I'm not a Yank, so it's none of my business, Germany has its own ample share of skeletons in the closet, tens of millions of them.
But considering what "you" (= US-Americans with a migratory Caucasian background somewhere in the past, a lot of them ethnic Germans, I'm aware of that) took from North American Indigenous people, a bunch of protected treaty and legal rights for them today have given you on balance one hell of a good deal. Try finding another geographic expanse like North America and, especially, the US of A to take over. In other parts of the world, most Caucasian migrants were eventually evicted from the colonies they conquered, but you guys stayed by sheer numbers and an invasive expansive culture + technology geared toward domination. Tell me when the US is so broke that it can no longer afford special treatment of the few Native Americans "you" have left, I think it will be a while. Until that happens "you" can keep coping with "your" guilt for, say, another 100 or 200 years by granting them a special status that is a much belated pittance of a compensation for what "you" took.
People are so caught up in the here and now that they sometimes miss the historical perspective (not just a US issue I hasten to add). Would have European settlers said "
No, thanks, way too expensive, we're going back home then." if the Indigenous People of North America had welcomed them with the comment "
You're all free to settle here, that's fine, but in a few hundred years down the line, we'll expect some lucrative gambling casino operation licenses in return after you have killed most of us and relegated our culture to a few reservations!"?
Am I being unreasonable?
PS: Re Buffy, I think she certainly created an image of being bio-indigenous (out of a sense of wishing to belong, is that so terrible?) and I don't have a memory of her stating "
According to my birth certificate I'm the biological daughter of my Italian parents, but I always doubted that and believe I was adopted." That would have perhaps been more forthright. A DNA test today could of course answer a lot of questions (last I heard the Cree never invaded Italy), but I understand that at her age and with the activist life she has lived, she perhaps doesn't want that clarity. I respect that. If someone told me today that my daughter or my son weren't co-conceived by me and that I should get a DNA test to prove it, I'd say "
Are you out of your frigging mind, why should I care about that?!" I get uneasy with the DNA obsession some of the "true biological" Native North Americans show in that Canadian TV report show: Do we now have Class A and Class B tribe members? Germany's past of biological race determination throws a long shadow with me. The CBC show tried hard to portray the estranged family as being bullied and victimized, it made me wonder what would have needed to have happened in my family if my daughter now went round telling everyone that she's adopted and a descendant of Vietnamese boat people and whether I would really have the urge to "set the record straight" in public. Whiffs très of sublimation to me - from all sides.
And I don't think anyone of us can form an informed opinion on whether the abuse allegations are fact or fiction. I'd also caution anyone to jump from "
She lied about being Native American." to a convenient "
Then she must have lied about being abused too." All liars sometimes tell the truth. And Dave, that's another thing Chief Sigmund would tell you, having an outward "warm relationship" doesn't rule out prior abuse, people come to terms or cope with, suppress and displace the most horrible things. Just watch this movie sometime, very thought-provoking.
(Without spoiling too much, Laura Dern plays a woman who as a very young teen was sexually groomed and abused by a (not related to her) attractive couple, but she has stored it away as "
I was almost a full-grown woman at that point and wanted it too."-Lolita type incident because she just won't allow herself to be a victim. The movie recounts how in fact she was - visibly - still a child back then and how her sexual encounter was not co-spawned by any budding adolescent sexual inquisitiveness on her part, it was forced on her. The film contrasts how she really looked and acted back then i.e. what really happened with her false memories of it.)
That said, if Buffy was abused as a child by her Caucasian relatives then that might give her motivation to long for a Native American ancestry, but it would not make her any more or any less an "Indian".
PPS: You're not alone, Dave, Edith agrees with you that Buffy's a sham re the assumed ancestry and denying her true own.
