The controversies over claims to Native American ancestry

By G.F.

EARLIER this month Elizabeth Warren, a senator from Massachusetts suspected of harbouring presidential ambitions, released a video (pictured) in which she presented the results of a DNA test purporting to prove her Native American ancestry. Since Ms Warren first ran for the Senate in 2012 critics have accused her of claiming indigenous ancestry to further her career (for example by identifying as a minority in a national law-school directory). President Donald Trump has repeatedly made fun of her claim by calling her “Pocahontas”, and she was taunted to take a test to prove her heritage. Ms Warren’s video, however, has ended up angering many Native Americans. Why?

Early European settlers displaced those they called “Indians” through an unholy trinity of violence, disease and starvation. By the 19th century, the process was rather more official. In 1838 President Andrew Jackson forced one of the largest tribes, the Cherokee, to move from the land east of the Mississippi River into Oklahoma. Thousands died on a journey that came to be known as the Trail of Tears. But then attitudes started to soften, and white Americans—especially in the South—began to tell tales of their (frequently invented) Indian ancestors. Native Americans, in particular the Cherokee, became idealised as “noble savages” who had fought for self-determination, much as the Southern states were doing in the run-up to the Civil War. Not only did Southerners’ Native American identity “prove” their ties to the soil, but it also allied them with a group that had taken up arms to resist federal authority.

Fast-forward to 2010 and over 2.3m Americans claimed American Indian or Native Alaskan descent in the national census, 40% more than in 2000. And that was prior to consumer DNA testing. Today people can cite a report by 23andme, a genetic-testing firm, showing some percentage of Native American genetic code, to back up family myth. But DNA testing raises the hackles of many in the tribal nations, a response in part to the federal government’s historical use of “blood quantum laws” to identify Native Americans in order to restrict their rights. As a result many Native Americans have not added their DNA to databases used for ancestral analysis. Ms Warren’s DNA, for example, was not checked against any samples from tribes with which she claimed affiliation. Instead a comparison with DNA from indigenous Peruvians, Mexicans and Colombians was used to show that it was statistically likely that she had a Native American forebear six to ten generations ago. DNA evidence of Native American ancestry does not qualify a person for tribal membership. The tribal nations are the sole arbiters of enrolment. A claimant to tribal membership may need to show a mix of historical documentation, genealogical research and an ongoing relationship with the tribe. The Cherokee Nation’s secretary of state, Chuck Hoskin, Jr, says that the use of DNA to prove kinship dishonours legitimate tribal governments and their citizens, “whose ancestors are well documented and whose heritage is proven”.

It is unclear why the number of Americans claiming Native American ancestry is surging. They may be attracted to a heritage that stretches back thousands of years. They may hope that such claims absolve them of collective European guilt for the genocide of indigenous people. Perhaps all people claiming such ancestry should draw a lesson from Johnny Cash. He once called himself “almost a half-breed Cherokee-Mohawk”. When later genealogical testing proved this claim to be false, he stopped making it, says his daughter, Rosanne Cash. That did not stop him from advocating for Native American rights.