(Elizabeth) Warren says she told schools of heritage

[alp227]

Source: Boston Globe

Democratic Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren acknowledged for the first time late Wednesday night that she told Harvard University and the University of Pennsylvania that she was Native American, but she continued to insist that race played no role in her recruitment.

“At some point after I was hired by them, I . . . provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard,’’ she said in a statement issued by her campaign. “My Native American heritage is part of who I am, I’m proud of it and I have been open about it.’’

Warren’s statement is her first acknowledgment that she identified herself as Native American to the Ivy League schools. While she has said she identified herself as a minority in a legal directory, she has carefully avoided any suggestion during the last month that she took further actions to promote her purported heritage.

When the issue first surfaced last month, Warren said she only learned Harvard was claiming her as a minority when she read it in the Boston Herald.

Read more: http://www.boston.com/news/local/massachusetts/articles/2012/05/31/elizabeth_warren_acknowledges_telling_harvard_penn_of_native_american_status/?page=full

---

Is she done now, or will the voters forgive her like in Connecticut voters did for Richard Blumenthal (who mistakenly claimed in some speeches to have served in Vietnam).

Jonathan Turley linked to this story from a broader post, "Elizabeth Warren Admits She Claimed Minority Status . . . Then Faces New Questions Over Being The First Nursing Mother To Take Bar".

[closeupready]

1. If this is all the GOP's got, Brown's toast and they know it.

K&R

[cali]

22. If you think he's toast, you don't know his

campaign manager. He's a very dirty guy.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mike-lux/jim-barnett-scott-brown_b_1555730.html?ref=media&ir=Media

[closeupready]

26. Wow. What a dirtbag.

No wonder he admires Rove and Atwater.

[onehandle]

2. Obama voters better vote downballot this Fall. nt

[JackRiddler]

3. In other news, who cares?

[elleng]

4. 'Forgive' her for what???

[alp227]

7. evading this issue.

[elleng]

10. When/how did she 'evade?'

“At some point after I was hired by them, I . . . provided that information to the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard,’

[alp227]

13. Only NOW did she acknowledge submitting ethnic info

after first claiming she only learned about the colleges listing her as Cherokee by reading the Herald. Don't voters want an HONEST candidate?

[RBInMaine]

15. Go troll elsewhere. This is the silliest of silly shit there is.

[elleng]

16. Right, Thanks. You said it for me.

[goclark]

24. Said it for me too

[OmahaBlueDog]

20. So a poster with nearly 15K posts who disagrees with you is now a troll?

I agree with Warren on virtually every issue, and I think she's an outstanding consumer advocate, and I still believe she'll be an outstanding Senator.

But let's be real here -- what she's done here was plain stupid. What she did putting down the Native American ethnicity may have been a lark, or a misguided attempt to get an admission advantage or whatever. That's not the issue. The issue is that she did it, then was questioned about it, then denied it, and now admits having done it. There's a word for this action: it's called a "lie."

I'm sorry if you dislike that Warren is on the receiving end of criticism, but to accuse a poster of "trolling" for pointing out her dishonesty is just wrong.

[closeupready]

27. +100.

nt

[wordpix]

33. how much "native" she is, we don't know--- if I were 1/8 native or Hispanic or whatever,

I would probably use that to my advantage on an application, too.

[gratuitous]

5. Damned if'n you do, damned if'n you don't

Join me a little thought experiment: Elizabeth Warren comes to the little "Native American" check box on some application or another and in her heart of hearts says, "You know, I am of Cherokee ancestry, but it's back a few generations. I'll just leave it blank." Twenty years later, 30 years later, some beady-eyed little gremlin of a Republican operative unearths the application and sees the Native American box is . . . BLANK! The smoking gun on Elizabeth Warren at last: She's ashamed of her heritage!

Tell me I'm wrong.

[RUMMYisFROSTED]

19. Prose-tastic!

"...some beady-eyed little gremlin of a Republican operative unearths..."

[cali]

23. His name is Jim Bartlett and he's scum of the first order

he's that "nice" Senator Brown's campaign manager and he's a rove acolyte and admirer of Lee Atwater.

[OmahaBlueDog]

21. You're wrong only to an extent

If I check "Native American", being 1/32 Native American, it creates the appearance that I'm a Caucasian fishing for affirmitave action to which I'm not legally entitiled.

I otherwise agree with your sentiment.

[Zorra]

30. The current Principal Chief of the Cherokee Tribe, Bill John Baker, is 1/32

Cherokee.

I'm just sayin'...ya know...

[McCamy Taylor]

6. We are all part Native. So, I can't see the voters getting riled up.

[goclark]

25. I'm part Native American too.

[lunasun]

29. say what?

[erpowers]

8. White Women

I always thought white women were covered by affirmative action. So, are white women covered by affirmative action? If they are than whether or not she claimed Native American heritage does not matter.

[FarCenter]

9. She'd be a 'twofer', with a tick in the rare "native American" column as well as the "female" one

[Zorra]

11. This is a total non- issue.

Elizabeth's believing what her mom told her makes her what?

Normal?

Many American families have oral histories pertaining to having American Indian ancestry, stories that are passed down from generation to generation. Sometimes these stories are accurate, and sometimes they are not. If an individual hears these stories as child and believes them, but never questions their accuracy because they were passed down from a parent or relative, can this person be blamed for what they believe to be the truth?

