Free Republic

U.S. Senate candidate Loretta Sanchez was criticized Saturday by her chief rival, Attorney General Kamala Harris, after a videotape surfaced showing her making a whooping cry in reference to Native Americans during an apparent joke. Harris called the gesture "shocking.'' A video posted on The Sacramento Bee website shows Sanchez, a 10-term congresswoman, fluttering her hand against her mouth and making a whooping sound while speaking to a group of delegates at a state Democratic Party convention.

In the latest chapter of political correctness versus the sporting world of common sense, which is overwhelmingly behind owner Dan Snyder, leftists have now recruited some game announcers to refrain from saying “Redskins” during broadcasts. Why you ask? It’s all about a political agenda, a victimization platform, designed to grossly misrepresent the intent and history behind one the most recognizable teams in NFL history. If you recently fell off the turnip truck and landed in Nancy Pelosi’s garden for the not so gifted, the term ‘Redskins’ was obviously chosen to cheer a professional football team onto victory by conveying the...

A palate cleanser via Time, which notes that the “Redskins Facts” site is behind this and that the team itself is apparently behind “Redskins Facts.” (The anti-Redskins ad that inspired this rebuttal is also embedded below for context.) This is really just a taste of what they’ve got cooking; go to their YouTube account and you’ll find interviews with individual Native Americans defending the name. It’s an understandable counterattack — if your critics claim you’re victimizing a group, the natural response is to find members of the group who don’t feel victimized — but realistically we’re past the point...

Homosexuals Often Had a High Status in Native American Tribes Native American males were expected to become warriors and hunters, but it was also recognized that the stress of being under such burdens often demanded spiritual advice and healing. This duty would usually fall upon a homosexual Shaman. In the Native culture, to be gay meant to be "from the outside world," to be "spiritually gifted." However, Homosexual only included men who preferred social and sexual "female roles." Needless to say, they were highly respected within the community. In fact, straight men could have sex with a homosexual without having...

How A ‘Mohawk Saint’ Can Inspire Us All Stephen Beale Recently canonized Saint Kateri Tekakwitha obviously has a special meaning for Native Americans, but she’s already being held up as a powerful inspiration for other faithful Christians in many other ways.One is reminded of St. Paul, who wrote in 1 Corinthians 9 that he had “become all things to all, to save at least some.” Much the same could be said about St. Kateri regarding the many ways she can inspire Christians at different points in their faith journeys—based on reactions to her canonization in the Catholic News Service and First...

In the past few primary elections the Tea Party has won some and lost some. Lately it's been more "lost some" than "won some." Several months ago I wrote that the Tea Party was founded on an act of impersonation based on an act of deception. They named themselves and patterned themselves after a bunch of so-called Boston Patriots who decided to rebel over a tax on tea by sneaking aboard a vessel that had received a shipment of tea and dumping the tea into the Boston Harbor. In order to conceal this criminal act from the authorities they dressed...

Senator Elizabeth Warren, aka Fauxcahontas -- the woman who gained Ivy League tenure by claiming to be of Native American heritage on highly questionable (i.e., phony) grounds – apparently has decided that it is no longer advantageous to claim to be a Cherokee Indian. At least that is the conclusion to be drawn from the advance materials being distributed for her new book, A Fighting Chance. Warren matters because she is the current darling of the American left, regarded as presidential timber, and standing by in case Hillary Clinton decides not to run for the Democratic nomination in 2016....

SANTA FE—Where did the first Americans come from? Most researchers agree that Paleoamericans moved across the Bering Land Bridge from Asia sometime before 15,000 years ago, suggesting roots in East Asia. But just where the source populations arose has long been a mystery. Now comes a surprising twist, from the complete nuclear genome of a Siberian boy who died 24,000 years ago—the oldest complete genome of a modern human sequenced to date. His DNA shows close ties to those of today's Native Americans. Yet he apparently descended not from East Asians, but from people who had lived in Europe or...

Nephi Craig graduated from culinary school in 2000 and began a promising career. In a few years, he was working his way up the stations at Mary Elaine’s, Arizona’s only five-star French restaurant, led by James Beard Award–winning chef Bradford Thompson. “I was getting a great French, classical training, but something was missing,” says Craig, who is 33. “The French tradition isn’t my tradition, and I wanted to cook in the tradition of my people: Apaches and Navajos.” It’s an early Tuesday morning in late July, and Craig is driving his 10-year-old son, Ari, and me around the Fort Apache...

