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

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:

One, dismiss it. "Who cares?" he told reporters as he was leaving the White House on his way to survey hurricane damage in the South.

Two, deny it. "I didn't say that," he told a reporter who asked about his million-dollar offer, even though video of him saying precisely that at the July rally would be played and replayed on television news programs and websites.

Three, rewrite the rules. In a news briefing later in Georgia, he answered the Warren question with a new condition: "I'll only do it if I can test her personally, OK? That will not be something I'll enjoy doing, either."

We'll see. Although his answer made me wonder whether he knows how genetic testing is conducted, I take it as a sign that we can expect this little feud to continue.

That's what a number of folks on both sides are looking for. Warren's supporters were thrilled in 2016 when, despite her courtly professorial demeanor, she sounded willing to give as good as she got in her back-and-forth with Trump's smash-mouth approach to politics.

Judging by the similarly feisty stances we've seen and heard from the two dozen or more likely Democratic contenders, we're facing a presidential campaign that may sound at times like a Comedy Central roast.

Let the games begin. If anybody has lost moral authority to call anyone else a liar, it is Trump, whose falsehoods chronicled by The Washington Post's Fact-Checker column run into the thousands. But Warren's ancestry claims have critics on her own left-progressive side, too.

"Elizabeth Warren, where the hell have you been?" writes Simon Moya-Smith, a witty Oglala Lakota and Chicano journalist. In an essay on CNN's website, Moya-Smith, whose forthcoming book is titled, "Your Spirit Animal is a Jackass," echoes other Native American writers and activists who decry Warren's absence on issues of great concern to tribal communities, including poverty, education, pipeline incursion controversies and crises of high sexual assault rates on reservations.

Like most of us who claim to have "a little Indian blood" in our family trees -- myself included -- Warren has been absent from tribal registration and other aspects of Native American life.

Such is the nature of the historical tragedy that has relegated this land's original people to the margins of mainstream society. But it's not too late for her -- and the rest of us -- to start. After all, presidential candidates are supposed to serve all of the nation's people, not just their own political tribe.

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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)