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Oct. 19, 2018 - Brother Nathanael
07:12
The Dark Side Of Warren's DNA
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Elizabeth Warren is unfit to lead, says the headline in a Washington Post op-ed this week.
Citing her dubious DNA claim of Native American ancestry, the piece suggests she seeks out a Jewish one instead.
But Warren would have some work to do, the author said.
Her demeanor screams white bread and jello molds.
I don't know about you, but when a hyena tries to look like a duck, toss it in the water and see if it swims.
What's come up lately is Ms.
Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, at various times in her career has been identified as a Native American.
And looking at her, it doesn't necessarily seem plausible.
No, I mean, you look at her and she's as white as a ghost of a polar bear after a dental bleaching in a snowstorm.
The ghost came back to haunt her.
Elizabeth Warren may have cooked her goose in her own DNA juice.
Tonight, the leaders of the Cherokee Nation are speaking out against Senator Elizabeth Warren's campaign video touting her Native American ancestry courtesy of a newly revealed DNA test.
The tribe saying in part, quote, a DNA test is useless to determine tribal citizenship.
Out front now, the Secretary of State for the Cherokee Nation, Chuck Hoskin Jr., thanks so much for joining us.
Why do you find this offensive?
Jake, thanks for having me on.
The problem with the DNA test is that it proves nothing of relevance to whether a person is a citizen of an Indian nation, a member of an Indian nation.
DNA, at best, can give you some indicators of some markers that indicate that you're related to somebody who lived long ago that may have lived in North and South America, may have been a native peoples of those continents.
You need blood, tribal blood, to prove American Indian ancestry.
And the blood quantum must range from one quarter to one thirty-second, not one one thousand, like Warren's DNA, which proves absolutely beyond any doubt that Warren is 99.99% white.
If she contradicts, she should claim she's Latina, not Cherokee.
For Warren's DNA report concedes that with scant samples from North American groups available, her DNA was instead compared against samples from Mexico, Colombia, and Peru.
Look, tracing American Indian ancestry or Jewish ancestry as the Waupo piece proposes has nothing to do with demeanor.
I recall that a few years ago, Rabbi David Weiss, a Hasid of the Natura Karta anti-Zionist group, made an attempt to bring me back into the fold.
Your mother a Jew?
he asked. Both my mother and father, I answered.
Ten generations back, according to our family tree.
That was more than good enough for him, so he launched into a reconversion technique with, you need to fan your Yiddish flame.
Not sure what flame can be fanned in Lizzie's inner Indian.
I understand that tribal membership is determined by tribes and only by tribes.
I never used my family tree to get a break or get ahead.
I never used it to advance my career.
But I want to make something else clear, too.
My parents were real people.
Then let those real people produce a real family tree to show that Warren's a real Cherokee, as she's been saying for years.
And did they pass on enough real blood to enroll Warren as a member of the Cherokee tribe?
Well, Senator Elizabeth Warren continues to insist that she is a genuine American Indian in spirit, if not genetically.
And to support her claim, she cites her parents, whom she claims had to elope due to racist objections to her mother's part Indian heritage.
Twyla Barnes is an actual Cherokee genealogist.
She's looked into this, and she joins us tonight to tell us what she's found.
Twyla, thanks for coming on. Thank you.
So if you could just settle this for us, since this is something that you're expert in, is Elizabeth Warren a Cherokee Indian?
No. But she's got high cheekbones!
She's also given this sound bite about her appearance and the appearance of others in her family.
Take a listen. I still have a picture on my mantle at home, and it's a picture my mother had before that, a picture of my grandfather.
And my Aunt Bea has walked by that picture at least a thousand times, remarked That her father, my papa, had high cheekbones like all of the Indians do, because that's how she saw it.
And she said, and your mother got those same great cheekbones, and I didn't.
She thought this was the bad deal she had gotten in life.
Being Native American has been part of my story, I guess, since the day I was born.
What's your reaction to that, Twyla?
Well, when she said it's part of her story, that's true.
It's just a story.
And honestly, I have never walked by any picture of any of my ancestors that are Indian and said, they have high cheekbones.
It's just not something we say.
You can't have it both ways.
Family lore is fine for misty eyes, but enrollment needs certifiable bloodlines.
But the issue is not about race.
It's about the threat to the survival of American Indian sovereignty as federally recognized political entities that Warren is darkly turning into a stepping stone to the presidency, just as she did at Harvard, just as she did for her Senate seat.
You see, it doesn't matter one whit what Warren claims about her Cherokee ancestry and her family lore, but it does matter how it threatens the ongoing battles for American Indian legal defense of its tribal sovereignty with its inclusive property, environmental, and self-governing rights.
For if American Indian tribal identity is a matter of what my mama told me or my DNA test told me so, then the boundaries of that societal identity are breached and that's the beginning of the end of legally established American Indian sovereignty which can, by an act of opportunist congressional hacks like Warren, be overturned.
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