I think its also interesting to compare and contrast this with the claims or Marco Rubio, who made the story his parents told him about fleeing Castro a centerpiece of his political identity, despite the fact that they actually left 2 and a half years before the revolution.
I would be one thing if Warren was running on her identity as a native American, but near as I can tell it was her opponents who brought it up.
Who are you going to vote for? Me, or my opponent: crooked Brad*FAKE!! * 
I’m really curious; why is it appropriate to “round” 0.10% down to 0.09% ?
I really don’t get it. If you’d said “Sorry, for the minor arithmetical mishap” I’d have said “I didn’t think it was anything else — I’m over-reacting because of [Doper name censored] who likes to make errors in his favor and then accuse me of ‘nitpicking’ if I correct him.”
But you didn’t. You doubled down. What gives? 
Do you feel the Cherokee Nation is also a bunch of assholes?
I wasn’t “rounding”, I was giving rough number. And I’m not “doubling down”, I’m responding to someone acting like a crazy person. You are really, really, really taking this vastly more seriously and emotionally than it remotely merits.
This.
The full numbers are 1.5625 and 0.09765625. Is that good enough to prevent your aneurysm?
In this country, with this country’s history? She* is* an Indian because she’s even part Indian. That’s how bias works. That’s why there are political cartoons of her in a war bonnet (even though she’s of Leni Lenape and Cherokee descent and they don’t wear war bonnets).
She’s an Indian now, like Vin Diesel is black, regardless of what they were passing for before.
It’s all semantics, except when there is a legal decision that X% is the cut-off point. The definition of native american, with regards to the law, is a legal definition, and nothing more. There is no real biological definition for race, because it’s an artificial construct based on what people look like, which is totally subjective. And the second part of the arbitrary cut-off is what constitutes a reliable test. What percentage of an error rate for the test is acceptable? Because, almost no test is 100% accurate and definitive. We’ve had problems with DNA identification before, we’ve had problems with contamination by the lab and the people doing the tests. And how reliable is the science itself?
I’ve heard this sort of reasoning described as science denial when used in other contexts. You might have a good point though.
I have read several people suggesting that it was Harvard’s idea to list her as a Native American and that she just let them but I don’t get it. If she never claimed NA ancestry in any of her student or employment paperwork how did the university get the idea to list her as a minority on the staff & faculty page? Surely they didn’t just decide that everyone with high cheek bones was part NA and ask them if it was true.
This is just not true. Someone who has merely a “family legend” of distant Native ancestry, and no connection to any specific tribe (even the DNA test she had done could not pinpoint a specific tribe or even whether the ancestry came from North America or South America - where are you getting Lenape from?) is not “an Indian just because she’s even part Indian” regardless of this country’s history. The “one drop rule” may apply in various times and places in America to varying degrees, but in the present day, it doesn’t become reality just because you say it does.
Also it’s inaccurate to say that “Vin Diesel is black.” Vin Diesel in his own words is “of ambiguous ethnicity”. That is how he defines himself. He says he identifies as “a person of color”, which is not the same thing as being simply “black.” He is not universally perceived as being black; if he was, he would not have been cast as an Italian-American soldier in Saving Private Ryan or any number of other ethnicities he has portrayed.
The lines between “white”, “non-white”, “Indian”, “black”, etc, are a hell of a lot blurrier than you seem to think they are, and they’re entirely dependent on cultural factors that vary by place and time. This isn’t the antebellum south, and there’s nobody who’s actually enforcing any of this as if there are official rules and laws.
Nothing I have seen so far contains any specifics on this; so as far as I know none of the parties involved have discussed the details this occurrence with the press. Facts of the matter that seem not to be in dispute are that Warren listed herself as white on her college application, was listed as a minority in the literature for Harvard and the law review, but in subsequent applications identified herself as white.
There is also the fact that she was described as a minority - that is the exact word used to describe her status in the literature during her time at Harvard. I believe this distinction does have some importance.
