Elizabeth Warren, the Senator from Massachusetts has been checking off her ethnicity as Native American her entire life. She says she did this because her parents told her that she had a distant relative that was Native American. She had never lived in a Native American community and she did not in the slightest have a single Native American friend for most of her young adult life.
But she checked this box because her parents told her to. OK, she didn’t actually say this is why she did it, but she has apologized to he local Oklahoma Native American Tribes and she has not offered any reason why she would have ever claimed this other than, you know, family lore and all.
However, she does want you to know that she did NOT check this box for any personal advantage when applying to college or for various positions or promotions over her lifetime. Of course we don’t have her college admissions form to see what ethnicity she checked, but we do have other examples of applying for faculty positions where she claimed to be Native American. I suppose she could claim that as she aged and grew in wisdom she changed her ethnicity because she realized that claiming to be Native American based on family lore was ridiculous. But, wait then her forms for faculty and jobs she applied for as an adult wouldn’t show her as a Native American. So I think we can be pretty sure her initial college application also contained the same erroneous claim.
Senator Warren could authorize the release of her original college applications and clear this all up. But I suspect that they are suspiciously no longer available. Well and after “clearing up” her Native American claims by releasing her DNA testing which only revealed that at best she might be anywhere from 0.1% to 0.01% Native American she might not want to go down that rabbit hole of ridicule again.
Of course Senator Warren assures us she did not list herself as Native American because she was trying to the game the system. No, heavens no. Why that would be a serious character flaw implying that she unethically leveraged the admissions process by pretending to belong to a protected class of which she was not in fact a member. I mean what politician would say or do anything unethical to advance their own career? How dare you even imply this? She is after all, Senator Elizabeth Warren.
I don’t know about any of you, but I also grew up with a mother who often talked about how we had a great, great grandmother who was Native American. Unbelievably I never took this to heart and claimed myself as such on my college admission applications. Because to do so would have been, well, bullshit. To this day I haven’t the vaguest clue whether somewhere back in the day one of my ancestors was a Native American. More importantly, assuming it was true, what the hell negative impact would that lone ancestor have so greatly imparted on me that I would feel the need to point it out so as to grant me special consideration when applying to college or a job?
"Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes, and only tribes, determine tribal citizenship, and I respect that difference."
Well Old Stewy here could forgive and forget if Senator Warren would just admit she did it because of the advantages it would give her when applying to college. But she won’t. And that in and of itself reveals her tremendous lack of character. It’s hard to admit that you’re a liar, a cheat, and well really not a Native American.
Plus it’s possible the Elizabeth Warren we see today is predicated on this lie. The butterfly effect as it were. One small change or decision can ripple through one’s life and have a tremendous effect on how that life turns out. Maybe that one lie led her to her current position as Senator.
I mean in fairness, Senator Warren begrudgingly admits she is not a member of a tribe, but only because as she puts it, the tribes are the ones who decide membership. Apparently they aren’t reaching out to Elizabeth. Especially not since she cut herself shaving and and that 0.01% Native American blood may have escaped.
I can’t take credit for the cutting wit of that verbal jab. It was relayed to me by an actual Native American. She was pretty sure she was Native American too. You see she knew this because her mom and dad were both white anglo-saxon protestants with interesting family stories about a great, great, great uncle’s sister mother that was a Native American. No, crap this is confusing, her parents were both Native Americans. Oh, and they and her actually belong to a tribe.
Next time Senator Warren opens her mouth just keep in mind that whatever she says could be pearls of wisdom or just as likely it could be a steaming load of self serving horse pucky. Elizabeth Warren, just another slimy politico doing whatever it takes to get ahead.