A Native American group says Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren "better be able to defend" her claim to Native American heritage. According to the Daily Caller:
"Once you put that down, you better be able to defend it," Ray Ramirez of the Native American Rights Fund told The Daily Caller on Monday.
Warren, who no longer publicly refers to herself as Native American, has disputed that she claimed Indian-American minority status then to give herself a professional advantage.
Asked for evidence of her ancestry to back up the candidate’s past statements, a Warren spokeswoman told TheDC on Monday that the campaign is "working on digging up some sort of evidence to appease" inquirers. But the campaign hasn’t been able to immediately provide any documentation.
Update: The Warren campaign now claims that the candidate is 1/32nd Native American, according to the Boston Herald:
Desperately scrambling to validate Democrat Elizabeth Warren’s Native American heritage amid questions about whether she used her minority status to further her career, the Harvard Law professor’s campaign last night finally came up with what they claim is a Cherokee connection — her great-great-great-grandmother.
"She would be 1⁄32nd of Elizabeth Warren’s total ancestry," noted genealogist Christopher Child said, referring to the candidate’s great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith, who is listed on an Oklahoma marriage certificate as Cherokee. Smith is an ancestor on Warren’s mother’s side, Child said.