May 11, 2013

The Flight from White -- American Indian version

High school picture of
Chief Party Hearty Dude of the
Cherokee Tribe of Ulster
Here's the inspirational story of a redhead who has made an academic career for himself out of being 1/16th Native American by genes and 0/16th Native American by upbringing. From the New York Times:
Overcoming Addiction, Professor Tackles Perils American Indians Face 
By ALAN SCHWARZ 
LAWRENCE, Kan. — The visitor to Haskell Indian Nations University detailed his roaring 20s: drug addict, garbage collector, suicidal burnout once told by a doctor that he was mentally retarded. It was a curious way to inspire a group of young American Indian students long surrounded by these types of problems. Until he got to the good part. 
“I never shared this with anyone until I got my Ph.D.,” he said. 
His American name is David A. Patterson, his Cherokee name Adelv unegv Waya, or Silver Wolf. He is a tenure-track assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work at Washington University in St. Louis. His groundbreaking research on the pitfalls facing Native Americans is both informed and inspired by his own story of deliverance. 
“Mentally retarded? I wish I could find that doctor now,” Dr. Patterson said, the students transfixed. 
Dr. Patterson, 49, has devoted what he considers his second life to studying the quicksand that just about swallowed him, and that continues to imperil American Indians more than any other ethnic group. About 18 percent of American Indian or Alaska Native adults need substance-abuse treatment, almost twice the national average, according to figures from the federal government. Deaths from alcoholism, diabetes, homicide and suicide are two to six times as high among Native Americans as they are among other groups, according to various studies. 
Student and Dr. Patterson
During Dr. Patterson’s childhood in Louisville, Ky., any interest he might have had in his Cherokee roots was discouraged by his abusive father and squelched by teasing schoolmates. By 9, he had moved from beer to highballs, and at 18 he was a quaalude-favoring high school dropout. Detached and directionless, he pointed a loaded rifle at his head one afternoon in his basement before someone knocked at the door. 
It was his mother’s brother, Bill Allen. He treated David’s disconnection with some long-repressed family history. Mr. Allen recounted how his grandmother, David’s great-grandmother, was half-Cherokee, making David 1/16th Cherokee.

1/16th Cherokee!
He told him where she came from, the traditions David never enjoyed. This expanding family lineage, which to that point had essentially stopped with his Irish father, gave David a new sense of belonging. ... 
Dr. Patterson used this newfound past to conceive a future. ... Growing his hair into a Cherokee ponytail and with fresh tattoos of a wolf and three tepees, he enrolled at Spalding University and earned a degree in social work.  
He got his master’s degree and his doctorate from the University of Louisville, also in social work. He was hired by the University of Buffalo as an assistant professor studying solutions for Native American substance abuse and high dropout rates — longtime problems caused in part, Dr. Patterson’s research suggests, by the same cultural disconnection that he had felt. 

As you know, no redhead in the history of Scotland, Northern Ireland, Ireland, England, or Wales has ever battled alcoholism.

Actually, the reddish-haired peoples have a variety of traditions of semi-successful social movements to overcome alcoholism, going back to Hogarth's 1750s paintings of Gin Alley v. Beer Lane, the Irish Catholic temperance movement of the mid 1800s, Bill Wilson and Bob Smith's Alcoholics Anonymous, up through Ian MacKaye and Jeff Nelson's punk band Minor Threat, which launched the Straight Edge movement.

There have been similar movements among American Indians, going back to Tecumseh's brother The Prophet's demand that Indians give up firewater. But, the general lack of success among American Indians at battling demon rum is of course what makes it so much more profitable these days to be a professional American Indian helping more real American Indians to get in touch with their traditions, even though their traditions are largely ones of failure in dealing with the evolutionarily novel chemical.

