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Native Americans" came into being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native sovereignty. (Photo: Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty Images)
Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped U.S.-Native American relations has no relevance to today's realities.
Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged on by Donald Trump's "Pocahontas" taunts and his mocking of her claims to native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to "prove" her Native American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry, however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.
The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it's true that the it's-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science rejects nineteenth-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is offering a twenty-first-century version of pseudoscience that once again reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.
If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty.
Today's policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into unfair "privileges" offered to a racially defined group and so "discrimination" against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts, dismantled the Indian Child Welfare Act (a law aimed at preventing the removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota.
Profiting by Recreating Race
Let's start by looking at how the ancestry industry contributes to, and profits from, a twenty-first-century reformulation of race. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe lure customers into donating their DNA and a hefty sum of money in exchange for detailed reports claiming to reveal the exact geographical origins of their ancestors going back multiple generations. "Who do you think you are?" asks Ancestry.com, typically enough. The answer, the company promises, lies in your genes.
In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers.
Such businesses eschew the actual term "race" in their literature. They claim instead that DNA reveals "ancestry composition" and "ethnicity." In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the "ethnicities" they identify bear an eerie resemblance to the "races" identified by European scientific racist thinking a century ago. They then produce scientific-looking "reports" that contain purportedly exact percentages linking consumers to places as specific as "Sardinia" or as broad as "East Asia."
At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make up the vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes (or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are -- something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.
Is There Any Science Behind It?
Although all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, there are some markers that exhibit variations. It's these markers that the testers study, relying on the fact that certain variations are more (or less) common in different geographical areas. As law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts puts it, "No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are 99.9% alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic commonality to the 0.1% of human genetic difference. This difference is increasingly seen as encompassing race."
Ancestry tests rely on a fundamental -- and racialized -- misunderstanding of how ancestry works. The popular assumption is that each of us contains discrete and measurable percentages of the "blood" and DNA of our two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, and that this ancestral line can be traced back hundreds of years in a meaningful way. It can't. As science journalist Carl Zimmer explains, "DNA is not a liquid that can be broken down into microscopic drops... We inherit about a quarter of our DNA from each grandparent -- but only on average... If you pick one of your ancestors from 10 generations back, the odds are around 50% that you carry any DNA from him or her. The odds get even worse beyond that."
In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That's partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today's world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them.
So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it's that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can't be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today's Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry's claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
While whites of European ancestry seem enthralled with the implications of this new racial science, few Native Americans have chosen to donate to such databases. Centuries of abuse at the hands of colonial researchers who made their careers on Native ancestral remains, cultural artifacts, and languages have generated a widespread skepticism toward the notion of offering genetic material for the good of "science." In fact, when it comes to one DNA testing outfit, 23andMe, all of the countries included in its lists of the geographical origins of those who have contributed to its "Native American" database are in Latin America and the Caribbean. "In North America," the company blandly explains, "Native American ancestry tends to be five or more generations back, so that little DNA evidence of this heritage remains." In other words, 23andMe claims DNA as conclusive proof of Native American identity, then uses it to write Native North Americans off the map altogether.
The Ancestry Industry and the Disappearing Indian
The ancestry industry, even while celebrating diverse origins and multiculturalism, has revived long-held ideas about purity and authenticity. For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution. New England's native peoples were, for instance, systematically denied land rights and tribal status in the nineteenth century on the grounds that they were too racially mixed to be "authentic" Indians.
For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution.
As historian Jean O'Brien has explained, "Insistence on 'blood purity' as a central criterion of 'authentic' Indianness reflected the scientific racism that prevailed in the nineteenth century. New England Indians had intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the credence for their Indianness in New England minds." The supposed "disappearance" of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which, in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a people.
However, it was never phenotype or distant ancestry but, as O'Brien points out, "complex regional kinship networks that remained at the core of Indian identity in New England, despite the nearly complete Indian dispossession that English colonists accomplished... Even as Indians continued to reckon membership in their communities through the time-honored system of kinship, New Englanders invoked the myth of blood purity as identity in denying Indian persistence."
Such antiquated understandings of race as a biological or scientific category allowed whites to deny Indian existence -- and now allow them to make biological claims about "Indian" identity. Until recently, such claims, as in Senator Warren's case, rested on the murkiness of family tales. Today, the supposed ability of DNA companies to find genetic "proof" of such a background reinforces the idea that Indian identity is something measurable in the blood and sidesteps the historical basis for the legal recognition or protection of Indian rights.
The ancestry industry assumes that there is something meaningful about the supposed racial identity of one of hundreds or even thousands of an individual's ancestors. It's an idea that plays directly into the hands of right-wingers who are intent on attacking what they call "identity politics" -- and the notion that "minorities" are becoming unduly privileged.
Indeed, white resentment flared at the suggestion that Senator Warren might have received some professional benefit from her claim to Native status. Despite an exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe showing conclusively that she did not, the myth persists and has become an implicit part of Donald Trump's mockery of her. In fact, any quick scan of statistics will confirm the ludicrousness of such a position. It should be obvious that being Native American (or Black, or Latino) in the United States confers far more risks than benefits. Native Americans suffer from higher rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and low birth weight, as well as lower educational levels and shorter life spans than do whites. These statistics are the result of hundreds of years of genocide, exclusion, and discrimination -- not the presence or absence of specific genetic variations.
Reviving Race to Undermine Native Rights
Native rights, from sovereignty to acknowledgment of the conditions created by 500 years of colonial misrule, rest on an acceptance that race and identity are, in fact, the products of history. "Native Americans" came into being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native sovereignty. Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Let's look at three developments that have, over the past year, undermined the rights of Native Americans: the reversal of reservation status for Mashpee tribal lands in Massachusetts, the striking down of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Republican attempts to suppress Native American votes in North Dakota. Each of these acts came from a different part of the government: the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the courts, and North Dakota's Republican-dominated state legislature. But all three rely on notions of identity that place race firmly in our genes rather than in our history. In the process, they deny the histories that turned the sovereign and autonomous peoples of North America before European colonists arrived in "the New World" into "Native Americans," and imply that Native American historical rights are meaningless.
