The Politics of Ancestry

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Speaker 2 Senator Elizabeth Warren recently shared results of a genetic analysis to back up her family's story of Cherokee ancestry, hoping to blunt a favorite Republican attack line. The move backfired.

Speaker 2 A DNA result does not confer a Cherokee heritage. And in general, efforts to link our genetics with our ethnic or cultural identities have a long and sordid history.
So, what's more revealing?

Speaker 2 The results of DNA tests like Warren's

Speaker 2 or what we try to find in them. This is Radio Atlantic.

Speaker 2 Hi, I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic. With me in the studio today here in DC is a Radio Atlantic veteran, staff writer, Sarah Zhang.
Hello, Sarah.

Speaker 3 Hi, Matt. It's so nice to be back.

Speaker 2 It's so nice to have you. You've been doing wonderful coverage of the scientific, cultural, political, personal dimensions of DNA testing, which pertains to our conversation here today.

Speaker 2 And joining us by phone from Oklahoma is Rebecca Nagel, a writer, community organizer, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us.

Speaker 4 Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2 It is our pleasure. This week, neither of you will be surprised to hear,

Speaker 2 Senator Elizabeth Warren kicked off quite a fuss when she announced the results of a DNA test that she said proved her Native American ancestry.

Speaker 2 Her claims of having a Cherokee ancestor had been ridiculed for a long time by President Trump and other Republicans.

Speaker 2 And actually, the president had challenged her about these claims at a rally, saying that if she could prove them, he'd give her favorite charity a million dollars.

Speaker 2 Warren, since posting her DNA analysis, asked the president to donate his stake in the losing bet to a Native American charity.

Speaker 2 But the whole exchange between Trump and Warren obscures the fact that citizenship in the Cherokee Nation is not determined by a DNA test.

Speaker 2 Much like the U.S., that citizenship is conferred by the Cherokee Nation on individuals who can meet the criteria for eligibility.

Speaker 2 So, by publicizing these results, Warren has perpetuated a false idea that they mean something regarding her putative part Cherokee ancestry.

Speaker 2 Now, Rebecca, I wanted to start with a big, kind of broad question to you.

Speaker 2 You are actually a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Speaker 2 What does that identity mean to you? And how does it manifest in your life in a day-to-day basis?

Speaker 4 Wow, that's a big question. That is a big question.

Speaker 4 Well, I think for first off, I think that it's important for people to understand that as Native Americans, we're not a race, we're a political group.

Speaker 4 And so my status as a Cherokee Nation citizen is established by the nation-to-nation relationship between my tribe and the United States that has been established by the several treaties that we have signed together.

Speaker 4 And part of what that means for me and why it's significant is that I'm actually the descendants of treaty signers. And so my ancestors, Major Ridge and John Ridge, signed the Treaty of New Achota.

Speaker 4 um that was actually a Cherokee Nation's removal treaty and it was controversial and they were actually assassinated for that decision in a series of revenge killings and violence that happened within Cherokee Nation after we got to Oklahoma.

Speaker 4 And, you know, I think about their extremely difficult and impossible decision to do that and the sacrifice that they made signing it knowing that they would pay with their lives.

Speaker 4 But they thought that moving west would be the only way that Cherokee Nation would remain a sovereign tribe and that if we stayed east we would just be absorbed.

Speaker 4 And so for me that point of sovereignty is something that I carry with me every day in my life. You know right now I actually have the privilege of working for my tribe.

Speaker 4 for an adult language immersion program and learning to speak my language.

Speaker 4 And I'm at the very beginning stages of it. It's very difficult language.

Speaker 4 But for me, that also goes back to sovereignty because for us to self-determine as Indigenous people, it's about us being able to speak our language. It's about us being able to practice our culture.

Speaker 4 It's about us being able to pass our own laws, say what we want to have happen with our own artifacts, say who we want raising our children.

Speaker 4 And the entire legal structure that allows us to exist as Native people in those ways is really determined by tribal sovereignty. Yeah.

Speaker 2 I want to quote a passage that you wrote for Think Progress just a little while ago.

Speaker 2 Quote, as contemporary Native Americans, we live in the space between Donald Trump and Elizabeth Warren, between the stereotypes that were created to excuse the wholesale slaughter of our people and the stereotypes that were created to excuse the wholesale appropriation of our identity and cultures.

Speaker 2 The Trumps and Warrens of the world leave very little space for us to exist, which, when you understand the history of the United States, makes perfect sense.

Speaker 2 I want to ask you, what were some of the stereotypes that you were summoning when you wrote that passage?

Speaker 4 You know, it's something that I'm faced with every day. I mean, right now, my Twitter mention feed is full of people telling me that I'm white because I look white.
Like, obviously, I'm white.

