“Pocahontas” takes a DNA test

Elizabeth Warren announced the result of a DNA test that showed she has Native American ancestry.

The press has magnified the significance of this finding. The test showed that she seemed to have one Native American ancestor eight generations ago! That would about about the time of the Revolutionary War. It may have been as far back as ten generations, which takes us back to the very founding of San Antonio and New Orleans. If she could just get it back maybe three more generations, she might be a descendant of the REAL Pocahontas!

Exaggeration aside, Trump did say, “I will give you a million dollars, paid for by Trump, to your favorite charity if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian … we’ll see what she does.”

Warren tweeted Monday morning that Trump could “send the check to the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center.”

Trump said Monday that he “didn’t say” he would pay Warren $1 million for showing her test results. “I didn’t say that. You better read it again.”

Trump is correct in not paying up. The test doesn’t “show she’s an Indian,” and that’s exactly what he said he would pay for.

In fairness, the National Review had this take:

Earlier today, Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren released DNA test results that confirmed that she misled employers, students, and the public about her Native American heritage for years. Bizarrely, all too many members of the media treated the results as vindicating her. Down is up. Black is white. The imperatives of the resistance apparently dictate propping up a liar — as long as she might be able to beat President Trump in 2020.

Here are the facts. For an extended period of time — at a key point in her professional life — Warren identified herself as a Native-American woman. She listed herself as Native-American on a key legal directory reviewed by deans and hiring committees. Former employers — such as the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard Law School — listed Warren as a minority faculty member. Harvard Law School even trumpeted her as the school’s first tenured “woman of color.”

Warren contributed to a Native-American recipe book called — I kid you not — “Pow Wow Chow.” She has told people that her parents eloped because her father’s parents said he couldn’t marry her mother “because she is part Cherokee and part Delaware.”

Of course the National Review is a publication with a conservative slant, but all opinions aside, they went on to point out an important scientific fact: Warren is no more Native American than the average North American of European descent.

 In 2014, the New York Times reported on the results of a massive DNA study and found that “European-Americans had genomes that were on average 98.6 percent European, .19 percent African, and .18 Native American.”

That’s pretty much the same percentage as Warren. If she had a Native American ancestor eight generations ago, then she is 1/256th Native American. That’s .39%. But her ancestor may be as remote as 10 generations, which is .10%. In other words, she’s just about exactly as Native American as the average white European-American.

18 thoughts on ““Pocahontas” takes a DNA test

  1. I know this is beating a dead horse at this point, but Glenn Kessler at the Washinton Post dug deep on this and covered the key question – exactly how unusual are the specific DNA test results that Warren released? The answer is that they do show more Native ancestry than the average white American. The report also talks about the 23andMe study and some other stuff. Again, if you’re convinced she’s a terrible person (or a saint) I don’t know that there’s much in here to convince you otherwise, but I think it helps advance the topic further, and he did actually talk to DNA experts.

    https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2018/10/18/just-about-everything-youve-read-warren-dna-test-is-wrong/

    1. It seems to me that WaPo buried the lede:

      “Bustamante did not have access to Native American DNA, so he relied on samples of indigenous people from Mexico, Peru and Colombia.”

  2. Elizabeth Warren has claimed her parents had to elope because her father’s parents objected to her mother’s Cherokee blood. If Warren’s test indicates she might have had a Native American ancestor 6 – 10 generations ago, her mother couldn’t really have had much Cherokee ancestry. Now perhaps her paternal grandparents were bigots that wrongly believed her mother was Cherokee. Or perhaps this story is about as true as Senator Blumenthal’s military service in Vietnam.

    Senator Warren was listed in Harvard Law School’s faculty descriptions as Harvard Law School’s first tenured female of color. Personally, I don’t think one ancestor 6 – 10 generations ago would qualify a person as Native American. That would make her faculty bio incorrect. It’s possible it was an honest mistake. Harvard says that her ancestry had no impact on hiring or promotion decisions. That may also be true. But I think Senator Warren almost certainly checked the Native American box because she thought it might help her career in academia given the emphasis most elite universities place on diversity. Now diversity in academia might be defined as a campus where people look different, but mostly think the same. But that is an argument for a different day.

