Back in October, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) unveiled the results of a DNA test showing "strong evidence" of a Native American ancestor some six to 10 generations ago, along with a slick campaign-style video, to negate attacks that she had falsely claimed Cherokee and Dakota heritage. Perhaps she thought the orchestrated stunt would achieve what President Barack Obama did in releasing his Hawaii birth certificate, making fools of nasty trolls, Donald Trump in particular, with incontrovertible proof. The result was anything but that.
Instead of vanquishing her critics, Warren added fuel to their fire. Jokes about her fractional Native American ancestry—estimated at anywhere from 1/64th to much lower—abounded. Trump kept on with his racist "Pocahontas" taunts.
More consequentially, Warren drew outrage from Native American leaders. At the end of her "family story" video, she made the distinction between ethnic ancestry and tribal membership. But that would only be clear to close observers. In promoting a DNA test with a renowned Stanford geneticist to substantiate her family's story of tribal heritage, she pushed the conflation of racial category and Native American identity. The Cherokee Nation, whose leaders have defended Warren in the past, issued a sharp rebuke: "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. Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong."
Last week, The New York Times reported that Warren's advisers and allies were concerned about the political fallout from "unintentionally [making] a bigger mistake in treading too far into the fraught area of racial science." Warren had seemingly released the multi-part PR offensive on her ancestry as a ramp-up to a presidential run. Instead, The Washington Post relayed that the controversy was creating "fissures in the tightknit political operation that has guided her throughout her career."
The gaffe was entirely avoidable. Warren had six years to figure out a well-calibrated response, during which she could have, at any point, consulted with Native American groups. The controversy first surfaced all the way back in 2012 during her Senate campaign to unseat then Republican incumbent Scott Brown. The Boston press dug up reports that Harvard Law School was publicizing her as a Native American. At that time, Warren's own team couldn't find a direct-line ancestor to substantiate her family lore, nor could any Cherokee genealogists. That meant she wasn't eligible for any of the three federally recognized Cherokee groups: Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, United Keetowah Band of Cherokee, and Cherokee Nation. In her defense, Warren offered family memories of her maternal grandfather who "had high cheek bones like all of the Indians do." That kind of ham-handed attempt at evidence made by white people for Cherokee heritage has become a running joke on reservations, but coming from a renowned professor, it was given a dangerous appearance of legitimacy. "I'm proud of my Native American heritage," said Warren. "I'm proud of my family."
Warren has not been well aided by supporters and many liberal pundits, who have also either ignored or downplayed many Native Americans' concerns. In the most recent wave of criticism, Nate Silver described the issue as "a minor story treated as a crisis." And The Nation's Katha Pollitt raised a "nobody's perfect" defense, characterizing critics as a "left firing squad" with "a point" but "the least charitable view of a rather more nuanced message." Last July, New York magazine writer-at-large Rebecca Traister profiled Warren in an exultant 7,000-word cover story, "Leader of the Persistence," mentioning Warren's claim of Cherokee heritage—the most enduring controversy of her political career—only in the context of Trump's insult. She didn't include any of the critiques by Native Americans. The cursory mention, which whitewashed Warren's ongoing claim as that of "a young law professor from Oklahoma," was followed by Traister's observation that "Warren's willingness to sink her teeth into the president's ankles has turned out to be a smart tactical move."
As the latest episode has proven: not quite.
In responding to Trump's DNA-test taunts, Warren elevated his bad-faith trolling over Native Americans' legitimate complaints—incorporating clips of Trump in her "family story" video but not, of course, any from tribal members whose heritage she still claims. It was as Kim TallBear, a professor at the University of Alberta and author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, called it: "privileging nonindigenous definitions of being indigenous."
It's not like Warren wasn't warned, either. For years, many Native Americans have laid out their concerns. "Indian identity is not a mythical connection to a long romanticized (and assumed long dead) people," April Youpee-Roll, a member of the Fort Peck Tribes, wrote in 2016 in The Missoula Independent. "It's a conversation that native people are having right now about kinship, family, civic participation and nationhood." That same year, Simon Moya-Smith, a citizen of the Oglala Lakota Nation and editor of Indian Country Today, wrote for CNN that Warren owed Native Americans an apology for avoiding engagement with them, reinforcing "racist Native American stereotypes," and "encouraging the claims of millions of convenient Indians who self-identify as Native American for their own gain." In a scathing 2017 Thinkprogress op-ed, Rebecca Nagle, a member of Cherokee Nation, also called on her to apologize for refusing to meet with a group of Cherokee women at the Democratic National Convention and failing to advance Native American interests in government, among other missteps. Warren did not apologize. But earlier this year, she did appear at the National Congress of American Indians, pledging to advocate for issues that affected them. Still, she has continued to insist that "my family history is my family history." And in her dogged quest to prove her family folklore, she again trampled over the interests of those who actually live in Cherokee communities.
Interestingly enough, Warren burnished her liberal firebrand credentials most recently by raising up the voices of minorities. During the 2017 nomination of Jeff Sessions to attorney general, she read Coretta Scott King's 1986 letter opposing his federal judge nomination for his history on black voting rights. That prompted Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to scold Warren, launching a feminist meme and a line of "nevertheless, she persisted" merchandise. It was more of an effort than she made for the Standing Rock Sioux protests of the Dakota Access Pipeline, on which she stayed silent until after the Army Corps of Engineers announced it would not grant the final easement for the pipeline's construction and there was no longer political capital at stake. Warren's stand on the Senate floor wasn't the only time she wielded a minority cause as a convenient political tool against a white man. On the day her DNA results were released, she tweeted to Trump: "Remember saying on 7/5 that you'd give $1M to a charity of my choice if my DNA showed Native American ancestry? I remember – and here's the verdict. Please send the check to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center."
Among many liberals, the attention paid to minority concerns is in proportion to their political visibility, and Native Americans have had little representation in Congress or elsewhere. In her recent book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women's Anger, Traister, who wrote around the indigenous criticism of Warren in her profile, goes to great lengths to highlight the dynamic of blackness and whiteness, as well as the erasure of black feminists, but not other marginalized groups, like Asians or Native Americans. After all, women can only have revolutionary power if enough of their group are still alive and recognized—I imagine any number of women were enraged along the Trail of Tears. "What is beyond maddening is that, as Native people, we are relegated to being invisible, while Warren is not," wrote Nagle. And that's what it comes down to in the political arena, whether it's rural whites in the Rust Belt or East Coast professors raising their fists: Whose anger is worth hearing out and whose can be ignored?
Had Warren or her liberal supporters taken her Native American critics seriously over the past six years, she could have avoided this debacle altogether. Nevertheless, she persisted.
