Author Topic: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee  (Read 20401 times)

Offline Pono Aloha

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What do you make of this controversy? She claimed Cherokee heritage based on family lore and her grandfather's high cheekbones. She was listed as a minority professor at Harvard Law School. There is no evidence that she has Cherokee ancestry. http://www.bostonherald.com/news/politics/view/20220515genealogical_society_no_proof_of_warrens_cherokee_heritage_found/srvc=home&position=also

Offline educatedindian

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #1 on: May 16, 2012, 08:30:31 pm »
The writer of that headline and every other one based on racist puns surrounding this story need to get backhanded...

Warren never used that claimed family history to benefit herself. Her school did use the claim to count her as a minority, so any blame is with them.

Some conservatives (or more accurately, racists who pose as conservative) seem convinced that every last minority professor is hired based on quotas. It's just as phony a claim as the idea that NDNs get handed free money, and both ideas are equally based on race baiting. You get hired based on the work you've done, how good your writing and teaching are, period.

Offline ShadowDancer

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #2 on: May 30, 2012, 11:48:12 pm »
Came across this article today:

http://news.yahoo.com/cherokees-elizabeth-warren-don-t-claim-154806591.html

Quote
Cherokees to Elizabeth Warren: ‘We don’t claim you!’
The Daily Caller -

More than 150 Cherokee Indians have joined a group online demanding more information from Massachusetts senate candidate Elizabeth Warren about her claims of Native American heritage.

“You claim to be Cherokee. …We don’t claim you!” the group “Cherokees Demand Truth from Elizabeth Warren” declares on its website.

Warren has been embroiled in a controversy for weeks after it was revealed that the Harvard law professor once touted herself as an American Indian minority. She has since struggled to prove those claims as critics argue she claimed that heritage to further her career.

According to a mission statement posted on its website, the group is made up of “authentic Cherokees and descendants devoted to sharing the truth about our history.”

The group said they are made up of descendants from the Cherokee Nation, the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

“Our mission is to help people understand what a real Cherokee is and to show why Elizabeth Warren claiming to be Cherokee without proof is harmful and offensive to us.”

Cornell Law School professor William A. Jacobson first reported the existence of the group Wednesday morning on his Le-gal In-sur-rec-tion blog.

The group states on its website that the group is led by Twila Barnes and David Cornsilk.

“I would like to meet with Ms. Warren, in person, and explain why her false claim of Cherokee ancestry is an issue,” Barnes told Breitbart.com. “She can ignore the questions of a reporter, but can she ignore the questions of a real Cherokee?”

A spokesman for the group couldn’t immediately be reached by The Daily Caller.
« Last Edit: May 30, 2012, 11:51:58 pm by ShadowDancer »

Offline LittleOldMan

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #3 on: May 31, 2012, 09:49:37 am »
I understand (read somewhere) that she is supposed to be 1/32 that is not that far back a good genealogist should be able to vet this.  "LOM"
Blind unfocused anger is unproductive and can get you hurt.  Controlled and focused anger directed tactically wins wars. Remember the sheath is not the sword.

Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #4 on: May 31, 2012, 08:40:57 pm »
Educated Indian, so you are saying that this whole thing is because of what the school did, not Elizabeth Warren, and that she herself never claimed to be Cherokee?
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Offline educatedindian

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #5 on: May 31, 2012, 09:13:04 pm »
That was my understanding. The school chose to list her. Universities don't hire based on ethnicity but on your record as a teacher.

That Cornsilk doesn't care for her is no surprise. Cornsilk is unusual. He claims you have to be enrolled to be Native, period. But he also argues a tribe should be able to enroll anyone, so he argues that the Freedmen should be Cherokees although most don't have ancestry.

He also likes attention, so I'm guessing he doesn't care how his little group is going to be used by the right wing to go after Warren. This is such a minor matter IMO, and Warren has a good record of fighting for the little guy.

Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #6 on: May 31, 2012, 09:32:58 pm »
Thanks. I can see it as a minor issue in regards to Warren herself, but I also see it
as a larger issue based on what I've read on this board regarding the many who try to
use ndn identity, from the misguided to those who are knowingly setting out to
cultivate a profit.

It's in the spotlight, and imo, creates an opportunity for Americans to be educated
on on this, it would be nice if Warren stepped up and took that opportunity.
press the little black on silver arrow Music, 1) Bob Pietkivitch Buddha Feet http://www.4shared.com/file/114179563/3697e436/BuddhaFeet.html

Epiphany

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #7 on: May 31, 2012, 09:41:25 pm »
About Elizabeth Warren's Family Story about being Cherokee http://americanindiansinchildrensliterature.blogspot.com/2012/05/about-elizabeth-warrens-family-story.html

I wish Warren would use the spotlight & provide education. I think she could even come out ahead.