    As always with things like this, I ask myself would I feel the same if Senator Warren were a conservative Republican. I think I would, though I would probably care about the issue less.

  3. I’ve always been on the edge, but you won my support with your take here. Very open minded and fair. More people need to look beyond the vitriol and actually look at the facts. Nice take.

  4. The National Review is not exactly a very credible publication. They are clearly trying to propagate the lie that Elizabeth Warren used her claim of native ancestry to further her career without actually saying so. I’d say that is far more dishonest than anything that Elizabeth Warren did.

    1. That’s probably their motivation, but you’re missing the scientific point of their article, which is not about any of her claims, but about the fact that she is no more or less Native American than any other average white European-American.

  5. Key point: Trump does NOT owe the million dollars. The test didn’t show that she is “an Indian,” which is what he said he’d pay for.

  6. She didn’t say she “is Native American.” She has said in various interviews that her mother’s family had Native American ancestry. A lot of people in Oklahoma do. At some point someone in right-wing media suggested she’d used her Native American ancestry story (which they thought was probably BS) to get ahead via affirmative action.

    The video that Warren released has two messages: A) her story isn’t BS and B) she didn’t use the family history to try to get ahead through affirmative action. Whether or not you believe the issue is settled probably depends on whether you think she’s a trustworthy person.

    One thing that seems to be coming up a lot on twitter and so forth is the idea that just about everyone has some Native American ancestry, which does not appear to be true. The best estimates I can find say that percentage of self-identified white Americans who have identifiable Native American DNA sequences is less than 3%. The vast majority of white, non-hispanic Americans seem to have 100% European DNA. That could change as DNA marker research gets better, but that’s the best we have. If in fact she has identifiably Native American genetic markers in her DNA, then it’s pretty solid proof that she has a Native American ancestor.

    Really the larger issue is that Trump has never had any reason to doubt Warren’s story, there’s never been any evidence she benefited from the story (other than I guess it adds interest to her family history), yet he constantly mocked her over it and accused her of lying. I know it’s hardly the worst thing Trump has ever done, but it’s still really bad.

    1. Don

      That 100% does not appear to be correct. The actual number is 98.6%, according to this study. I know the tiny difference may seem like I’m being punctilious, but in fact it is a critical difference in this context. The average European American comes out .18% Native American in these DNA tests – indicating one Native American ancestor born nine generations ago (about one out of 512 ancestors from that generation). That’s almost identical to Warren.

      I would be one of those who should be at 100%, in that I know where all eight of my great-grandparents were born, and none of them were likely to pick up any Native American blood as Polish manual laborers. I should do one of those DNA tests to see if I get any false positives.

      1. I agree that Trump didn’t really promise the million dollars.

        I have seen that study. Talking about an “average” amount of Native DNA across the population is not answering the same question. The distribution is wildly uneven. It’s like saying that between me and Bill Gates, we have an average wealth of 25 billion dollars (or whatever it is now).

        Some people have a lot of Native American DNA markers and some have none at all. How many have none at all? My understanding is that about 97% of people in the US who self-identify as white have 0% detectable Native American DNA markers. For comparison, 99.75% of white Europeans have 0% detectable Native American DNA markers.

        So the National Review’s analysis that says she has an “average’ amount of Native American DNA isn’t really a useful way to look at it. If you randomly sampled 100 white Americans and sent in a DNA test to 23andMe, my assertion is that the expected number that would come back with 0% Native American ancestry is 97.

        If you averaged the total percentage of markers across that sample, maybe you’d get that 0.18% or something close to it, but that’s really misleading with statistics, IMO.

        1. Again, that does not appear to be correct. You’re stating a definition different from theirs. It would be fair to say that 97% of Americans show less than 1% Native American DNA. It would not be at all fair to say that 97% show NO Native American DNA.

          Here is the actual study in full

          What it actually says is “As many as five million Americans who self-identify as European might have at least 1% Native American ancestry.” While that is a fairly low number of people, about 2 or 3% as you suggest, it’s because 1% is a fairly high threshold – seven generations. If you reduce the threshhold to ANY traces of Native American markers, it increases exponentially. In fact, they even found traces of Native American blood in people like me, whose identifiable ancestors all come from the same European country! They say “We observe a substantially lower occurrence of Native American and African ancestry in individuals who self-report four grandparents born in the same European country.” The wording there is significant – “substantially lower” as opposed to “no.”

