The Elizabeth “Pocahontas” Warren meme will never die, in part because Warren and her allies won’t let it. In a new fact-check piece, The Washington Post’s Glenn Kessler again tries to make the case that Warren really is as Native American as she claims, and to do so he declares that “just about everything you’ve read” on her much-maligned DNA test is “wrong.”
On Monday, The Boston Globe published a report that was part of Warren’s media blitz containing information provided by the senator that offers “strong evidence” that she was not using false claims of Native blood to get ahead in academia:
Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented move by one of the top possible contenders for the 2020 Democratic nomination for president. …
[Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship] concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamente calculates that Warren probably has a pure Native American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago,” which the Globe calculated (after an initial incorrect calculation) likely made her anywhere from 1/64th to 1/1,024th Native American. The result was wide public mocking of Warren for the media blitz backfire.
But Kessler says everyone’s got the math wrong because “ancestors do not contribute genetic material equally over time.”
“Some ancestors contribute a lot — while others nothing at all,” he writes. “In other words, as you go back in time, the number of your ancestors keeps increasing but not nearly as fast as the number of genealogical ancestors. Look closely at the sixth generation, and you will see some strong contributors of genetic material — and many weak ones.”
In other words, all the talk of Warren having less genetic relationship to Native Americans than the average American is false, Kessler says:
This basic error in understanding the test results was compounded by the RNC’s reference to the 2014 New York Times article, which was about a genetic profile of the United States, based on a study of 160,000 people drawn from the customer base of 23andMe, a consumer personal genetics company. With reporters believing that Warren’s genome was only as much as 1.56 percent Native American, the article’s line that “European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American” made it appear as if Warren’s sample was even smaller than that of the average American.
Not so. Remember we said that the Bustamante study said she had 10 times more than the individuals from Utah? That’s the relevant statistic, indicating that her claim to some Native American heritage is much stronger than most European Americans.
In other words, Warren is (probably) more Native American than the average American. Most likely.
So, if she does potentially have more than 1/64th Native American blood, does this mean she had a right to be described as Harvard’s first “woman of color“? We’d better leave that up to the Intersectionality crowd to hammer out.
In an interview with the Globe following the massive backlash to her DNA test, including from the Cherokee Nation, Warren said she wishes she “had been more mindful” of making the distinction between ancestry and citizenship. “The tribes and only the tribes determine citizenship,” she said. “It’s their right as a matter of sovereignty, and they exercise that in the ways they choose to exercise it. I respect that distinction.”
Her comments follow a searing rebuke by Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr., who slammed Warren for “undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
“Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong,” said Hoskins. “It makes a mockery out of DNA tests and its legitimate uses while also dishonoring legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”
Related: Elizabeth Warren Tries Once Again To Explain Her Claim To Be Native American — And It’s Hilarious