Last Thursday, I was featured with three other Native writers by Passion Passport as part of Native American Heritage Month. I'm resharing it here because I think the interviewer did a great job capturing why I write. If you'd like to support my work on #GivingTuesday please do check out my Patreon. Also, support all Native journalists by donating to the Native American Journalists Association (of which I am a board member) here.


JACQUELINE KEELER (@JFKEELER)
DINÉ (NAVAJO) AND DAKOTA JOURNALIST

Who she is: “With a Diné mother and a Dakota father, my dual Indigenous cultural backgrounds have always provided me with an alternative way to view the world, both from a historical and a political standpoint. As I note in my piece ‘Thanksgiving and the Hidden Heart of Evil’: ‘As a child of a Native American family, you are part of a very select group of survivors, and I learned that my family possessed some inside knowledge of what really happened when those poor, tired masses [the Pilgrims] came to our homes.’”

What she does: “I write, think, and lecture. In 2017, I also edited a book titled ‘Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears,’ which compiles the works of Native poets, activists, teachers, writers, students, and public officials, and shares their passionate feelings about the Bears Ears.”

Why her work is important: “Writing in mainstream media allows me to put a Native perspective on newsworthy events in front of Americans who have never considered that point of view. It also allows me to intellectually address the issues Native people face and help our people process these experiences. We do not have a media that does this for us, so every article I write is putting ideas in the public sphere that would not normally be there.”

How she thinks society at large can better support Indigenous people: “Publish the writing of Native journalists and pay attention to the issue of sovereignty. Tribes are Indigenous sovereign nations within the United States; they have a federal relationship that includes treaties, which can only be entered into by sovereign nations. We are not a race or minority group — we are citizens of nations that precede and persist through the creation of the colonial state.”

This is my first newsletter and it has been quite a learning experience. I have a lot to improve on next month!

Hope you all had a wonderful time with family and friends! Nizhónígo Tązhii Day! 🦃 #NoThankstaking Wopida!

An unusual amount of national media coverage of Native Americans surrounded the 2018 Midterms—which means it was not zero as is what we are accustomed to expect. From the North Dakota ID law to the election of the first two Native congresswomen, Native people were in the news.

Today you can read my analysis on the election in Truthout (see below). Just so you know, my working title was "In Partisan America, the Native American Vote Rules: How A Little Known Demographic Maintains the Balance of Power in Congress." I know, long. You can also hear the KBOO Wednesday Talk Radio show I co-hosted on Native American political and ethical leadership online. The show includes an interview I did with Congresswoman-elect Deb Haaland when she was in Portland. On Thanksgiving Eve, I was on a panel Art & Power: Centering the Voices of Native Artists here at Portland State University. I closed out the evening reading aloud my take on Thanksgiving (see below).

But really, for me, the theme of this month was "Make America Native Again" or MANA for short (and you can buy the hats here). And that began in October as more cities across the country gave up the ghost on Columbus Day in favor of Indigenous Peoples' Day. I examined this in a piece I wrote for Yes! Magazine: Beyond Columbus Day: Changing the Name Is Just the First Step and spoke to Klee Benally on KBOO. He helped organize protests in Flagstaff on Indigenous Peoples' Day. 13 are now facing misdemeanor charges.

In October, I also addressed Senator Elizabeth Warren's announcement of her DNA results (see below) and shared a byline for the first time with Kelly Hayes, (Menominee) for NBC News' THINK (link below). Then I did it again with Terri Hansen, (Ho-Chunk) for a post-election piece for Yes! Magazine “We Are Still Here”: Native Americans Win a Voice in Government. It was wonderful collaborating with both of these talented Native women. I would do it again in a heartbeat.

In November, Edge of Morning: Native Voices Speak for the Bears Ears, a book I edited in 2017 is also having a moment. The book is featured by Powell's City of Books for Native American Heritage Month in their store here in Portland, Oregon (see photo below) with a number of other amazing Native-authored books. The bookstore's blog published an essay I wrote "Trump vs. Bears Ears: Five Tribes Take a Stand for Their Collective Histories on the Land, and the U.S. President Dismantles It." In it, I quoted from my famous (or infamous?) Thanksgiving essay "Thanksgiving and the Hidden Heart of Evil." This bit of writing has been published all over the world in many different languages over the years and was republished in The New York Times last year. Words, it seems, have a life of their own.

I have one more piece to finish writing that is a special request from my uncle, Sam Deloria. He takes issue with the way the word 'tribal' is being used by talking heads on tv when they are discussing the political divide in this country. The working title of my response is "It’s Not Tribalism, Let’s Call It What It is: Terror." And the even longer subtitle is "The American Dream Has Always Been About White Affirmative Action and Terror for Everyone Else."

We'll see if any editor is brave enough to carry it! In any case, happy MANA!

You can read the rest of the Make America Native Again newsletter here. And sign up here.

However, even as L.A. celebrates its first Indigenous Peoples' Day, there are protests over a Columbus Statue the city refuses to take down. I will be interviewing local leader Joel Garcia about it on the monthly KBOO talk radio show I co-host this Wednesday. Klee Benally will also be our guest.