Speaker 4 I should just take a DNA test, and I should have to prove that I'm Native American. And Elizabeth Warren is more Native than I am, and that I should shut up.

Speaker 4 And I think that,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 Native people in the United States right now are invisible.

Speaker 4 And that's why this conversation is so damning is because, you know, non-Native people have no real information about what it means to be a citizen of a tribe to check the harmful stereotypes that they're hearing about in the media against.

Speaker 4 You know, you're not going to find us in your textbooks. You're not going to find us on television.
You're not going to find us in the news.

Speaker 4 And that wholesale erasure informs what it's like for me to interact with non-Native people on a daily basis. Yeah.

Speaker 2 One part of this that is particularly fascinating, this whole story, is the

Speaker 2 DNA test.

Speaker 2 There is a deep entrenched desire on the part of some Americans to establish that much of our identity can be determined by DNA.

Speaker 2 And that is obviously one of the factors that's at issue in this particular week and this particular story. And Sarah, I wanted to ask you the question.

Speaker 2 What can

Speaker 2 DNA tell us about our culture or identity and what can't it tell us?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, I think first of all, it probably can't tell us that much about our culture and identity, but maybe we can talk a little bit about how these tests work, which also gets at the limitations of what they can tell us.

Speaker 3 So I think in the case of Elizabeth Warren, what she did, she didn't take a 23Me or ancestry test, but she sent her DNA to a Stanford geneticist who consults for these companies.

Speaker 3 He did something very similar, which is he looked at about, you know, a little bit over 600,000 letters in her DNA that are sort of especially informative for ancestry and compared them to a reference data set.

Speaker 3 So this reference data set is made up of people whose DNA has been analyzed who live, are of European descent or are of European descent and live in the US, and then also of people who are indigenous in Colombia, Peru, and Mexico.

Speaker 3 And we can go back and talk about why in those countries and not the US in a second. But what we found is that there were a few small segments in her DNA that just stood out as not looking European.

Speaker 3 There's not very many, but enough that he thought

Speaker 3 she probably had an indigenous ancestor six to ten generations ago. So that's about the best available that the technology can tell us.
But what does that mean? I don't think science can answer that.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 You had written in a great piece for the site, quote, at a recent genealogy meeting I attended, an audience member asked how to convince people to upload their DNA results to more genealogy sites.

Speaker 2 You quote, one member of the audience saying, quote, tell them they'll find their Native American and they'll all go.

Speaker 2 Why do you think that there is such a persistent desire among folks who haven't actually inhabited Native American culture in any significant way to nonetheless claim a Native American culture?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I was, you know, I knew this was a thing, but I was surprised when literally everyone in the room burst out laughing because this had happened to them.

Speaker 3 Well, I think there might be a few different things.

Speaker 3 I think one is some people did grow up with this in their family history, and whether it's accurate or not, this is part of their family history and they're looking for documentation of that.

Speaker 3 I think there's another part, and this might come off as a little bit cynical, but I think maybe some Americans want to feel like they are not just white.

Speaker 3 Maybe they have something a little bit more interesting in their background, or

Speaker 3 some people have said maybe quote unquote exotic. And it's not just

Speaker 3 looking for Native American roots. Sometimes it's anything that is unexpected or often non-European is interesting or quote-unquote exotic.

Speaker 2 Yeah. But like Rachel Dolajal notwithstanding,

Speaker 2 folks aren't like lining up to say,

Speaker 2 hey,

Speaker 2 I'm actually black.

Speaker 2 Right, right.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 3 Oh, I think it's almost like

Speaker 3 you get to be interesting without having to also pay the

Speaker 3 have the disadvantages of being that, right?

Speaker 3 Like, this is something that's maybe cool to post on Facebook or to talk about a party, but you don't have to live the consequences of actually, say, being black. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And Rebecca, I want to point that question to you.

Speaker 2 I'm curious,

Speaker 2 as

Speaker 2 for myself, you know, coming from someone, my ethnic and racial identity is

Speaker 2 pretty stigmatized.

Speaker 2 And I'm curious,

Speaker 2 what what is it like to have people

Speaker 2 claiming part of your identity or wanting to at least?

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 I think that

Speaker 4 what exactly what you guys were talking about is so true that

Speaker 4 racial identity theft is normally not socially acceptable, especially on the left.

Speaker 4 But somehow native identity is this cruel exception. And I think it's important for people to put it in its historical context.

Speaker 4 You know, if you think about, you know, and I could talk for hours about, you know, the legal reality and historical documents that back this up, and it may sound like an abstract idea, but the United States and the kind of idea of the whole United States is white settlers replacing Native people.

