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Pow Wow Chow and Elizabeth Warren

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Prof. Elizabeth Warren and Holly Petraeus speak with servicemembers and their families at a forum in Ft. Myer.

Originally posted on October 16, 2018.

The Boston Globe’s Ms. Linskey on Senator Elizabeth Warren’s various racial claims:

  • In 1984, Warren contributed five recipes to a Native American cookbook entitled “Pow Wow Chow: A Collection of Recipes From Families of the Five Civilized Tribes: Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole.” Her name is listed as “Elizabeth Warren, Cherokee.”
  • Warren also listed herself as a minority in a legal directory published by the Association of American Law Schools from 1986 to 1995. She’s never provided a clear answer on why she stopped self-identifying.
  • She was listed as a Native American in federal forms filed by the law schools at Harvard University and University of Pennsylvania, where she worked.
  • In 1996, Harvard Law School was being criticized for lacking diversity. A spokesman for the law school told the Harvard Crimson that Warren was Native American.

“If the Massachusetts senator is now a person of color, then the term has no meaning,” writes James Freeman in the WSJ.

Given that Senator Warren’s family does not belong to a tribe, the likely Democratic presidential candidate in 2020 is trying to explain her long-time claim of Native American Heritage.

“Warren provided a sample of her DNA to a private lab in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator’s aides,” reported Annie Linskey in the Boston Globe.

Warren didn’t use a commercial service, but Bustamante is on the scientific advisory board for Ancestry, which provides commercial DNA tests. He’s also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.

Warren said she was committed to releasing the report regardless of the results. However, Warren’s aides would not say whether she or any of her three siblings had previously done a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance about Bustamante’s analysis.

James Freeman does not find it odd that the senator didn’t rely on analysis performed by a commercial firm. “Especially with her apparent hostility to commerce in general.”

DNA Conclusion?

While the vast majority of the individual’s ancestry is European, the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor in the individual’s pedigree, likely in the range of 6-10 generations ago.

The researchers found that European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.

These broad estimates masked wide variation among individuals. Based on their sample, the researchers estimated that over six million European-Americans have some African ancestry. As many as five million have genomes that are at least 1 percent Native American in origin.

This means the senator is somewhere between 1/64th and 1/1024th Native American, notes Mr. Freeman.

“In recent years geneticists have been uncovering new evidence about our shared heritage, and last week a team of scientists published the biggest genetic profile of the United States to date, based on a study of 160,000 people,” reported Carl Zimmer in the New York Times. Mr. Zimmer added:

We’re All Native Americans Now

According to the DNA report, Sen. Warren could possibly have far less than 1% Native American ancestry. Her genetic makeup is perhaps similar to that of the average white person in the U.S.

Elizabeth Warren misled her employers, her students, and the public. Her response is positively Trumpian, NRO’s David French points out. “No retreat. No surrender. But if she’s going to act like Trump, then the least the media could do is treat her like it treats Trump.”

Is that asking too much?

Read more from James Freeman here.

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Debbie Young

Debbie, editor-in-chief of Richardcyoung.com, has been associate editor of Dick Young’s investment strategy reports for over three decades. When not in Key West, Debbie spends her free time researching and writing in and about Paris and Burgundy, France, cooking on her AGA Cooker, driving her Porsche Boxter S through Vermont and Maine, and practicing yoga.