Thursday, May 30, 2013

Pow Wow Chow

They want the "Redskins" to lose their name, but Elizabeth Warren, who is not even Native American, can write (actually, plagiarize) a book called "Pow Wow Chow" and that's okay?

Some background, in an email from WH:

Elizabeth Warren, the queen of the notional proposition, wrote a book entitled Pow Wow Chow. 

It was much later pointed out that the book was plagiarized. Basically no one ever read the book and those that did read it at its face value [recipe book]. 

However, when Warren was running for the senate she made a big deal of being of native American ancestry. The claim of native American ancestry lead people to investigate the claim. The investigation spider webbed into all kinds of nooks and crannies once it was determined her claim was dubious and that she had parleyed her claim into obtaining crony type benefits over her career. 

The aggregate investigation by reporters and plain old regular folks lead to the uncovering of Pow Wow Chow as plagiarized. The plagiarizing is old news. But the Amazon book reviews are little known. Huh? Given the above, the book Pow Wow Chow is sold on Amazon. Over the years only a handful of reviews existed. Once the whole native American ancestry deal was exposed and the book having been plagiarized, people started visiting the book's site on Amazon and writing additional comments. Some of the "new" comments [note the proliferation in 2012] are absolutely hysterical! 

 I'm not so sure about the "plagiarism" thing.  After all, these are recipes.  Maybe she should have made a little more effort to change things up, but recipes are rarely original.

The title "Pow Wow Chow," on the other hand:  Wow! She can only get away with that because she's a real Native American.  Oh...wait.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

This is comical stuff... If you go to a redskins home game, you will find various protest groups picketing the naming of the team. These groups are largely made up of white people. Most Native Americans if asked about it (or Alt. Braves, or Clv Indians, or, or, or...) either don't care or actually have a sense of pride about it. They very rarely find it to be in poor taste or worse.

Anonymous said...

Regarding "I'm not so sure about the plagiarism thing"... I got curious and found a nice side-by-side comparison here:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2146628/Elizabeth-Warrens-Pow-Wow-Chow-Cherokee-recipes-word-word-COPIES-famous-FRENCH-chefs-techniques.html

The directions for "Cold Omelets with Crab Meat" consist of about 17 sentences over 3 paragraphs, and the only difference is one or two "the"s. Same deal on "Crab with Tomato Mayonnaise Dressing".

Go ahead, you can feel OK about calling it "plagiarism" now I'd say.

Michael said...

I'm not a fan of Elizabeth Warren, but as a reporter in Massachusetts I need to correct the facts here. She isn't the one who made a big deal of her 1/32nd American Indian heritage.

It came out that she was counted as a diversity faculty member at Harvard and had written it on application forms to the school.

Opponent Scott Brown's campaign made this the centerpiece of their negative ads (probably because she had never held office before and had no record to criticize) as a reflection of her character. The Liz Warren response was to say she was being "attacked" for her Native American heritage.

Fauxcahontas never made this the focus of her campaign.