After claiming for nearly 40 years that she was Native American, Sen. Elizabeth Warren decided to take a DNA to prove it.
That didn’t work out so well.
In October 2018, shortly before she entered the race for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, Warren released the results. They showed she may have had an American Indian ancestor — six to 10 generations ago. That means she’s anywhere from 1/64 to 1/1,024 American Indian. To put those terms into percentages, that means she’s between 1.562 percent and .0924 percent Native American. So that means she’s anywhere from 98.437 percent to 99.9 percent white.
That’s pretty white.
But Warren said the results proved her case, and the mainstream media went along with her. After the DNA results were released, CNN posted a story headlined, “Elizabeth Warren releases DNA test with ‘strong evidence’ of Native American ancestry.” The Daily Beast’s headline called it a big win with a story headlined, “Elizabeth Warren Fights Trump’s ‘Pocahontas’ Taunt With DNA Test Proving Native-American Roots.”
Now, though, Warren must be having second thoughts. She’s deleted the DNA results from her campaign website, which had been posted until Sunday.
“CNN reported Sunday that the campaign planned to scrub sections of Warren’s website dealing with her heritage as part of a reboot of her campaign. The change appears to have been made by Monday, though the content remains viewable on the Internet Wayback Machine,” the Daily Caller reported.
Warren has been cashing in on the Native American claim for years. She listed herself as Native in the Association of American Law School Directory, and according to The Boston Globe, she “had her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at Harvard University Law School, where she was a tenured faculty member starting in 1995.”
Some critics — including President Trump — say she got the Harvard slot by claiming to be American Indian. “Harvard Law School in the 1990s touted Warren, then a professor in Cambridge, as being Native American,’” CNN reported last November. “They singled her out, Warren later acknowledged, because she had listed herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory.”
A 1997 Fordham Law Review article identified the Democrat as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color.” Warren even submitted recipes to an American Indian cookbook called “Pow Wow Chow,” which was released in 1984 by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee, Oklahoma. She signed her entries “Elizabeth Warren — Cherokee.”
Trump has hammered her over her claims that she is Native American, dubbing her “Pocahontas.”
“She said she was Indian,” Trump said at his rally in Cincinnati last month. “And I said that I have more Indian blood than she does, and I have none. I’m sorry.”
“And we drove her crazy. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And she went out and she had a blood test done and it came out 1/1024th. He says somewhere back there hundreds of years ago there may have been an Indian — or it may have been a statistical error ‘cuz it was so small,” the president said.
“Everything she did was a fraud,” Trump said. “She got into colleges, she got teaching jobs, she said she was of Indian heritage, it turns out to be a lie. So Elizabeth Warren really has a big lack of credibility,” he said.
