Coulter Column | Elizabeth Warren's Indian Name: Dances with Lies

Elizabeth Warren, who also goes by her Indian name, "Lies on Race Box," is in big heap-um trouble. The earnest, reform-minded liberal running for Senate against Scott Brown, R-Mass., lied about being part-Cherokee to get a job at Harvard.

Harvard took full advantage of Warren's lie, bragging to The Harvard Crimson about her minority status during one of the near-constant student protests over insufficient "diversity" in the faculty. Warren also listed herself as an Indian in law school faculty directories and, just last month, said, "I am very proud of my Native American heritage."

Except, oops, she has no more evidence that she's an Indian than that buffoon out of Colorado, Ward Churchill.
The Boston Globe immediately leapt to Warren's defense, quoting a genealogist who found a marriage license on which Warren's great-great-uncle scribbled that his mother, Warren's great-great-great grandmother, was a Cherokee. This is not part of the official marriage license. (If I scribble "Kenyan" on Obama's birth certificate, does that make it true?)

But let's say it's true. That would make Warren a dotriacontaroon -- 1/32nd Cherokee. That's her claim to affirmative action bonus points? You don't know what it's like to be 1/32nd Cherokee, to never have anyone to talk to, spending so many evenings home alone, wondering if there was some other 1/32nd Cherokee out there, perhaps looking at the same star I was.

Soon, however, the preponderance of the evidence suggested she wasn't even 1/32nd Cherokee. The census records for 1860 list the allegedly Cherokee great-great-great-grandmother, O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford, as "white." Also, Warren's family isn't listed in the Cherokee registry. (Unlike Democrat voter rolls, to be on the Cherokee list, proof is required.)

On the other hand, we have what her son scribbled on his marriage license -- something, by the way, that none of his siblings claimed about their mother.

So now we're down to Warren's reminiscence that her great-aunt used to point to a portrait of her great-great-grandfather and call him an Indian, noting his high cheekbones.

Family lore is not proof. Proof is contemporary documentation, produced under penalty of perjury, such as a census record. My mother told me she found me under a rock, but I don't put that on job applications.

The universities that employed Warren rushed to claim that her fake Indian ancestry had nothing to do with it. They speak with forked tongue, causing heap-um laughter. (Harvard was so desperate for diversity, it made a half-black dilettante president of the Harvard Law Review!)

To grasp what a sin against political correctness this is, consider the Jesuitical debates about blackness regularly engaged in at our universities. About the time Lies on Race Box was getting a job with Harvard as a fake Indian -- valued for her fake hunting and tracking skills -- a debate broke out at Northwestern University law school about whether a potential faculty hire was black enough.

One professor wrote a heated three-page letter to the hiring committee complaining that the recruit "should not be considered a black candidate," explaining, "(n)ot all with dark skins are black," nor should they be considered "black in the U.S. context." (Flash to: My exact position on Obama.)

Warren has defended herself, claiming she did it only so she would be invited to powwows, or what the great white father calls "meetings," saying she hoped "I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am."

What on earth does "people who are like I am" mean? Let's invite Elizabeth because she's 1/32nd Cherokee. We really need the 1/32nd Cherokee perspective around here. Maybe she has some old recipes that are 1/32nd Cherokee!

Then, the Warren campaign claimed it was sexist to question Warren about her bald-faced lie: "Once again, the qualifications and ability of a woman are being called into question by Scott Brown ... It's outrageous."

First, Scott Brown has barely mentioned Warren's stinking lie.

But, second, the only people who consider it a "qualification" to be 1/32nd Cherokee are university hiring committees. Possible Warren campaign speech:

"I am a dotriacontaroon American. I want to be a voice for those who are 1/32nd Cherokee, but also 1/32nd Pequot, 1/32nd Mohawk -- basically the senator for all dotriacontaroons. Isn't it time we had a senator who was 1/32nd Cherokee?"

Now it's beginning to look like her ancestors not only did not suffer, but caused the suffering she's getting the benefit of. The great-great-great-grandfather married to the not-Cherokee O.C. Sarah Smith Crawford turns out to have been one of the white enforcers on the brutal Trail of Tears, helping round up Indians from their homes in order to march them to a less desirable part of the country.

What's next?

"Yes, and my other grandfather, Theophilus Connor ..."

BULL CONNOR?

"Yes, but I swear, James Earl Ray is not a BLOOD uncle. We're related only by marriage. At least that's what my cousin John Wayne Gacy used to always tell me."

Warren's lie is outrageous enough to someone like me, who isn't a fan of race-based affirmative action programs. Still, she is a liar, and she stole the credit of someone else's suffering.

For liberals, it should be a mortal sin: Elizabeth Warren cheated on affirmative action.