Speaker 4 and replacing us. And so I think it's kind of a logical extension of that that at some point they would claim to be us, you know, while not participating in our culture, while not

Speaker 4 experiencing the same kind of discrimination, but thinking that even our identity is theirs.

Speaker 4 And I think that because it's so pervasive and it's so popular, especially the theft of Cherokee identity, a lot of people don't know enough to one, know why it's not true, you know, basic facts like Cherokees are one of the most well documented people in the history of the world up there with royalty and so it's pretty ridiculous for people to say that they're Cherokee and not have any documentation

Speaker 2 and so people just don't know enough to know how to ask the right questions about these false claims yeah Sari, you had spoken to Kim Tallbear, who is a professor at the University of Alberta, who researches anthropology.

Speaker 2 You asked her about this case, and you wrote, quote, she said it showed a grave misunderstanding of Native American identity.

Speaker 2 And quoting Professor Tolbert here, quote, it might be all these people have Native American ancestry, she said. My question is, who cares?

Speaker 2 If there is a particular ancestor that is close enough you can find living family, then you can do that.

Speaker 2 If there's nobody for you to find and no tribal community that's going to claim you, it doesn't really mean anything.

Speaker 2 End quote. So Elizabeth Warren doesn't have any ancestors listed on the Dawes Rolls, which is the federal census of Cherokee citizens taken at the turn of the 20th century.

Speaker 2 Having an ancestor on the rolls is a prerequisite for eligibility in the Cherokee Nation. And so I have a pure science question for you.

Speaker 2 Would it be possible for a DNA test to even establish an ancestral tie to someone on the Dawes Rolls?

Speaker 3 I think the answer right now is no, and probably will be no. Well, I think there's sort of a lot of different levels to this, right? And one,

Speaker 3 going back to what I was saying earlier, why didn't the Stanford Genesis Genesis compare Elizabeth Warren to anyone who was a Native American in the U.S.? The answer is that

Speaker 3 Native Americans have not given their DNA to these databases.

Speaker 3 And the reason is that there is this kind of a long history of misunderstanding between Genesis and Native American tribes, going back to several incidents back in the 90s. And

Speaker 3 they have not participated in these studies.

Speaker 3 And there are lots of other

Speaker 3 questions of how do you establish someone as a tribe. One is like, there are lots and lots of different tribes.

Speaker 3 Who belongs to a tribe that's not aesthetic, right? Like

Speaker 3 people are

Speaker 3 having children, they are moving. How do you even determine that?

Speaker 3 And I think just getting back to what Rebecca has been saying, Elizabeth Warren is sort of striking this careful balance where she is not saying that she is a Cherokee or even Native American, but she's kind of framing it as, these are stories my parents have told me and Donald Trump is calling my mom a liar and that's what's hurtful.

Speaker 3 And she,

Speaker 3 you know, she is trying to strike this capital balance, but it's very difficult because now there are headlines everywhere saying like DNA and Native American.

Speaker 3 And I think that is also perpeturating that message. Yeah.

Speaker 2 And so I wanted to for a moment just put aside the claims that Warren made about her cultural heritage and ask about the experience of stigma that she described.

Speaker 2 She said in part that because her ancestor was perceived by others in her community as Native American, she was stigmatized as a result.

Speaker 2 And I was curious that even if that perception was wrong, does the sense of having been stigmatized create any sense of affinity for you?

Speaker 4 Well, I think that the problem with

Speaker 4 Warren's story is that it's not grounded in fact.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, she always goes back to, and even in her most sort of recent campaign style video, goes back to the story of the elopement.

Speaker 4 But if you look at it, it doesn't look like an elopement based on the historical records. You know, her parents were married by a prominent minister in the community.

Speaker 4 There was a newspaper announcement of their wedding.

Speaker 4 And so normally, if it was looked down upon, you wouldn't see those things.

Speaker 4 And then to contrast that with my experience in my family, family, you know, when my Cherokee grandmother married my Irish grandfather, his mother, my great-grandmother, was so opposed to the wedding that she disowned her son.

Speaker 4 And we have this handwritten letter that's actually written in pencil that one of my cousins has telling my grandfather that he's dead to her because he's marrying an Indian.

Speaker 4 And they actually eloped, instead of eloping to like the next town over, they eloped to a different state and so

Speaker 4 it doesn't resonate with me um and her stories don't resonate with me because i have my own stories and i'm also surrounded by other native people who have their own stories and for those of us who are native

Speaker 4 we we hear that difference that i think a lot of non-native people don't hear um because non-native people aren't used to hearing stories from native people actually they're more used to hearing stories from people like warren than they're used to hearing stories from native people and so i don't think it sends up the red flags that it does for us.

