Over 200 Native Americans sign letter urging Warren to retract ancestry claims

More than 200 Cherokees and other Native Americans on Wednesday signed on to a letter urging Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) to unequivocally retract claims that she previously made about having Native American ancestry.

The letter, which was organized by Cherokee Nation citizens Joseph M. Pierce, Daniel Heath Justice, Rebecca Nagle and Twila Barnes, calls on the Democratic presidential candidate to “fully address the harm you have caused,” arguing that her past claims “have normalized white people claiming to be Native.”

“Your actions do not exist in a vacuum but are part of a long and violent history,” the letter reads, citing a Los Angeles Times report that found more than $800 million in federal contracts reserved for minorities have been allocated to members of groups with suspicious ties to Native tribes. The LA Times first reported the Cherokee Nation's new request of Warren.

The letter goes on to argue that “as the most public example of this behavior,” Warren needs “to clearly state that Native people are the sole authority on who is — and who is not — Native.”

Warren for decades claimed that her family history included Cherokee ancestry. She once said she was “American Indian” on a registration card for the state bar of Texas, and before announcing a White House bid in 2018, she released the results of a DNA test that found she was between 1/32 and 1/1,024 Native American.

https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/484731-over-200-native-americans-sign-letter-urging-warren-to-retract-ancestry