WASHINGTON—President Donald Trump has been denounced by Native American leaders for calling Democratic Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas.”He just did it again — at an event honouring Native American war heroes.Trump held a White House ceremony on Monday to celebrate Native American “code talkers,” who used their languages to transmit secret messages during the Second World War. Fewer than two dozen code talkers are believed to be still alive.After complimenting the code talkers, Trump said, “You were here long before any of us were here. Although we have a representative in Congress who they say was here a long time ago. They call her Pocahontas.”Pocahontas is a famous Native figure from the 17th century. Trump has regularly used her name to describe Warren to mock the Massachusetts senator’s claim of partial Native ancestry, for which she does not have hard proof. Many Natives and many others see the term as a racist slur. “It is deeply unfortunate that the president of the United States cannot even make it through a ceremony honouring these heroes without having to throw out a racial slur,” Warren told MSNBC. “Donald Trump does this over and over thinking somehow he is gonna shut me up with this. It hadn’t worked in the past, it is not gonna work in the future.”“I think he definitely says it as a slur,” Jacqueline Pata, executive director of the National Congress of American Indians, told the New York Times in June. “No matter how he feels about Elizabeth Warren, to throw that out there is disrespectful to real Native Americans.”Trump has regularly offended minority groups with comments that have ranged from insensitive to plain bigoted. Last week, he angered Black Americans, again, by accusing LaVar Ball, of being an “ungrateful fool” for declining to praise him for his claimed role in freeing Ball’s son from China after a shoplifting ...
|