Elizabeth Warren, the current Democratic candidate for the United States Senate in Massachusetts, has for 25 years asserted that she has Native American ancestry but has never produced one bit of credible evidence to support that assertion. Shockingly, several of the law schools that have employed her have accepted her assertion without requiring her to provide evidence to support the claim.

When pressed recently to explain her assertion of native American ancestry, Warren gave a long, rambling response:

‘I have lived in a family that has talked about Native America, talked about tribes, since I’ve been a little girl,’ she said. ‘I still have a picture on my mantle at home, and it’s a picture of my mother’s dad, a picture of my grandfather, and my Aunt Bee has walked by that picture at least a 1000 times, remarked that her father, my Pappa, had high cheekbones, like all of the Indians do, because that’s how she saw it, and your mother got those same great cheekbones, and I didn’t. And she though this was the bad deal she had gotten in life. Being Native American has been a part of my story, I guess since the day I was born, I don’t know any other way to describe it.’

But for over a quarter of a century, Ms. Warren has surely known that her claim of Native American ancestry cannot be supported by credible evidence. Yet she still did and has persuaded her law school employers to accept it.

William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection notes that Warren first claimed minority status in 1986, when an official publication of the Association of American Law Schools placed her on a list of Minority Law Teachers. She was, at the time, employed by the University of Texas. In 1994, the same publication placed her on a list of Minority Law Teachers while she was employed by the University of Pennsylvania.

Neither the University of Texas nor the University of Pennsylvania appear to have checked on the validity of Ms. Warren’s assertions. Harvard may still list her as a ‘minority teacher,’ although it’s hard to get the administration to issue an official statement on that topic.

Indeed, as recently as 1996, Harvard Law School spokesman Mike Chmura was touting Warren’s Native American ancestry, as Noreen Malone reported this week in New York Magazine:

‘Although the conventional wisdom among students and faculty is that the Law School faculty includes no minority women, Chmura said professor of law Elizabeth Warren is Native American,’ read a 1996 Crimson article, timing that provides grist for those who want to imply that identifying as Cherokee was a careerist move that helped her get inside the most rarefied Ivy gates….
@Ed; Lol, Which ‘Career’ exactly’ You mean her Long and Distinguished career gaming the system and scamming to get hired as an Affirmative Action Queen’ Or are you referring to her Long and Distinguished career Lying to get a job’