Elizabeth Warren’s claim to be Native American is an issue that just won’t go away.
It dogged her during the 2012 Senate run, but she was able to deflect the issue through the help of supportive media and reliance on supposed “family lore,” Some of that “lore” was downright laughable, like the “high cheekbones” story which itself was questionable.
Much of the “lore,” or as much as was capable of being fact checked considering it was based on several decades-old stories, also was questionable.
Warren turns questioning of her story into an attack on her family, as a way of shutting down inquiry.
There is no evidence that Warren meets either part of the two-part test for claiming Native American status: Actual ancestry plus affiliation with a Native American tribe or otherwise living as a Native American. That’s the test used by two of Warren’s former employers, U. Penn and Harvard, as well as federal agencies.
Genealogical research by Cherokee researchers could not find any evidence that Warren had Native American ancestry, and Warren never claimed to have affliated with a tribe. The family lore stories have been largely debunked, though it is possible what there were some family rumors as there were for many families in Oklahoma.
Very few people understand just how Warren claimed to be Native American, and why. The full version is summarized at ElizabethWarrenWiki.org, the website at which we accumulated all the research we did on Warren during the 2012 campaign. (Note: Her self-narrative has problems beyond the Native American issue — read, for example, about how she represented major corporations against the interests of consumers.)
The short version is that Warren never claimed Native American status until she was in her 30s, and climbing the law professor ladder.
In the 1980s, Warren listed her status as Native American when entering her biographical information in the national law professor directory that was used for hiring purposes by law schools. There was no internet then, and the paper directory was the source for information about prospective law professor hires. Entering herself as Native American landed Warren on a short list of “Minority Law Teachers” in the directory.
Why would Warren do such a thing?
When this was expose during the 2012 campaign, Warren said that she wanted to meet other law professors who were Native American like her, maybe have lunch with them. The problem is that no one reading the directory would know she claimed to be Native American; that specific status was not listed, only that she was a “Minority Law Teacher.” So she could not possible meet other Native American law teachers through her listing.
Warren claims that she never told anyone at Harvard Law that she was Native American, but when she was a visiting professor at Harvard Law in the early 1990s she somehow ended up on a list of “Women of Color in Legal Academia.”
Soon after permanent hiring, Harvard Law touted her Native American status. Warren claimed when the Boston Herald exposed Harvard Law’s position not to know why she was promoted that way.
Did Warren get the Harvard Law job because she claimed to be Native American?
We don’t know, neither she nor Harvard Law have released her hiring file. But that’s not really the pertinent question. What we do know is that she tried to benefit from the claim, so at minimum there was an attempt to exploit that false claim.
Warren appears to the taking on the role of official Democratic attack dog on Trump. She has launched into Trump-like Twitter tirades against Trump recently. There is speculation that Hillary will make Warren her running mate to energized the Sanders’ supporters and because Warren is so good when in attack mode.
Trump responded tonight by raising the Native American issue again with typical bluntness.
Donald Trump is right about Warren on the Native American issue. It’s her weakness when portraying others as frauds.
Expect the media to cover for Warren again on her ethnic fraud. Liberal media types already are doing so.
But it may not work this time.
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