What, exactly, makes someone American Indian? Even Indians themselves don’t agree as they debate the case of Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren, whose claim of American Indian identity is shining a rare spotlight on the malleable nature of Indian heritage and the long history of murky claims to such ancestry.
Warren, a Harvard Law School professor and Democrat who is running in Massachusetts against Republican incumbent Sen. Scott Brown, was listed as American Indian in law-school directories.
Warren has said that her “family lore” described Indian ancestors, and the New England Genealogy Association said it found indications — but not proof — that Warren had a Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, which would make her A/cb Indian.
“I’m proud of my heritage,” Warren said Thursday. Asked how she knew it included American Indians, she said, “Because my mother told me so.”
Her opponents question whether Warren chose this heritage to gain advantages available to Indians and other underrepresented groups in academia.
“Warren has zero evidence that she is at all Native American,” said Brown’s campaign manager, Jim Barnett.
The genealogy association acknowledges that it found only secondary references to Cherokee family members, not primary sources such as marriage, birth or census records.
Among American Indians, the varying opinions demonstrate that Indian identity is subjective even among Indians themselves.
When David Eugene Wilkins first saw Warren interviewed during her nomination to a federal post, he was smitten by her intelligence and politics. When he heard about her claims of Indian ancestry, “I shook my head and said, ‘Oh, no.’ “
“For us it was always about allegiance rather than biology or ancestry,” said Wilkins, an enrolled member of the Lumbee tribe and professor of American Indian studies at the University of Minnesota. “It’s where you place your political, cultural, emotional allegiance. She lived her entire life and never had any association whatsoever with any community. So something doesn’t wash for me.”
But David Treuer, an award-winning writer and Ojibwe Indian from Leech Lake Reservation in Minnesota, said there is a difference between Indian identity and ancestry.
“An Indian identity is something someone claims for oneself; it is a matter of choice,” Treuer wrote in a Washington Post essay titled “Elizabeth Warren says she’s Native American. So she is.”
There are 566 federally recognized American Indian tribes, each with its own rules for membership, according to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, or BIA. Some tribes require a “blood quantum” measurement of as much as one-half or one-quarter Indian ancestry. Others require a certain place of birth or residence.
Wilkins, the professor, is married to a Navajo with many siblings.
“I’ve asked them what defines a Navajo,” he said. “One said you have to speak the language. Another said you have to live within our sacred mountains. Another said no, you have to take part in ceremonial life. All this in one family!”
Warren grew up in Oklahoma, home of the 310,000-member Cherokee Nation, the largest Indian tribe. Warren does not claim official Cherokee membership.
4.5 million
People who identify themselves as American Indians or Alaska Natives, according to the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs
2 million
Enrolled tribal members in 2005, the most recent numbers available