Offline amorYcohetes

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #8 on: September 30, 2012, 07:24:39 am »
See, Boston?  This is why we can't have nice things.   :-[ http://colorlines.com/archives/2012/09/cherokee_nation_demands_scott_brown_apologize_for_downright_racist_behavior.html

http://bostonglobe.com/metro/2012/09/29/brown-supporters-fun-not-amusing-native-american/Aq9QYyYPqfQoct4AYcLA9L/story.html

http://leanforward.msnbc.com/_news/2012/09/20/13997015-barney-frank-rips-scott-brown-over-his-attacks-on-elizabeth-warren?lite

But we've come such a long way, right?  I mean, hey, at least they didn't beat anybody with the American flag.   This time.  :o

Quote
That Cornsilk doesn't care for her is no surprise...He also likes attention, so I'm guessing he doesn't care how his little group is going to be used by the right wing to go after Warren.
Yeah, this is really unfortunate.  Our local right-leaning paper keeps going back to this Twila Barnes and her anti-Warren group, now with this recent incident, quoting them so as to make them sound like apologists for the Brown supporters' racist behavior, and like they are sniping at Principal Chief Baker of the CNO.  IMHO, this distracts from the message of condemning a group of White men publicly harassing a political opponent by performing a bunch of ugly, mocking, stereotypes of Native Americans.  *sigh*

Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #9 on: October 01, 2012, 07:10:49 am »
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/opinion/sunday/kill-the-indians-then-copy-them.html?smid=fb-share&_r=0

Kill the Indians, Then Copy Them

JUST over a week ago, a handful of Senator Scott P. Brown’s supporters gathered in Boston to protest his opponent, Elizabeth Warren. The crowd — making Indian war whoops and tomahawk chops — was ridiculing what Mr. Brown, Republican of Massachusetts, called the “offense” of Ms. Warren’s claim that she has Cherokee and Delaware ancestry.

To mock real Indians by chanting like Hollywood Indians in order to protest someone you claim is not Indian at all gets very confusing. Even more so because early Americans spent centuries killing Indians, and then decades trying to drive any distinctive Indianness out of the ones who survived. Perhaps we’ve come a long way if Americans are now going around accusing people who don’t look or act Indian enough of appropriating that identity for personal gain. But in fact, the appropriation of Indian virtues is one of the country’s oldest traditions.

Indians — who we are and what we mean — have always been part of how America defined itself. Indians on the East Coast were largely (but never completely) deracinated, and tribes like the Delaware were either killed or relocated farther west. At the same time, their Indianness was extracted as a set of virtues: honor, stoicism, dignity, freedom. Once, in college, an African-American student shook his head when I told him that I was Indian and he said he was jealous. Why? I asked. Because you lived life on your own terms and would rather have died than become a slave. That sentiment — totally at odds with the reality in which many tribes were indeed enslaved and a few owned slaves themselves — seemed a very wistful expression of what being an Indian meant.

In any case, the mythic Indian virtues of dignity and freedom adhere less to real Indians than they do to the very nation that deposed them. Just think of how much the ultimate American, the cowboy, has in common with the Indian: a life lived beyond the law but in accordance with a higher set of laws like self-sufficiency, honor, toughness, a painful past, a fondness for whiskey and always that long, lingering look over his shoulder at a way of life quickly disappearing. Contrary to the view held by a lot of Indian people, America hasn’t forgotten us. It has always been obsessed with us and has appropriated, without recourse to reality or our own input, the qualities with which we are associated.

BEGINNING in the late 19th century, assimilation of the remaining American Indian population was official federal policy. This was around the time that the American frontier was considered closed: the West Coast had been reached and there were no more lands or peoples to conquer. And yet Indians still held on to much of our land and our identity. So at the behest of the federal government, thousands of Indian children were removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools. Indian languages and native religions were suppressed.

Even as late as the 1950s, the federal government ran a relocation program that promised American Indians housing and job training if they left their rural communities for cities like Cleveland, Chicago and Los Angeles. (Very few of these programs provided anything close to what the brochures handed out door to door on many reservations had promised.)

Meanwhile, Indians themselves found work or didn’t, left their communities, or didn’t. Fell in love and married — sometimes other Indians and sometimes not. Had children. Got hired, got fired, found Jesus or went to a sweat lodge. For many of us, our Indianness was more than a heritage or an ancestral tale about who our great-great-grandparents were; our cultures remained central to who we were. For others, not so much. In states like Oklahoma, where Elizabeth Warren is from, it’s almost unusual not to grow up hearing stories about your Indian heritage. So many tribes were moved there, there was such a saturation of Indians who worked and were educated and lived alongside other Americans and such pressure to assimilate, that to have such heritage was, in some ways, to be an Oklahoman.

Growing up as I did, on the Ojibwe Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota, it was patently obvious to me that Indians came in all different shapes and colors. I’m fairly light-skinned and have been told many times that, looking the way I do, I can’t be an Indian, not a real one. I’ve heard this from colleagues, writers, neighbors. Once I was told I couldn’t be Indian because we’d all been killed. And yet I am. We are bound by much more than phenotype or blood quantum; we share a language, history, religion, foods, the bonds of family.

