“Pocahontas” and the Rorschach Inkblot Test at the Lincoln Memorial
By: Wilhelm Kühner
Tags: Colonialism, History, Native Americans, Lincoln Memorial, White Privilege

“Never wrestle with a pig. You just get dirty and the pig enjoys it.” — Anonymous

On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, many Americans found themselves reflecting on a short viral video from the Lincoln Memorial on Friday in which a group of White Catholic anti-abortion teens wearing MAGA hats appear to intimidate, and smirk at, a Native American elder singing resolutely and beating a drum. In an interview afterwards, Nathan Phillips claimed he was trying to defuse a situation between “two groups” and was intimidated by the mob of rowdy youth in MAGA hats.

Soon, a longer video surfaced showing the other group, five Black Hebrew Israelite street preachers, spewing hateful rhetoric at anybody who would listen, which eventually included the mob of around 100 Catholic teens. The student at the center of the controversy released a statement, with the assistance of a Louisville PR firm named RunSwitch, claiming he was also trying to defuse the situation and that the mob had assembled because it was provoked by the hateful rhetoric of the Black street preachers — “Black Muslims” as his mother apparently referred to them.

The pro-Trump Internet quickly entered the fray and some accused the media of “wildly mischaracterizing” the story — “at best” — and getting the facts wrong while bemoaning the tribalism and social media mob reaction and judging the boys’ behavior as “probably the least egregious.” Others saw an omnious parallel with earlier times and pushed back on the “innocent victims” narrative and the “whitewashing” of white supremacy and white privilege which justifies the MAGA youth’s behavior and gives them the benefit of the doubt for disrespecting an elder. Near universal condemnation of the hate speech by the Black Hebrew Israelites seems to be the only area of agreement between these two fundamentally different interpretations of the same set of facts. Reasonable people can disagree. It happens to the best of us (see, for example, Wittgenstein’s Poker).

As with Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry DNA test and the Rorschach Inkblot Test, your intuition and experience (including your race, your religion, your politics, your education, and even your language) — as much as the facts in this particular case — will probably determine what you see on the two hours of video that have been released from various sources at the national monument we built to honor a president who preserved our union and abolished slavery. My own perspective is informed by, and evolving as a result of, my own intuitions — and biases — as well as my own experiences. And in my experience, the facts do matter. But so does the emotional and moral context.

According to David Brooks, “Everybody involved in the incident was operating in an emotional and moral context that has been set by the viciousness of the Black Hebrew Israelites.” Wouldn’t it be nice if life were so simple? Living in the rural American south, my own experience with hateful street preachers is primarily limited to White Christian fundamentalists who spew their invectives at our apple festivals, Oktoberfest, and LGBT Pride events. However, I have run into Black Hebrew Israelites before — if I’m not mistaken — in the same spot at the Lincoln Memorial (during the Reason Rally in 2016). In neither case have I ever witnessed a mob assemble in response to their provocations, but I was unable to find any online video to corroborate my memory.

Sure, the Christian street preachers at our local LGBT events are often blocked and drowned out by a small ensemble of local church groups (of the same race) holding banners and singing “This Little Heart of Mine” or something similar, but that’s not exactly the same thing as 100 white kids doing a pep rally cheer while one of them takes off his shirt and jumps around like a monkey in front of hateful Black street preachers. However, in both cases I think we risk giving the street preachers the attention they crave — or just getting muddy ourselves. And in both cases we risk antagonizing extremists. So I think there’s some wisdom in the old internet maxim, “ignore the trolls.” But let’s not ignore the facts or the larger context here.

“The good life is inspired by love and guided by knowledge.” — Bertrand Russell

Of course, its not always possible to ignore trolls or street preachers. But it’s also not always possible to control the passions of a mob once they’re stirred up. As a third cousin twice removed once said, “there is always the possibility of human feeling dethroning calm judgement.” And in my experience, a handful of hateful street preachers are less threatening than a mob of their angry trolls. Your own mileage may vary. However, the recent events at the Lincoln Memorial also occur in a historical and contemporary context that cannot be ignored. From “Pocahontas” and Wounded Knee taunts of a sitting Senator claiming Native American heritage to the portrait of Andrew Jackson in the Oval Office and “good people on both sides” of a neo-Nazi tiki torch march in Charlottesville, Donald Trump is doing a lot to inspire Americans to learn more about the dark parts of our past that many of us would rather forget — or simply ignore as irrelevant to the issue at hand.

