Thread: Elizabeth Warren's DNA Test

(CNN)Twenty-four hours after Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren shocked the political world with a five-minute video (and a mountain of documentation) aimed at putting to bed the controversy over her claims of Native American heritage, it's becoming increasingly clear the strategy amounts to a swing and a miss.

Warren's goal was to take the issue of her heritage off the table for nervous Democrats and to show that she was ready, willing and able to stand up to President Donald Trump if and when the time came that she was the party's nominee against him in 2020. The problem is that, when you strip away all of the glitz of her well-produced video, you are left with this: There's still no certainty that Warren is, in any meaningful way, Native American.

Yes, Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante tells Warren in the video that "the facts suggest that you absolutely have a Native American ancestor in your pedigree." But the estimates of just how much Native American blood Warren actually posses range from 1/64th to a whopping 1/1024th. Which, um, ain't a lot.

Trump himself picked up on that uncertainty in a series of tweets (of course) on Tuesday morning.

"Pocahontas (the bad version), sometimes referred to as Elizabeth Warren, is getting slammed," tweeted Trump. "She took a bogus DNA test and it showed that she may be 1/1024, far less than the average American. Now Cherokee Nation denies her, 'DNA test is useless.' Even they don't want her. Phony!"

(Trump is referring to this statement from Cherokee Nation Secretary of State Chuck Hoskin Jr.: "A DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship. Current DNA tests do not even distinguish whether a person's ancestors were indigenous to North or South America.")...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/10/16/polit...tas/index.html

Yeah, been reading about this a couple of days. What a joke. lol.

Saw another article where Cherokee nation was calling her a fraud or something an saying she was doubling down on a lie.

Originally Posted by fuego

Yeah, been reading about this a couple of days. What a joke. lol.

Saw another article where Cherokee nation was calling her a fraud or something an saying she was doubling down on a lie.

Did you have a flashback to that Paul Revere and the Raiders song? I sure did.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=caCvDB9ivOE

Originally Posted by fuego

He completely owns the totality of that fraction.

Originally Posted by FireBrand

He completely owns the totality of that fraction.

I'm more Indian than she is - 1/16 Blackfoot. My paternal grandmother was 1/4 and you could see it in her but you can't see it in me because I'm 94% European. I grew up in North Texas. My mother and paternal grandfather were born in Oklahoma like Warren was. Half of the white people in this region have Indian blood in them, but very few identify as Indian. You only do that if you are a recognized member of a tribe, and most tribes require evidence of at least 1/16 native blood. If what I'm told about our family is true I would qualify, but Liz Warren doesn't.