State of the Discussion

Maybe this is me being overly charitable but it's quite possible she believes/d it. I have a few friends with Cherokee ancestor stories, and for all I know they're true (the friends who have them seem to think they are). Of course none of them use it to claim any sort of benefit or anything so if we ever found out it was false or embellished or whatever it wouldn't matter.

But this is kind of where this stuff goes. Start attributing a positive value to a particular identity and suddenly there will be an incentive to reclaim that funny old story grandma used to tell.

"Her family always said they were part Indian, but two years ago we found out she is only a tiny fraction. I'm still disenchanted."

Really seriously- I want to meet this person.

This is the wild card... I can't believe she'd try to fish in that pond again; but then as I commented above to Oscar, the Video does dip a toe into the victim pool: she is part of a Native American family wasn't good enough for her Father's family.

I don't know what to say, the section in the video is completely unsubstantiated (maybe she's got something that someone foolishly edited out) but man, it sticks out like a sore thumb from otherwise changing the narrative to, "Hey, leave off my Mom... she said we had an Indian ancestor, and we do... apologies if I made it sound closer in our family history than it is... but that's oral tradition for you and mom wasn't sure exactly herself... why are you picking on an old dead lady??"

Instead, she wants us to believe that her family 5-9 generations removed from any Native American blood were victims of racial tensions. I hate to say it, but from *her own video* I'm led to believe she's lying and that the allure of victim status clouded her judgement.

If I were a Republican operative... I'd start canvassing the old folks who knew her Father's family... my hunch (and its just an Occam's razor thing) is that no, there's no-one who thought her Mother couldn't marry into the family for being Indians... but hey, I'm just watching the video *she's* putting out there to support her claims.

Its an unforced error in her unforced error cleansing process. Such is the power of Identitarian Politics...

I think maybe this is taking this far too seriously.
I mean, really, are people at your work talking about this?

Every single family int he world has some kind of Origin Myth.

And from what I have heard, almost never does one of these DNA tests match up neatly with the myth because people are never as neatly simple as we like to imagine, because people have been moving around and intermarrying for thousands of years.

So I'm trying to imagine anyone who really changes their view of Warren because of this.

So I ask again of the people here- aside from the "Savvy Politics" aspect, does this actually change your opinion of her?

She made it quite plausible that her family stories are true: there was someone who identified as Native American a few generations back.

Will it stop Trump calling her Pocahontas? No, nothing will short of his (unlamented) demise.

"Women, he implied, must be prepared to endure that, no matter what it might include, up to the point of criminality. "

No, this is Sam implying because he thinks there is only one right answer to every question.

But Warren didn't hit Trump, she hit herself squarely on her own jaw. I mean, I get the idea of trying to swing at Trump and the problems doing so entails, but she didn't do that here.

Why in the hell did she announce this?

Charitably, because she wanted to hit the ground running after the midterms and thought this was her biggest political liability.

If Trump insults you and you don't respond, you look weak. If you do respond, but not forcefully enough, you still look weak. If you do respond forcefully, you're taking him too seriously. Trump is being an asshole, of course, but everyone expects that, so it doesn't hurt him.

They aren't just from Mexico, Peru or Columbia, but Indians from those countries. If you look at the plot Figure 2, Warren's sample falls between First Nations (Canada) and Indigenous Mexican People:

https://mk0elizabethwarh5ore.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Bustamante_Report_2018.pdf

@dave Sullivan made it clear that boorish male behavior that did not rise to the level of criminal activity - rape, in other words - should not have appeared on the list. Women, he implied, must be prepared to endure that, no matter what it might include, up to the point of criminality. Although he later apologized for doing so - after being rightly pilloried for it - he included as boorish things like removing a condom during sex without permission, something he did not consider to be at all problematic. In Sullivan's argument, women should not warn other women about this kind of behavior. Removing a condom during sex is, as Sullivan puts it, "a minor offense." It was thus unfair and unbecoming to document it, and if it was not criminal, it should not go documented. That seems like an entirely bogus claim, especially considering what we know about unbelievably useless the justice system actually is at adjudicating actual criminal activity. Women do not owe men an endurance of their bullshit no matter what Sullivan is willing to excuse away with a wave of his hands.

If you watch the video... kinda, yes. I thought it was the weakest part of the video where she claims that her Father's family was against the marriage because her mother's family was Native American. The video evidence is of a couple of pictures that look like her Father's Family was quite a bit richer than her Mother's - which would be plenty plausible for an unsuitable match. Unless I missed it, even the interview portion didn't mention anything about Indians... just that her Father's family made it difficult...

So it struck me as odd that she doubled down on that - especially without any compelling testimony from some ancient Aunt or something.

Looks like an unforced error to me and why I only gave it a B grade.

She's running for President.

She said some things that are awkward.

She's preemptively is changing the narrative from her being Native American, to her (and her Republican brothers - yes I watched the "carefully choreographed" video) defending their family's verbal storytelling - and in particular their mother's memory.

I think it does what it needs to do... provide a response to a mistake she introduced.

It won't convince anyone of anything... she's both part Native American and not Native American at all... just as she was before. But now she can say the question has been asked and answered. If she's smart, she never says a word about it ever again. [That's why she released it 22-days before the Mid-Terms... too close and it becomes a "thing" for the mid-terms, but after the Mid-terms it becomes the first of the Presidential "things" because Nov 8, 2018 is Day-1 of President 2020 (2Oprah)]

As political rhetoric, I give it a solid B for plugging a hole that needed plugging. Unless she tries to campaign on it, then its a D-, probably an F. But she'd never do that would she?

Personally, I wonder why this seems so important to her? Is her identity that wrapped up in the idea that she has some Native American ancestry? Or is this just a poor attempt to hit back at Trump for calling her Fauxcahontas?

Either way, it takes a bit more of the shine off of her, IMHO (not that there was much to begin with).

And there's this part from the article too. (I'm adding the emphasis.)

Detecting DNA for Native Americans is particularly tricky because there is an absence of Native American DNA available for comparison. This is in part because Native American leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.

“The tribes have felt they have been exploited,” explained Lawrence Brody, a senior investigator with the Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch at the National Institutes of Health. “The amount of genetic data that is available from Native Americans is sparse.”

To make up for the dearth of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru, and Colombia to stand in for Native American. That’s because scientists believe that the groups Americans refer to as Native American came to this land via the Bering Strait about 12,000 years ago and settled in what’s now America but also migrated further south. His report explained that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed “for maximal accuracy.”

So the test didn't prove anything about her ancestry except that somewhere, between 6 and 10 generations back, there was someone from Mexico, Peru, or Colombia.

This is a shit show.

Why in the hell did she announce this?

Now there is a tendency among many of Warren's critics to latch on to the "maybe somewhere between six and ten generations back" and turn that into "ten generations back" and there is a lot of running with the 1/1024th thing when, hey, it could be six generations back.

But *I* have an ancestor five generations back who was full Cherokee (my great-grandmother was half Cherokee) and I think that everybody here would be vaguely irritated if I referred to myself as Native American and talked about myself as a member of a minority.

I mean, seriously.

Totally off-topic, but if you are ever looking for reading material, check out "Weird Scenes Inside the Canyon: Laurel Canyon, Covert Ops & the Dark Heart of the Hippie Dream" by David McGowan. It is a bit mind-blowing, if you enjoy crazy conspiracy theories that make you go hmm.