good bargain. And a piece of shit is a piece of shit is a piece of shit.
So tl;dr #1: Yes. That’s the world we live in now.
#2. My guess is no, most people who celebrate the Disney version of Pocahontas– or who sling her name as an insult at a sitting US Senator– don’t understand her actual historical positionality. I’m not going to write a treatise here on it because she’s far from my favorite Indigenous topic, but if you read that Wikipedia link I offered it gives a decent overview. Pocahontas– in the real history of her life– represents a Native who was whitewashed and made by the colonists into what they felt she should be. Pocahontas the cartoon and John Smith story-figure is a colonist-authored fiction and/or sexual fantasy oddly employed to make people think, much like telling false stories about Thanksgiving, that reverence was given to the Indigenous people of this continent when the Europeans descended on it with their weird Manifest Destiny and just started taking everything and herding my ancestors west.
So tl;dr #2: No, most people don’t know the history, but that hasn’t ever actually stopped people from talking about “Indians” however they wish. When you’re only 2% of the population of the land you were 100% of not THAT long ago, it’s hard to be heard over the din of the forces that put a boot to your throat.
#3. Anyone white who thinks they get to tell someone Indigenous to North America that they are or are not a member of one or another tribe, band, or nation is way out-of-bounds. But I guess I should expect no less from a man who spent years trying to prove that his predecessor as President of the United States was not born here, literally asking for “Papers, please.”
That’s it’s own tl;dr. White people don’t decide if we’re native or not. It’s not your job, so fucking stop. Seriously. Cherokee identity is already endlessly fragmented and chopped-and-screwed by the government trying to figure out which of us are and aren’t who and what we are. It isn’t yours to decide, so step back. Your governmental structures tried to erase us, and when we couldn’t be eradicated we were relegated to reservations. I know that no one reading this post was part of making that happen, but that’s the legacy the country is built on. So walk away slowly and let us have the pieces of our culture we managed to save from domination. Don’t reassert dominance and re-inscribe the sins of the past for a punchline.
#4. I’ve said to people who would listen, since McCain lost to Obama, that a moment like the one we are living was coming. Because while we can claim we’ve come so far racially, we really haven’t. The newer generations have, I think, in incremental ways. My students are less racist than my peers were. My peers were less racist than their grandparents. We’re making slow positive progress. But the power structure and everything about it is still the one built before my grandparents, run by the part of my mother’s generation that echoed their parents. The fresh new leaders who were working through our race issues are people like Elizabeth Warren and Corey Booker. Barack Obama. Duval Patrick. The Castro brothers (the American ones, not the Cuban ones).
There was going to be a “oh my God, a Black guy beat us” moment, because we aren’t post-racial. It’s been building for eight years. Now it erupted. It’s disgusting and shameful and I wish it wasn’t true, but we have to accept it. It’s reality. The people driving our nation right now don’t even give more than the thinnest, most threadbare impression that they truly care about people of color, about women, about the poor, about LGBTQ populations, etc. This is the era of the good old boys being the Good Old Boys again. That’s how America was made “Great Again.” The nostalgia for a point in the past that wasn’t real. The “Great” America we were told of there is like the Thanksgiving where native people and colonists broke bread, about the World War II that we entered to stop the evil of Hitler (and not because the Pearl Harbor attacks pushed our hands), about the world where we had no idea why people in the middle east might hate us after we used their homes as a battleground for a Cold War that we’ve apparently so completely forgotten that let that enemy return for the sequel. It’s the America where we won Vietnam. It’s the America where Trickle Down Economics worked.
tl;dr #4: Trump’s presidency is largely about racist self-interest taking up a role of power without the veil that made it okay for us to pretend that wasn’t the structure. Racist, sexist, elitist Oz is out from behind the curtain, and it turns out he used to host that show that the Terminator terminated.
And I say that as someone who is terrified of where that trend ends. It’s enough already. We get it. A white dude has control of the Presidency again and he gets to say whatever he wants. A person who has made documented racist comments is our Attorney General. Most of our elected officials would like to erase Planned Parenthood and no longer care that things like the Bowling Green Massacre didn’t even happen. They fear another Sandy Hook but love their guns. They hate Obama Care but think any life is sacred from the moment of conception. It’s clear what the power elite want. Can we maybe ease off the throttle a little now and think about human decency?
There’s no way Pocahontas will ever be the face of the Democratic party, though she might be the face of the Washington DC Football team at some point. Pocahontas is a stuffed toy and a cartoon that Disney uses to sell whitewashed “Indian” to the masses. That’s what I expect to be the Native invoked by a racist. It’s a badly forged identity.
But if President Trump thinks that calling Elizabeth Warren the face of our party is an insult, he might want to realize that he is looking into the eyes of his destroyer, just as he is the destroyer of the work that President Obama did.
Because people are fickle, and they’re going to want a change from this change just like they thought that Trump was a change from what they didn’t like before. And when it’s time to vote out the sexist reality show star President, the best option is going to be the “realist” woman in the fight.
I’d be glad for Elizabeth Warren to be the face I’m identified by.
I hope it’s the face that haunts this President for the next 3 years and 10 months. Then I hope he goes back where he came from.