Sen. Elizabeth Warren defended her decision to take a DNA test to prove her Native American ancestry — clarifying she’s “not a person of color.”
“I am not a person of color; I am not a citizen of a tribe,” the 2020 presidential hopeful said during a Saturday campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, according to video of the event.
“Tribal citizenship is very different from ancestry. Tribes, and only tribes, determine tribal citizenship, and I respect that difference.”
The Massachusetts Democrat has previously addressed the backlash to the DNA test results she released in October that showed “strong evidence” she had a Native American ancestor — six to ten generations ago.
The genetic tests irked some Democrats who argued that Warren was playing into the hand of her opponents, including President Trump, who has nicknamed her “Pocahontas.”
Warren had also previously listed herself as a minority in a national law directory, and her critics claimed the classification had given her a leg up.
But an investigation by the Boston Globe found that this wasn’t a factor when she was hired as a Harvard University law professor or elsewhere.
During her Saturday campaign event in the packed Orpheum Theater, the first question from an attendee was: “Why did you undergo DNA testing and give Donald more fodder to be a bully?”
The logic behind it, Warren explained was that, growing up in Oklahoma, she’d always been told of her family’s Native American roots — but the claims had been used against her by Republicans during her successful 2012 Senate campaign.
“And so my decision was: I’m just gonna put it all out there. Took a while, but just put it all out there,” Warren said.



