The U.S President Donald Trump consistently called the U.S Senator Elizabeth as “Pocahontas” because of her claims. She had made claims regarding having ancestry from indigenous Native American people. A professor at Stanford University disclosed a recent analysis of her DNA and said that she is a part of Native American. The Boston Globe report mentioned that the analysis of Warren’s DNA was done by a Stanford University professor and expert in the field, Carlos D. Bustamante. He won a 2010 MacArthur fellowship also known as a genius grant for his work on tracking population migration via DNA analysis.
The analysis has indicated that the vast majority of Warren’s ancestry is European, but Bustamante added that the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor. Bustamante calculated that Warren’s pure Native American ancestor appears in her family tree in the range of 6-10 generations ago. That timing fits Warren’s family lore, passed down during her Oklahoma upbringing, that her great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, as she was found partially Native American. Smith was born in the late 1700s. She identified as white in historical documents. It is noteworthy that Indians faced discrimination in that era.
Smith would have had strong incentives to call herself white if possible. Trump’s consistent ridiculing of Warren as “Pocahontas” has been criticized for being immature at best and racist at worst. The political media reaction to this story will almost certainly fall along predictable lines. Some outlets will likely give it relatively a little air coverage, choosing not to validate the initial criticism from the right. Conservative outlets will almost certainly dismiss the findings and take issue with the relatively little amount of Native American ancestry in the blood of Warren.