Speaker 3 Rebecca, I sort of have a question kind of going off of that, which is that, you know, putting Elizabeth Warren aside for a second, she's a public figure, she's a politician, she has responsibilities that ordinary people don't.

Speaker 3 But lots of Americans have these stories in their families.

Speaker 3 And they're not trying to join a Native American tribe.

Speaker 3 They're not necessarily trying to identify as Native American, but they're interested in investigating these roots because it's part of their family history. What do you say to them?

Speaker 4 I I think people should do their genealogy and go into that process with the mindset that there's a 99.9% chance that the story that their family has is wrong.

Speaker 4 You know, I mean, and Cherokee genealogists do this type of work all the time. You know, my friends are Cherokee genealogists and people will come, you know, with these stories.

Speaker 4 And pretty much anyone who publicly claims to be Cherokee, they'll do the genealogy and see if it matches up.

Speaker 4 And so it's actually not, I think a lot of people treat it like it's this mystery that we can't solve. And it's not.

Speaker 4 Like if somebody was claiming to be, you know, related to like the Duke of London or something, I don't even know if that's a thing, but you know how people like make up these stories about being related to royalty.

Speaker 4 You would just be like, okay, well, where's the evidence? So like, why don't we apply that same logic to Cherokee people?

Speaker 4 And it's because there's this idea that, you know, what happened when we traveled the Trail of Tears is that we all just like went into hiding and scattered. And that's not true.

Speaker 4 Like what actually happened is that we came to Oklahoma and we reestablished our government.

Speaker 4 You know, after removal, Cherokee Nation had the first compulsory co-ed public education system in the United States. You know, we're not some sort of primitive people hiding out in the woods.

Speaker 4 And I think a lot of that racist thinking is what fuels these myths. And I think the other thing that it does is that it whitewashes an extremely violent history.

Speaker 4 One of the reasons that Cherokee people are so well documented is much like the Nazis during World War II and the Holocaust, the U.S.

Speaker 4 government keep really good records of the people that they were trying to exterminate. You know, and so there is a log of every person that traveled the Trail of Tears and their daily rations.

Speaker 4 There's a census of Cherokee people before we were rounded up for removal so they would know how many people they were rounding up.

Speaker 4 And there's that role that everyone likes to complicate the Dawes role

Speaker 4 and say that their ancestors aren't on it for blah, blah, blah reason.

Speaker 4 But if you actually look at the historical documents, actual Cherokee people who didn't want to sign up because they didn't want to go through this forced assimilation process were thrown in jail and then signed up anyways without their consent.

Speaker 4 Meanwhile,

Speaker 4 thousands, thousands of white people flooded Indian territory trying to get on the rolls of the five tribes so that they could get a piece of free land.

Speaker 4 And the tribes had to fight those people to get them off and now their grandkids and their great-grandkids are still coming around and saying look you know like my ancestor applied to be on your rolls and you kicked us off and it's not fair you know I mean it's like when you actually look at the history these claims aren't innocent but they're based in like a really really really violent and brutal history of white entitlement I want to ask you

Speaker 2 one more question and one about the contemporary politics of this

Speaker 2 before I turn to a few larger questions, just about the ineffable identity and heritage aspects of what we've been discussing. But, Rebecca,

Speaker 2 you wrote in the Huffington Post recently that, quote, the politics of who is and who is not Indian has real consequences.

Speaker 2 You talk about the Moshby Wampanoag, the tribe that welcomed the pilgrims, as you wrote it, who, quote, had their land taken out of trust because, according to the Department of the Interior, they no longer fit the legal definition of Indian.

Speaker 2 The Trump administration's actions against the Wampanoag is the first time tribal land has been taken out of trust since Harry Truman's presidency, you wrote.

Speaker 2 Now that the Department of the Interior has ruled on this, one of the few recourses that the Mashby Wampanoag have

Speaker 2 to claiming this land

Speaker 2 as part of the trust is a bill that was introduced into the House of Representatives by U.S. Democratic Representative William Keating.

Speaker 2 And it was followed by a corresponding bill in the Senate.

Speaker 2 The Wampanoag Tribal Council Chairman Cedric Cromwell issued a statement saying, I would very much like to thank the outstanding leadership of Senators Ed Markey and Elizabeth Warren on this bill to protect our ancestral homeland.

Speaker 2 And so I'm curious about the political

Speaker 2 extension of Warren's claims here. Obviously, Elizabeth Warren could both say, listen, I don't identify as Cherokee, and I apologize for claiming any identity

Speaker 2 in any part,

Speaker 2 claiming that identity in any part. And also, I offer Native Americans political support.

Speaker 2 Do you think that there is any political argument for saying, okay, let's all agree that Cherokee heritage is not a matter of DNA tests, but

Speaker 2 you can privately chase your alleged Cherokee ancestor as long as you support tribal interests like the Mashby Wampanoags?

