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WASHINGTON – Senator Elizabeth Warren has released a DNA test that provides "irrefutable evidence": she had in her family tree a Native American dating back 6 to 10 generations, an unprecedented gesture of one of the main possible candidates for Democratic nomination for the presidency of 2020.
Warren, whose President Trump and other Republicans mocked his claims, sent the results of the test to the Globe Sunday to defuse questions about his ancestors that have persisted for years. She planned a detailed presentation of the results Monday as she was seeking to attract public attention.
Warren's DNA analysis was conducted by Carlos D. Bustamante, a Stanford University professor and domain expert, a 2010 MacArthur Fellow, also known as the Engineering Scholarship, for his work on the monitoring of population migrations by DNA analysis.
He concluded that "the vast majority" of Warren's ancestry is European, but he added that "the results strongly support the existence of an Amerindian Native American ancestor".
Bustamante calculated that Warren's pure Native American ancestor figured in his family tree "about 6 to 10 generations ago." This schedule reflects Warren's family tradition, passed on as a child to Oklahoma, when his great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith was at least partially Aboriginal.
Smith was born in the late 1700s. She identified white in historical documents, although at the time, Indians faced discrimination, and Smith would have been strongly encouraged to call himself white if possible. .
The vagueness inherent in the six-page analysis of DNA could feed Warren's critics. If her great-great-great-grandmother was Native American, this places her at 1 / 32nd American Indian. But the report includes the possibility that she is only 1 / 512th Native American if the ancestor is 10 generations old.
The test and publication of the results reveals the seriousness with which Warren takes the attacks of Trump, who managed to caricature and diminish his national enemies through nicknames and conspiracy theories. Trump urged President Barack Obama to publish the long form of his birth certificate to prove that what most people already knew was already true: he was born in America.
This decision also reflects the seriousness with which Warren plans to run for the presidency. And while it's unclear whether the test will convince Trump and his most dedicated followers, Warren will be able to point this out with other, more open-minded voters. Once Obama produced his birth certificate in 2011, the racist "Birther" movement, which thrived on the Internet and was stoked by Trump, has largely evaporated.
Warren is seeking re-election in Massachusetts and should easily win a second term. She said she would "closely" examine her candidacy for the Democratic president's candidacy at the end of the mid-term elections. She has already published 10 years of her tax returns and has made her personal records available to the Boston Globe, demonstrating that ethnicity was not a factor in her rise to the law.
By performing a DNA test, Warren shows that if she runs for president, she plans to become a very different candidate for Hillary Clinton. The Democratic presidential candidate of 2016 had trouble disclosing personal information and was followed throughout her campaign by her use of a private server while she was secretary of state .
Warren provided a sample of his DNA to a private laboratory in Georgia in August, according to one of the senator's assistants. The data from this test were sent to Bustamante and his team for analysis. Warren received the report last week.
Warren did not use a commercial service, but Bustamante is a member of Ancestry's scientific advisory board, which provides commercial DNA testing. He was also consulted on a project for 23andMe, another major DNA testing company.
Warren said she was determined to release the report, regardless of the results. However, Warren's assistants would not indicate whether she or any of her three siblings had ever performed a commercial DNA test that would have provided them with some assurance as to Bustamante's analysis.
According to the report, five parts of Warren's DNA indicated that she had an Amerindian ancestor. The largest piece of Native American DNA was found on his 10th chromosome, according to the report. Every human has 23 pairs of chromosomes.
"That really stood out," Bustamante said in an interview. "We found five segments, and this long segment was quite significant. It tells us about an ancestor and we can not exclude other ancestors. "
He added, "We are convinced that this is not a mistake."
The detection of DNA for Native Americans is particularly delicate because there is no Native American DNA available for comparison purposes. This is partly because US leaders have asked tribal members not to participate in genetic databases.
"The tribes had the feeling of being exploited," said Lawrence Brody, senior research scientist at the National Institutes of Health's Medical Genomics and Metabolic Genetics Branch. "The amount of genetic data available from Native Americans is scarce."
To offset the shortage of Native American DNA, Bustamante used samples from Mexico, Peru and Colombia to replace Native American. This is because scientists think that the groups that Americans call Native Americans arrived on this land by the Bering Straight about 12,000 years ago and settled in present-day America, but also migrated further south . His report explains that the use of reference populations whose genetic material has been fully sequenced was designed "for maximum accuracy".
Bustamante said that he could explain the similarities between these South Americans and Native Americans of the North American continent.
Bustamante also compared Warren's DNA to white populations in Utah and Britain to determine if the amount of Native markers in Warren's sample was significant or was a background noise .
Warren has 12 times more Native American blood than a white man from Britain and 10 times more than a white man from Utah, according to the report.
Warren is the victim of virulent attacks by Trump for claiming the Amerindian heritage. His taunts as "Pocahontas" are now part of his classic rally monologue.
Earlier this month, at a rally in Iowa, Trump said he hoped Warren would run for president because it would let him know "whether or not she has Indian blood ".
In July, at a rally in Montana, Trump had imagined debating Warren in the 2020 presidential election and had said he would try to get him a DNA test by throwing it at him. on the scene. "We have to do it gently, because we are in the # MeToo generation, so we have to be very soft," said Trump.
He also offered to donate $ 1 million to the charity of his choice if he passes the test.
Warren's campaign in the Senate used clips of Trump and his spokesman Sarah Sanders attacking him for claiming the Native Americans' claims in a well-produced video that she planned to distribute Monday morning. It includes a scene of Warren and his three older brothers discussing the issue.
There are even images of Warren calling Bustamante to get the results of his DNA test.
"The president likes to call my mother a liar. What do the facts say? Warren asks, sitting at a desk behind a Macintosh laptop.
"The facts suggest that you absolutely have Native American ancestry in your pedigree," Bustamante replies, which was also filmed by Warren's team.
Bustamante is considered one of the world's leading DNA analysts. Earlier this year, the Globe asked several DNA experts how they would have recommended Warren to undergo a DNA test. His name has been mentioned many times.
He never donated to Warren's campaigns. (Another California professor with the same name donated $ 200 to Obama in 2008, according to federal records.)
Questions about Warren's ethnicity have been clamoring for her since her campaign in the 2012 Senate. It was then that GOP agents found archival stories in the Harvard Crimson of a bearer. Harvard Law School, calling it Native American as a means of showing the school that its faculty was diverse.
During her academic career as a law professor, her ethnicity changed from white to Native American at the University of Pennsylvania's Faculty of Law, where she taught from 1987 to 1995, and at the Faculty of Law. Harvard University, where she was a permanent faculty member. in 1995. (She was a visiting professor at Harvard during the 1992-1993 academic year.)
In an interview published in the Globe last month, Warren explained that he was identified as a Native American in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when many of his family's matriarchs were dying and She was beginning to feel that her stories and her family story were getting lost. .
The Ivy League universities, like those where Warren taught, were under pressure to show that they had a diverse staff.
The University of Pennsylvania completed a paper explaining why she hired a white woman rather than minority candidates – it was obvious she did not consider it a Native American addition. And the Globe interviewed 31 faculty members from Harvard Law School who voted for his appointment, and all said his legacy was not a factor.
Annie Linskey can be contacted at [email protected]. Follow her on Twitter @annielinskey.
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