WARREN STANDS BY DNA TEST, BUT EVEN FANS ARE AGHAST
Fans urge apology for upsetting Native Indians, as she inches toward possible presidential bid.
The plan was straightforward: After years of being challenged by President Donald Trump and others about a decades-old claim of Native American ancestry, Sen Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass, would take a DNA test to prove her stated family origins in the Cherokee and Delaware tribes.
But nearly two months after Ms Warren released the test results and drew hostile reactions from prominent tribal leaders, the lingering cloud over her likely presidential campaign has only darkened. Conservatives have continued to ridicule her. More worrisome to supporters of Ms Warren’s presidential ambitions, she has yet to allay criticism from grassroots progressive groups, liberal political operatives and other potential 2020 allies who complain that she put too much emphasis on the controversial field of racial science — and, in doing so, played into Mr Trump’s hands.
Advisers close to Ms Warren say she has privately expressed concern that she may have damaged her relationships to Native American groups and her own standing with activists, particularly those who are racial minorities. Several outside advisers are even more worried: They say they believe a plan should be made to repair that damage, possibly including a strong statement of apology.
The advisers say Ms Warren will have to confront the issue again if she announces a presidential campaign, which is expected in the coming weeks, and several would like her to act soon.
Publicly, at this point, the senator is not second-guessing her actions.
“There have been a lot of thoughtful conversations about this and I appreciate that,” Ms Warren said in an interview. “I believe for everyone in public life that transparency is crucial.”
Asked if the criticism of the test has inspired any regret, Ms Warren said: “I put it out there. It’s on the internet for anybody to see. People can make of it what they will. I’m going to continue fighting on the issues that brought me to Washington.”
For some Warren allies and progressive groups, Ms Warren’s standing by the DNA test amounts to profoundly poor judgment. Some said she was too reactive to Mr Trump’s attacks — tests results would never silence a president who often disregards facts, they said — and created a distraction from her own trademark message of economic populism. The president revels in repeatedly slurring Ms Warren as “Pocahontas”, and conservative commentators like Howie Carr of the Boston Herald have enjoyed holding the DNA issue over the senator’s head.
“The biggest risk in engaging a bully is that bullies don’t usually stop, regardless of what the truth is,” said Charles Chamberlain, executive director for the progressive political group Democracy for America. Mr Chamberlain’s group had, in 2014, launched a “Run Warren Run” campaign to encourage her to seek the 2016 presidential nomination. “When you can’t win an argument,” he added, “then sometimes it’s not worth having that argument”.
Ms Warren’s allies also say she unintentionally made a bigger mistake in treading too far into the fraught area of racial science — a field that has, at times, been used to justify the subjugation of racial minorities and Native Americans.
Ms Warren has also troubled advocates of racial equality and justice, who say her attempt to document ethnicity with a DNA test gave validity to the idea that race is determined by blood — a bedrock principle for white supremacists and others who believe in racial hierarchies. Native American critics, including Kim TallBear, a prominent scholar from the University of Alberta, said in October that Ms Warren’s actions relied on “settler-colonial” definitions of who is an indigenous American and amounted to a haughty refusal to hear out her long-standing critics.
This line of criticism has particularly stung Ms Warren, who has made a point to hold several private talks with Native leaders since taking the DNA test, emphasising her respect for tribal sovereignty and making clear she does not claim tribal citizenship.
Three people close to senior members of Ms Warren’s team, who were granted anonymity to speak freely on the issue, said they were “shocked” and “rattled” by the senator’s decision to take the DNA test, which they described as an unequivocal misstep that could have lasting consequences, even on 2020 staffing. One former adviser, who also asked not to be named, called the whole affair a “strategic failure” and added that it was “depressing and unforgettable.”
Jennifer Epps-Addison, co-director for the Centre for Popular Democracy, a group that has previously been supportive of Ms Warren, said, “If she wants to be considered the leader of our party or the leader of the progressive movement, she needs a reconciliation.
“And that reconciliation should centre Native voices and make sure that their stories of loss and theft of identity come front and center, not, you know, one white woman’s tale of understanding her DNA,” Ms Epps-Addison said.
Ms Warren’s claim to Native American heritage first became an issue in her 2012 race for Senate, when the Boston Herald reported that Harvard had once identified her as a member of a minority group when she was a law professor there. The Warren campaign at the time also confirmed she had listed herself as a minority member in a legal directory, but said she had done nothing wrong and said Native American ancestry had been part of her “family lore.” Her Republican opponent that year, Scott Brown, seized on the disclosures; she ultimately won the race by 7 percentage points, but Republicans like Mr Trump have continued to accuse her of misrepresenting herself for years.
But as Ms Warren inches closer to a presidential run, even critics of her decision to take the DNA test believe she is well positioned to shore up support. In the past week she has received heaps of praise for a foreign policy speech at American University, and she remains one of the party’s top fundraisers and surrogates.
Allies in Boston pointed out that, in Ms Warren’s recent re-election effort in Massachusetts, there was no evidence that the DNA announcement hurt her standing among voters. Those close to Ms Warren also note they had several allies in the progressive and Native American communities who supported their decision from the outset.
Deb Haaland, the newly elected House member from New Mexico who will be one of the first Native American women to serve in Congress, said she believed the senator was seeking to learn more about her past. Other tribal leaders, including those from the Lenape Indian Tribe in Delaware and the Eastern Band of Cherokee in North Carolina, have also supported Ms Warren’s decision. Ms Warren’s DNA test, which was conducted by renowned geneticist Carlos Bustamante and released by her office, showed strong evidence that Ms Warren has Native American pedigree “6-10 generations ago”.
“I respect tribes’ authority to determine who are tribal members,” Ms Haaland said. “But I don’t think that’s what Elizabeth Warren was doing. She was merely looking to find a connection to her past and that’s exactly what she did.”
This is not a view universally shared. The Cherokee Nation have said Ms Warren’s decision dishonoured “legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven.”
Ian Haney López, the law and racial justice professor at the University of California, Berkeley, said Ms Warren made a “naïve” error by not seeming to grasp the attack strategy of conservatives. Just as Mr Trump used his so-called “birther” campaign to depict former President Barack Obama as a foreign-born immigrant, Mr Trump was not seeking to make a factual claim against Warren but to brand her as an outsider, Mr López said.
Twila Barnes, a Cherokee genealogist who has tracked Ms Warren’s claims of native ancestry since it became national news in 2012, said her “jaw was on the floor” when she saw Ms Warren’s decision to take the DNA test and the slick video that accompanied the announcement of the results.
Ms Barnes said Ms Warren had an opportunity to teach the broader public about how genetic testing has historically been used as a weapon against Native communities, but instead she “helped perpetuate a very dangerous idea.” ©2018 THE NEW YORK TIMES
Ms Warren’s actions relied on “settler-colonial” definitions of who is an indigenous American. SCHOLAR FROM THE UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA, KIM TALLBEAR