Pajamas Media | Friday, December 12, 2008 The funeral for Shirwa Ahmed last week in Burnsville, Minnesota, punctuated a growing national security threat metastasizing inside the U.S. — one Homeland Security and law enforcement authorities have quickly taken note of. Ahmed, who killed himself in a suicide bombing attack in Somalia in October, is just one of up to 40 men from the Twin Cities area who have disappeared and are feared to have returned to their homeland for training with the al-Shabaab terrorist group to wage jihad. The FBI is investigating similar disappearances in other major Somali communities in...

Many libertarians, outraged by how our government spies on us, call me a "traitor" because I'm not very angry. I understand that the National Security Administration tracking patterns in our emails and phone calls could put us on a terrible, privacy-crushing slippery slope. But we're not there yet. Some perspective: We are less closely watched by government than citizens of other countries. There are about 3,000 government security cameras around New York City, but London has 500,000. Some people in London love that, believing that the extra surveillance deters crime and catches terrorists. I thought government cameras helped identify the...

The White House ✔ @whitehouse Unless you're a Native American, you came from someplace else. Share your family's story: http://at.wh.gov/kQgOt #ImmigrationNation

This afternoon in Las Vegas, President Obama reminded most American citizens that they were descended from immigrants themselves. Obama warned that the issue was an emotional one, but that it was important for Americans to not view it as “us versus them.” “It’s really important to remember our history,” Obama continued. “Unless you were one of the first Americans, a Native American, you came from someplace else, somebody brought you,” he said

I didn't think that exchange over her heritage at the debate last week had drawn any blood, but evidently it did. There's no way her team would waste resources in addressing this subject unless they didn't like the feedback they got afterward. And if that doesn't convince you, check out the second clip below: Brown is now running attack ads on it. I wonder what sort of nerve this is hitting in the polling for it to suddenly be injected back into the race. Is it a pure "trust" thing or are her academic credentials more important to her candidacy...

Could Democrats really be this tone deaf? For nearly two weeks, Team Obama has been reeling from his "you didn't build that" comment --- to the extent that Barack Obama himself had to cut a personal response ad to stanch the bleeding, so far to no avail. And yet, the Charlotte Observer picks up on a Boston Globe report from ten days ago that the "buzz" around the Democratic convention (such as it is) has the author of that argument, Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, under serious consideration to be the keynote speaker at the DNCC: The crowds at political conventions...

Native Americans spread out today from Canada to the tip of Chile descended not from one but at least three migrant waves from Siberia between 5,000 and 15,000 years ago, a study said Wednesday. The finding is controversial among geneticists, archaeologists and linguists -- many of whom have maintained that a single Asian ancestral group populated the Americas. But the new study, claiming to be the most comprehensive analysis yet of Native American genetics, claims to have found incontrovertible proof that there were three immigration waves -- a theory first put forward in 1986. Most Native Americans, said the study,...

[Snip]...At lunch, I went to listen to Elizabeth Warren’s speech and panel discussion. I wanted to ask her a few questions after her panel, which was entitled “2012 and the War on (and for) Women.” Specifically, I wanted to ask Warren questions about being a Woman of Color. Since she put herself on lists of Minority Law Teachers and Woman of Color in Academia, and identified herself to two employers as Native American, I wanted to see if Warren stood by those designations in light of evidence they are false designations. As I was waiting, a woman noticed me (perhaps...

Elizabeth Warren can no longer count the Harvard University administrator who listed her as "Native American" among her advocates in the unfolding scandal of her professed minority heritage. In the reaction to the Boston Globe's controversial article on Harvard's EEOC reports which listed Elizabeth Warren as a Native American, one particular revelation has gone largely unnoticed. Alan Ray, the former administrator who filed diversity reports during Warren's tenure, distances the university from any responsibility for erroneously listing her as a Native American.

If there’s any politician that infuriates me more than a carpetbaggin’, recipe-stealing fake Indian, it’s one that unloads her imported BMW 528i just before announcing her candidacy, and then doesn’t even bother to pay the automobile excise tax on her campaign’s new Ford Escape. Yes, Comrade Warren, I’m talking about you. A BMW — how tenured Harvard Law is it? She’d owned it since early 2000, but it had to go. After all, she’s a “fight-ah,” as her new TV ad says. So adios BMW and hello used 2008 Ford — hybrid, of course — which is registered to her...

There's no truth whatever to Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren's claim to Indian ancestry. She's been proved a fraud. Time for her to fess up and end this charade. All the evidence she's offered to justify listing herself as a minority on law school directories the last 25 years has been shot down. The Harvard law professor's claims just don't stand up to scrutiny. The New England Historical Genealogical Society this week reversed its claim it had proof of Warren's alleged Cherokee heritage. That proof was hearsay Warren fed the society, and in turn, the Boston Globe. She cited the...