Elizabeth Warren announced the result of a DNA test that showed she has Native American ancestry.
The press has magnified the significance of this finding. The test showed that she seemed to have one Native American ancestor eight generations ago! That would about about the time of the Revolutionary War. It may have been as far back as ten generations, which takes us back to the very founding of San Antonio and New Orleans. If she could just get it back maybe three more generations, she might be a descendant of the REAL Pocahontas!
Exaggeration aside, Trump did say, “I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian … we’ll see what she does.”
Warren tweeted Monday morning that Trump could “send the check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.”
Trump said Monday that he “didn’t say” he would pay Warren $1 million for showing her test results. “I didn’t say that. You better read it again.”
Trump is correct in not paying up. The test doesn’t “show she’s an Indian,” and that’s exactly what he said he would pay for.
In fairness, the National Review had this take:
Earlier today, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren released DNA test results that confirmed that she misled employers, students, and the public about her Native American heritage for years. Bizarrely, all too many members of the media treated the results as vindicating her. Down is up. Black is white. The imperatives of the resistance apparently dictate propping up a liar — as long as she might be able to beat President Trump in 2020.
Here are the facts. For an extended period of time — at a key point in her professional life — Warren identified herself as a Native-American woman. She listed herself as Native-American on a key legal directory reviewed by deans and hiring committees. Former employers — such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School — listed Warren as a minority faculty member. Harvard Law School even trumpeted her as the school’s first tenured “woman of color.”
Warren contributed to a Native-American recipe book called — I kid you not — “Pow Wow Chow.” She has told people that her parents eloped because her father’s parents said he couldn’t marry her mother “because she is part Cherokee and part Delaware.”
Of course the National Review is a publication with a conservative slant, but all opinions aside, they went on to point out an important scientific fact: Warren is no more Native American than the average North American of European descent.
In 2014, the New York Times reported on the results of a massive DNA study and found that “European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.”
That’s pretty much the same percentage as Warren. If she had a Native American ancestor eight generations ago, then she is 1/256th Native American. That’s .39%. But her ancestor may be as remote as 10 generations, which is .10%. In other words, she’s just about exactly as Native American as the average white European-American.