politics

Her making such a big deal out of the DNA test just showed how much of a joke it was. Blood quantum is pretty controversial among American tribes because colonial subjugation and assimilation has pretty much made DNA tests useless for determining how indigenous someone is. For example, a decent number of escaped black slaves joined up with the tribes in the 1700s-1800s. Some of their descendants aren't indigenous by blood at all, they may take a test and find out that they are 100 percent African descent. But if your family has spent multiple generations living on the reservation, they shouldn't be denied membership because the white people running BIA decide they're not indigenous enough.

This goes the other way around as well. There are black people that don't have a lick of African ancestry. Not as common as the other way around, but I've met people like this. They still identify as a black family. Their family has been living the lives of black Americans, unaware of their indigenous and hispanic ancestry for generations until a couple years ago with the rise of 23andme type tests. Race is real, but it really is widely a social construct. I don't think it's reasonable to say my friend's family isn't black when they have been living as black people among other black people for generations.

I say all this to say that Elizabeth Warren could have come back with test results that prove that she's indigenous and it really wouldn't matter. Her and her family have lived as white people for generations. When it comes to modern American indigenous identities, DNA really doesn't mean shit