Warren: Conservatives back Cherokee protesters

Liz Warren camp says Cherokee activists tied to senator

By Chris CassidyFour Cherokee activists, who are in Boston to force a meeting with Elizabeth Warren over her Native American heritage claims, will sit down with U.S. Sen. Scott Brown’s campaign today—while the Warren camp is charging that the Cherokees are doing Brown’s bidding.To be specific:The Warren campaign fired back yesterday attempting to link the women to Scott Brown.

“The out-of-state group in question is being promoted and supported by a right-wing extremist who is on the record supporting and contributing money to Scott Brown,” said Warren spokeswoman Alethea Harney. “It is past time we moved on to the important issues facing middle-class families in Massachusetts—even if Scott Brown won’t.”

Both Brown’s campaign and the Cherokees, who said they lean left politically, have denied the Brown campaign put them up to it. Harney referred to Cornell University Law Professor William Jacobson, who runs the conservative blog Legal Insurrection and contributed $500 to Brown during the special Senate election two years ago.

Jacobson, who has been in touch with the Cherokee activists and set up some media interviews for them, declined to comment when asked whether he was providing them with any financial support. The Cherokee group said it’s doing some fundraising — taking in about $160 from Facebook—but denied they’ve received any money from Republican groups or activists.Of Right Wings and Indians: Warren Staff Circles Their Wagons

By Cole R. DeLauneAlthough Warren has contended in recent weeks that, “My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I’m proud of it,” she welcomed Barnes and company (evidently not the variety of American Indian to whom she was referring when she explained her history of ethnic self-identification as attributable to a hope that “something might happen with people who are like I am”) by dispatching Harney to mischaracterize the Native perspective uncomfortable with the professor’s response to this issue over the course of the past six weeks as the precipitate of right-wing extremism. In their disingenuous generalizations, Warren and the Massachusetts Democratic Party (the communications director of which, one Mr. Kevin Franck, dismissed the Native protestors at the party’s state convention earlier this month as “rabble-rousers” motivated by a desire “to draw attention to themselves”) are effectively denying any agency to her indigenous opponents in this debate by dishonestly positioning them narratively as the cravenly self-exploitative or inadvertently dimwitted agents of the GOP. And this is the populist Joan of Arc who will most capably represent a spectrum of ideologies and advocate for the interests of the oppressed with respect to both locally and nationally repercussive legislation in the upper chamber of Congress?

If the Warren campaign has any sources of evidentiary support to substantiate their dangerous implication that Ms. Barnes and her cohorts rely on the financial largesse of a Republican “extremist,” it bears a civic responsibility to disclose them. The views expressed in the conservative new media that has reported on the professor’s embarrassing pattern of evasions are, like those of any journalistic outlet, entirely the prerogative of each particular website, and anyone with the most elementary facility for deductive reasoning understands that a reply to a request for further comment from a news apparatus does not constitute a collaborative public relations strategy.Comment:  A Native acquaintance on Facebook made a claim similar to Warren's. Namely, that Indians don't care about this issue...that Scott Brown's camp is manufacturing it.

Since Indian Country Today has run almost 20 articles on the issue--all by Native reporters or columnists--the first part of this claim is easy to refute. As for the second part, Brown may have introduced the issue, but Warren's bungled explanations of the facts has kept it alive. If she had documented her claims or apologized for them, the issue would've died weeks ago.

For more on Elizabeth Warren, see Warren Benefited from White Privilege and Warren's Neon "Pick Me" Sign.

Below:  "NOT GOING AWAY: Twila Barnes, left, a Cherokee genealogist, and Ali Sacks, a Cherokee from Oklahoma, want to meet with Elizabeth Warren." (Patrick Whittemore)