Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., couldn’t possibly have thought this week would end with her apologizing to the Cherokee Nation. But at the rate things are going, that’s exactly what she’ll have to do to get out of the mess that she has created for herself.
The Massachusetts senator kicked off Monday by sharing the results of a DNA test she and her fans in the news media say vindicates her from criticisms that she tried to benefit undeservedly from claiming minority status when she taught at Harvard Law School. Warren has claimed for years that she is of Cherokee Indian descent.
However, the DNA report shows that Warren is maybe six or 10 generations removed from having any ties to the Native American ancestry, if she has any at all. Depending on whether her great-great-great-great-grandmother was indeed a Native American, which neither the report nor Warren can say, the senator would be 1/64th Native American. But she could just as easily be 1/1,024th Native American. Then there’s the problem that the study wasn’t based on Native American DNA from within the United States, but on Mexican, Peruvian, and Colombian DNA.
In other words, Warren’s claim to Cherokee heritage is, uh, thin, to put it politely. It’s so thin, in fact, that the actual Cherokee Nation released a statement Monday, nuking Warren’s supposedly vindicating report from orbit.
“A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person’s ancestors were indigenous to North or South America. Sovereign tribal nations set their own legal requirements for citizenship, and while DNA tests can be used to determine lineage, such as paternity to an individual, it is not evidence for tribal affiliation,” said Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr.
His statement added, “Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong. It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven. Sen. Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
And to think that this day began with Warren attempting to dunk on President Trump with the results of her DNA test.
The senator’s report is a massive self-own. By putting numbers to her ancestral claims, and by revealing just how thin her ties to the Cherokee Nation really are, the senator has shined a blinding spotlight on the absurdity of a mess that is 100 percent of her own making. There is no scenario where the fact that she was referred to as Harvard Law School’s ” first woman of color” or the fact that she described herself as a ” minority” for several years on a law professors’ listingdo not feel like cruel jokes, especially considering that the best she can say is that she is maybe — maybe! — 1/64th Native American.
The test retroactively raises serious questions about why Warren’s two former employers, Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania, listed her as “Native American” on federal forms. The report also casts well-deserved doubt on the senator’s oft-repeated claim that her parents were forced to elope because her supposedly Cherokee mother was ostracized by her father’s family.