Warren DNA analysis points to Native American heritage
WASHINGTON – After years of dealing with criticism for claiming Native American ancestry, Sen. Elizabeth Warren is going public with the results of a DNA test.
The Massachusetts Democrat shared the analysis of her genetic background – which found “strong evidence” of Native American ancestry going back six to 10 generations – with the Boston Globe on Sunday and shared the full report on her website Monday.
Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante conducted the analysis and concluded that while a “vast majority” of Warren’s background is European, “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
President Donald Trump has derisively referred to Warren as “Pocahontas” in an attempt to mock her claim. Last week, Trump said at a rally in Iowa that he hopes Warren runs against him in 2020 so that “we can finally get down to the fact as to whether or not she has Indian blood.”
“Her mother says, ‘She has high cheekbones, that’s why,’ ” Trump said. “And she’s gotten a lot of advantages by falsely claiming what she’s claiming.”
His attack echoes a long-running criticism among conservatives who say Warren used her claim of Native American ancestry to gain advantage in the academic world.
Warren changed her ethnicity from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, where she worked from 1987 to 1995. She began working as a tenured professor at Harvard University Law School in 1995. Four months after she started, she changed her ethnicity from white to Native American in Harvard’s human resouces system, according to the Globe.
Warren fired back at Trump in a campaign video about her background, which includes a scene where she gets the results from Bustamante.
“The president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say?” Warren asks Bustamante in a phone call.
“The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree,” Bustamante says.
The Stanford professor’s profile lists him as an “internationally recognized leader in the application of data science and genomics technology to problems in medicine, agriculture, and biology.” The 2010 MacArthur Fellow has worked as an adviser for Ancestry.com and the National Genome Research Institute, according to Bloomberg.
The video also includes clips of eight colleagues from various law schools who praise Warren as a scholar and vehemently deny that her background played any role in her hiring.
Last month, Warren released to the Globe the contents of her personnel files from the universities where she has worked. In addition, the paper interviewed more than 100 colleagues and every person involved with her hirings whom reporters were able to contact.
The Globe’s conclusion: “It is clear that Warren was viewed as a white woman by the hiring committees at every institution that employed her.”
Warren sent a tweet Monday reminding Trump that in July he offered to donate $1 million to the charity of her choice if a DNA test showed that she is Native American. She said she chose the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.
“Remember saying on 7/5 that you’d give $1M to a charity of my choice if my DNA showed Native American ancestry?” Warren asked Trump. “I remember – and here’s the verdict. Please send the check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.”
Trump denied making the $1 million offer when asked about it by reporters outside the White House on Monday.
“Who cares?” Trump said. “I didn’t say that. You better read it again.”
A review of a video from Trump’s rally in Great Falls, Montana, on July 5 shows that he made the offer in the context of a hypothetical presidential debate with Warren.
Trump’s denial of the offer prompted Warren to send a tweet mocking the president’s “memory problems.”