Elizabeth Warren is under fire for reports she claimed status as a minority lawyer based on a far-back blood connection to the Cherokee line.
The Boston Globe reported that the Democratic candidate challenger to Scott Brown in the Senate race in Massachusetts self-identified as a minority from 1986 to 1995, though she has no recent Native American family.
Genealogist at the New England Historic Genealogical Society Chris Child set out to hunt down Warren’s ancestry last Thursday. In less than a week, he discovered documents citing an 1894 marriage record that lists Warren’s great-great-great grandmother, O. C. Sarah Smith as Cherokee, meaning that Warren is 1/32nd Native American.
The story kicked off Friday when the Boston Herald reported on an article that ran in the Harvard Crimson in 1996 about students’ concerns regarding a lack of diversity among the school’s faculty. In the story, Warren, who serves as the Leo Gottlieb Professor of Law at Harvard’s Law School, was cited as Native American. Warren’s identification as Native American pre-dates her time at Harvard.