The Mashpee of Massachusetts finally achieved federal recognition and a grant of reservation land only in 2007, based on the fact that they "had existed as a distinct community since the 1620s." In other words, federal recognition was based on a historical, not a racialized, understanding of ethnicity and identity. However, the tribe's drive to build a casino on its newly acquired reservation in Taunton, Massachusetts, would promptly be challenged by local property-owners. Their lawsuit relied on a technicality: that, as they argued in court, reservation land could only be granted to tribes that had been federally recognized as of 1934. In fact, the Mashpee struggle for recognition had been repeatedly stymied by long-held notions that the Indians of Massachusetts were not "real" or "authentic" because of centuries of racial mixing. There was nothing new in this. The state's nineteenth-century legislature prefigured just such a twenty-first-century backlash against recognition when it boasted that real Indians no longer existed in Massachusetts and that the state was poised to wipe out all such "distinctions of race and caste."
In September 2018, the Department of the Interior (to which the court assigned the ultimate decision) ruled against the Mashpees. Recently appointed Assistant Director of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, the first Native American to hold that position, "paved the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era," a 20-year period from the 1940s to the 1960s when the federal government attempted to "terminate" Native sovereignty entirely by dismantling reservations and removing Indians to urban areas to "assimilate" them. The new ruling could affect far more than the Mashpees. Some fear that, in the Trump years, the decision portends "a new termination era," or even a possible "extermination era," for the country's Native Americans.
Meanwhile, on October 4th, a U.S. District Court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. This is a potentially devastating development as Congress passed that Act in 1978 to end the then-still-common practice of breaking up Native families by removing Indian children for adoption into white families. Such acts of removal date back to the earliest days of white settlement and over the centuries included various kinds of servitude and the founding of residential boarding schools for Indian children that were aimed at eliminating Native languages, cultures, and identities, while promoting "assimilation." Indian child removal continued into the late twentieth century through a federally sponsored "Indian Adoption Project," as well as the sending of a remarkable number of such children into the foster care system.
According to the ICWA, "An alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions." States, it added, "have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families." The Act gave tribes primary jurisdiction over all child custody issues including foster placements and the termination of parental rights, requiring for the first time that priority be placed on keeping Native children with their parents, kin, or at least within the tribe.
The ICWA said nothing about race or ancestry. Instead, it recognized "Indian" as a political status, while acknowledging semi-sovereign collective rights. It was based on the Constitution's implicit acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty and land rights and the assignment to the Federal government of relations with Indian tribes. The District Court's ICWA decision trampled on the collective political rights of Indian tribes by maintaining that the act discriminated against non-Native families in limiting their right to foster or adopt Native children. That rationale, like the rationale behind the Mashpee decision, directly attacks the cultural and historical acknowledgement of Native sovereignty.
Superficially, the assault on Native voting rights may appear conceptually unrelated to the Mashpee and ICWA decisions. North Dakota is one of many primarily Republican-controlled states to take advantage of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling eliminating key protections of the Voting Rights Act to make registration and voting more difficult, especially for likely Democratic voters including the poor and people of color. After numerous challenges, a North Dakota law requiring prospective voters to provide a street address was finally upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018. The problem is this: thousands of rural Native Americans, on or off that state's reservations, lack street addresses because their streets have no names, their homes no numbers. Native Americans are also disproportionately homeless.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens -- the right to vote -- whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens -- the right to vote -- whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty. The new voting law invoked equality and individual rights, even as it actually focused on restricting the rights of Native Americans. Underpinning such restrictions was a convenient denial by those Republicans that the country's history had, in fact, created conditions that were decidedly unequal. (Thanks to a massive and expensive local effort to defend their right to vote, however, North Dakota's Native Americans showed up in record numbers in the 2018 midterm election.)
These three political developments downplay Native American identity, sovereignty, and rights, while denying, implicitly or explicitly, that history created today's realities of racial inequality. The use of DNA tests to claim "Native American" genes or blood trivializes this same history.
The recognition of tribal sovereignty at least acknowledges that the existence of the United States is predicated on its imposition of an unwanted, foreign political entity on Native lands. The concept of tribal sovereignty has given Native Americans a legal and collective basis for fighting for a different way of thinking about history, rights, and nationhood. Attempts to reduce Native American identity to a race that can be identified by a gene (or a genetic variation) do violence to our history and justify ongoing violations of Native rights.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had every right to set the record straight regarding false accusations about her employment history. She should, however, rethink the implications of letting either Donald Trump or the ancestry industry define what it means to be Native American.
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Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped U.S.-Native American relations has no relevance to today's realities.
Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged on by Donald Trump's "Pocahontas" taunts and his mocking of her claims to native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to "prove" her Native American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry, however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.
The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it's true that the it's-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science rejects nineteenth-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is offering a twenty-first-century version of pseudoscience that once again reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.
If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty.
Today's policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into unfair "privileges" offered to a racially defined group and so "discrimination" against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts, dismantled the Indian Child Welfare Act (a law aimed at preventing the removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota.
Profiting by Recreating Race
Let's start by looking at how the ancestry industry contributes to, and profits from, a twenty-first-century reformulation of race. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe lure customers into donating their DNA and a hefty sum of money in exchange for detailed reports claiming to reveal the exact geographical origins of their ancestors going back multiple generations. "Who do you think you are?" asks Ancestry.com, typically enough. The answer, the company promises, lies in your genes.
In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers.
Such businesses eschew the actual term "race" in their literature. They claim instead that DNA reveals "ancestry composition" and "ethnicity." In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the "ethnicities" they identify bear an eerie resemblance to the "races" identified by European scientific racist thinking a century ago. They then produce scientific-looking "reports" that contain purportedly exact percentages linking consumers to places as specific as "Sardinia" or as broad as "East Asia."
At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make up the vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes (or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are -- something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.
Is There Any Science Behind It?
Although all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, there are some markers that exhibit variations. It's these markers that the testers study, relying on the fact that certain variations are more (or less) common in different geographical areas. As law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts puts it, "No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are 99.9% alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic commonality to the 0.1% of human genetic difference. This difference is increasingly seen as encompassing race."
Ancestry tests rely on a fundamental -- and racialized -- misunderstanding of how ancestry works. The popular assumption is that each of us contains discrete and measurable percentages of the "blood" and DNA of our two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, and that this ancestral line can be traced back hundreds of years in a meaningful way. It can't. As science journalist Carl Zimmer explains, "DNA is not a liquid that can be broken down into microscopic drops... We inherit about a quarter of our DNA from each grandparent -- but only on average... If you pick one of your ancestors from 10 generations back, the odds are around 50% that you carry any DNA from him or her. The odds get even worse beyond that."
