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In the past (perhaps during her Senate campaign), Senator Elizabeth Warren has mentioned that she has some Native American blood in her geneology. For some reason, Donald Trump has accused her of lying about this, and he's also made fun of her by calling her "Pocahontas". It seems reminiscent of the way he championed the "birther" movement that claimed President Barack Obama was not actually born in the US, and demanded to see his birth certificate.

At a rally earlier this year he challenged her to prove it, saying he would donate $1 millon to her favorite charity. Today she released results of a DNA analysis that showed a strong likelihood that an ancestor 6-10 generations ago was Native American, and gave the name of a charity Trump should give the millon dollars to. Trump is now disputing that he ever made that offer (even though the media has been playing the tape of it all day), and other Republicans are saying that it's a really small fraction of her lineage (did she say otherwise?).

Why does any of this matter? As far as I can recall, she doesn't refer to this much when discussing legislative policy. What point was she trying to make when she claimed Native American heritage? Are her opponents just trying to catch her in a lie, that she falsely claimed Native American ancestry to try to garner support from that constituency? Or is there more significance to it than that?

Senator Warren has given some indications that she might consider a run for the Presidency in 2020. I'd hate to think that something trivial like this could derail such ambitions.

What point was she trying to make when she claimed Native American heritage?

There's a few things to consider here

1. Native Americans are a pretty well defined minority group, complete with an actual culture. Warren either sold herself, or heavily implied, that she was a minority, despite the fact that she was clearly not a member of that minority. She has never done anything culturally with Native Americans, nor did her parents live as Native Americans.



2. 
   

   Warren has been inconsistent on why she did it and how much she knew. In 2012, while running for Senate, she said she did it to "find people like her". She was listed as a minority for most of her Harvard tenure

   
   
   

   
   

   US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren said on Wednesday that she listed herself as a minority in directories of law professors in the hopes of networking with other “people like me” — meaning those with Native American roots.
   Asked whether she considers herself to be a minority, the Democrat said, “Native American is part of my family. It’s an important part of my heritage.”

   
   
   

   Last week, Warren said she had no idea that Harvard was touting her as a minority in the 1990s. But two days later, she acknowledged that for years before she joined the faculty at Harvard, she had been classifying herself as a minority professor in a directory of the Association of American Law Schools.
   That directory included Warren on a list of minority professors from 1986 through 1995.

   
   

   
   
   

   She then claimed "high cheekbones" as proof of her claim

   
   
   

   
   

   "I have lived in a family that has talked about Native Americans, talked about tribes since I had been a little girl," she said. "I still have a picture on my mantel and it is a picture my mother had before that - a picture of my grandfather. And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a 1,000 times remarked that he - her father, my Papaw -- had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do. Because that is how she saw it and your mother got those same great cheek bones and I didn't. She that thought was the bad deal she had gotten in life."

   
   

   
   
   

   More recently she has claimed that her parents had to elope because her mother was "too Cherokee" (a claim that seems less likely in light of the distant relationship from her test)

   
   
   

   
   

   My mom and dad were very much in love and they wanted to get married. And my father’s parents said, ‘Absolutely not, you can’t marry her, because she’s part Cherokee and part Delaware.’ After fighting it as long as they could, my parents went off, and they eloped. It was an issue in our family the whole time I grew up about these two families. It was an issue still raised at my mother’s funeral.

   
   

   
   


3. 
   

   Warren submitted several recipes for a cookbook entitled "Pow Wow Chow" that appear to have been plagiarized, and from non-Native American sources

   
   
   

   
   

   The 1984 cookbook Pow Wow Chow was edited by Mrs Warren's cousin Candy Rowsey and is billed as a collection of recipes from the Five Civilized Tribes.

   
   
   

   But it appears that at least three of the five recipes featured in the book were fakes, according to an investigation by Mr Carr.

   
   

   
   


4. 
   

   Harvard touted Warren as a minority professor as a way to blunt criticism that the faculty was not diverse (emphasis mine)

   
   
   

   
   

   "The fact that there never have been Asian Americans, Native Americans, gays, lesbians, Latinos, Latinas and women of color [on the faculty] is a subject of major concern," said Wilkins, who is black.

   
   
   

   Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said Professor of Law Elizabeth Warren is Native American.

   
   

   
   

Why does any of this matter?

The problem, ultimately, is that Warren clearly derived some social benefit from the claims she made. Warren is basically a white woman, but by claiming to be a minority woman she could raise her social standing among her peers by being touted as some sort of ceiling breaker (i.e. being viewed as a a Harvard version of Rosa Parks), instead of a woman with white privilege.

While the test does indicate that she indeed has a Native American ancestor, the test does not make her a part of any Native American tribe, which is what the box is meant to indicate. It raises questions about Warren's credibility. Consider that she may be facing off, in the Democratic primaries, against Corey Booker and/or Kamala Harris in 2020 (both are black). It's easy to assume they would want to question her about being labeled a "woman of color".

Politically, it is a very fruitful issue for those who wish to have the most bang for their attack-ad dollar.