William S. Parkerson inciting the mob. Harper's Weekly, March 28, 1891.

And if you want a thorough history of Columbus Day, I suggest checking out my article on Medium called "Goodbye Columbus." I examine Columbus' diaries and atrocities and how Italians Americans created the holiday after the largest mass lynching in American history, of Italian American immigrants. They sought to put themselves in American history to protect themselves from murder and assault.

A demonstrator outside the Goldwater Institute in Phoenix. Photo Credit: @DefendICWA

On Thursday, October 4, a U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Texas declared the Indian Child Welfare Act unconstitutional claiming it is a “race-based statute.” The ruling ignores hundreds of years of federal Indian law recognizing Native American tribes as nations. Judge Reed O’Connor claimed. Indigenous nations are not governments at all and not to possess national interests in children born to their tribal members. Congress passed the law in 1978 in response to a study finding 25-35 percent of Native children were taken from their homes and over 80 percent placed with non-Native families. This high rate of removal falls under the United Nations’ Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of Genocide,  Section II  which defines genocide as “any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group … (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

In a joint statement, leaders of the four tribes named in the suit restated their commitment to protecting children of their respective nations saying in part, “If ICWA is struck down in whole or in part, the victims will be our children and our families, Native children and Native families.”
This ruling represents the culmination of years of work by the Goldwater Institute, a conservative think tank. By using the 14th Amendment’s “equal protection under the law” clause, the institute finally obtained a ruling that alleges the definition of “Indian” is illegal because it is race-based. Native attorneys I have interviewed believe the organization’s goal is to create a circuit court split and take the case to the Supreme Court. There, a very conservative court could declare unconstitutional the protections of ICWA and, by extension, make tribes, themselves, illegal. Thus, this ruling has serious implications for both the unity of Native families and the sovereignty of their respective nations. Ironically, “Indians” are not named in the 14th Amendment because when it was passed in 1868, Native Americans were not viewed as citizens of the United States by Congress, but as citizens of their Indigenous nations and thus, did not require an exemption under the amendment. Native Americans were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1924.

How ICWA does and does not work at the state court level illuminates how ignorance of the law puts Native American parents in danger of losing their children every year. Colorado is unique in that it has a state-level ICWA law on the books, two dedicated ICWA courts, and a dedicated en banc court of appeals panel for ICWA review. However, there is still a great deal of education that needs to occur. It should be noted most judges and attorneys are not required to learn Indian Federal Law in law school or to pass the bar and therefore do not know it. Even Justice Sonia Sotomayor admitted she had no familiarity with Indian Federal Law before she arrived at the Supreme Court. Allegedly, the late Justice Scalia bragged about his ignorance of it to Native lawyers and claimed to be “just making it up” as he went along.

And the results of this ignorance can be devastating to Native families. In 2011, NPR in a series about Native foster care in South Dakota found 700 Native children, a disproportionate number for their percentage of the population were being placed in foster care every year. Reporters also found that ICWA, which gives preference to placement with relatives or their tribe, was not being followed.

“Cousins are disappearing; family members are disappearing.” Peter Lengkeek, a Crow Creek Tribal Council member, told NPR 33 years after the passage of ICWA. “It’s kidnapping. That’s how we see it.”

I hope more states do more to implement ICWA fully and to understand what sovereignty means to Indigenous nations.

Elizabeth Warren at a campaign rally in 2012. Credit Tim Pierce

UPDATE 10/15/2018:
My response to recent reports that Senator Warren has released DNA results proving she has a pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” This would make her between 1/64th and 1/512ths Native American. However, without documentation it is unclear which percentage she is. For comparison, I can prove I am 1/16th French, 1/16th English and 1/16th German. None of which I claim as my identity or "race." 

Here was my response:


And this response on Twitter really gets to the heart of the problem:

To me, it seems like if they know nothing of the person they’re related to, their culture then or now, & need a blood test because they & they’re family have lived as white for generations, they’e evidence of genocide & that fraction is an artifact of genocide not indigeneity.

— Ericka Twitty (@ErickaTwitty) October 15, 2018

And this response from an epidemiologist about whether the DNA evidence ties her to actual documented Cherokee or Delaware citizens: 

no, it doesn't. He didn't match her with people that claimed to be Native American. He looked at a sequenced cohorts from Latin American that had a history of admixture. She shared patterns of genetic variation (allele frequencies) with the Native American background

— James Jaworski (@jaworskijim) October 15, 2018

I also edited my Facebook post (but cannot correct the tweet) because The Boston Globe corrected its math on her possible blood quantum from 1/512ths to 1/1024ths. Interesting tweet regarding this percentage:

So Elizabeth Warren is *possibly* 1/1024 (0.09%) Native American.

Scientists say the average European-American is 0.18% Native American. (https://t.co/XU0l1JQO1L)

That'd make Warren even less Native American than the average European-American.

— Michael Ahrens (@michael_ahrens) October 15, 2018