In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That's partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today's world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them.
So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it's that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can't be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today's Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry's claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
While whites of European ancestry seem enthralled with the implications of this new racial science, few Native Americans have chosen to donate to such databases. Centuries of abuse at the hands of colonial researchers who made their careers on Native ancestral remains, cultural artifacts, and languages have generated a widespread skepticism toward the notion of offering genetic material for the good of "science." In fact, when it comes to one DNA testing outfit, 23andMe, all of the countries included in its lists of the geographical origins of those who have contributed to its "Native American" database are in Latin America and the Caribbean. "In North America," the company blandly explains, "Native American ancestry tends to be five or more generations back, so that little DNA evidence of this heritage remains." In other words, 23andMe claims DNA as conclusive proof of Native American identity, then uses it to write Native North Americans off the map altogether.
The Ancestry Industry and the Disappearing Indian
The ancestry industry, even while celebrating diverse origins and multiculturalism, has revived long-held ideas about purity and authenticity. For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution. New England's native peoples were, for instance, systematically denied land rights and tribal status in the nineteenth century on the grounds that they were too racially mixed to be "authentic" Indians.
For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution.
As historian Jean O'Brien has explained, "Insistence on 'blood purity' as a central criterion of 'authentic' Indianness reflected the scientific racism that prevailed in the nineteenth century. New England Indians had intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the credence for their Indianness in New England minds." The supposed "disappearance" of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which, in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a people.
However, it was never phenotype or distant ancestry but, as O'Brien points out, "complex regional kinship networks that remained at the core of Indian identity in New England, despite the nearly complete Indian dispossession that English colonists accomplished... Even as Indians continued to reckon membership in their communities through the time-honored system of kinship, New Englanders invoked the myth of blood purity as identity in denying Indian persistence."
Such antiquated understandings of race as a biological or scientific category allowed whites to deny Indian existence -- and now allow them to make biological claims about "Indian" identity. Until recently, such claims, as in Senator Warren's case, rested on the murkiness of family tales. Today, the supposed ability of DNA companies to find genetic "proof" of such a background reinforces the idea that Indian identity is something measurable in the blood and sidesteps the historical basis for the legal recognition or protection of Indian rights.
The ancestry industry assumes that there is something meaningful about the supposed racial identity of one of hundreds or even thousands of an individual's ancestors. It's an idea that plays directly into the hands of right-wingers who are intent on attacking what they call "identity politics" -- and the notion that "minorities" are becoming unduly privileged.
Indeed, white resentment flared at the suggestion that Senator Warren might have received some professional benefit from her claim to Native status. Despite an exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe showing conclusively that she did not, the myth persists and has become an implicit part of Donald Trump's mockery of her. In fact, any quick scan of statistics will confirm the ludicrousness of such a position. It should be obvious that being Native American (or Black, or Latino) in the United States confers far more risks than benefits. Native Americans suffer from higher rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and low birth weight, as well as lower educational levels and shorter life spans than do whites. These statistics are the result of hundreds of years of genocide, exclusion, and discrimination -- not the presence or absence of specific genetic variations.
Reviving Race to Undermine Native Rights
Native rights, from sovereignty to acknowledgment of the conditions created by 500 years of colonial misrule, rest on an acceptance that race and identity are, in fact, the products of history. "Native Americans" came into being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native sovereignty. Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Let's look at three developments that have, over the past year, undermined the rights of Native Americans: the reversal of reservation status for Mashpee tribal lands in Massachusetts, the striking down of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Republican attempts to suppress Native American votes in North Dakota. Each of these acts came from a different part of the government: the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the courts, and North Dakota's Republican-dominated state legislature. But all three rely on notions of identity that place race firmly in our genes rather than in our history. In the process, they deny the histories that turned the sovereign and autonomous peoples of North America before European colonists arrived in "the New World" into "Native Americans," and imply that Native American historical rights are meaningless.
The Mashpee of Massachusetts finally achieved federal recognition and a grant of reservation land only in 2007, based on the fact that they "had existed as a distinct community since the 1620s." In other words, federal recognition was based on a historical, not a racialized, understanding of ethnicity and identity. However, the tribe's drive to build a casino on its newly acquired reservation in Taunton, Massachusetts, would promptly be challenged by local property-owners. Their lawsuit relied on a technicality: that, as they argued in court, reservation land could only be granted to tribes that had been federally recognized as of 1934. In fact, the Mashpee struggle for recognition had been repeatedly stymied by long-held notions that the Indians of Massachusetts were not "real" or "authentic" because of centuries of racial mixing. There was nothing new in this. The state's nineteenth-century legislature prefigured just such a twenty-first-century backlash against recognition when it boasted that real Indians no longer existed in Massachusetts and that the state was poised to wipe out all such "distinctions of race and caste."
In September 2018, the Department of the Interior (to which the court assigned the ultimate decision) ruled against the Mashpees. Recently appointed Assistant Director of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, the first Native American to hold that position, "paved the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era," a 20-year period from the 1940s to the 1960s when the federal government attempted to "terminate" Native sovereignty entirely by dismantling reservations and removing Indians to urban areas to "assimilate" them. The new ruling could affect far more than the Mashpees. Some fear that, in the Trump years, the decision portends "a new termination era," or even a possible "extermination era," for the country's Native Americans.
Meanwhile, on October 4th, a U.S. District Court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. This is a potentially devastating development as Congress passed that Act in 1978 to end the then-still-common practice of breaking up Native families by removing Indian children for adoption into white families. Such acts of removal date back to the earliest days of white settlement and over the centuries included various kinds of servitude and the founding of residential boarding schools for Indian children that were aimed at eliminating Native languages, cultures, and identities, while promoting "assimilation." Indian child removal continued into the late twentieth century through a federally sponsored "Indian Adoption Project," as well as the sending of a remarkable number of such children into the foster care system.
According to the ICWA, "An alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions." States, it added, "have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families." The Act gave tribes primary jurisdiction over all child custody issues including foster placements and the termination of parental rights, requiring for the first time that priority be placed on keeping Native children with their parents, kin, or at least within the tribe.