Children generally trust their parents and relatives to give them accurate information about their families.

One huge question that arises in Elizabeth Warren's situation is:

If she was told by her mother that her great great great grandmother was Cherokee, why would she have reason to question this information that came from her mother? Why would she find it necessary to document her heritage?

If your parents tell you are 1/32 Spanish, or Irish, or African American, do you find it imperative to go out of your way to prove it to yourself or others?

This whole thing is about nothing. Apparently, she has not used this belief that she is Cherokee for any financial gain in any way. While it is true that some American Indians get upset when people claim undocumented Native American heritage, it is also true that Native American tribal heritage is sometimes difficult or impossible to substantiate due to inaccuracy of record taking and keeping.

Traditional tribal records are often full of mistakes. Census takers in previous centuries often looked at the color of a person's skin to guess at their percentage of Indian ancestry. Sometimes American Indians told BIA men that they were white, because they worried that their land would be stolen

Sometimes, the documents are just...flat out gone, burned up in a fire, or lost in time.

So maybe she is part Cherokee as she was told by her parents that she was. Maybe her parents were misinformed about this.

If she were trying to get tribal membership, or casino money out of this, then there would be very good reason for us to demand proof of her ancestry.

Otherwise, all she did was reiterate something her mother told her. This does not meant that Elizabeth has been duplicitous in any way if her mother was mistaken about her ancestry. She just believed what her mom told her.

I still believe the things my mom told me as well.

And among those things that my mom told me and that I believe, include, especially include, the stories of my diverse ancestry.

[ingac70]

18. I think she looked it up....

I looked mine up and found my 4x great grandma on the Dawes Roll....

http://www.archives.gov/research/native-americans/dawes/dawes-how-to.pdf

[Iliyah]

12. The GOP are protraying

Native American as a bad thing? Who fucking cares.

[RBInMaine]

14. This is such a non-issue load of shit. Who the hell cares.

[JDPriestly]

17. On the frontier in early America, men outnumbered women.

Of course, there was, if not recorded intermarriages, lots of mixed families and households.

And while it may now be chic to claim Indian heritage, it would not have been for the parents and children of earlier times. The Indian wars continued into the 20th century.

For example:

The Apache Wars were a series of armed conflicts between the United States and Apaches fought in the Southwest from 1849 to 1886, though other minor hostilities continued until as late as 1924.[1][2][3] The Confederate Army participated in the wars during the early 1860s, for instance in Texas, before being used more extensively during the American Civil War in New Mexico and Arizona. Gregrory Michno, an American Indian Wars historian, says that there were more conflicts in the Southwest between the United States and native Americans than elsewhere in the country. This was mostly due to the various Apache warrior cultures.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apache_Wars

The Trail of Tears evacuated many Cherokees, but left some in N. Carolina. It took place in the 1830s. I am not of Indian descent as far as I know, but my mother whose family lived in the North, has told me the story of the Trail of Tears. Her emotional account of the story that was handed down to her about that march to new lands indicates to me that the exodus of the Indians into the lands to the West was heartwrenching for many white families, not just for the Indians themselves.

. . . .

In 1831, the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Muscogee-Creek, and Seminole (sometimes collectively referred to as the Five Civilized Tribes) were living as autonomous nations in what would be called the American Deep South. The process of cultural transformation (proposed by George Washington and Henry Knox) was gaining momentum, especially among the Cherokee and Choctaw.[3] Andrew Jackson continued and renewed the political and military effort for the removal of the Native Americans from these lands with the passage of the Indian Removal Act of 1830.

In 1831 the Choctaw were the first to be removed, and they became the model for all other removals. After the Choctaw, the Seminole were removed in 1832, the Creek in 1834, then the Chickasaw in 1837, and finally the Cherokee in 1838.[4] After removal, some Native Americans remained in their ancient homelands - the Choctaw are found in Mississippi, the Seminole in Florida, the Creek in Alabama, and the Cherokee in North Carolina. A limited number of non-native Americans (including African-Americans - usually as slaves) also accompanied the Native American nations on the trek westward.[4] By 1837, 46,000 Native Americans from these southeastern states had been removed from their homelands thereby opening 25 million acres (100,000 km2) for predominantly white settlement.[4]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trail_of_Tears

Whether you are an Indian, a Jew or a German, contesting the racial purity of others is a questionable matter.

I will never forget a German friend's reaction when he saw my tiny baby maybe three months old: Oh, she has such an Aryan head. I was utterly disgusted, and besides, there wasn't all that much "Aryan" about her. She happened to be a pretty baby with a round head so he wanted to pay her a compliment. I was not pleased.

The questions about Warren's Cherokee heritage would be as laughable as the search for Obama's birth certificate except that this kind of fanatical attention to racial/ethnic ancestry can have tragic effects. Let's stop it now.

There are many reasons why a person with a Cherokee grandmother might not have officially recorded that fact as recently as 50 years ago.

[BlueToTheBone]

28. My mother spent some time trying to prove her

native American heritage. The major problem in her case was that the Cherokee woman had only her given name of Sally/Sarah. Hard to get on any roles with that.

[Odin2005]

31. I'm sure a lot of Oklahomans have some Cherokee ancestry.

Raking her over the coals for this is stupid.

[slackmaster]

32. That was probably not one of her best decisions