Liz Warren. Why the Cherokee rolls can be used to prove but NOT to disprove heritage.

[pnwmom]

4. She wasn't ever trying to establish a "solid public identity." She was attacked

when she ran for the Senate because decades ago, on some listing of law professors, she indicated she had some Cherokee heritage. She says she did it because she was hoping to meet other people with tribal roots, and the people who hired her at Harvard said they weren't even aware of it.

One of my relatives did the exact same thing because he was proud of it --not because he had anything to gain from it. But he didn't become a politician decades later, so it has had no ramifications in his life.

And the Cherokee nation should be well aware that the tribal lists are incomplete. There are many reasons -- including marriage and migration -- that a Cherokee's name wouldn't appear on a roll. Even an unlisted person who was a full sibling of someone on a roll wouldn't be an "official" Cherokee today.