The ICWA said nothing about race or ancestry. Instead, it recognized "Indian" as a political status, while acknowledging semi-sovereign collective rights. It was based on the Constitution's implicit acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty and land rights and the assignment to the Federal government of relations with Indian tribes. The District Court's ICWA decision trampled on the collective political rights of Indian tribes by maintaining that the act discriminated against non-Native families in limiting their right to foster or adopt Native children. That rationale, like the rationale behind the Mashpee decision, directly attacks the cultural and historical acknowledgement of Native sovereignty.
Superficially, the assault on Native voting rights may appear conceptually unrelated to the Mashpee and ICWA decisions. North Dakota is one of many primarily Republican-controlled states to take advantage of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling eliminating key protections of the Voting Rights Act to make registration and voting more difficult, especially for likely Democratic voters including the poor and people of color. After numerous challenges, a North Dakota law requiring prospective voters to provide a street address was finally upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018. The problem is this: thousands of rural Native Americans, on or off that state's reservations, lack street addresses because their streets have no names, their homes no numbers. Native Americans are also disproportionately homeless.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens -- the right to vote -- whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens -- the right to vote -- whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty. The new voting law invoked equality and individual rights, even as it actually focused on restricting the rights of Native Americans. Underpinning such restrictions was a convenient denial by those Republicans that the country's history had, in fact, created conditions that were decidedly unequal. (Thanks to a massive and expensive local effort to defend their right to vote, however, North Dakota's Native Americans showed up in record numbers in the 2018 midterm election.)
These three political developments downplay Native American identity, sovereignty, and rights, while denying, implicitly or explicitly, that history created today's realities of racial inequality. The use of DNA tests to claim "Native American" genes or blood trivializes this same history.
The recognition of tribal sovereignty at least acknowledges that the existence of the United States is predicated on its imposition of an unwanted, foreign political entity on Native lands. The concept of tribal sovereignty has given Native Americans a legal and collective basis for fighting for a different way of thinking about history, rights, and nationhood. Attempts to reduce Native American identity to a race that can be identified by a gene (or a genetic variation) do violence to our history and justify ongoing violations of Native rights.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had every right to set the record straight regarding false accusations about her employment history. She should, however, rethink the implications of letting either Donald Trump or the ancestry industry define what it means to be Native American.
Amid the barrage of racist, anti-immigrant, and other attacks launched by President Trump and his administration in recent months, a series of little noted steps have threatened Native American land rights and sovereignty. Such attacks have focused on tribal sovereignty, the Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA), and the voting rights of Native Americans, and they have come from Washington, the courts, and a state legislature. What they share is a single conceptual framework: the idea that the long history that has shaped U.S.-Native American relations has no relevance to today's realities.
Meanwhile, in an apparently unrelated event, Senator Elizabeth Warren, egged on by Donald Trump's "Pocahontas" taunts and his mocking of her claims to native ancestry, triumphantly touted her DNA results to "prove" her Native American heritage. In turning to the burgeoning, for-profit DNA industry, however, she implicitly lent her progressive weight to claims about race and identity that go hand in hand with moves to undermine Native sovereignty.
The DNA industry has, in fact, found a way to profit from reviving and modernizing antiquated ideas about the biological origins of race and repackaging them in a cheerful, Disneyfied wrapping. While it's true that the it's-a-small-world-after-all multiculturalism of the new racial science rejects nineteenth-century scientific racism and Social Darwinism, it is offering a twenty-first-century version of pseudoscience that once again reduces race to a matter of genetics and origins. In the process, the corporate-promoted ancestry fad conveniently manages to erase the histories of conquest, colonization, and exploitation that created not just racial inequality but race itself as a crucial category in the modern world.
If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty.
Today's policy attacks on Native rights reproduce the same misunderstandings of race that the DNA industry is now so assiduously promoting. If Native Americans are reduced to little more than another genetic variation, there is no need for laws that acknowledge their land rights, treaty rights, and sovereignty. Nor must any thought be given to how to compensate for past harms, not to speak of the present ones that still structure their realities. A genetic understanding of race distorts such policies into unfair "privileges" offered to a racially defined group and so "discrimination" against non-Natives. This is precisely the logic behind recent rulings that have denied Mashpee tribal land rights in Massachusetts, dismantled the Indian Child Welfare Act (a law aimed at preventing the removal of Native American children from their families or communities), and attempted to suppress Native voting rights in North Dakota.
Profiting by Recreating Race
Let's start by looking at how the ancestry industry contributes to, and profits from, a twenty-first-century reformulation of race. Companies like Ancestry.com and 23andMe lure customers into donating their DNA and a hefty sum of money in exchange for detailed reports claiming to reveal the exact geographical origins of their ancestors going back multiple generations. "Who do you think you are?" asks Ancestry.com, typically enough. The answer, the company promises, lies in your genes.
In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers.
Such businesses eschew the actual term "race" in their literature. They claim instead that DNA reveals "ancestry composition" and "ethnicity." In the process, however, they turn ethnicity, a term once explicitly meant to describe culture and identity, into something that can be measured in the genes. They conflate ethnicity with geography, and geography with genetic markers. Perhaps you won't be surprised to learn that the "ethnicities" they identify bear an eerie resemblance to the "races" identified by European scientific racist thinking a century ago. They then produce scientific-looking "reports" that contain purportedly exact percentages linking consumers to places as specific as "Sardinia" or as broad as "East Asia."
At their most benign, these reports have become the equivalent of a contemporary parlor game, especially for white Americans who make up the vast majority of the participants. But there is a sinister undertone to it all, reviving as it does a long-discredited pseudoscientific basis for racism: the notion that race, ethnicity, and ancestry are revealed in the genes and the blood, and passed down inexorably, even if invisibly, from generation to generation. Behind this lies the assumption that those genes (or variations) originate within clearly defined national or geographic borders and that they reveal something meaningful about who we are -- something otherwise invisible. In this way, race and ethnicity are separated from and elevated above experience, culture, and history.
Is There Any Science Behind It?
Although all humans share 99.9% of our DNA, there are some markers that exhibit variations. It's these markers that the testers study, relying on the fact that certain variations are more (or less) common in different geographical areas. As law and sociology professor Dorothy Roberts puts it, "No sooner had the Human Genome Project determined that human beings are 99.9% alike than many scientists shifted their focus from human genetic commonality to the 0.1% of human genetic difference. This difference is increasingly seen as encompassing race."
