This is not an opinion, it’s a clear message to Donald Trump to stop name-calling against Native American women. We all know from Access Hollywood he bragged about his sexual assaults and sexual harassment of women. Now he supports a child pedophile who is running for the U.S. Senate seat in Alabama.
Name calling by using “Pocahontas” against another Native American, Sen. Elizabeth Warren. No matter how much blood quantum, you are still considered Native by our way of life and beliefs.
What Trump did was disgraceful when honoring our American Navajo code talkers by insulting one our Native peoples who just happens to be a senator.
My Tlingit great-grandmother, my Tlingit grandmother, my Tlingit and Japanese mother grew up in that kind of environment; they witnessed and experienced first-hand the bigotry, the prejudice, within our own communities because they were different and spoke a different language. The Alaskan Natives, and the American Indians were brutally punished for speaking their native tongues and were beaten, abused in schools that were controlled by Christian missionaries of various denominations in the early 19th and early 20th centuries.
Now you have the President of the United States just called a Native American woman Pocahontas, who just happens to be an outspoken U.S. Senator in such a disdain disrespect contempt mannerism. By name-calling a person in a disdainful prejudicial, bigoted way, he also is calling all of us a name too.
Leimomi Martin,
Juneau
• My Turns and Letters to the Editor represent the view of the author, not the view of the Juneau Empire.