Speaker 4 You know, I think that Warren

Speaker 4 could have done that before Monday. And I think now we're at a point of no return where

Speaker 4 her decision to release the DNA test, she is a U.S. senator.
She's a former Harvard law professor.

Speaker 4 She claims to be, you know, a champion of tribal sovereignty and an ally to Native people.

Speaker 4 So she has to know enough about the current political climate and the threats to tribal sovereignty and how the ideas of race

Speaker 4 versus citizenship really plays into that to know that this would have a negative impact and that she would make a political calculation that beating Trump was more important to that

Speaker 4 for me she's done and I just think it was reckless and irresponsible and that like the attack on native rights using confusion about native identity and confusion about race is real

Speaker 4 and Warren

Speaker 4 adding to that for me is unacceptable.

Speaker 2 I want to play an edited clip of some of Senator Warren's remarks to the National Congress of American Indians

Speaker 2 the other day.

Speaker 2 She said this:

Speaker 5 I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes and only by tribes.

Speaker 5 I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead. I never used it to advance my career.

Speaker 5 So I'm here today to make a promise. Every time someone brings up my story, I'm going to use it to lift up the story of your families and your communities.

Speaker 2 And Rebecca, to close out just this part of the discussion on politics, I'm curious,

Speaker 2 given the current political challenges and realities that you describe, do you think that there's any advantage to having someone highly placed in the Senate,

Speaker 2 possibly elsewhere,

Speaker 2 that by dint of claiming a Native American identity, in part, also claim allyship?

Speaker 4 Yeah,

Speaker 4 well, I think

Speaker 4 the speech that Elizabeth Warren made to NCAI needs to be put in its political context. And not that I take full credit for it, but it was actually after I

Speaker 4 and some other liberal Native people had drawn a lot of criticism.

Speaker 4 I wrote a piece for Think Progress criticizing her, and it was one of the first times the criticism had come from the left.

Speaker 4 And I think she always just kind of ignored it when it came from Trump and the far right. But when it started coming from the left, you could tell that the way she talked about the issue changed.

Speaker 4 The other thing about her speech in February to NCAI

Speaker 4 is that

Speaker 4 her history of sponsoring and supporting Native legislation basically started within like a two-week window of making that speech.

Speaker 4 So in her entire tenure as a senator, she's been supporting Native issues for less than a year.

Speaker 4 And I think that it's not that it's not helpful to Native people and that Native people shouldn't work with her and that we shouldn't accept that help, but I think it's pretty messed up for people to say that, well, since you guys are so marginalized anyways, shouldn't you just accept help at whatever cost it comes?

Speaker 4 And I would assert that no, like Native people deserve an ally that is going to championship our champion our rights in the Senate and is also not going to participate in things like releasing a DNA test that really undermines undermines our sovereignty.

Speaker 4 And you can look at some senators that have actual relationships with tribes and Native people in their state that are consistently sponsoring Native legislation.

Speaker 4 You know, Tester, even Murkowski is a good example. And when you look at, you know, bills that are coming through the Indian Affairs Committee, they're constantly on there.

Speaker 4 And Warren isn't, you know, and that's because she's new to this. And I, you know, I welcome her to continue to help Indian Country, and she should.

Speaker 4 And honestly, every senator who is in Congress right now should be doing that. But we shouldn't, I don't think as Native people, we should be asked to make that trade-off.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I want to turn away from

Speaker 2 Warren herself and the politics a little bit and talk once again a bit more about

Speaker 2 culture and our cultural identities.

Speaker 2 And

Speaker 2 there seems to be this sort of deeper,

Speaker 2 widespread yearning among some for

Speaker 2 our DNA to say something essential about who we are or who we have the potential to be.

Speaker 2 Sarah, you wrote this fascinating story from last year about participants on the White Nationalist Discussion Forum Stormfront having to confront DNA test results that revealed their ancestry wasn't 100% European.

Speaker 2 And it forced at least some of them to rethink, as you write, quote, the criteria for whiteness.

Speaker 2 For example, one user, you write, suggested a white nationalist confederation where different nations would have slightly different criteria for inclusion, end quote.

Speaker 2 And then you quote another example user who says, so in one nation, having Genghis Khan as your ancestor won't disqualify you,

Speaker 2 while in others it might.

Speaker 2 Hypothetically, I might take a DNA test and find that I don't qualify for every nation and every nation's standards, though I'm sure that at least one of those nations and probably many of them will have standards that would include me.

Speaker 2 So like the Stormfront folks have gone deep on this.

Speaker 3 Yeah, they've discovered race as a social construct.