In the long run, biochemical advances are the most likely way to deal with the fact that Native Americans haven't had as along to evolve to deal with the effects of alcohol, the way, say, Mediterranean peoples have. But there doesn't seem much interesting in studying that approach these days, since we all know race doesn't exist.
The Brown School, ranked by U.S. News and World Report as one of the nation’s top schools of social work, lured him away last year.
Squinting like Clint playing a halfbreed       
“He brings to the table new strategies, new ways and new perspectives to think about,” said Pete Coser, the program manager for the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies, a division of the Brown School. “His story and experiences will be able to bring, at least, a light to those that are experiencing it now. Things that plague Indian country. How do we get over the mental monster that keeps us in that box?” ...
Dr. Patterson’s research focuses on intervention strategies for substance abusers in underserved populations, particularly American Indians. He has just finished teaching a graduate-level class on drug and alcohol abuse. 
As the first American Indian professor at the Brown School, Dr. Patterson has helped connect Indian students on campus, of whom there about 20, with their varying heritages. (Students belong to the Choctaw, Navajo and Seneca nations and a half-dozen others across the United States.) He invites them to his home to sit around a drum and teach one another Native songs. 
One evening, eight students gathered in a downpour with Dr. Patterson outside the Brown building for a traditional spiritual cleansing ceremony. A student lighted some blades of sweet grass and gently waved the smoke on each student with an eagle feather. The smoke rose into the dripping trees as a student led the prayer: “We ask our creator to help us stay on track,” he said, “and take this education, this training, kinship, all of this back home.” 
Lindsay Belone, a Navajo from Twin Lakes, N.M., is working on her master’s degree with Dr. Patterson. “He’s brought to the classroom a lot of American Indian spirituality and social justice issues — honoring mother earth and our ancestors,” she said. “He’s definitely a leader in Indian country who I can look up to. If you want to be a professor, that can happen.” 
Dr. Patterson will return to Buffalo this summer to participate in ceremonies among the Six Nations of the Iroquois and speak with students about Indian challenges. He also plans to visit other American Indian communities across the nation to share his story, much as he did last fall at Haskell, the only accredited university devoted to serving various Indian tribes. 
Haskell’s history makes it as much shrine as school: a century ago, young Indians whose tribes’ land had been seized by the United States were sent there to become Christians, cut their hair and shed their traditional customs and tongues. Students who did not comply could be beaten or chained to walls in what is now Kiva Hall. Many died there from such abuse. 

The Stolen Generations -- which is totally different from the oncoming Borrowed Generations of government-provided infant care and preschool and after school programs and that public boarding school in D.C. for poor kids.
Today, about 1,000 students use some of the same buildings to become one of the rare members of their tribes to earn a college degree. More inspiration came from Dr. Patterson, most poignantly when he explained why he took the name Silver Wolf. Wolves “take care of each other,” he said. “Their survival depends on it.” 
Terry Redlightning, a Haskell junior from the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, recalled how only 17 of his 100 classmates at Flandreau Indian School graduated with him.

Apparently, the UnStolen Generation educational method isn't working, either.
He described a “feeling of hopelessness” pervading his community back home and said Indians there live on whatever comes to them. “Whether that’s a government handout or a minimum-wage-paying job — or you commit suicide,” he said. 
“Those are your options — at least that’s what the thinking is,” Mr. Redlightning said. “Especially when you’re a kid, you see it. You’re constantly going to funerals. Death by drugs or alcohol. Car wrecks. Suicide. You don’t have any high expectations.” 
After his lectures last fall, Dr. Patterson walked around campus to visit relics of Haskell’s sad past — the powwow grounds, Kiva Hall and some sacred wetlands. Then he went to the most solemn area of all. It was a cemetery filled with dozens of small, weathered gravestones for children who, four and five generations ago, did not survive their days at Haskell. 
Dr. Patterson teared up when he saw the stones from a distance. “These are the children of the Holocaust for us,” he said. 
He dried his cheeks with a tissue and kept walking toward the cemetery. He looked up and saw a red-tailed hawk perched on a lamppost, leading him still.

This is not, of course, to diminish the tragic problems of genuine American Indians. But it does point out one source of the constant demand to import foreigners whose children and grandchildren are above average in likelihood to need expensive social services. Jason Richwine is being excoriated for suggesting that the American-born children of, say, foreign stoop laborers are, statistically, likely to be greater tax-consumers than taxpayers.

But, to a lot of people out there, that quite obvious prediction sounds less like a bug than a feature. More immigration of Latin American laborers will create more social work jobs for people like them. And, if they can gin up some tenuous claim to being Hispanic themselves, they can be not only social workers, but role models and leaders of their vibrant people, celebrated in the NYT, like Dr. Patterson is celebrated for being 1/16th American Indian.

53 comments:

  1. In the southern US, you see this sort of thing now and then. Some of them really are Indians. Many of them are fake - or the connection is tenuous indeed.

    1/16 Cherokee is a common claim among these types.

