This issue has always personally rankled me. I have a great, great grandmother that is native American. She’s in an old family photo. I’ve visited her grave in our family cemetery. My family has never learned which tribe she’s from or much about her childhood.
I would never refer to myself as a minority or use it to my advantage. That’s an insult to the real Native Americans struggling in this country. They’ve already been exploited enough imho.
Warren should have immediately had that Harvard entry retracted and corrected. Imho
Harvard insists it didn’t advance her career. But Warren needs to lay off the the claims of native American heritage. It’s unseemly and just wrong to appropriate another culture.
Just imagine a person with a black ancestor, 8 generations ago claiming black heritage.
From what I can see, Elizabeth Warren doesn’t make these claims today. It’s Donald Trump and his ilk who keep bringing it up. And Trump promised a million-dollar donation to charity if she took a DNA test but is now reneging on that.
No idea if Warren has tried to use her heritage to try gain an advantage politically or professionally; I don’t really follow stuff like this. However, I assume she’s mostly just trolling Trump here, since Trump once shot his mouth off and “offered” $1 million if she would take a blood test to demonstrate her heritage. I imagine few people actually care about her heritage or the $1M.
While it’s true that Trump won’t shut up about this and has blown it way out of proportion, he never actually offered her $1M to take a test. He talked about doing so if they ever debated each other, but that has not come to pass. See the thread in Elections for the actual quote.
If the ancestor actually was 10 generations back, that probably stretches the ability of commercially available test to detect that DNA, which might explain why she went to someone like Bustamante. Or, maybe she just wanted to have an expert in the field certify the results. At any rate, I think she’s done what can be done to verify her family lore, and she can claim to have some NA ancestry. Whether she actually claimed to be Native American, as some seem to suggest, is unclear. How she got listed that way at Harvard could be an overly aggressive PR attempt by the department she was in, or maybe she innocently checked some box at some point. I don’t think we need to assume anything deceptive on her part.
Make up your mind. In your first post, your use of the present tense suggests you think she is currently making these claims but in your second post, you acknowledge that she did so a long time ago.
I don’t know what Warren will say from now on. She has a trace of Native American blood. That validates her family’s oral history. How she proceeds is up to her.
It doesn’t matter. After he spent so much time mocking her by calling her Pocohantas, I would not have a problem if she persisted in mocking him for refusing to make good on the deal.
The people who keep harping on this are Republicans looking for a reason to taunt Warren or her supporters. Much like Obama’s birth certificate (and remember Trump’s reaction to that?) this won’t solve anything because the problem was never Warren, it’s the people desperate to attack her.
I suppose I’m fine with Warren taunting Trump now about his bet while Republicans scramble to say “But… but… he never REALLY said it” since those people were fine with giving Warren shit for years.
I so much want Warren to throw this in Trump’s face. He shouldn’t be allowed to get away with that kind of crap. This is what I always said she should do (get tested and only release the results if positive). I just never thought she would do it. That is not to say that I support her for President, but I do admire her for fighting back. (Also, I think she is entitled to consider herself to have Native American ancestry but not to derive any benefit from being culturally native american-ie she can check the box but not use it to get jobs, benefits etc, which there is no evidence of her doing).
Did Scott Brown, Donald Trump and you pay as much attention to the details of what she said and when she said it as you think we should give to what Trump said about the bet he’s now trying to get out of?
He’ll weasel out.
