Elizabeth Warren Releases Her Own DNA Results to Prove Native American Ancestry
On Monday, The Boston Globe released a DNA test from Senator Elizabeth Warren. The results show surprisingly firm evidence backing up Warren's claims that her family tree includes Native Americans, rebuking a much-beleaguered talking point from Donald Trump.
Warren provided the DNA results directly to the Globe, which published them on the front page of Monday's edition. Trump has made a habit of mocking Warren for the claims about her ancestry, famously calling her "Pocahontas," which the president's supporters bend over backward to defend as "not racist." But Warren seems to have gone to great lengths to shut the whole argument down. Per the Globe:
The analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and expert in the field who won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship, also known as a genius grant, for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.
He concluded that “the vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
Along with the DNA results, Warren has released an ad with her conservative-leaning family members pushing back on the "Pocahontas" slur.
At a rally back in July, Trump again taunted Warren and said he'd pay $1 million to a charity of her choice if she took a DNA test and proved her ancestry. Now Warren is taunting him back.
While Warren's DNA results do a lot to confirm her family history, indigenous groups in the U.S. have a complicated relationship with genetic testing, as Native American writer and professor Adrienne Keene points out:
Of course, this isn't really about proving Donald Trump wrong. Trump's shown no capacity to apologize or admit that he's wrong, and based on the continuing "lock her up" chants at his rallies, he's not interested in dumping good slogans just because they're outdated or bullshit. And it's harder for Trump to rant about Warren's anti-corruption bill than to just keep using racial slurs. Much more likely, Warren's revelation is meant to better position her for a presidential run in 2020 and to neuter one of Trump's favorite slurs against her.
In that sense, Warren may not be expecting Trump to abandon the "Pocahontas" line (he did promote birtherism, after all). She may even be counting on him to keep it up.
