The media has attacked President Donald Trump for calling Sen. Elizabeth Warren “Pocahontas” and has said little of the many lies Sen. Warren has told about her “Cherokee” heritage.
Various media members and Warren herself have feigned offense at the “racial slur,” but the real offense is in Warren faking her ancestry to get ahead professionally and politically.
Legal Insurrection created a Wiki page documenting the full saga that followed the discovery of Warren’s “heritage,” and the story is absolutely insane.
In 1996, a Harvard Crimson article referred to Warren as Native American. Warren claimed that she had no idea why the school was labeling her as such and that it never came up during the hiring process. Then, in 1997, a Fordham Law Review article described her as Harvard Law’s “first woman of color,” based on a “telephone interview with Michael Chmura, News Director, Harvard Law.”
Warren later acknowledged that Harvard had singled her out as a Native American professor because she identified herself as a minority in an Association of American Law Schools directory from 1986-1994. She stopped listing herself as such when she gained tenure at Harvard.
Warren claimed that she checked herself off as a Native American in the hopes of meeting other people like herself, and had no intentions of using it to boost her employment options.
“That was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off,” said Warren, chalking up her Native American history to family lore. “These are my family stories, I have lived in a family that has talked about Native Americans and talked about tribes since I was a little girl.
However, this explanation doesn’t make sense because the AALS directory only listed her as a “minority” and not as a “Native American.”
Reporters later uncovered that Warren identified herself as Native American to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard for federal reporting purposes. Both schools made federal filings based on Warren’s claim, even though she admitted she did not have the documentation to prove her ancestry.
A group of Cherokee genealogists decided to do a thorough investigation of Warren’s family tree to settle the matter once and for all. They researched her entire family line and were unable to find ancestors that were identified as anything other than white, including Warren’s mother and Aunt Bea. Their investigation went all the way back to before the Trail of Tears.
Nonetheless, Warren claimed in a television interview that her parents had to elope because of her mother’s Cherokee and Delaware ancestry. She said it was “an issue” throughout her childhood and that the issue was raised at her mother’s funeral.
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Not only was Warren’s mother listed as “white” on her death certificate, but there were a number of marriage announcements for her parents in local papers, suggesting they did not elope as Warren claimed.
Warren’s next dubious piece of “proof” is that her Aunt Bea would point to her family members having “high cheekbones like all of the Indians do.”
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Besides the odd assertion that “high cheekbones” can prove that someone is Native American, Aunt Bea was also identified as “white” on her death certificate.
In another interview, Warren asserted that she had photos around her house proving her ancestry, but would not show them to reporters.
“I have plenty of pictures–they’re not for you,” she said.
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Warren’s ridiculous claims about her heritage became a flashpoint in her Massachusetts senatorial campaign, and a number of Cherokees slammed her for trying to co-opt their heritage. Here’s a Cherokee genealogist striking down Warren’s so-called “ancestry.”
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Let’s not forget that Warren also contributed five recipes to a “Pow Wow Chow” cookbook in 1984, but at least two of the recipes appeared to be plagiarized. The New York Times story in 1979 indicated that the recipes originated from Le Pavilion, a French restaurant in Manhattan.
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