BOSTON (AP) — Responding to years of derision by President Donald Trump and other critics, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday released a report on a DNA analysis that provides strong evidence she does, in fact, have Native American heritage.
The analysis on the Massachusetts Democrat was done by Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante. He concluded Warren’s ancestry is mostly European but says “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamante, a prominent expert in the field of DNA analysis, determined Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears “in the range of six to 10 generations ago.”
That meshes with an 1894 document the New England Genealogical Society unearthed suggesting Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American. That would make Warren 1/32nd Native American.
But if her ancestor is 10 generations back, that could mean she’s just 1/512th Native American, according to the report . That could further excite her critics instead of placating them.
Those critics have charged that Warren advanced her career with a narrative she is a descendant of Cherokee and Delaware tribes, although Warren has released personnel files to support her insistence that ethnicity was never a factor.
Trump has repeatedly mocked his potential 2020 presidential election challenger as “Pocahontas,” going so far as to offer $1 million to a charity of her choice if she took a DNA test that proved her claims.
The analysis was first reported by The Boston Globe and posted on the newspaper’s website along with a video produced by her Senate re-election campaign.
In it, Warren says: “The president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say?”
Bustamante replies: “The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree.”
In an email Monday to supporters, Warren said she “never expected the President of the United States to use my family’s story as a racist political joke against Native American history, culture, and people — over, and over, and over.”