So, things not in dispute AFAIKT are when she listed herself as white, the literature describing her as a minority, the statements she made about discrimination her mother faced due to Native American ancestry, and the DNA results showing Native American ancestry several generations removed.
So, with those facts that are not being disputed, several scenarios are possible. One would be she was pressured to allow herself to be marketed as a minority. Another is that it was all her idea and thought it would be good for her career.
Politically, however, I don’t see any way this really benefits Warren in regards to how she stands in relation to her progressive platform. In the one scenario you have someone who faked being a true minority in order to bolster her career. In the other scenario, you have someone who really believes they should be considered a minority yet never applied for any of the aid available to help minorities - what does that say about the usefulness of those forms of aid? It also seems odd to me that one of the lines of defense I often hear is “she never took anything set aside for native americans,” and that seems to be an odd line of defense considering that as someone with a disadvantage she should use the aid as a way to level the playing field without it having any negative conotations.
No, it was her idea. Or at least she said it was. She said, in one interview, that one reason she listed herself that way was that she hoped it would help her connect with others who were like her. She also said that she often spoke of her NA ancestry.
Answering the OP, no she is not a minority. Of course like I said in the Kamala Harris thread “I consider Native Americans to be white. Same with Asians, Iraqi’s, Syrians, Pakistanis ect. It really goes by the hair. The fact that white people don’t see this is a problem with white people.”
To expand, just because white people think they don’t share traits with the peoples I’ve mentioned doesn’t make it so. They used to think Irish and Italians weren’t white also
That said I totally believe having some NA blood was an issue for her parents, no matter how small the percent was.
I hold a bachelor’s in Genetics and having read Bustamante’s report I find the protocol troubling.
The significance of genetic testing comes down to the math. A “genetic match” doesn’t mean much if the statistics are not firm in comparison to a known reference population. So, in a hypothetical criminal trial a lab technician saying there is a “genetic match” should be challenged with the question, “What are the odds that any random person pulled off the street would also match?” Any answer to such a question depends upon knowing the frequency of various alleles in a reference population.
The problem is Bustamante used very limited reference populations with no particular reason to believe the control populations were representative of Warren’s background. He compared her “European” ancestry against populations of "Americans of predominantly European ancestry from Utah (n = 99 individuals) and British individuals of European ancestry from Great Britain (n = 86 individuals). " And, as has been noted, he used populations “from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. (It is not possible to use Native American reference sequences from inside the United States, since Native American groups within the US have not chosen to participate in recent population genetics studies.)” as a comparison for matching native ancestry.
But there is one additional part of the report that seems off. Bustamante mentions a 13.4 centiMorgan segment that is presumed to be of native ancestry. That is the largest of five segments identified as of native ancestry. Five out of 660,173 segments that could be matched against the sample populations. 5 out of 660,173 is a LOT lower than would be expected for an ancestry match from a non-admixed ancestor from 6 to 10 generations ago. That may be accounted for by the lack of a native reference population from within the United States. But it is off by a TON.
The fragment size of 13.4 centiMorgans is unusual too as the other four fragments identified are substantially smaller. I would expect the various fragments to be approximately the same measure if they came from the same non-admixed ancestor.
In short, this was not a particularly robust examination to attempt to determine whether Warren has ancestry from any of the native peoples of the United States.
A bachelors you say?
Here’s a crazy thought - if one needs to go to this level of analysis to determine if they are a minority they should perhaps err on the side of considering themselves not particularly disadvantaged.
As mentioned in a recent post a single 15 cM match seems to be typical for a 4th-cousin match at GedMatch. (For comparison, Elizabeth Warren would be 4th cousin with a same-generation descendant of Neoma Ocie, the alleged half-breed Cherokee.)
I realize the actual arithmetic involved gets complicated, and would want to hear more about the "non-admixed ancestor’ reference sample. But, by itself, the 13.4 cM match doesn’t seem too short.
That is a pretty crazy thought. You think Warren took this test to prove she was disadvantaged?