Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides “strong evidence’’ she had a Native American in her family tree.
The results come after years of being mocked by President Trump and other Republicans about her heritage, going so far as to call her names like Pocahontas.
She provided the test results to the Boston Globe in an effort to quell the comments.
The analysis of her DNA was done by Stanford University professor Carlos Bustamante; an award winning expert in the field of DNA analysis.
His conclusion is that:
“The vast majority” of Warren’s ancestry is European, but he added that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.” That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was at least partially Native American.
Smith was born in the late 1700s. She identified as white in historical documents, though at the time Indians faced discrimination, and Smith would have had strong incentives to call herself white if possible.
A lot of people are also seeing this move as a sign of greater things...like a potential move to run for the presidency in 2020.
By doing the test, she's taking a note from former President Obama who after producing his birth certificate in 2011 almost completely stopped the "birther" movement started against him by....Donald Trump.