Liawatha not an Indian. Just a racist.
Liz Warren's entire life is a fraud. Of course the Boston Globe held the article until a Friday night.
https://www.bostonglobe.com/news/nation/2018/01/19/elizabeth-warren-native-american-problem-goes-beyond-politics/uK9pGOl4JBmqmRUcxTNj3H/story.html
Elizabeth Warren’s Native American problem goes beyond politics
WASHINGTON — There’s a ghost haunting Elizabeth Warren as she ramps up for a possible 2020 presidential bid and a reelection campaign in Massachusetts this year: her enduring and undocumented claims of Native American ancestry.
Warren says now, as she has from the first days of her public life, that she based her assertions on family lore, on her reasonable trust in what she was told about her ancestry as a child.
“I know who I am,” she said in a recent interview with the Globe.
But that self-awareness may not be enough, as her political ambitions blossom. She’s taken flak from the right for years as a “fake Indian,” including taunts from President Trump, who derisively calls her “Pocahontas.’’ That clamor from the right will only grow with her increasing prominence.
And, more telling, there’s also discomfort on the left and among some tribal leaders and activists that Warren has a political blind spot when it comes to the murkiness surrounding her story of her heritage, which blew up as an issue in her victorious 2012 Massachusetts Senate race. In recent months, Daily Show host Trevor Noahmockedher for claiming Native American ancestry and the liberal website ThinkProgress published a scathing criticism of her by a Cherokee activist who said she should apologize.
As Warren is mentioned as a serious presidential contender in 2020, even some who should be her natural allies say Warren has displayed a stubborn unwillingness to address the gap between the story she was told of Native Americans in the family tree and a dearth of hard evidence to back it up.
It’s a disconnect that has lingered unresolved in the public sphere for more than five years.
Warren says she grew up understanding that forebears in her mother’s family had Cherokee and Delaware blood. But examinations by genealogists of documents including birth, marriage, and death records have shown no conclusive proof of Native American ancestry.
While it may be easy to dismiss Trump’s continued Twitter attacks as bigotry, which has been Warren’s response thus far, the view of her more sympathetic critics is that she is leaving herself vulnerable by not clearing the air in a definitive way. Their fear is that the issue could act as a drag on her profile as she considers whether to seek the Democratic nomination for president.
If Warren seeks to tackle the issue, there are no easy options. Some tribe members want her to apologize to Native Americans for claiming heritage without solid evidence. Tribes across America have spent centuries denouncing whites who claim Indian DNA without a clear basis, claims they find deeply offensive.
Another path includes pursuing stronger outreach to the tribes with whom she claims to share kinship, a strategy that she’s begun to employ. This too is fraught, as some Native American leaders are resentful that she’s done, in their estimation, little to help tribes as a powerful senator.
“She’s not part of the Cherokee community,” said Chad Smith, who was the principal chief of the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation from 1999 to 2011. “She hasn’t reached out. She hasn’t come here and participated much.”
“The mark of value in claiming heritage is: Do you use your position to give back?” Smith said. “If it is a claim that is valuable to her, she should be helping Indian country. She might be doing it with the overall agenda. But unless she’s contributing back, it is a somewhat hollow claim.”
Other Native Americans do give her credit for engaging on issues in Washington that benefit tribal members, even if the measures have been fairly low-profile and not entirely targeted at Native Americans. That includes a proposal she’s backed to allowing post offices to offer some financial services — an idea aimed generally at helping rural communities that could also be beneficial to tribes.
Warren declined to say if she would consider saying she’s sorry to Native communities, or otherwise address this lingering issue.
“My three brothers and I learned about our family heritage back in Oklahoma the way everyone does,” Warren said in a brief phone interview from storm-ravaged Puerto Rico, where she led a delegation of Massachusetts lawmakers this month. “From our aunts, our uncles, and our grandparents. I never asked for any benefit from it and I never got any benefit from it.”
Warren disputed the notion that she’s been absent on Native American issues, saying that she’s forged relationships with tribal leaders from Massachusetts and elsewhere including meeting with the current chief of the Cherokee Nation.
She’s pointed to her work ensuring that data is collected to monitor education in Native schools, and she notes her efforts in combating opioid abuse, a particular scourge among Native Americans.
“I work on these issues,” said Warren. “I meet with tribal leaders. I attend events. I speak. I’ve appreciated the opportunity to speak out. And I’ve tried to be helpful.”
Still, highlighting such relationships can be awkward for Warren, given the avalanche of criticism she endures when questions about her heritage arise. But just as Barack Obama had to deal with claims that he wasn’t born in America and Mitt Romney felt he had to address, in a major speech, questions about his Mormon faith, observers believe that Warren is going to have to find a way to defuse the issue before it gains traction in presidential swing states.
“She’s saddled with it,” said Jeff Berry, a political science professor at Tufts University who has closely followed her rise.
He predicted that, if she runs for president, her claims to Native American heritage will be picked over on conservative websites and the issue will bubble over into questions at her news conferences.
“From a strategic perspective, taking the live step of taking responsibility and an apology, even while noting that it was not her intention to harm anyone, is important,” said Tom Bonier, CEO of the Democratic polling firm TargetSmart. “Will that change votes? I don’t think that doing so will lose her votes.”