Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren is facing new criticism from Native Americans over her heritage claims as a nearly three-decades old family cook book called "Pow Wow Chow" has surfaced.
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The "Pow Wow Chow" cookbook contributed to by Elizabeth Warren and family members in 1984 is still on sale for $19.95 by the Five Civilized Tribes Museum of Muskogee, Oklahoma. (Photo courtesy of fivetribes.org)Democratic U.S. Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren is facing new criticism from Native Americans over her heritage claims as a nearly three-decades old family cook book called "Pow Wow Chow" has surfaced.
Warren, who is working to gain the Democratic nod to take on Republican U.S. Sen. Scott Brown in November's general election, has been under fire for several weeks as Brown's campaign and others have questioned whether she used family stories of Cherokee ancestry to further her career through affirmative action programs.
Although Warren, a Harvard Law School professor, has repeatedly denied such claims, and the universities that previously hired her released statements saying they weren't aware of such heritage claims or that they played no part in her hiring, the specter of such allegations has lingered.
This week, the "Pow Wow Chow" cookbook, which includes recipes contributed by Warren and family members, was obtained by the Boston Herald, documenting that Warren has identified with her family lore of Cherokee ancestry as far back as the early 1980s.
The book is a compilation of “special recipes passed down through the Five Tribes families,” according to the Herald, which mentions Warren's recipes for savory crab omelet and spicy barbecued beans.
For almost a decade in the 1980s and '90s, Warren listed her Native American ancestry in a directory of law professors compiled by the Association of American Law Schools, a move she said was to meet people "who are like I am," referring to the stories of Native American ancestry which were passed down by family members. When the directory proved fruitless as far as networking with other Native Americans, Warren said she stopped checking that box on the directory listing.
And as Harvard University, Warren's employer, was under fire for a lack of diversity hires in the 1990s, they touted the law professor as the school's first minority female hire, a claim Warren said she was unaware of until reading about the situation in the press.
Earlier this week, Politico reported that in a 1997 Fordham Law Review story by Laura Padilla called “Intersectionality and positionality: Situating women of color in the affirmative action dialogue,” a news director at Harvard Law School said Warren was the university's "first woman of color."
Brown has called on Warren to release all law school applications and personnel files from the universities where she taught.
Warren has denied using her ancestry to gain an advantage but she has also faced criticism as to whether or not she is actually Cherokee, even 1/32nd, as a New England Historic and Genealogy Society researcher had initially claimed. The organization later retracted its claims as it was unable to produce copies of original documents, prompting the Boston Globe which originally reported the development to issue a correction.
Twila Barnes, a Cherokee blogger and self-described genealogist, called on Warren to "come clean" recently, saying that she also doubts Warren's heritage claims.
"You have claimed something you had no right to claim -- our history and our heritage and our identity. Those things belong to us, and us alone," Barnes wrote on her blog. "These are not things we choose to embrace when they benefit us and then cast aside when we no longer need them, but that is what you seem to have done by 'checking a box' for several years and then no longer 'checking' it more recently, when apparently you no longer needed it."
Warren's press secretary, Alethea Harney, has repeatedly defended the consumer advocate against the criticisms, calling the situation a "distraction" from the real issues of the campaign.
"Elizabeth has been clear that she is proud of her Native American heritage and everyone who hired Elizabeth has been clear that she was hired because she was a great teacher, not because of that heritage," Harney told Politico. "It's time to return to issues - like rising student loan debt, job creation, and Wall Street regulation - that will have a real impact on middle class families."
Below are statements provided by the Warren campaign regarding her hiring at several universities across the country.