Facts do matter, and we cannot escape our current situation or our history. Nor, as Lincoln warned, can we avoid the possibility that “we will be remembered in spite of ourselves.” My paternal ancestors were “Palatine Boors” (Benjamin Franklin, 1751) later remembered as being “among the honored heroes who subdued the foes of husbandry in a wild unsettled region” (Alfred Nixon, 1908). The “foes of husbandry” were not named, nor were the enslaved who helped my ancestors subdue them. Facts are interpreted, and “crowd-pleasing narratives” spread faster than corrections, clarifications, or caveats.

Human feelings can indeed dethrone calm judgement, but bad judgement, however calm, can also misinterpret or ignore relevant facts — or falsely assume it is in possession of all of them — while abandoning caring, compassion, and empathy for others. Innocent victims can become perpetrators, and calm judgement can conclude that the mob is being treated too harshly. In my judgement, the only “hero” of the ruckus at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday is the Omaha tribal elder who successfully defused the increasingly tense situation with a Native American anthem about strength and courage in the face of harassment and racism.

History rarely conforms to simple narratives about good guys and bad guys, but if I were being harassed by hateful street preachers, I’d much rather have Nathan Phillips try to defuse the situation than a mob assemble and further escalate it. As a notable American philosopher once confirmed, you don’t fight fire with fire when a hose will suffice. That’s not to say I believe the incident “reveal[s] the dark hearts” of teens who should be banished to oblivion for this sin or doxed by a social media mob. But a respectful dialogue with Nathan Phillips would go a long way toward repairing any damage done to the students’ reputations in my view. But, where were their chaperons?

“On a long trudge through history — two parents, four grandparents, and so on — very soon everyone runs out of ancestors and has to share them.” — Steve Jones

In many ways, Elizabeth Warren’s ancestry DNA test represents a similar case of human feeling dethroning calm judgement and getting muddy when wrestling with a pig. She wanted to call Trump’s bluff and fight fire with fire. She was outraged by his crude mocking of her family’s story about their Native American ancestry, which she apparently never benefitted from professionally. She used the rollout of her ancestry DNA test results to call out discrimination (in her own family) against miscegenation rather than glorify the institution of colonialism that resulted in the genocide of Native Americans. And she urged Trump to donate, as he had promised, to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, which works to end ongoing “gender-based and domestic violence perpetrated against Native American women.”

That said, I think Warren made a yuge mistake. First of all, I can’t fathom how a smart, progressive U.S. Senator and 2020 Presidential candidate could possibly do something like this without first consulting the Cherokee Nation and (ideally) including them in her PR roll out (or least insuring that they would not release a statement harshly criticizing it). Has she ever read anything written by a Native American on this subject? Did her staff consult with any Native Americans? Did she actually believe Trump or his supporters, some of whom are still looking for Obama’s birth certificate, would be convinced by an ancestry DNA test?

Granted, Warren’s incompetence in this instance pales in comparison to almost anything the current President has done. And her cultural ignorance or insensitivity in this case is trivial compared to “honoring” Navajo code talkers by taking more Native American land while cracking crude “Pocahontas” jokes with a portrait of Andrew Jackson hanging in the background. I still believe Warren would be a vast improvement over the current occupant of the White House, but I think she also missed a real opportunity here to talk about the overwhelming genetic similarities between “races,” which is a social and cultural construct and not a biological attribute with genetic markers.

Instead, she seems to have lost her way and jumped into the latest folk genetics trend (with serious privacy issues) and perpetuated the white nationalist frame (the “reduction of identity to percentages of a genome”) that Trump taunted had her about. Did she know that the underlying science of testing for DNA markers for Native Americans is “apt to be flawed” as a result of the Native American gene database being so thin, making conclusions like those in her case “all but useless from a scientific perspective” (ABC News)? Or that an increasing number of “white” Americans are attempting to claim Native American benefits based on their own DNA tests?

Does she understand that DNA tests become even more meaningless the further you go back, or that all our family trees become entangled in an impenetrable thicket at some point? Has she ever done the math? Does she know that “almost every Briton is a descendant of Viking hordes, Roman legions, African migrants, Indian Brahmins, or anyone else they fancy” (Steve Jones) or that both she and Lindsay Graham (as well as myself) probably do in fact have Iranian ancestry at some point based on the language we speak?

Does Warren understand that “[a]ncestry reflects the fact that human variations do have a connection to the geographical origins of our ancestors” which can be used to “make a reasonable guess about their ancestry. However, unlike the term ‘race,’ it focuses on understanding how a person’s history unfolded, not how they fit into one category and not another” (Vivian Chou)? Will she admit her mistake and use this as a teaching moment about our evolving understanding of race and ancestry and the real and pressing issues that Native Americans continue to face — or will she let all this fade back into the popular imagination of a guy giving up his lederhosen for a kilt and a tragic Native American past that has no relevance today?