    I always wonder, "What about the other 15/16?"

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  2. He told him where she came from, the traditions David never enjoyed. This expanding family lineage, which to that point had essentially stopped with his Irish father, gave David a new sense of belonging. ...

    What about the traditions he grew up with? What about American traditions and culture? Or have those been thoroughly destroyed by the Frankfurt School.

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  3. In the southern US, you see this sort of thing now and then. Some of them really are Indians. Many of them are fake - or the connection is tenuous indeed.

    Like you actually know they are faked. A lot of Southerners have some Indian ancestry.

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  4. Steve you have to admit that Patterson does look part Native American.

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  5. "Steve you have to admit that Patterson does look part Native American."

    No, he doesn't. In his current academic portrait, he's squinting to keep you from seeing the shape of his eyes. It's an old trick used by actors in Western movies who are playing half-breed characters.

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  6. 'Silver Wolf' sounds somewhat grandiose. Perhaps we should all make up a Native American name to use on the internet or for social purposes. Zuckerberg's name could be 'Running Weasel'.

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  7. "... once told by a doctor that he was mentally retarded ... "I never shared this with anyone until I got my Ph.D." he said ... He is a tenure-track assistant professor at the George Warren Brown School of Social Work. His groundbreaking research on the pitfalls facing Native Americans is both informed and inspired by his own story of deliverance.

    Considering that he is professor of nothing and that his research is an obvious bullshit, and that he is riding an AA gravy train, the mild mental retardation part is still a distinct possibility.




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  8. My father always claimed we had Cherokee ancestry, but when I got my 23andMe results, they show that I belong to both maternal and paternal haplogroups common among people who live around the Irish Sea, with no evidence of Amerind ancestry going back at least five generations. Given the family history (hillbillies and bottom land farmers in Arkansas), I think I can safely say that I have Irish and Anglo-Scottish Border people as my ancestors.

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  9. I myself am of either 1/8th or 1/16th Cherokee ancestry. I would never, ever think of claiming any kind of preferential treatment on the basis of this. The one Cherokee ancestor of whom I have any information actually declined to receive any benefits from the government on account of her ethnicity. That was back when getting things from the state for no other reason than that one was such-and-such was still seen as highly dishonorable. (At least, that's how it was, and, to some extent, still is in the South.) My, how things have changed.

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  10. I consider 1/16 to be a fake Indian.

    Is someone who is 1/16 black, black?

    Is there a one-drop rule for feather Indians?

    It seems to me the truth is that when the connection gets that tenuous, you're looking at value choices: the person *chooses* to be "Indian" and *rejects* what he is 15/16 of. That choice could easily - and much more justifiably - have been the reverse.

    The Flight from White is an excellent title to this post. These are white people fleeing being white ... defining their fundamental identity entirely around the smallest fraction of who they are.

    Not to scorch anyone's tee-pee, but these people are silently but widely regarded as being mentally off. Many of them know that and push the identity thing not only as a government-spoils hustle but also as a way to bait the bourgeoisie.

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  11. I myself am of either 1/8th or 1/16th Cherokee ancestry. I would never, ever think of claiming any kind of preferential treatment on the basis of this.

    Why not?

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  12. Not to scorch anyone's tee-pee, but these people are silently but widely regarded as being mentally off.

    Who are "these people" and who are the people who "widely regard" them as being being off?

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  13. I myself am of either 1/8th or 1/16th Cherokee ancestry. I would never, ever think of claiming any kind of preferential treatment on the basis of this.

    If you don't, someone else will.

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  14. 1/16th....?!?!?!

    Shit I'm almost certainly 1/16th black....(Irish doncha know)! And as of late I'm beginning to think maybe 1/16th to 1/8th female...as I'm getting older my man tits are getting pretty impressive......


    What do I win?

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  15. " More immigration of Latin American laborers will create more social work jobs for people like them."

    This point is not emphasized enough in the immigration debate. The phenomenon is much clearer in the UK, where the Labor party, esp. in England, essentially went from being the party of horny handed workers to the 'beard and sandal' set of Polytechnic instructors and social workers. In the UK context, these 'caring professional' are far more important than the cheap lobby in promoting mass immigration

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  16. Another interesting aspect of this story is how a 'heritage', even tenuous, can give some people motivation.