Ancestry tests rely on a fundamental -- and racialized -- misunderstanding of how ancestry works. The popular assumption is that each of us contains discrete and measurable percentages of the "blood" and DNA of our two biological parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, sixteen great-great-grandparents, and so on, and that this ancestral line can be traced back hundreds of years in a meaningful way. It can't. As science journalist Carl Zimmer explains, "DNA is not a liquid that can be broken down into microscopic drops... We inherit about a quarter of our DNA from each grandparent -- but only on average... If you pick one of your ancestors from 10 generations back, the odds are around 50% that you carry any DNA from him or her. The odds get even worse beyond that."
In reality, such testing does not tell us much about our ancestors. That's partly because of the way DNA is passed down through the generations and partly because there exists no database of ancestral DNA. Instead, the companies compare your DNA to that of other contemporary humans who have paid them to take the test. Then they compare your particular variations to patterns of geographical and ethnic distribution of such variations in today's world -- and use secret algorithms to assign purportedly precise ancestral percentages to them.
So is there really a Sardinian or East Asian gene or genetic variation? Of course not. If there is one fact that we know about human history, it's that ours is a history of migrations. We all originated in East Africa and populated the planet through ongoing migrations and interactions. None of this has ended (and, in fact, thanks to climate change, it will only increase). Cultures, ethnicities, and settlements can't be frozen in time. The only thing that is constant is change. The peoples who reside in today's Sardinia or East Asia are a snapshot that captures only a moment in a history of motion. The DNA industry's claims about ancestry award that moment a false sense of permanence.
While whites of European ancestry seem enthralled with the implications of this new racial science, few Native Americans have chosen to donate to such databases. Centuries of abuse at the hands of colonial researchers who made their careers on Native ancestral remains, cultural artifacts, and languages have generated a widespread skepticism toward the notion of offering genetic material for the good of "science." In fact, when it comes to one DNA testing outfit, 23andMe, all of the countries included in its lists of the geographical origins of those who have contributed to its "Native American" database are in Latin America and the Caribbean. "In North America," the company blandly explains, "Native American ancestry tends to be five or more generations back, so that little DNA evidence of this heritage remains." In other words, 23andMe claims DNA as conclusive proof of Native American identity, then uses it to write Native North Americans off the map altogether.
The Ancestry Industry and the Disappearing Indian
The ancestry industry, even while celebrating diverse origins and multiculturalism, has revived long-held ideas about purity and authenticity. For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution. New England's native peoples were, for instance, systematically denied land rights and tribal status in the nineteenth century on the grounds that they were too racially mixed to be "authentic" Indians.
For much of U.S. history, white colonizers argued that Native Americans would "vanish," at least in part through biological dilution.
As historian Jean O'Brien has explained, "Insistence on 'blood purity' as a central criterion of 'authentic' Indianness reflected the scientific racism that prevailed in the nineteenth century. New England Indians had intermarried, including with African Americans, for many decades, and their failure to comply with non-Indian ideas about Indian phenotype strained the credence for their Indianness in New England minds." The supposed "disappearance" of such Indians then justified the elimination of any rights that they might have had to land or sovereignty, the elimination of which, in a form of circular reasoning, only confirmed their nonexistence as a people.
However, it was never phenotype or distant ancestry but, as O'Brien points out, "complex regional kinship networks that remained at the core of Indian identity in New England, despite the nearly complete Indian dispossession that English colonists accomplished... Even as Indians continued to reckon membership in their communities through the time-honored system of kinship, New Englanders invoked the myth of blood purity as identity in denying Indian persistence."
Such antiquated understandings of race as a biological or scientific category allowed whites to deny Indian existence -- and now allow them to make biological claims about "Indian" identity. Until recently, such claims, as in Senator Warren's case, rested on the murkiness of family tales. Today, the supposed ability of DNA companies to find genetic "proof" of such a background reinforces the idea that Indian identity is something measurable in the blood and sidesteps the historical basis for the legal recognition or protection of Indian rights.
The ancestry industry assumes that there is something meaningful about the supposed racial identity of one of hundreds or even thousands of an individual's ancestors. It's an idea that plays directly into the hands of right-wingers who are intent on attacking what they call "identity politics" -- and the notion that "minorities" are becoming unduly privileged.
Indeed, white resentment flared at the suggestion that Senator Warren might have received some professional benefit from her claim to Native status. Despite an exhaustive investigation by the Boston Globe showing conclusively that she did not, the myth persists and has become an implicit part of Donald Trump's mockery of her. In fact, any quick scan of statistics will confirm the ludicrousness of such a position. It should be obvious that being Native American (or Black, or Latino) in the United States confers far more risks than benefits. Native Americans suffer from higher rates of poverty, unemployment, infant mortality, and low birth weight, as well as lower educational levels and shorter life spans than do whites. These statistics are the result of hundreds of years of genocide, exclusion, and discrimination -- not the presence or absence of specific genetic variations.
Reviving Race to Undermine Native Rights
Native rights, from sovereignty to acknowledgment of the conditions created by 500 years of colonial misrule, rest on an acceptance that race and identity are, in fact, the products of history. "Native Americans" came into being not through genes but through the historical processes of conquest and colonial rule, along with grudging and fragile acknowledgement of Native sovereignty. Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Native American nations are political and cultural entities, the products of history, not genes, and white people's assertions about Native American ancestry and the DNA industry's claim to be able to reveal such ancestry tend to run roughshod over this history.
Let's look at three developments that have, over the past year, undermined the rights of Native Americans: the reversal of reservation status for Mashpee tribal lands in Massachusetts, the striking down of the Indian Child Welfare Act, and Republican attempts to suppress Native American votes in North Dakota. Each of these acts came from a different part of the government: the Bureau of Indian Affairs in the Department of the Interior, the courts, and North Dakota's Republican-dominated state legislature. But all three rely on notions of identity that place race firmly in our genes rather than in our history. In the process, they deny the histories that turned the sovereign and autonomous peoples of North America before European colonists arrived in "the New World" into "Native Americans," and imply that Native American historical rights are meaningless.
