Responding to years of derision by political critics, Sen. Elizabeth Warren on Monday released a report on a DNA analysis that provides evidence she does, in fact, have some Native American heritage.
Warren is somwhere between 3% and 0.0019% Native American ancestry. That’s a bit less than previously claimed, but the test does leave open the possibility that her family story is true.
The analysis on the Massachusetts Democrat was done by Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante. He concluded Warren’s ancestry is mostly European but says “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor.”
Bustamante, a prominent expert in the field of DNA analysis, determined Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears “in the range of six to 10 generations ago.”
That range does mesh with an 1894 document the New England Genealogical Society unearthed suggesting Warren’s great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, could have been partially Native American.
But if her ancestor is 10 generations back, that could mean she’s just 1/512th Native American, according to the report. That could further excite her critics instead of placating them.
For example, President Donald Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., challenged Warren earlier this summer to prove she was more than 6% Native American.
For years, critics have charged that Warren advanced her career with a false narrative she is a descendant of Cherokee and Delaware tribes. She was listed as the first minority female Harvard Law faculty member when she was 68-years-old. Warren has insisted that ethnicity was never a factor in her success.
Trump has repeatedly mocked his potential 2020 presidential election challenger as “Pocahontas,” going so far as to offer $1 million to a charity of her choice if she took a DNA test that proved her claims.
The analysis was first reported by The Boston Globe and posted on the newspaper’s website along with a re-election campaign video produced by her political allies.
In it, Warren’s daughter says: “The president likes to call my mom a liar. What do the facts say?”
Bustamante replies: “The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree.”
In an email Monday to supporters, Warren said she “never expected the President of the United States to use my family’s story as a racist political joke against Native American history, culture, and people — over, and over, and over.”
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The Associated Press contributed to this article