    Now think of white kids in todays public schools. Their heritage has been stripped from them. I'm surprised we don't see more dysfunction than we do among them. As things go on, I grow more and more sympathetic to Malcolm X's argument, here.

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  17. This guy's full of it. American men of a certain age will recall all kinds of conspicuous 1/16 this-or-thats running boasting out from under their seventies-layered-locks. This even goes for black Americans. It was cool a long time ago,Hispanics not so much maybe--I know it was always the immigrant Mexicans who were dismissive of Indios--conspicuously Indian-looking fellow nationals.
    Patterson, dude, it's been cool for a long time.

    Hell, this was a scene from the Sopranos years ago--the guidos are at some Indian casino, out comes Chief Doug Smith offering to comp them. Tony can't help noting he looks in no way Indian; Doug, smiling, doesn't miss a beat, enthusing about his recent but growing interest in his 1/16 or so heritage.

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  18. A year or two ago, they made fun of this kind of situation on a Thanksgiving-themed episode of South Park. Stan's neighbor, a blond-haired Polish-surnamed guy with 1/16th Cherokee ancestry, wouldn't shut up about how Thanksgiving was a holiday that celebrated the oppression of "his people".

    Sometimes life really does imitate fiction.

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  19. Look I claim no other ethnicity other than white.

    But as a Southerner I've always heard we had some Indian way back. And yeah it is almost always Cherokee. Though with the geography of my place it is unlikely.

    BS? I don't know. But it's not the kind of thing that bugs me. Actually most of us are rather proud of that, mistaken as it might be. No idea why it works that way.

    I'd much rather have American Indian blood in my background than ... well it's stupid. Until I have the dna test, I'll just go along with family tradition.

    Anyway, any garden variety dumbass can claim to be all Dutch for example. (Hey what kind of name is Sailer?) It take an extra special DOUBLE DUMBASS to claim to be part Cherokee.

    PS, the message I took from this whole thing is the gullibility of the American University community. Or maybe it is all convenient.

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  20. You go to school for a degree in Social Work and you end up sitting outside in the rain with some asshole blowing smoke on you.

    I do have one friend who is from West Virginia and says he's 1/8 Cherokee and I'm inclined to believe him because his personal alcoholism blows me away in its scope and power. He looks like a white guy though.

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  21. >Who are "these people"<

    Already answered. Are you being somewhat oppositional here? (I am, so don't worry if you are.)

    >and who are the people who "widely regard" them as being being off?<

    I am directly reporting to you that for 40 years (I am 46) I've lived in the South, and that it was and still is a standard-issue truism among everyone I've known there, from every walk of life, that the "Indian Princess/Prince syndrome" is a laff, i.e., ridiculous. This syndrome archetypally consists of blond-haired blue-eyed females with names like "Anabelle O'Hara" or "Jennifer Fishbein"'s announcing, usually in the first flush of their adolescence, that they are "Indian royalty." I can count over a dozen such girls off the top of my head.

    1/16 or one-droppers are definitive cases of IPS, although I have heard of a couple cases of 1/32 (likely invented cases). This Syndrome used to occur less often in males. I don't know if male IPS is a bigger phenomenon now.

    That said, I've known many people who were a quarter Indian, and they looked it. They considered it part of their identity, not necessarily their whole identity. Such people, other things like character being equal, were regarded as just fine. (A sneaking admiration sometimes attended them: your social status went up if you were buds with the Indian.)

    I never heard a bad word about Indians in common commerce with normal people, other than the usual ethnic jokes. The most scandalous (and funny) of these was the one about Tonto's saying "What you mean WE, white man?" to the Lone Ranger. (The joke, in case you haven't heard it, is that the LR and T find themselves hopelessly surrounded by hostile Indian armies. The duo faces death at their hands. "Well," says the LR to T, "it looks like we're doomed, my old friend." T replies as given above.)

    If you have other questions, direct 'em to Google. There's a good bit of info about much of this that you can find.

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  22. Harry Baldwin5/11/13, 7:27 PM

    Does Dr. Patterson always speak in a slow, portentous manner so that the banalities he utters sound profound? It seems to work for the movie Indians.

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  23. Wow I just watched that Malcolm X video. What an interesting, articulate dude.

    You know what is whacked? If Malcolm X were your neighbor, I just have this feeling his yard would be immaculate, and you would think the coolest dude in the universe were your neighbor.

    American has been going downhill since the 60's.

