ROOTS & BRANCHES

Your columnist rarely steers “Roots & Branches” into territory that might be considered political.

Rarely but not never.

I’ve watched U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s claims of Native American ancestry from a distance over the last decade or so.

My opinion – shaped by some 30 years of doing genealogy and having many people find their assertions of Native American ancestry debunked (or at least unprovable) – had been that there likely wasn’t a whole lot to Warren’s claims.

She had talked about “family stories” and a cookbook of Native American recipes, as my memory serves.

Those of us in the genealogy world had heard all this before. The only thing missing from Warren’s claims was that her ancestor was a tribal princess (this seems to be one of the most enduring legends of genealogy – right up there with the Ellis Island Name Change Myth – is that virtually every otherwise-apparently-white person’s story about Native ancestry stems from a princess).

Related to all this was the suspicion that Warren had used the family legend to claim minority status in a way that furthered her career.

Warren addressed both these issues last week.

As far as the assertion that she played a “minority card” for advancement, while it is ultimately unknowable whether her claims had any affect in the legal academic world, it seems likely that while her employer (Harvard) benefited from her listing as a minority that she did not.

But on the issue of the actual Native American ancestry, the verdict was more clear: Her DNA test showed five strings associated with Native American ancestry, mostly likely eight generations back, but suggested to be in the range of between six and 10 generations.

This is consistent with what Warren had claimed was the family story and had been suggested by a limited paper trail of documentation.

In current world of ethnic DNA testing, no proof is 100 percent; the field is still evolving. The researchers also do not attribute her Native American blood to any particular tribe (Warren has said her Native American ancestry is Cherokee and Delaware).

The analyst who ran the DNA test did not know that Warren was the subject. The report on the test was put out under the name Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University geneticist and former MacArthur Fellow.

My bottom line: Just as much as I was skeptical of family stories, I’m now convinced by the science. I admire that Warren had the moxy to have such a test done.

The report about Warren’s Native American DNA is found at this URL, https://mk0elizabethwarh5ore.kinstacdn.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/Bustamante_Report_2018.pdf