Native American Blog Posts | Comedy Central Indecision

Elizabeth Warren Admits Reporting Native American Heritage to Schools

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May 31, 2012 02:58 PM by Ilya Gerner | Comments:

For weeks, Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren — derided by conservative opponents as "Fauxcahontas" for her claim to Cherokee and Delaware Indian ancestry — has insisted that she never authorized Harvard to list her as a Native American in its faculty directory.

As it happens, the nation's top schools do not use tribal divination rituals to determine the ethnicity of their faculty for the purpose of creating directories and filing accurate EEOC reports. They rely on self-reporting…

"At some point after I was hired by them, I… provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard," she said in a statement issued by her campaign. "My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I'm proud of it and I have been open about it."

Warren's statement is her first acknowledgment that she identified herself as Native American to the Ivy League schools. While she has said she identified herself as a minority in a legal directory, she has carefully avoided any suggestion during the last month that she took further actions to promote her purported heritage.

Particularly galling is the fact that university administrators would trumpet the hiring of a professor with (at best) 1/32 Cherokee ancestry as a sign of their overwhelmingly white faculties' diversity. It's reminiscent of Rick Santorum's claim that he "came from the coal fields of Pennsylvania," based on the mining career of his immigrant grandfather. By this logic, which turns the clearly white Warren into a Native American and the upper middle class Santorum into a hardscrabble coal miner, I am an Eastern European peasant who spends his days narrowly avoiding rape by Cossack hordes.

Despite the controversies hobbling the Warren campaign, she and her Republican opponent Scott Brown remain locked in a tight race; the latest poll has Brown up by just 1%. Probably because the only thing more mythical than Warren's Native American roots is the idea of a Republican resurgence in Massachusetts.

Photo by Alex Wong/Getty Images News/Getty Images

Tags: Elizabeth Warren, Massachusetts, Native American, Scott Brown

Stephen Colbert on Tea Party Demands to Rewrite History

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Feb 1, 2012 12:42 PM by Dennis DiClaudio | Comments:

History, they say, is written by the winners. But then, however, it's rewritten by a bunch of dudes in discount tricorne hats and colonial soldier costumes.

The Colbert Report airs Monday through Thursday at 11:30/10:30c.

Tags: Benjamin Franklin, Education, Founding Fathers, George Washington, Native American, Slavery, Stephen Colbert, Tea Party, Tennessee, The Colbert Report, Thomas Jefferson, Video

The Onion: Economy Failing Because U.S. Built on Ancient Indian Burial Grounds

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May 31, 2011 03:52 PM by Dennis DiClaudio | Comments:

This is obviously a joke, but what disturbs me is that a lot of people employ such magical thinking when it comes to important national matters like the economy. Clearly, there has to be some sort of homeopathic explanation for our country's woes, probably something involving vaccines…

Tags: Barack Obama, Constitution, Economy, House of Representatives, Native American, The Onion