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  24. He can't be 1/16th native American because race is a social construct.

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  25. I've posted about the crypto-Cherokee thing that is everywhere in the South before, such at the biker-POW/MIA-Cherokee dreamcatcher types. As another commenter posted, they always claim Cherokee, though Choctaw, Creek, Yuichi, etc is more likely for a lot of these 1/32 folks.

    It's as goofy as the crypto-Celtic thing (there's actually a good bit of overlap there).

    The motives range from the usual Escape from White Privilege journey to the search for a nature-based spirituality that doesn't go the Wicca route.

    The best that comes out of all of this, from my personal observation, are those who get involved in Native American Church ceremonies that steer clear of Magic Indian hucksterism. There's a few natives who occasionally let some of these sorts sit in. it is out there, but it's purely word of mouth, and jive artists don't last long.

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  26. "My great-great-grandmother was Dutch."

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  27. >It's as goofy as the crypto-Celtic thing<

    Ha HA! I remember a Jewish girl who was big into that between ages 16-18. She also said she thought she was Finnish. Never could say why; she just "felt" it. It wore off.

    It's fun to pretend to be princes, princesses, Celts, Indians, Martians. No white I knew ever pretended to be descended from any black, though. (Although this is much more likely.) The exception to that is a certain cachet that "black blood" has among swipples in TN (and they use that term): if a white swipple guy is in a relationship with a gal who is not completely "whitebread," let's say her eyes are black instead of brown, then he likes to brag, as a status thing, that she's part black. That shows he's hip.

    (Among blacks, some girls are called "Spanish." This maybe is similar?)

    Somebody should do a book on this shit. Elvisd, I nominate you. Call it: "The Neuroses of the Deracinated." Or "White 'N' Crazy" if you want it to sell.

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  28. Funny Malcolm X name appeared on this topic because the man was probably more white than black genetically. A black man with red hair?

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  29. Zuckerberg's name could be 'Running Weasel'.

    "Zuckerberg" means "sugar mountain" in German.

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  30. The motives range from the usual Escape from White Privilege journey to the search for a nature-based spirituality that doesn't go the Wicca route.

    The "motives" are the truth. The fact is a whole lot of Southerners have some Indian ancestry and a lot of them have good evidence to prove it.

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  31. with no evidence of Amerind ancestry going back at least five generations

    Five generations might not be enough. A lot of the mixing occurred in the early years of the nation.

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  32. A year or two ago, they made fun of this kind of situation on a Thanksgiving-themed episode of South Park. Stan's neighbor, a blond-haired Polish-surnamed guy with 1/16th Cherokee ancestry, wouldn't shut up about how Thanksgiving was a holiday that celebrated the oppression of "his people".

    Hey, just like a Passover Seder! You won't see that mocked on South Park though. What percentage of Moses and his people in Egypt would you guess is in Passover celebrants? 1/16?

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  33. >he's squinting to keep you from seeing the shape of his eyes. It's an old trick used by actors in Western movies who are playing half-breed characters.<

    Orson Welles in "The Black Rose" (1950). See 1:06 especially. Get ready to laugh.

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  34. All of this tragedy would have been avoided if the Natives had strictly enforced the Immigration Laws of 1620.

    Neil Templeton

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  35. All of this tragedy would have been avoided if the Natives had strictly enforced the Immigration Laws of 1620.

    A cautionary tale.

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  36. Wow I just watched that Malcolm X video. What an interesting, articulate dude.

    If you imagine a white leader saying some of those exact same things about white Americans today, it actually would have some plausibility.

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  37. Clarification:

    If you imagine a white leader saying some of those exact same things about white Americans today, it actually would have some plausibility.

    If you imagined a white leader in Malcolm X's seat speaking about his people like X did about his, some of the observations would have some plausibility.

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  38. The name Spielberg could roughly be translated as "mountain of bullshit".

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  39. I'm a little over 1/8th Hawaiian (my mother is 1/16th, my father 1/4th). It's a bit of a touchy spot for me. Most of my cousins are essentially phenotypically white, one with blond hair and blue eyes. I'm not, due to the Asian share of my heritage from my mother (thought the balance in me is still over 50% European, mostly Portuguese). I don't act very Hawaiian, wasn't raised very Hawaiian, and don't have any Hawaiian interests outside of playing music and dancing. I'm pretty much a brown-skinned SWPL with heretical beliefs

    What bothers me is that I am attracted to and mostly date white women. Any children I have will likely be white people who are toenail Hawaiians. Being that Hawaiians are dying out via outmarriage, I feel about about contributing to the watering away of my people. Oh well, c'est la vie.