“Blood quantum [is] an institution of colonialism, & we don’t do this for other races.” Graham Lee Brewer, Cherokee tribal member and reporter in Oklahoma

My own (more traditional) genealogy research has failed to uncover a Native American Princess or Madonna in my paternal lineage, but I’ve been investigating and reflecting a lot over the past few years about both ancestry DNA testing and my own German-American colonial ancestors’ documented connections to the Cherokee. The Elizabeth Warren DNA saga only reinforces my initial skepticism of both the Cherokee princess myth common among many white Americans and the accuracy and relevance of current ancestry DNA testing (not to mention the risks).

According to several family histories, I share an ancestor with a 19th century Methodist missionary and school teacher and superintendent for Cherokee remaining in western North Carolina after the Trail of Tears. Licensed to preach by the Methodist Episcopal Church in 1825, Horace Ulrich Keener served as a circuit rider in the Virginia, North Carolina, and Tennessee mountains for five years. However, he “remained local, preaching a good deal, and struggling hard to raise and educate his family” from 1830 — the year the Indian Removal Act passed — until 1845 and was “not satisfied in the local sphere, nor did his temporal matters prosper.”

Ulrich was then reappointed to the Methodist Conference in 1845 and sent to the Qualla Boundary in western North Carolina to establish and run a permanent mission and school there for the remaining (or returning) Cherokee. Did he leave the Conference in protest over the failure of the Methodists — soon to be officially divided over the issue over slavery — to officially condemn the Indian removal like the Baptists did? The historical record appears to be silent on this question.

Believed to be my fourth cousin four times removed, his granddaughter “cherishe[d] the stories told about him by her father and will tell you that he was a kinsman of John Christian Keener, famed Methodist Bishop of New Orleans and chaplain of the western Confederate Army, and a first cousin of the distinguished Isham Greene Harris, Civil War-era governor of Tennessee” (Asheville Citizen-Times, 1994). Ulrich’s cabin still stands as the “oldest architectural structure at a Cherokee site in North Carolina.” His brother, Joseph (“Joe”), was apparently “instrumental in getting locals to sell the land making possible the Qualla Indian Reservation” in Cherokee, North Carolina. Ulrich was an extensive reader who “left behind a considerable library of standard books, especially on the subject of theology.”

Joe was a “tolerable scholar, a fine scribe familiar with legal and clerical forms, and a man of excellent judgement” who joined, in 1846, with other local white men to “certify that we have lived neighbors to the Qualla Town Cherokee Indians since 1838” and “consider them fast improving in the knowledge of the arts and agriculture. As an evidence of the latter, they have not only raised a support for themselves, but during the past summer sold a considerable quantity to the whites, without which many of the white citizens would have been compelled to procure corn from a considerable distance.”

The Cherokee were “temperate and in­dustrious, and make useful citizens. They aid the whites in working the public roads that lead through their town. A large number of them have em­braced the Christian religion, and are regarded as orderly members of the Baptist and Methodist societies.” Ulrich even learned their language, and the Cherokee language and culture survived alongside Christianity at Cherokee United Methodist Church.

“At first, an Indian named Jeff Hornbuckle served as his interpreter. But Keener was determined to learn the Cherokee language, and using the Sequoyah alphabet and syllabary, he was soon preaching to the Indian parishioners in their own tongue.” — John Parris (Asheville Citizen Times, 1994)

Until his funeral there in 2018, Jeremiah “Jerry” Wolfe was an active member of the church and could recite the Lord’s Prayer in Cherokee. In 2013, Wolfe was named Beloved Man (“a man who looks after the community”) of the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians, the first man to receive this honor in over 200 years. But the recent repentance by Methodists for the Trail of Tears at Cherokee United Methodist Church does not erase the fact that Christian missions were an attempt to civilize (that is, Christianize) “savages” and to erase their culture or that some of their schools “had abusive policies and teachers, which led to hard feelings between missionary groups and Indians for generations to come” (Higham, 2016).

Nor does it erase the legacy of Cherokee slavery, which all of the “Five Civilized Tribes” ultimately fought to preserve. And five hateful black street preachers does not erase the legacy of menacing white mobs acting with impunity, of settler-colonialism and its attempted removal and erasure of Indigenous peoples, or the very real pain, anguish and anger over the events at the Lincoln Memorial on Friday. History matters, and so do other current events. For these reasons, and others, people will see different things in the various videos and images from the Lincoln Memorial and Elizabet Warren’s DNA. But let’s not selectively ignore the facts, the history, or the larger current context that shape these different American perspectives.