Only someone like Mr. Brown, who hasn’t spent any time around us or has only passing acquaintance with us, could say, as he did during a debate: “Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she is not.” After the video of the tomahawk-chopping protesters emerged on the Internet last week, Mr. Brown apologized for their behavior. But he also explained that Ms. Warren had “claimed something she wasn’t entitled to.”

Thankfully, we American Indians are no longer forced to assimilate to accepted American culture. Instead, as the senator from Massachusetts suggests, we’re expected to assimilate to accepted Indian culture, a stereotype perfected in Boston way back in 1773, when protesters tossed tea into the harbor dressed as Mohawks in war paint. By going after Ms. Warren’s claim, Mr. Brown is appealing to an American narrative just as old as the one where Indians are noble and dark and on horseback, and just as divorced from the textured complexity of the American experience; one where the good guys are broad-chested and the villains twirl their mustaches; one where the only differences that are allowed are those that serve to reinforce American fantasies; one where Americans persist in eradicating problem Indians, so that they can wear our feathers.

David Treuer is an Ojibwe Indian and the author of “Rez Life: An Indian’s Journey Through the Land of His People.”
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Offline ShadowDancer

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #10 on: February 15, 2018, 12:48:44 am »
Article on Feb 14 2018 Slate.com

Elizabeth Warren Addresses (but Doesn’t Apologize for) Contested Claims of Native Ancestry in Surprise Speech

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/02/elizabeth-warren-addresses-pocahontas-controversy-in-surprise-speech.html

Quote
Warren didn’t apologize for or retract her past claims per se—in fact, she asserted that “my mother’s family was part Native American.” But she acknowledged implicitly that this belief is supported only by family lore and does not meet many others’ standards of what it means to be a member of a Native community:

      I get why some people think there’s hay to be made here. You won’t find my family members on any rolls, and I’m not enrolled in a tribe.

      And I want to make something clear. I respect that distinction. I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes — and only by tribes.

Offline Defend the Sacred

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #11 on: February 15, 2018, 06:44:26 pm »
She is still insisting that blood myths make her Native, even after Cherokee genealogists have proven the ancestors she claims are Cherokee are all white. She has not apologized to the Cherokee. She went to a general group, not a Cherokee one. She still thinks white fantasies override Indigenous people's rights to set tribal citizenship criteria.

She admitted she's not enrolled - everyone already knew that.
She admitted her ancestors are not on the rolls - that means she's not Cherokee.
Then she insisted she's Cherokee anyway. Because her white privilege makes her that emboldened.

https://thinkprogress.org/elizabeth-warren-is-not-cherokee-c1ec6c91b696/

"She is not from us. She does not represent us. She is not Cherokee."

During her time in office she has not helped with Indian issues. She's only backed into a corner now due to her presidential aspirations. She is not an ally.

Offline Defend the Sacred

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #12 on: February 15, 2018, 07:26:31 pm »
Shadowdancer, that Slate article you posted is biased and inaccurate. They end the piece calling the Twitter stream - Elizabeth Warren native - "Right Wing Twitter" [sic]. Once again, valid criticism of her false claims is misrepresented as "right wing."

This is the twitter stream: https://twitter.com/search?q=Elizabeth%20Warren%20native&src=typd
Yes, there are right wingers there. Some of them are hideous racists. But she opened the door to them with her lies. But that stream also has Natives commenting on her false claims. Quite a large percentage of the posters I see are Natives, given the percentage of Natives in the broader population.

In Indian Country, the issue of Warren's false claims, and her other insults to Indian County, have  never been about Left/Right, Dem/Repub. It's about sovereignty. It's about a white person lying about who they are and screwing over NDNs in the process.

This has been the spin control since the beginning. When Natives speak out against her, the press calls all critics "right wing." It's a divisionary tactic to silence Natives. But the Natives who have tried to communicate with her, and then wound up protesting her due to her racism, are largely leftists and independents. Some of the Cherokee have spoken to conservative media despite the political differences simply because leftist media refuse to speak to anyone who criticizes Warren.  Like in the inaccurate article you posted, left-leaning media has lied and called Native protesters "right wing" since the first protests against her.

Offline Defend the Sacred

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #13 on: February 16, 2018, 04:38:35 am »
I'm changing the name of this thread to simply Elizabeth Warren's name. She, and her supporters and critics alike, need to keep Matoaka's name, and slurs based on it, out of their mouths. #LeaveMatoakaAlone

As for her talking about Matoaka now, she's still just doing it to boost her own career, and getting most of it wrong. It's no better coming from her than from Trump.

Offline Defend the Sacred

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Re: Elizabeth Warren and her disproven claims of being Cherokee
« Reply #14 on: February 16, 2018, 04:46:59 am »
Elizabeth Warren's Genealogy, and other research debunking her claims, by Cherokee genealogists:

http://www.pollysgranddaughter.com/p/elizabeth-warren-information.html

Also includes links to coverage of how egregiously Warren has treated Cherokee people who tried to reach out to her. This is in no way resolved.