Last week, Donald Trump referred to Senator Elizabeth Warren as "Pocahontas". He did so as a way to take a jab at her exaggerated claims to Native ancestry she made during her election campaign. On one hand, Senator Warren's claims are offensive on their own, as she was using her supposed heritage as a means of pandering to Native voters.
I hope she has learned that American Indian people care about more than just the race and culture of their elected officials. However, even though Senator Warren made a naive mistake, Donald Trump has absolutely no right to call her Pocahontas. In doing so, he only adds to the legacy of slurs being used against Native Americans in the mainstream.
That brings me to the controversial Washington Redskins football team. Last week, an article in the Washington Post asserted that a recent poll found that 9 out of 10 American Indians did not find the name "Redskins" offensive. While that may be true in the case of that one particular survey, it certainly does not seem to be true for many American Indians. When the poll was published, many American Indians took to social media to express their outrage with the Washington Post. It was noted that the poll only received 504 responses, and many Natives asked how anyone could believe that was a fair representation of over two million people in America.
Donald Trump's name-calling and the Washington Post poll emphasized the same sad reality- mainstream America generalizes and stereotypes the American Indian population.
For a newspaper to use a survey with 504 respondents as enough evidence to declare a dictionary and historically defined racial slur as inoffensive is infuriating and disrespectful. I have to wonder if the survey had included the atrocious etymology of the word, if the American Indians (though there is also question as to who exactly the poll represented) who claimed it was not offensive would still feel the same way. The term 'redskin' refers to the bloody scalps of Native men, women, and children who had been tortured to death by settlers conquering the American landscape.
But yeah. It's not offensive.
It's as inoffensive as Donald Trump using the name of a 12 year old girl who was kidnapped, most likely assaulted, and married to a man over twice her age who took her across an ocean to a foreign land where she gave birth to a child and then died of smallpox in her early twenties, but only after she was 'christianized' through baptism, a name change, and learning a language other than her own to jest about someone's claim to Native ancestry. The issue with Trump using Pocahontas as a joke is that he probably isn't even aware of that history. The Pocahontas that he's referring to is most likely the copper skinned Disney princess, the same one who has become one of the only images non-Native people have of the entire culture. And boy is it an easy image to swallow. She's beautiful, connected to the earth, and she was kind to the colonists. For Trump to use this image when teasing Senator Warren only shows the watered down version of history that supports the white supremacist narrative that keeps people like him in power.
The American mainstream continues to paint American Indian people into a box. 504 people are not enough to state an opinion of a much larger group of people. Diversity exists. Pocahontas' story is tragic and traumatizing, and we should shed the rose-colored portrait we continue to have of her. Her story is still too real and relevant to the thousands and thousands of American Indian and First Nations women that are missing and have been murdered, but Americans still see her as just a princess. It has to stop.
If it doesn't, Native people will continue to be just scalps and princesses to be had.
