Report: Elizabeth Warren’s ancestor may have … rounded up Cherokee for Trail of Tears

Out: Elizabeth Warren, Native American. In: Elizabeth Warren, Jacksonian Democrat.

Man, in hindsight it’s a good thing she didn’t attend the annual Harvard Powwow yesterday after all, huh? Awwwk-ward.

As I pointed out in my article here on Sunday, no evidence supports this claim [that her great-great-great grandmother was Cherokee]. O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford had no Cherokee heritage, was listed as “white” in the Census of 1860, and was most likely half Swedish and half English, Scottish, or German, or some combination thereof. (Note, the actual 1894 marriage license makes no claim of Cherokee ancestry.)



But the most stunning discovery about the life of O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford is that her husband, Ms. Warren’s great-great-great grandfather, was apparently a member of the Tennessee Militia who rounded up Cherokees from their family homes in the Southeastern United States and herded them into government-built stockades in what was then called Ross’s Landing (now Chattanooga), Tennessee—the point of origin for the horrific Trail of Tears, which began in January, 1837.

This new information about Ms. Warren’s true heritage came as a direct result of a lead provided to me by William Jacobson over at Legal Insurrection, who in turn had received the information from one of his readers. Jacobson, who has questioned Warren’s explanation for her law faculty listing, calls this discovery “the ultimate and cruelest irony” of the Warren Cherokee saga.

Follow the link to Breitbart.com for background. All that’s left now is the inevitable revelation that Scott Brown is part Cherokee and that his ancestors were rounded by Warren’s and this narrative will be wrapped up in a pretty little bow.

Speaking of Brown, this afternoon his team called on Warren to release her law-school applications and personnel files to prove that she never used her alleged Native American identity to gain a hiring advantage. That’s the lingering mystery in all this, of course. For someone who was so dogged about claiming minority status — nine years in a row in those faculty listings, remember — supposedly in order to make friends with “people who are like I am,” she seems to have been curiously passive about making friends with Native Americans who were right in front of her. Case in point: The executive director of Harvard University’s Native American Program told Team Breitbart yesterday that she can’t remember Warren ever having participated in program events. Go figure. Maybe if they’d invited Ben Affleck and Matt Damon to campus and charged $5,000 a head for her campaign, she might have showed up.