Because I study and teach Native History, a lot of people have asked me questions about the recent Elizabeth Warren’s not really Cherokee kerfuffle. I’m happy to answer those questions as best I can, with a few caveats:
- I’m not Cherokee, or Native, and I don’t pretend to speak for the Cherokee Nation or Native people more generally.
- Many Native scholars and other Native people are speaking out. If you really want to understand this issue, you should listen to them, not me. And of course the Cherokee Nation released its own statement.
- My own studies are not centered on Cherokee history, so there are real limits to what I know. That being said . . .
Let’s start with the issue of Cherokee citizenship. Like any other nation, the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma gets to determine its own criteria for who is and isn’t a citizen. One of the things they demand is that you can prove descent from Dawes rolls: a series of government censuses taken of Native people at the turn of the 20th century. Warren cannot, and so she has no legitimate claims of being a Cherokee citizen.
Some people have asked me: Aren’t the Dawes rolls a problematic way to determine citizenship? Absolutely, for several reason I won’t go into here. But the point is that nations get to determine their own citizenship criteria, good, bad or otherwise. For example, some people think that simply being born in the United States, while having no other connection to the nation or its culture, is a dumb way to determine U.S. citizenship, but that’s something we do. Citizenship, by definition, is a contrivance. So all criteria are bound to be contrived and even flawed. The point then isn’t that the Dawes rolls aren’t problematic. It’s that the Cherokee Nation gets to decide who’s in and who’s out, just like any other nation would, and she doesn’t meet their criteria.
So what about Elizabeth Warren simply being Cherokee in an ethnic sense? That’s a really clear No. She wasn’t raised in Cherokee society. Nor was she raised by Cherokee family, because she has no Cherokee family. She is not Cherokee in any ethnic or cultural sense, and so you can probably see that any pretense of her being “Cherokee” because of an unnamed, distant relative, is really a bit insulting. It would be like me claiming to be Mongolian because I’ve heard vague family stories about having a Mongolian ancestor. At best, that kinda thing is just silly. But it’s not a laughing matter. Warren’s claims to being Cherokee either cheapen Cherokee Nation sovereignty and/or insult Cherokee culture.
Okay, so then what about Warren’s more general claim to being “Indian” in some vague sense, based, again, on a distant, unknown ancestor?
Once more, I’m not speaking for Native people. But in my experience, that kinda thing really doesn’t go over well in Indian Country. Why? Because Native people are constantly having to put up with this nonsense. They even have a nickname for people with vague, BS claims of being Indian. They call them Wannabes. And it’s not just white Americans. There are plenty of black Americans who claim to be part-Indian, but aren’t.
But even if you can actually claim an Indigenous great-great-grandmother, why would you? Who runs around insisting they’re 1/16 Chinese? Or brags that they’re 1/32 Belgian?
Elizabeth Warren citing vague family lore to insist she’s Indian is just one more example of how Americans frequently use Native peoples and cultures as props for their own identity mythology (whether national or personal). It illustrates how Americans don’t treat Native cultures the same way they treat other cultures.
Americans insist on ignoring today’s Native cultures, treating them as dead things of the past. They then misappropriate Native cultures, turning them into 
stereotypical sports mascots, Halloween costumes, children’s camps rituals, war whooping movie characters, sentimental paintings and tattoos, and Cherokee great-grandmas.
And yes, of course most Native people generally loathe Donald Trump’s racist “Pocahontas” jibes at Warren. If fact, they constantly call him out for it (although the press doesn’t cover their complaints about that nearly as much). But that doesn’t mean they’re happy with Warren’s clichéd, BS claims of being Indian generally or Cherokee specifically.
It’s all part of how Native peoples are subjected to an ongoing colonial system that mitigates their ability to define themselves and their nations, and a popular culture that says being “Indian” is really just about checking a box or wearing a made-in-China costume. So some of what Elizabeth Warren is doing/has done is insulting and exacerbates ongoing problems. It cheapens Indian sovereignty and reinforces popular misunderstandings of Native people, cultures, nations, and governments.