The Mashpee of Massachusetts finally achieved federal recognition and a grant of reservation land only in 2007, based on the fact that they "had existed as a distinct community since the 1620s." In other words, federal recognition was based on a historical, not a racialized, understanding of ethnicity and identity. However, the tribe's drive to build a casino on its newly acquired reservation in Taunton, Massachusetts, would promptly be challenged by local property-owners. Their lawsuit relied on a technicality: that, as they argued in court, reservation land could only be granted to tribes that had been federally recognized as of 1934. In fact, the Mashpee struggle for recognition had been repeatedly stymied by long-held notions that the Indians of Massachusetts were not "real" or "authentic" because of centuries of racial mixing. There was nothing new in this. The state's nineteenth-century legislature prefigured just such a twenty-first-century backlash against recognition when it boasted that real Indians no longer existed in Massachusetts and that the state was poised to wipe out all such "distinctions of race and caste."
In September 2018, the Department of the Interior (to which the court assigned the ultimate decision) ruled against the Mashpees. Recently appointed Assistant Director of Indian Affairs Tara Sweeney, the first Native American to hold that position, "paved the way for a reservation to be taken out of trust for the first time since the termination era," a 20-year period from the 1940s to the 1960s when the federal government attempted to "terminate" Native sovereignty entirely by dismantling reservations and removing Indians to urban areas to "assimilate" them. The new ruling could affect far more than the Mashpees. Some fear that, in the Trump years, the decision portends "a new termination era," or even a possible "extermination era," for the country's Native Americans.
Meanwhile, on October 4th, a U.S. District Court struck down the Indian Child Welfare Act, or ICWA. This is a potentially devastating development as Congress passed that Act in 1978 to end the then-still-common practice of breaking up Native families by removing Indian children for adoption into white families. Such acts of removal date back to the earliest days of white settlement and over the centuries included various kinds of servitude and the founding of residential boarding schools for Indian children that were aimed at eliminating Native languages, cultures, and identities, while promoting "assimilation." Indian child removal continued into the late twentieth century through a federally sponsored "Indian Adoption Project," as well as the sending of a remarkable number of such children into the foster care system.
According to the ICWA, "An alarmingly high percentage of Indian families are broken up by the removal, often unwarranted, of their children from them by nontribal public and private agencies and that an alarmingly high percentage of such children are placed in non-Indian foster and adoptive homes and institutions." States, it added, "have often failed to recognize the essential tribal relations of Indian people and the cultural and social standards prevailing in Indian communities and families." The Act gave tribes primary jurisdiction over all child custody issues including foster placements and the termination of parental rights, requiring for the first time that priority be placed on keeping Native children with their parents, kin, or at least within the tribe.
The ICWA said nothing about race or ancestry. Instead, it recognized "Indian" as a political status, while acknowledging semi-sovereign collective rights. It was based on the Constitution's implicit acknowledgement of Indian sovereignty and land rights and the assignment to the Federal government of relations with Indian tribes. The District Court's ICWA decision trampled on the collective political rights of Indian tribes by maintaining that the act discriminated against non-Native families in limiting their right to foster or adopt Native children. That rationale, like the rationale behind the Mashpee decision, directly attacks the cultural and historical acknowledgement of Native sovereignty.
Superficially, the assault on Native voting rights may appear conceptually unrelated to the Mashpee and ICWA decisions. North Dakota is one of many primarily Republican-controlled states to take advantage of a 2013 Supreme Court ruling eliminating key protections of the Voting Rights Act to make registration and voting more difficult, especially for likely Democratic voters including the poor and people of color. After numerous challenges, a North Dakota law requiring prospective voters to provide a street address was finally upheld by a Supreme Court ruling in October 2018. The problem is this: thousands of rural Native Americans, on or off that state's reservations, lack street addresses because their streets have no names, their homes no numbers. Native Americans are also disproportionately homeless.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens -- the right to vote -- whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty.
In the North Dakota case, Native Americans are fighting for a right of American citizens -- the right to vote -- whereas the Mashpee and ICWA cases involve fights to defend Native sovereignty. The new voting law invoked equality and individual rights, even as it actually focused on restricting the rights of Native Americans. Underpinning such restrictions was a convenient denial by those Republicans that the country's history had, in fact, created conditions that were decidedly unequal. (Thanks to a massive and expensive local effort to defend their right to vote, however, North Dakota's Native Americans showed up in record numbers in the 2018 midterm election.)
These three political developments downplay Native American identity, sovereignty, and rights, while denying, implicitly or explicitly, that history created today's realities of racial inequality. The use of DNA tests to claim "Native American" genes or blood trivializes this same history.
The recognition of tribal sovereignty at least acknowledges that the existence of the United States is predicated on its imposition of an unwanted, foreign political entity on Native lands. The concept of tribal sovereignty has given Native Americans a legal and collective basis for fighting for a different way of thinking about history, rights, and nationhood. Attempts to reduce Native American identity to a race that can be identified by a gene (or a genetic variation) do violence to our history and justify ongoing violations of Native rights.
Senator Elizabeth Warren had every right to set the record straight regarding false accusations about her employment history. She should, however, rethink the implications of letting either Donald Trump or the ancestry industry define what it means to be Native American.
"Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires," said one critic. "It is as malicious as it is absurd."
U.S. President Donald Trump's administration faced an onslaught of criticism on Tuesday for starting the process of repealing the 2009 legal opinion that greenhouse gases endanger public health and the welfare of the American people—which has enabled federal regulations aimed at the fossil fuel-driven climate emergency over the past 15 years.
Confirming reports from last week, Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Administrator Lee Zeldin unveiled the rule to rescind the 2009 "endangerment finding" at a truck dealership in Indiana. According to The New York Times, he said that "the proposal would, if finalized, amount to the largest deregulatory action in the history of the United States."
If the administration succeeds in repealing the legal finding, the EPA would lack authority under the Clean Air Act to impose standards for greenhouse gas emissions—meaning the move would kill vehicle regulations. As with the reporting last week, the formal announcement was sharply condemned by climate and health advocates and experts.
"Greenhouse gas emissions endanger public health and are the root cause of the climate crisis," said Deanna Noël with Public Citizen's Climate Program, ripping the administration's effort as "grossly misguided and exceptionally dangerous."
