Elizabeth Warren just can't get a break - update on her heritage

Professor William A. Jacobson is doing some wonderful posting on Elizabeth Warren at Legal Insurrection. Today he looks into her Indian claims and her maternal Great Grandfather:

Elizabeth Warren�s white great grandfather shot an Indian
Elizabeth Warren still is not Cherokee. She never was.

Her family lore is grossly exaggerated, in all likelihood by Warren herself not her parents. Yet whenever anyone questions this family lore, Warren acts like it is an attack on her family, thereby shutting down challenges to the stories.

Warren relies on family lore because it�s hard to disprove what she claims she was told. It�s why Warren digs in deeper with her family lore stories as the campaign goes on. She thinks she has found a safe place.

Yet there is plenty of evidence that the story about her parents eloping because her mother was Native American is not true, Warren didn�t self-identify as Native American until she was 38 and climbing the law professor ladder, and even her own adult nephew who researched family genealogy called the Native American claim just rumor. The Boston Globe�s attempt to back up this family lore actually ended up calling it into serious question.

But, while Warren thinks she has found a safe place in her family lore, it�s still worth pointing out that she is not Cherokee. The Cherokee line supposedly was through her maternal grandparents, the Crawfords.

But just to put another piece of evidence on the table, real Cherokee genealogist Twila Barnes has come up a newspaper clipping from the Muskogee Times Democrat on August 17, 1906.

The newspaper clipping relates to a story about how Warren�s great grandfather, John H. Crawford, shot a real Indian and was identified in the newspaper as white, via Twila Barnes:

Elizabeth Warren is the granddaughter of Hannie Crawford, daughter of John H. Crawford. Warren says the Crawfords were Cherokee.

According to the Boston Globe:

�Rosco Crawford, Hannie Crawford�s brother, told (his granddaughter) that as a young boy living in the Creek Nation of Indian Territory, the Indians were �pretty mean.� Once, when a Creek was hitting Crawford�s younger brother, their father shot and wounded the Indian, according to her biography, on file at California State University at Fullerton.�

I did not know that there was a tribe called "Fraud". Even in blue-state Massachusetts, it will be interesting to see how many votes she gets for her run at the Senate.