Sen. Elizabeth Warren Goes Absent from New Yorker Article on ‘Pretendians’

Explosive story about bogus Native Americans omits the phenomenon’s most famous practitioner

The March 4th issue of the New Yorker contains a comprehensive story by the excellent reporter Jay Caspian Kang. “Identity Crisis” details the surprisingly common phenomenon of “Pretendians”—academics who assume a Native American identity they don’t legitimately have.

The story focuses on Elizabeth Hoover, a tenured professor at University of California Berkeley, who one colleague describes as wearing so much beaded jewelry that “It looked like an Etsy shop exploded on her.”

Kang delves into the complex dynamics of identity, especially regarding native American membership, where some tribes might require a blood test showing 1/8 and others 1/4 and others still have exceptions for people who were adopted but raised within the community and the usual progressive nonsense.

Naturally enough, in telling the story of Professor Hoover, Kang devotes a substantial portion of this 6700-word story to cataloging other American academics who have been accused of fabricating their native American backgrounds. He even mentions how several who were accused on the academic blog FakeIndians were later able to prove the truth of their heritage.

But one name is so conspicuously missing that it’s almost impossible to believe a writer of Kang’s thoroughness hadn’t included it in an earlier draft.

Kang excludes Sen. Elizabeth Warren—so much the poster child for benefiting from an invented Native American heritage that she inspired one of the great political nicknames of all time, “Fauxcahontas”—from his deep dive into the phenomenon. Warren claimed to be a Cherokee for twenty years, even writing “American Indian” on the “Race” blank of her registration card for the State Bar of Texas.

According to the Washington Post, Warren also “label[ed] herself as Native American when at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard University.”

When questions inevitably arose about her background, Warren doubled down by ludicrously celebrating the results of the DNA test she took, which revealed that she in fact was .02% Native American. One can only imagine the bigotry and suffering she endured because of that .02%.

Warren eventually privately apologized to the Cherokee nation for “furthering confusion about tribal citizenship.”

Writing a lengthy story that mentions all the academics who have benefited from a forged native American identity without mentioning Warren is like writing a story about all the NFL players who killed their wife and her friend without mentioning O.J. Simpson. Warren is by far the best-known example of this dishonorable phenomenon. Furthermore, she has never fully accounted for any benefits that accrued to her because of her ruse. Benefits that were presumably denied to those who actually had one eighth or one quarter of the correct blood.

This is an election year for Elizabeth Warren. While Massachusetts doesn’t typically offer much hope for Republicans in statewide elections, Mitt Romney and Charlie Baker prove it’s not impossible. And Warren’s got a legitimate challenger this year in John Deaton, a populist lawyer who sued the SEC over its attempt to target American crypto-currency company Ripple. With Warren possibly the most anti-crypto legislator in all of Congress, Deaton is poised to benefit from the support of the millions-wide XRP Army throughout the world.

I have no real reason to think that Kang or his editors are trying to make an in-kind donation to send her Warren in the form of excluding her name from a mention of the ignoble trait she exemplifies more than anyone. But it is odd. Kang did not respond to several emails and DMs seeking comment on this matter.

The fact that Massachusetts voters nor Harvard University ever chose to punish Elizabeth Warren—either for her past as a conservative Republican, or for her more recent past as a Pretendian—is for the people of the Bay State to address. But the New Yorker didn’t help.