          1. I think this is a conflict in the meaning of “average.” The average amount of DNA markers indicating Native American ancestry in people with 4 European grandparents is 0.26%. Does that mean that the common person in that data set has some Native American ancestry? No. Most people in that sample had 0 Native American DNA markers. A small number of people in the sample had multiple markers. But this is like saying, “I have 9 shots of distilled water here on the counter and 1 shot of pure grain alcohol, so the average amount of alcohol in each glass is 10%.”

            This is why statisticians distinguish between different kinds of averages, like mean, median and mode. The mean amount of Native American DNA in their sample of people with four European grandparents is 0.26%. The median amount is 0%. The mode is 0%.

            Here’s a key quote from page 46 of the PDF (available here: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4289685/bin/mmc2.pdf) : “We find very low levels of African and Native American ancestry in Europeans with four grandparents born in Europe. We estimate that only 0.98% of Europeans carry African ancestry and 0.26% of Europeans carry Native American ancestry. These levels are substantially lower than the 3.5% and 2.7% of European Americans who carry African and Native American ancestry, respectively.”

            It’s possible I’ve misunderstood something, but it appears to me, especially after reading all the supplementary data, that they are talking about the number of people who have *any* Native American markers, not the 1% or 2% threshold they use in some of the charts.

          2. You definitely must have misunderstood, based on the math. Elsewhere they specifically said that 5 million European Americans are at 1% or higher. That translates to 2.7% of the white European population. Therefore, when they say 2.7% carry Native American ancestry, they must be specifically defining “carry Native American ancestry” as “1% or more.”

            I don’t know why they chose that definition, but I am assuming that anything less than 1% could be attributable to the limitations of the testing, so they considered those findings insufficiently reliable.

            Also, note that the last citation was worded in quite a weaselly manner (on their part, not on yours). “We find very low levels of African and Native American ancestry in Europeans with four grandparents born in Europe. We estimate that only 0.98% of Europeans carry African ancestry and 0.26% of Europeans carry Native American ancestry. These levels are substantially lower than the 3.5% and 2.7% of European Americans who carry African and Native American ancestry, respectively.” They SPECIFICALLY AVOIDED giving the results for the Americans who claim four grandparents born in the same European country. They gave the percentages for Europeans in general, and the overall percentages for White European Americans in general, but not for the specific sub-group they originally suggested as the key subjects of the first sentence! Damned if I know why they would do such a thing, but diversions like that always make me suspicious. Maybe it’s in another table somewhere. I don’t have the patience to go through every one.

      2. Total change in topic, Scoop, but just because you know all 8 of your great-grandparents were Polish manual laborers, that doesn’t mean you don’t have some exotic non-Caucasian admixture, albeit a bit further back than 10 generations.

        The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was the punching bag of first the Swedish and than the Russian Empire in the 17th and 18th centuries, and had more than its fair share of tussles with the Ottomans as well. The Ottomans did more than their share of trade with Africa in goods and humans, the Swedes brought along their Finnish subjects, who were closely related to the Siberians, and the Russians were under the Mongol Yoke for centuries.

        Any one of their numerous soldiers traipsing about Poland looking for a bit of willing or unwilling local skirt could have been one of your ancestors.

        The Russians in particular were probably the best vector for depositing far eastern material into the Polish gene pool, and trans-Bering Strait contact never really stopped after the first big push from the Clovis people. The Thule Culture ancestral to the folks referred to as “Eskimos” originated in the area on both sides of the Strait, and their descendants are still there on both sides. Ghenghis Khan’s alleged son Jochi took a wife from one of the Siberian tribes to the North and East of Mongolia proper, whose people would have had a trade relationship with the Thule.

        So it isn’t totally inconceivable you and someone one of the Inuit related tribes of the far North have a common ancestor as little as 1000 years back or less.

        Whether that is relevant to much of anything is another question.

  7. if one ancestor, 8 generations ago, makes you Native American, I guess I’m Attila the Hun. Sweet!

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