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Sen. Warren tries to reclaim Indian roots, but Trump's isn't done with them yet

By Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Sen. Elizabeth Warren wants to reclaim her Native American heritage, but President Donald Trump doesn't appear to be done with it yet.

Warren, a Massachusetts Democrat who has been behaving like someone who is seriously considering a presidential run, surprised the political world on Monday by releasing DNA test results to back up her long-held claim of Native American ancestry.

The report by Carlos Bustamante, a distinguished Stanford University DNA ancestry expert, concluded that although "the vast majority" of Warren's ancestry is European," the test results also "strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor."

Sure, it's a pretty distant ancestor -- likely in the range of six to ten generations ago -- as far as today's gene technology can tell, experts say. But it's better than nothing.

Until now, Warren said she had nothing to back up her claim except family lore, stories told within her family in Oklahoma and passed along through generations.

That's not good enough for some critics, most prominently Trump, who in utilizing his remarkable talent for turning schoolyard slurs into political ammo against his rivals dubbed Warren "Pocahontas," after the Native American woman in colonial Virginia whose memory deserves better treatment than this.

 

But Warren's evidence of an unknown Native American ancestor is significant enough for her to demand that President Trump pay up on a challenge he sarcastically issued at a July political rally in Montana for her to take a DNA test.

"I will give you a million dollars, to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you're an Indian," Trump said at the rally. "I have a feeling she will say 'no.' "

But she said yes to her own DNA test. In a series of tweets as she released the report on Monday, she called on Trump to pay up. "Please send the check to the National Indigenous Women's Resource Center," she wrote, describing the organization as "a nonprofit working to protect Native women from violence."

Trump's response? It came in three characteristic steps:

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(c) 2018 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

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