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Elizabeth Warren - 1/32nd Cherokee? How?

crimresearch said:
Did she claim or get a benefit over someone else who actually met the legal criteria?

As already shown, claiming set asides for Native American status requires more than distant ancestral connections.
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There is also the same requirement in Hawaii of 1/4 tp claim Hawaiian benefits however that standard is getting harder and harder to meet. Most of the original native Hawaiians died of disease and those that remain have intermarried. In a few generations there will be few left that meet that criteria so what then?
 
keale said:
Well you either have it in your ancestry or you dont
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I thought you were saying binary in the context that a person who was 1/32 Cherokee would be identified by 'most people' as being Cherokee, instead of being the other 31/32.
 
Call me cynical, but I think she played the "minority" card for as long as she thought it could benefit her and then dropped it when the risk/reward calculation (getting called out on her tenuous connection to her claimed minority status vs. potential career benefits) was no longer in her favor.

Her explanation that she only listed herself as a "minority law professor" in the legal directory in order to connect with other Native Americans is not credible, especially considering she apparently dropped it shortly after arriving at Harvard.
 
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keale said:
Lemme get this straight. Your Cherokee by blood which means to most people that you are Cherokee BUT your not part of the modern Cherokee community so the other Cherokee dont consider you Cherokee?

Did I get that right?
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Technically it only matters if the white liberal establishment considers you such. That's the important part.


[/sarcasm]
 
My great-grandmother went to Indian school, but her daughter, my grandmother, had blue eyes. So ... unless my grandma was a mutation, I don't think her mother could have been all Indian. Her father may have been - my mother says he looked it - but how common in 1880s-90s Oklahoma would it have been for an Indian man to marry a white woman?

There's a branch of the family that denies any Indian heritage. Weird. Anyway I see why the Cherokee would have been generous with enrollment in that diluting Indian blood was a strategy for turning half-breeds into whites.
 
Beerina said:
Technically it only matters if the white liberal establishment considers you such. That's the important part.
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Yes, that's why conservatives are making such a big fuss about Warren claiming to be Indian and calling her a liar because she's not Indian enough for them. Because liberals.
 
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As to the one drop rule, my new dentist informed me a couple of months ago that my ancestry included American Indian at some point - there is a protrusion thingie called a cusp on back teeth in a particular location that requires that apparently.
 
Chris Child, a researcher at the New England Genealogical Office, has offered one bit of evidence that some claim support Ms. Warren's contention that she has Cherokee heritage. But it's not much.

Mr. Child found that Ms. Warren’s great-great-grandfather, Preston Crawford, had a brother, William Crawford. In 1894, when William Crawford was about 57 years old, he submitted a marriage application to the officials of Logan County, in what was then Oklahoma Territory. In that application, William Crawford stated he wished to receive a license to marry Mary Long, and he further stated that his mother, O.C. Sarah Smith, was a Cherokee.

Here's the problem with that evidence: Nowhere do the records of that time support William Crawford's claim.

We know that between 1794 and 1799, Wyatt Smith and Margaret "Peggy" Brackin Smith had a little girl they named O.C. Sarah Smith. There's no evidence that “Peggy,” O.C. Sarah’s mother, was Cherokee, and her father's father—Andreas Smith—was the son of two Swedish immigrants, Hans Jurgen Smidt and his wife Maria Stalcop, who settled in Delaware shortly before Andreas' birth in 1731.

O.C. Sarah Smith—known in some records as "Oma" or "Neoma"—appears to be the mother of both Elizabeth Warren's great-great-grandfather, Preston Crawford, and his brother, William Crawford, who is said to have claimed she was Cherokee on that wedding application.

It is upon this claim by O.C. Sarah Smith's son that Ms. Warren's assertion of Native American ancestry precariously sits. But under the best case scenario for Ms. Warren, her great-great-great grandmother O.C. Sarah Smith was only half Cherokee and half Swedish, making her not 1/32 Cherokee, as most press reports have stated, but 1/64 Cherokee.

However, it is more likely that O.C. Sarah Smith had no Cherokee heritage.

Census records that listed O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford (her married name) as a resident of Tennessee in 1830, 1840, and 1860 classify her as white, not Indian.
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http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2012/05/06/no-credible-evidence-for-warrens-claim-to-native-american-ancestry

It's from Breitbart(Arrgh, it burns my fingers to even type the name) so it's probably nothing but lies, DAMNED LIES!
 
Minoosh said:
My great-grandmother went to Indian school, but her daughter, my grandmother, had blue eyes. So ... unless my grandma was a mutation, I don't think her mother could have been all Indian. Her father may have been - my mother says he looked it - but how common in 1880s-90s Oklahoma would it have been for an Indian man to marry a white woman?
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I don't know at all about that, but drifting a bit off-topic, I recall on one of Gates' PBS shows about celebrity ancestry, he checked up on several black families that had the oral history of being part Indian and debunked those stories. [ETA: Using DNA analysis.] Apparently Indians and Blacks did not intermarry with much frequency at all, despite the oral history.
 
JoeTheJuggler said:
I don't know at all about that, but drifting a bit off-topic, I recall on one of Gates' PBS shows about celebrity ancestry, he checked up on several black families that had the oral history of being part Indian and debunked those stories. [ETA: Using DNA analysis.] Apparently Indians and Blacks did not intermarry with much frequency at all, despite the oral history.
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I remember a similar story. Some of the black families were outraged and even threatened the testers when it turned out than many of them had German ancestry.
 
Travis said:
I'm still lost on why this is important?
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It would depend on whether or not it was done to obtain a government benefit specifically designated for those who meet the government's requirements for 'Cherokee' status.

She knew or should have known whether or not she was confirmed member of the one of the recognized Cherokee tribes.

As a law professor, she knew, or should have known that the legal requirements for claiming Cherokee status were not satisfied by family lore about '1/32'.

There seem to be some blanks that need filling in.
 
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crimresearch said:
It would depend on whether or not it was done to obtain a government benefit specifically designated for those who meet the government's requirements for 'Cherokee' status.
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I think it's a problem even if it wasn't directly related to obtaining a specific government benefit. Claiming "minority" status based on a tenuous 1/32 connection in order to gain better employment in the private sector during the early era of affirmative action hiring and then dropping the claim once the better position is obtained (when affirmative action is not viewed as favorably) strikes me as dishonest.
 
shuize said:
I think it's a problem even if it wasn't directly related to obtaining a specific government benefit. Claiming "minority" status based on a tenuous 1/32 connection in order to gain better employment in the private sector during the early era of affirmative action hiring and then dropping the claim once the better position is obtained (when affirmative action is not viewed as favorably) strikes me as dishonest.
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Harvard uses enough tax money that they are bound by federal laws, so getting hired there because of her 'minority' status would be a benefit.

Is there any way to determine if that claim actually helped her get a job she would not have otherwise qualified for?
 
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