"This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
"Stripping the EPA of its ability to regulate greenhouse gases is like throwing away the fire extinguisher while the house is already burning," she warned. "The administration is shamelessly handing Big Oil a hall pass to pollute unchecked and dodge accountability, leaving working families to bear the costs through worsening health outcomes, rising energy bills, more climate-fueled extreme weather, and an increasingly unstable future. This isn't just a denial of science and reality—it's a betrayal of public trust and yet another signal that this administration is working for corporate interests, and no one else."
Noël was far from alone in accusing the administration's leaders of serving the polluters who helped Trump return to power.
"Zeldin and Trump are concerned only with maximizing short-term profits for polluting corporations and the CEOs funneling millions of dollars to their campaign coffers," said Jim Walsh, policy director at Food & Water Watch. "Zeldin's assertion that the EPA shouldn't address greenhouse gas emissions is like a fire chief claiming that they shouldn't fight fires. It is as malicious as it is absurd."
Dan Becker, director of the Center for Biological Diversity's Safe Climate Transport Campaign, similarly said that the proposal is "purely a political bow to the oil industry" and "Trump is putting fealty to Big Oil over sound science and people's health."
Earthworks policy director Lauren Pagel also called the rule "a perverse gift to the fossil fuel industry that rejects yearslong efforts by the agency, scientists, NGOs, frontline communities, and industry to protect public health and our environment."
"Donald Trump and Lee Zeldin are playing with fire—and with floods and droughts and public health risks, too," she stressed, as about 168 million Americans on Tuesday faced advisories for extreme heat made more likely by the climate crisis.
🚨 The Trump administration just took its most extreme step yet in rolling back climate protections.
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— Sierra Club (@sierraclub.org) July 29, 2025 at 4:58 PM
Justin Chen, president of American Federation of Government Employees Council 238, which represents over 8,000 EPA workers nationwide, said that the repeal plan "is reckless and will have far-reaching, disastrous consequences for the USA."
"EPA career professionals have worked for decades on the development of the science and policy of greenhouse gases to protect the American public," he continued, "and this policy decision completely disregards all of their work in service to the public."
The Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) highlighted that Chris Wright, head of the Department of Energy, joined Zeldin at the Tuesday press conference and "announced a DOE 'climate science study' alongside remarks that were rife with climate denial talking points and disinformation."
UCS president Gretchen Goldman said that "it's abundantly clear what's going on here. The Trump administration refuses to acknowledge robust climate science and is using the kitchen sink approach: making every specious argument it can to avoid complying with the law."
"But getting around the Clean Air Act won't be easy," she added. "The science establishing climate harms to human health was unequivocally clear back in 2009, and more than 15 years later, the evidence has only accumulated."
Today, Zeldin’s EPA plans to release a proposal to revoke the Endangerment Finding, which is the legal & scientific foundation of EPA’s responsibility to limit climate-heating greenhouse gas pollution from major sources.
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— Moms Clean Air Force (@momscleanairforce.org) July 29, 2025 at 12:58 PM
David Bookbinder, director of law and policy at the Environmental Integrity Project, was a lead attorney in the 2007 U.S. Supreme Court case Massachusetts vs. EPA, which affirmed the agency's authority to regulate greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act and ultimately led to the endangerment finding two years later.
Bookbinder said Tuesday that "because this approach has already been rejected by the courts—and doubtless will be again—this baseless effort to pretend that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses that cause climate change are not harmful pollutants is nothing more than a transparent attempt to delay and derail our efforts to control greenhouse pollution at the worst possible time, when deadly floods and heat waves are killing more people every day."
In a statement from the Environmental Protection Network, which is made up of ex-EPA staff, Joseph Goffman, former assistant administrator of the agency's Office of Air and Radiation, also cited the 2007 ruling.
"This decision is both legally indefensible and morally bankrupt," Goffman said of the Tuesday proposal. "The Supreme Court made clear that EPA cannot ignore science or evade its responsibilities under the Clean Air Act. By walking away from the endangerment finding, EPA has not only broken with precedent; it has broken with reality."
Aru Shiney-Ajay, executive director of the youth-led Sunrise Movement, responded to the EPA proposal with defiance, declaring that "Donald Trump and his Big Oil donors are lighting the world on fire and fueling their private jets with young people's lives. We refuse to be sacrifices for their greed. We're coming for them, and we're not backing down."
Israel has already summarily rejected the U.K. leader's ultimatum to take "substantive" steps to end the war on Gaza by September, agree to a two-state solution, and reject West Bank annexation.
United Kingdom Prime Minister Keir Starmer was accused of "political grandstanding" after he said Tuesday that his country would recognize Palestinian statehood if Israel did not take ambiguously defined steps to end its war on Gaza—conditions that were promptly dismissed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
"Today, as part of this process towards peace, I can confirm the U.K. will recognize the state of Palestine by the United Nations General Assembly in September, unless the Israeli government takes substantive steps to end the appalling situation in Gaza, agree to a cease-fire, and commit to a long-term sustainable peace, reviving the prospect of a two-state solution," Starmer said during a press conference.
"This includes allowing the U.N. to restart the supply of aid and making clear that there will be no annexations in the West Bank," the prime minister continued, adding that "the terrorists of Hamas... must immediately release all of the hostages, sign up to a cease-fire, disarm, and accept that they will play no part in the government of Gaza."
Member of Scottish Parliament Scott Greer (Scottish Greens-West Scotland) responded to Tuesday's announcement on social media, saying, "Starmer wouldn't threaten to withdraw U.K. recognition of Israel, but he's made recognition of Palestinian statehood conditional on the actions of their genocidal oppressor?"
"Another profoundly unjust act from a Labour government thoroughly complicit in Israel's crimes," Greer added.
British attorney and activist Shola Mos-Shogbamimu asserted that "Keir Starmer knows his time is up and pivots to save his career but it's too late."
"By placing a condition on recognizing Palestine this declaration is performative and disingenuous because before September he can claim Israel has substantively complied with the condition," she added.
Leftist politician and Accountability Archive co-founder Philip Proudfoot argued on social media that "decent" Members of Parliament "need to table a no-confidence motion in Starmer now."
"He has just used the recognition of Palestine as a bargaining chip in exchange for Israel following its BASIC LEGAL OBLIGATIONS," he added. "This is one of the lowest political acts in living memory."
