A DNA test could put the controversy over her alleged Native American heritage to rest for good… but Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) refuses to take one.
Last week, an editorial in the Massachusetts newspaper Berkshire Eagle called on Warren to take a DNA test, saying that, “All the senator needs to do is spit into a tube, wait a few weeks and get her answer.”
Warren, however, refused to do so, claiming that she wanted to hold onto the stories that her family told her about their Native American heritage.
“My mother and daddy were born and raised in Oklahoma,” Warren said, explaining why she didn’t want a DNA test. “My daddy first saw my mother when they were both teenagers. He fell in love with this tall, quiet girl who played the piano. Head over heels. But his family was bitterly opposed to their relationship because she was part Native American. They eventually eloped.”
She added, “That’s the story that my brothers and I all learned from our mom and our dad, from our grandparents. It’s a part of me and nobody’s going to take that part of me away.”
Warren had been accused of faking a Native American heritage in order to secure a tenure-track professor position at Harvard Law in the 1980s. At a time when Harvard Law was under heavy criticism for not hiring enough female and minority professors, Warren listed herself as Native American. She was then touted heavily by Harvard Law as a “woman of color.”
However, genealogists were unable to identify any of Warren’s ancestors as Native American.
President Trump has drawn increasingly more attention to Warren’s phony heritage, nicknaming her “Pocahontas.” With Warren considered a top 2020 presidential candidate for the Democrats, it’s telling that she still refuses to settle the heritage debate once and for all: possibly because she knows that she made the whole thing up.