Speaker 2 What did you see in your dive through the darker corners of the web and in the desire about making genetics say something fundamental about who we are?

Speaker 3 Yeah, well, Stormfront is so interesting because this is a forum that's been around since, I think, the 90s, which means it's been around since the first human was sequenced up to our

Speaker 3 current moment where 23andMe and ancestry DNA are becoming super popular.

Speaker 3 So the story that I wrote was based on some research that sociologists did to see what happened when white nationalists got African ancestry and their results.

Speaker 3 Well, no one renounced white nationalism, which is maybe not surprising. You probably wouldn't do that on Stormfront.

Speaker 3 But

Speaker 3 one other interesting reaction was was that to say, well, my ancestor must have been raped, which is also kind of plays into their racist ideas of history.

Speaker 3 Yeah, and the other reaction, as

Speaker 3 you were talking about, is to say, well, you know, we should think about what exactly the criteria for whiteness is.

Speaker 3 And maybe it should be this way or that way or should be your mother's line or your father's line.

Speaker 3 And I think that you see some discovering that, like,

Speaker 3 this there is no objective criteria and that we as a society and they as a forum are kind of deciding it on the go.

Speaker 2 Yeah. So some folks are approaching their DNA as like a hunt for particular things about themselves.

Speaker 2 But I imagine a lot of folks are having the experience of taking a DNA test and finding out something unexpected or seeing something unexpected in the result that returns.

Speaker 2 And what do you think people can do with that information when they get it?

Speaker 3 Yeah, that's such a good question. I think it, first of all, depends on what exactly the result is.

Speaker 3 So one thing that you sometimes see if you watch a lot of 23andMe reveal videos, which is a genre on YouTube now, is

Speaker 3 a lot of African Americans, they'll discover that they have white ancestry, which is, of course, a legacy of slavery, right?

Speaker 3 And so

Speaker 3 one sort of like really super like, you know, maybe almost naive reaction is like, oh, everybody's mixed. We We should just all be happy because we're all mixed.

Speaker 3 Another way is to use DNA to think about history, right? Like use it to interrogate, like, why did this happen? And not just kind of

Speaker 3 just, you know, and realize that you've probably had both slaves and slave owners in your past, and they make up who you are. And not to just say, well, now we're all one big happy family.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 2 Rebecca, I'll point my last question to you before we turn to our closing segment.

Speaker 2 For all the people out there who are taking these DNA tests and finding out that they may have had a distant ancestor who was Native American, what, if anything, would you hope that they would do with that information?

Speaker 4 Very little.

Speaker 4 I think science has always had a very troubling relationship with race, especially when it comes to science defining race.

Speaker 4 And so I think that we need to enter this surge of DNA testing with a heavy and healthy dose of skepticism.

Speaker 4 You know, and you were talking about it a little bit earlier, but there's a pretty troubled history of Native Americans participating in these tests.

Speaker 4 And there's also a history of Native people's biospecimens being used

Speaker 4 under, you know, questionably ethical circumstances that we wouldn't consider acceptable today. You know, there are tribes that have had to sue universities to get them to stop doing the research.

Speaker 4 And so you know Native Americans are actually the group on

Speaker 4 the group where the genetic material is the least specific, kind of, I think the most questionable.

Speaker 4 I mean I think that you know Warren's test saying that she's from North Central or South America is kind of absurd.

Speaker 4 You know, if there was a scientific test that said, oh, well, you're from somewhere between England and Tokyo, we wouldn't see that as being racially specific.

Speaker 4 But why do we apply the same logic to a diverse group of Indigenous people that live from present-day Alaska to Chile?

Speaker 4 You know?

Speaker 4 And so, and I also think that, you know,

Speaker 4 Being Native American is not about what a scientist says, is not about what a DNA test says. It's about having a relationship to a tribe.
It's about who your family is and who your community is.

Speaker 4 And it's not okay for science in any way to supersede that or to take the place of the tribal communities, the kinship, and the laws that Native people have worked really hard to create and to preserve.

Speaker 2 Yeah. I think

Speaker 2 for listeners who

Speaker 2 want to continue diving into

Speaker 2 some of the questions that we've touched on in this conversation. I'm going to recommend the conversation that we had with Alex Wagner about her book,

Speaker 2 Future Face, earlier this year, in part because that book is Alex's story of her dive into her own identity and

Speaker 2 the history of her ancestors and her lineage. And I think one of the lessons implicit in it is that

Speaker 2 we

Speaker 2 come to our own histories sometimes with curiosity

Speaker 2 about the history that we might be able to claim or the heritage that we might be able to claim. And just as often,

Speaker 2 we walk away with, hopefully, a fuller understanding of the history that we instead have to contend with.

