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Another Stereotype of the Month entry:
By Steven Plaut
FrontPageMagazine.com | September 8, 2005
Ward Churchill is not the only leftwing anti-American extremist on campus these days pretending to be an American Indian.
Allow us to introduce you to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, a feminist who has made a career out of waving about the banner that she is about one-quarter American Indian. Her mother was half Native American, her father a white Oklahoma farmer.
Plaut continues with an irrelevant diatribe about Dunbar-Ortiz's politics, then concludes:
By the way, while it will upset the Cockburnites to hear it, the National Congress of American Indians claims that 15,000 Native Americans have been serving as combat troops in the Gulf. That is enough to make Dunbar-Ortiz hate them redskins!
Rob's reply
The problem here is Plaut's ignorance of what it takes to be an Indian. Being a quarter Indian by blood is more than enough for some tribes. Dunbar-Ortiz could very well be an enrolled Cherokee, for instance.
Even if she weren't enrolled, she could claim to be Indian by dint of having that much Native ancestry. But judging from the biography on her official website, she doesn't claim to be Indian. So Plaut is wrong on both counts: how Dunbar-Ortiz could claim to be Indian if she wanted to, and what she actually claims.
As for his final "redskins" comment, it's tasteless at best and racist at worst. In any case, it's stereotypical.
Related links
The essential facts about Indians today
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