The fact is, she checked Native American in addition to White in some post-hire Harvard survey to determine if their staff met diversity goals. While we can only guess at her motivation, the fact that it was done post-hire suggests it was not done for personal gain, but in a (possibly ill-advised) attempt at 'helping'. "Hey, my family has always claimed a Cherokee/Delaware ancestor! Harvard needs to meet its diversity quotas. I'm not lying if I check this box."

This by itself would not be a political problem but for the fact that she waffled on her acceptance of the mantle of 'Native American'. In political parlance, to refuse to embrace all aspects of one's (uncontroversial) heritage (especially mixed-heritage) is a show of weakness or intolerance. As her Senate opponent Scott Brown vowed not to accept Super PAC ads directly, the Scott-aligned Super PAC America 360 seized on this show of weakness and passed a tip to the Boston Herald that Warren's background was a bit confused on her status as a minority, thus skirting the ban.

This created an issue for Warren, a white woman from the very liberal state of Massachusetts:

1. She could disavow the fact that she checked a box in the 80s and risk offending Native Americans.




2. She could trump up her Native American heritage with no proof but hearsay from her grandparents and thus risk being proven wrong, risk the Native community's rejection as a cheap political ploy, AND risk liberal white Massachusetts voters thinking she's trying too hard.




3. Ignore the problem and hope it goes away.

These are the sorts of conundrums that attack ad people absolutely love: a problem with no good solution. She chose to waffle between choice 2 and 3, making what would have otherwise been a slam dunk campaign into a real nail-biter.

Trump has a real knack for seizing at other people's perceived weaknesses and playing them up into a whole persona, so when Warren started attacking Trump during the 2016 primaries, it didn't take him long to come up with the nickname of Pocahontas.

In 2018 America is multiracial ancestral cherry-picking a big deal?

Ancestry inevitably provides DNA.

Parents, guardians or caretakers generally provide various customs, skills, habits, ideas, languages, creeds, religions, and social bonds; also parents may additionally provide some legacy of owned resources, (be it capital, property, reputation, etc.), which resources may themselves oblige certain duties, responsibilities, tasks, missions, attitudes, customs, and burdens.

By some narrow usages Heritage has no overlap with Ancestry, and by other broader usages Heritage encompasses Ancestry. Harvard Law School and Warren favor the inclusive usage, Trump favors the exclusive usage.

In nations with less genetic variety ancestry and heritage are usually quite compatible, but America has both greater genetic variety and an ignorant and often malevolent history of racism. Historically, an exclusive distinction between ancestry and heritage could be of obsessive importance -- DNA dictated whether a person could own things, go into business and become a capitalist, or whether a person could own nothing and legally be unmade into nothing but capital.

Prior to the 20th century patronizing American schools worked to acculturate and "Americanize" Native children, a process very destructive to Native heritage. Mixed ancestry in of itself can interfere with familial heritage on all sides. The innocent child of two adversarial groups can be disinherited by both sides who each indirectly blame the child for the misdeeds the other side. Bereft of ancestral cultural heritage, such children make their way by adopting various substitutes for extended families, usually some combination of religious, civic, political, scholastic, sport, professional, or hobbyist. With sufficient substitutes they can even flourish, but as somewhat alienated adults may be prone to peculiar and sentimental notions about their identity.

Answer: No, because in 2018 American racists are a weakening minority. A candidate's ancestral cherry-picking might be eccentric, disingenuous, or annoying, but it's less obnoxious to exaggerate one's ancestry than it would be to exaggerate present capital to imply business acumen, or to understate inherited capital to the IRS.

Are her opponents just trying to catch her in a lie, that she falsely claimed Native American ancestry to try to garner support from that constituency?

No. The claim is that she did so to get better employment opportunities, not for political reasons. Her claim was made well before she entered politics. In addition, there are very few Cherokee in Massachusetts. Voters are generally white, not Native American. And those who are Native American, would generally be from other tribes.

It is an impactful claim because as a Democrat, she is reliant on votes from people who do expect to benefit from employment opportunities offered to people disadvantaged by their racial or ethnic background. Elizabeth Warren already enjoys the "privilege" of being white. She is not disadvantaged by her racial status. As such, if she used false claims about her race to gain employment advantage, she, a person of privilege, did so over others who were disadvantaged.

And there is just the silliness of it. She's obviously white. On average, her share of Native American DNA is lower than that of the typical American. I.e. she is less Native American (even assuming the genetics hold up under a less partisan review) than average. Yet she actually claimed to be Cherokee and thus providing diversity at colleges where she worked. She was listed as a minority employee.

If she's willing to lie for so trivial an advantage, what other lies has she or will she tell?

And if you think that this result proves her claim true, note that her original claim was that she was 1/32nd Native American. That is clearly disproved by the results. The liberal reviewer that she found was only willing to say that it is possible for her to be 1/64th to 1/1024th. This means that the relative that she claimed was a full-blooded Native American was not.

And while there has been a trend to replace Indian with Native American, I hardly see one as better than the other. America is a name given after an Italian explorer. It has nothing to do with the people who were here prior to that. It is no more legitimate a name than Indian, given by another Italian explorer. As a general rule, these are people who identified by tribe not continent.