Speaker 2 I want to turn us next in a minute to our closing segment: Keepers.

Speaker 2 So stick around.

Speaker 6 Some tech leaders question whether we're in an AI bubble, but others say the best of what AI has to offer is yet to come.

Speaker 7 Maybe in 10,000 years, AI will be based on physics that we don't even understand right now, and we'll have many different approaches.

Speaker 6 Join us weekly, starting October 15th, for the most interesting thing in AI, brought to you by Rethink, the Atlantic's creative marketing studio, in collaboration with PWC, wherever you get your podcasts.

Speaker 2 All right, and now we turn to keepers.

Speaker 2 The question that I ask at the end of every Radio Atlantic episode when I ask you, our listeners, and to our guests, what is it that you have heard, read, watch, listen to, or experienced recently that you do not want to forget?

Speaker 2 First, we will play a keeper from our listener, Anne.

Speaker 8 One of my keepers is re-establishing a balance of power in my marriage, in that I have lost most of my vision. And we downsized

Speaker 8 to smaller house, single-story, getting ahead of things. And we've been married almost 40 years and still very romantic.
But when we moved here,

Speaker 8 my husband started taking on more duties. He would wave me out of the kitchen, would not let me

Speaker 8 do things.

Speaker 8 And so suddenly I said, okay, if that's the way you want it.

Speaker 8 But it began to

Speaker 8 destabilize marriage. It was more of a dependency versus a caretaker and being cared for.
So once I figured it out, we had a

Speaker 8 conversation about it

Speaker 8 and balanced the scales so that we now are back again as husband and wife.

Speaker 8 And so now I carry in the groceries and empty the trash and do the recycles and water the

Speaker 8 and put away the groceries and it put a bump dot on the dryer so I could do it.

Speaker 8 Personally, it was figuring out the value of a marriage and the relationship

Speaker 8 between the two. And that's my keeper.

Speaker 2 It worked.

Speaker 2 I think that's a lovely story.

Speaker 2 It is a reminder, good reminder actually, that even after 40 years, the phases of our relationships with each other can keep changing.

Speaker 2 Sarah, what is your keeper?

Speaker 3 Yeah, I'm just going to recount the most delightful thing I've seen in the past week, which is that Liam Neeson is in a new movie. It is a Western.
He rides a horse.

Speaker 3 In the course of promoting this movie, he told one reporter that the horse recognized him.

Speaker 3 And Page 6 read this up.

Speaker 3 A writer tweeted, this is the love story our generation deserves.

Speaker 3 The horse recognized him from a previous movie.

Speaker 2 Okay.

Speaker 3 All right. At this point, Russell Crowe jumps in on Twitter and says, this is absolutely true.
There was a horse George who I gave the speech in the forest and gladiator on.

Speaker 3 Years later, he was on the set of Robin Hood and we would have a chat every day. Same with the white horse Rusty and Robin Hood.
We chatted again on Ling Miz.

Speaker 2 Lifelong friends.

Speaker 3 Wonderful. So I just love the idea of like a tom hangs of horses hanging around on sets.

Speaker 2 Totally. Yes.

Speaker 2 Horse better get an Instagram. Rebecca, what would you like to keep?

Speaker 4 Well, the thing I'm struggling to keep inside my brain every day is the Cherokee language and memorizing and learning and understanding new vocabulary.

Speaker 4 And this morning I was practicing a difficult set of words.

Speaker 4 And so the word that I'm trying to keep right now is quidis, which means to please hand me something.

Speaker 4 But the thing that's complicated about Cherokee is that we have,

Speaker 4 it's an extremely sophisticated and exact language. And so anytime you're talking, anytime you have a verb that's talking about an object,

Speaker 4 there are classifications. So the word changes depending on what type of object you're setting down, you're picking up, you're handing, you're putting over, you're hanging on the wall.

Speaker 4 All those verbs change depending on the shape of the object. So

Speaker 4 I was trying to remember skidit, which means please hand me something that is long.

Speaker 4 Sk'as is sort of the neutral, so something that's round or heavy, or skine us, which is like hand me something that's liquid.

Speaker 2 Awesome. Well, best of luck with your continued

Speaker 2 study. Thank you.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 4 I'm at the beginning of a very long journey.

Speaker 2 Absolutely. A lifelong journey, perhaps.

Speaker 2 I, I, for my part,

Speaker 2 I want to shout out another podcast that I hope many of you

Speaker 2 have listened to or will

Speaker 2 check out after this.

Speaker 2 So much deserved praise has been lavished on the podcast, Everything is Alive by Ian Shilog.