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  40. It's interesting that the Times in this mode has so little respect for its readers that they dont even bother trying to make the narrative consistent "During Dr. Patterson’s childhood in Louisville, Ky., any interest he might have had in his Cherokee roots was discouraged by his abusive father and squelched by teasing schoolmates. "

    when in the next paragraph

    "It was his mother’s brother, Bill Allen. He treated David’s disconnection with some long-repressed family history. Mr. Allen recounted how his grandmother, David’s great-grandmother, was half-Cherokee, making David 1/16th Cherokee."

    How his interest in his cherokee roots could have been squelched by his father or his classmates when he had no such interest because he didnt know of said roots, is left as an exercise for the reader. I think this kind of article in the NYTimes is more in the nature of a religious ritual than journalism

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  41. Chicago said...
    'Silver Wolf' sounds somewhat grandiose. Perhaps we should all make up a Native American name to use on the internet or for social purposes. Zuckerberg's name could be 'Running Weasel'.


    I call Shits-with-Bulls.

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  42. Hmm, I'm 1/32 Native American. When I heard that, I just went "huh, that's interesting" and it didn't go much beyond that. I would have felt like a fraud claiming to be a NA since no element of my upbringing or my parents culture contained any trace of NA influence.

    Too bad, it never occurred to me I could make a career out of it.

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  43. I knew one guy who was 1/4 Native American, the remainder Irish. Mainly he was one of my college drinking buddies. The only time he brought up his background was to joke, "I'm part Indian and part Irish. So I 100% love booze, but the Irish part of me can handle it and the Indian part of me can't. Ha-ha."

    I don't know if he ever realized what an opportunity he had. If he's lucky, maybe he's one of Patterson's proteges right now.

    Incidentally, people like Patterson make me want to puke, even more than all that cheap vodka and orange juice did.

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  44. "As the first American Indian professor at the Brown School..."

    Kudos to the NYT for writing this with a straight face! Who says they're a bunch of humorless liberals?

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  45. The "motives" are the truth. The fact is a whole lot of Southerners have some Indian ancestry and a lot of them have good evidence to prove it.

    Oh, get over it. My ex who is only 1/4 at most looks more Indian than a lot of Cherokees and Choctaws on the rolls, to the point that she's had full-bloods walk up to her and start talking in Tsalagi. My son looks more Indian than the guy pictured here. Neither of them would fathom trying to call themselves Native American, and that's with both of them having gone plenty of times to NAC ceremonies.

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  46. Hmm, I'm 1/32 Native American. When I heard that, I just went "huh, that's interesting" and it didn't go much beyond that. I would have felt like a fraud claiming to be a NA since no element of my upbringing or my parents culture contained any trace of NA influence.

    I don't understand here what your upbringing has to do with it. Is being Native America a question of culture or race?

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  47. 20,000 new First Nations people in the past couple of years in one Canadian province.

    http://news.nationalpost.com/2011/10/01/how-the-o’learys-and-20000-other-newfoundlanders-were-declared-mi’kmaq/

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  48. Forty-nine and he was offered a tenure-track job? It must be good to be an Indian. Or at least it must be good to be known to have hired one.

    At least he does look more Indian than Elizabeth Warren, who looks like she could be Sarah Chalke's mom.

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  49. "The "motives" are the truth. The fact is a whole lot of Southerners have some Indian ancestry and a lot of them have good evidence to prove it."

    Oh, get over it.


    Get over what. Why should Southerners deny a part of their ancestry? You shouldn't worry about the Indian part of them; they are still among the most loyal and assimilated group in this country.

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  50. Speaking of Indians, Southron, and diversity, here's "Skip" Gates, breaking the news to Don Cheadle that the red man not only enslaved his ancestors, but kept at it after the Civil War.

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  51. Get over what. Why should Southerners deny a part of their ancestry? You shouldn't worry about the Indian part of them; they are still among the most loyal and assimilated group in this country.

    I'm not worried about anything about them. I"m one of them.

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  52. He's still more of an Indian than Elizabeth Warren...

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  53. The clever nickname and Minor Threat reference made this another wonderful day in the Sailerhood.

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