Media critic Sana Saeed said on social media, "Using Palestinian life and future as a bargaining chip and threat to Israel—not a surprise from kid starver Keir Starmer."
Journalist Sangita Myska argued that "rather than threatening the gesture politics of recognizing a Palestinian state (that may never happen)," Starmer should expel Israel's ambassador to the U.K., impose "full trade sanctions" and a "full arms embargo," and end alleged Royal Air Force surveillance flights over Gaza.
Political analyst Bushra Shaikh accused Starmer of "political grandstanding" and "speaking from both sides of his mouth."
Starmer's announcement followed a Monday meeting in Turnberry, Scotland with U.S. President Donald Trump, who signaled that he would not object to U.K. recognition of Palestine.
However, U.S. State Department spokesperson Tammy Bruce called Starmer's announcement "a slap in the face for the victims of October 7," a reference to the Hamas-led attack of 2023.
While the United States remains Israel's staunchest supporter and enabler—providing billions of dollars in annual armed aid and diplomatic cover—Trump, Vice President JD Vance, and U.S. Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee have all expressed concerns over mounting starvation deaths in Gaza.
On Tuesday, the U.N.-affiliated Integrated Food Security Phase Classification warned that a "worst-case" famine scenario is developing in Gaza, where health officials say at least 147 Palestinians, including at least 88 children, have died from malnutrition since Israel launched its obliteration and siege of the enclave following the October 2023 attack.
Israel—which imposed a "complete siege" on Gaza following that attack—has severely limited the amount of humanitarian aid that can enter the strip. According to U.N. officials, Israel Defense Forces troops have killed more than 1,000 aid-seeking civilians at distribution points run by the U.S.-backed Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. IDF troops have said they were ordered to shoot live bullets and artillery shells at aid seekers.
Netanyahu—who is wanted by the International Criminal Court for alleged crimes against humanity and war crimes in Gaza including murder and weaponized starvation—responded to the U.K. prime minister's ultimatum in a social media post stating, "Starmer rewards Hamas' monstrous terrorism and punishes its victims."
"A jihadist state on Israel's border TODAY will threaten Britain TOMORROW," Netanyahu said. "Appeasement towards jihadist terrorists always fails. It will fail you too. It will not happen."
The U.K. played a critical role in the foundation of the modern state of Israel, allowing Jewish colonization of what was then the British Mandate of Palestine under condition that "nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine," who made up more than 90% of the population.
Seeing that Jewish immigrants returning to their ancestral homeland were usurping the indigenous Arabs of Palestine, the British subsequently prohibited further Zionist colonization. This sparked a nearly decadelong wave of terrorism and other attacks against the British occupiers that ultimately resulted in the U.K. abandoning Palestine and the establishment of Israel under the authority of the United Nations—an outcome achieved by the ethnic cleansing of more than 750,000 Palestinian Arabs.
On the topic of annexing the West Bank, earlier this month, all 15 Israeli government ministers representing Netanyahu's Likud party recommended the move, citing support from Trump. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) found last year that Israel's occupation of Palestine, including the West Bank and Gaza, is an illegal form of apartheid.
Last week, French President Emmanuel Macron said his country would announce its formal recognition of Palestinian statehood during September's U.N. General Assembly in New York. France is set to become the first Group of Seven nation to recognize Palestine, which is currently officially acknowledged by approximately 150 of the 193 U.N. member states.
Israeli Foreign Minister Israel Katz subsequently threatened "severe consequences" for nations that recognize Palestine.
Starmer's announcement came on the same day that the Gaza Health Ministry said that the death toll from Israel's 662-day assault and siege on Gaza—which is the subject of a South Africa-led genocide case at the ICJ—topped 60,000. However, multiple peer-reviewed studies in the prestigious British medical journal The Lancet have concluded that Gaza officials' casualty tallies are likely significant undercounts.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked a founding partner of pollster Zenith Research.
A new poll of the New York City mayoral race found that Democratic nominee Zohran Mamdani is very well positioned to win later this year and that former New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo is only competitive in the race if every other Mamdani opponent drops out.
The survey, which was conducted by polling firm Zenith Research, showed Mamdani holding what Zenith founding partner Adam Carlson described on X as a "commanding" lead of 28 points among likely voters in a five-way race featuring Cuomo, incumbent Mayor Eric Adams, Republican Curtis Sliwa, and independent candidate Jim Walden. Even in other scenarios where other candidates drop out of the race, Mamdani would still garner more than 50% of likely votes in each instance.
However, Mamdani's lead becomes much smaller when the poll is expanded to all registered voters, among whom he only holds a three-point advantage over Cuomo in a head-to-head matchup. This suggests that Cuomo has room to grow as long as he can convince Adams, Sliwa, and Walden to exit the race.
Even so, commented Carlson, Cuomo faces significant headwinds that could block his path to victory even if he succeeds somehow in making it a one-on-one race.
"Another thing that’s extremely tough for Cuomo is that 60% of likely voters (as well as 52% of registered voters) would not even consider voting for him," he explained. "Only 32% say they wouldn't consider voting for Mamdani. Cuomo will need to go scorched earth to bring that number up."
New Yorkers who oppose Mamdani will have to place their hopes in the disgraced former governor, given the dismal standing held by incumbent Adams.
"Eric Adams is a complete non-factor in this race," remarked Carlson. "He polls at 7% in the five-way race, 14% if Cuomo drops out, and 32% if Cuomo and Sliwa drop out. More than half of [likely voters] strongly disapprove of his performance and have a very unfavorable view of him. 68% won't consider voting for him."
The poll also found Mamdani with an overall lead among Jewish voters despite efforts by opponents to paint him as antisemitic given his opposition to Israel's war in Gaza and his past reluctance to criticize the slogan "globalize the intifada," which he told The Bulwark he viewed as "a desperate desire for equality and equal rights in standing up for Palestinian human rights." New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, a progressive Jewish ally of Mamdani's who has endorsed his mayoral bid, acknowledged before the election that some Jewish people view the phrase as a threat of violence.
Among likely Jewish voters, Mamdani leads Cuomo by 17 points in a five-way race. Although Cuomo holds a double-digit lead over Mamdani among likely Jewish voters over the age of 45, Mamdani dominates among young Jewish voters by pulling in more than two-thirds of likely Jewish voters between the ages of 18 and 44.