Speaker 2 And until this week, I and I think several other people have been telling folks, oh, no,

Speaker 2 listen to this podcast and start with the first episode, Lewis, Can of Cola. So, the conceit of this show is that

Speaker 2 in every episode, the host, Ian, interviews a different inanimate object. The inanimate object is played by an actor who has been prepped with actual, real details about the

Speaker 2 what the object is and how it's made, where it comes from,

Speaker 2 just obscure facts and trivia and history about the object and its life or objects like it.

Speaker 2 And so the conversation is a somewhat improvised conversation. If you listen to the first episode,

Speaker 2 Lewis Can of Cola, you'll hear a little bit about how these conversations are constructed.

Speaker 2 But what is fantastic about this show is that it seems like such a silly high concept thing,

Speaker 2 but

Speaker 2 The name of it, I think, really does speak to the ethos of it. Everything is alive.

Speaker 2 This idea that all around us are

Speaker 2 all of these things

Speaker 2 that we may think of as things and therefore disregard as things, but nonetheless have an experience of the world and things to tell us about it.

Speaker 2 And so now the new episode that I'm recommending to people is the most recently published episode, Chiyoke, Grain of Sand.

Speaker 2 Because these interviews are improvised and pretty naturalistic, there's this moment where as a listener, you might not know whether this is supposed to happen, but Chiyoke ends up having a problem of pronouns.

Speaker 2 Let me play it.

Speaker 9 Yeah, I mean, I think that if there's one

Speaker 9 difference between

Speaker 9 them and I.

Speaker 9 Sorry, I'm just having trouble with the pronouns. You know, we're doing this interview and I'm a grain of sand.

Speaker 9 Yeah. But that's not really,

Speaker 9 that's not really the way that I would think of myself. I think normally I would just say, we are sand.

Speaker 9 Okay.

Speaker 9 So you see that there's the kind of mass noun thing happening. And it's weird to talk to you because you don't have a mass noun thing or you don't seem to have a mass noun arrangement.

Speaker 9 So you say of yourself that you're

Speaker 9 a person, right?

Speaker 2 Yeah. Yeah, I would say I am a person.

Speaker 9 So like, why aren't you a grain of person?

Speaker 2 Like,

Speaker 2 why do I not consider myself as like a

Speaker 9 fraction of all of humanity? Yeah. Like that, that makes more sense.

Speaker 3 I haven't listened to the episode yet, but I love the lamppost episode.

Speaker 2 Yes, the lamppost episode is also pretty great.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I haven't heard that. I'll have to check it out.

Speaker 2 Highly recommend it After that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 4 It's always, I'm always looking for new things to listen to.

Speaker 2 Well,

Speaker 2 now you have one. And let me know if you, let me know if you like it.

Speaker 2 Rebecca, thank you so much for joining us this afternoon.

Speaker 4 Yeah, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.
And, you know,

Speaker 4 I think I told someone from your team this in an email, but I actually a couple months ago like did some media research where I created this giant spreadsheet of the top Google results for Native American Elizabeth Warren and was trying to kind of see if I could quantify, you know, how much terrible myths about native identity were coming up, like blood quantum and DNA tests and all of these things, and put some numbers behind it so people could see why it was so harmful.

Speaker 4 I haven't written about it yet, but actually, I came across an article from The Atlantic. It was one of the few non-native publications that got it.

Speaker 4 And so when you guys contacted me, I was excited about working with you, and I appreciate your coverage of it.

Speaker 2 Thank you very much, Rebecca, and we appreciate you joining us. And, Sarah, thank you, as always, for your great reporting and your contributions today.

Speaker 3 Yeah, thanks for having me. I knew this story was going to come up as soon as it became clear she's going to run for president.

Speaker 2 Here we are.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I know. It's such a predictable step.

Speaker 2 Well, here's to foresight. Thanks, y'all.
Till next time.

Speaker 2 that'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic. Thank you once again to our staff writer, Sarah Zhang, and to Rebecca Nagel, our guest.

Speaker 2 Thank you, as always, to Kevin Townsend for producing and editing this episode, and to Catherine Wells, to the Atlantic's executive producer for podcasts.

Speaker 2 Our theme music is the battle hymn of the Republic, as interpreted by the one and only John Batiste. What is your keeper?

Speaker 2 Call us at 202-266-7600 and leave us a voicemail with your contact information. Check us out at theatlantic.com/slash radio.
Catch our show notes in the episode description.

Speaker 2 And if you like what you're hearing, do rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app. But most importantly, thank you for listening.

Speaker 2 May you use the lessons of your own history to craft a better future. We'll see you next week.

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Speaker 10 The last time you were confident on uncertain terrain? The last journey that made you feel at home, conveniently connected at every step?

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How far will you let it take you?

Speaker 10 Range Rover, designed for distinction.