By MJ Lee
At the height of the 2012 campaign, it was reported that Warren had listed herself as having Native American roots at Harvard University. Soon, there was a “full-blown campaign frenzy,” Warren recalls, with Republicans demanding that she prove her Native-American roots and accusing her of getting her job at the elite university by making false claims about her personal background.
Caught off-guard, Warren admits that she “fumbled” when reporters first asked her about the controversy.
Things only got worse when the Brown campaign asked whether her parents had lied to their children about her family. “He attacked my dead parents,” Warren writes. “I was hurt, and I was angry.”
Brown’s allegation that Warren had used her background to get ahead “simply wasn’t true,” she writes. “I was stunned by the attacks.”
Warren devotes a section of her book—called “Native American”—to this controversy, explaining that she had simply grown up learning about her Native American background from her family and that as a kid, she had never questioned her family’s stories or asked for documentation.
“Everyone on our mother’s side—aunts, uncles, and grandparents—talked openly about their Native American ancestry,” she wrote. “My brothers and I grew up on stories about our grandfather building one-room schoolhouses and about our grandparents’ courtship and their early lives together in Indian Territory.”
New book recounts controversy
By Bob McGovern
“What really threw me, though, were the constant attacks from the other side,” Warren wrote, according to Politico.com, which received an advance copy of Warren’s book, “A Fighting Chance,” due to be released April 22.
“I would almost persuade myself that I was starting to get the hang of full-throttle campaigning and then—bam! Out of left field, the state Republican Party, or the Scott Brown campaign, or some blogger, would launch a rocket at me,” Warren wrote.
The Herald first reported that Indian tribes had no record of membership by Warren, and that genealogists were unable to confirm any Native American heritage. It later emerged that Warren had listed herself as a minority in the nation’s leading directory of law professors for a period of a decade as she moved up in academia, and she was ultimately cited by Harvard University as a minority hire.
Facts contradict claims
Cherokee women want to meet Elizabeth Warren on book tour
To get Warren to understand why they are hurt and angry that she assumed, then discarded, Native American identity.
By William A. Jacobson
Barnes is the Cherokee Genealogist whose groundbreaking genealogical research exposed the falsehood to Warren’s claims. Barnes and her team of Cherokee genealogists traced Warren’s family lines back to the early 1800s and documented that Warren’s family not only was not Cherokee or other Native American, but also that they never lived as such.
By Michael Patrick Leahy
As far back as 1986, while she was still a professor at the University of Texas Law School, Senator Warren consciously requested special treatment by falsely self-identifying as a "Minority Law Teacher." Her request for special treatment began with information she provided that was published in the 1986-1987 Association of American Law Schools (AALS) Directory of Faculty.
Breitbart's Pollak reported in May 2012 that despite Senator Warren's claim she wanted to "meet other people with tribal roots," she never attended or participated in a single event sponsored by Harvard University's Native American Program (HUNAP) at Harvard Law School before or after she landed a job there.
Well, so were the feelings of the Natives who tried to interview her, to get her to talk about the controversy. She refused every overture to explain her alleged Cherokee ancestry. So no one should feel sorry for her.
Apparently she wrote an entire chapter on the subject, but literally said nothing new. She was simply repeating her family stories, she says again, with no curiosity about whether they were true or not. One has to wonder if someone this thoughtless has the right temperament to be senator...or president.
It's extremely well-known throughout Indian country that people claim Cherokee ancestry with little or no evidence. But Warren the "Native" is as naive and ignorant as a child about this problem. Like every Indian wannabe of the last century, she never considered genealogy or DNA to verify her claims. She was happy just "playing Indian."
But that's not the only issue. She didn't just acknowledge her alleged Native roots. She actively claimed to be Native for decades. She used it in her professional career.
You normally can't do that unless you're enrolled in a tribe. If you're not enrolled, perhaps you can do it if you're substantially Native by blood--e.g., one-fourth or more. Neither of these conditions applies to Warren.
So why did she claim to be not merely of Native heritage, but flat-out Native? And why has she stopped making the claim? Why isn't she proudly declaring herself Native at every opportunity if she is, indeed, proud of being Native?
These are the type of questions Warren can't or won't answer. And that's why critics won't let her get away with her flimsy claims.
For more on Elizabeth Warren, see Delaune: Politicans Ignore Native Concerns and My Thoughts on Brown vs. Warren.
(Apologies for whoever misspelled "determined" in this image.)
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