For the past few decades, Elizabeth Warren has claimed that she is an “Indian American” and has used this falsehood to take advantage of programs supporting minorities, a tactic that eventually resulted in the Massachusetts Democrat being elected to the U.S. Senate.
However, Marco Rubio, a Florida Republican from the same chamber, learned recently that he had a distant relative who was a Native American, which gives him at least twice as much of that ancestry as the liberal candidate for the 2020 presidential election.
According to an article from Brent Scher, a staff writer for the Washington Free Beacon website, Rubio learned of his ancestor with “pure Native American ancestry” while being featured on the PBS program Finding Your Roots.
Scher also noted that “Rubio was shocked to learn from host Henry Louis Gates Jr., director of Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African & African American Research, that his great-great-great-grandmother was a Native American.”
“When we analyzed his mitochondrial DNA, a genetic fingerprint passed down unchanged from mother to child for thousands of years, we found that his direct maternal line was Native American," Gates stated during the episode, which aired on various PBS stations earlier this week.
Rubio also learned that his DNA profile revealed that he is 92.4 percent European and 4.6 percent American Indian.
Gates explained that the Native Americans Rubio is descended from migrated through the Yucatan Peninsula, a stretch of modern-day Mexico near Cuba, as early as 4,000 B.C.
In addition, John Bowden of The Hill noted that the Cuban-American lawmaker “found out he's not the first person in his family to become a lawyer or engage in public service.”
Bowden stated: “More than 200 years ago, Rubio's third great-grandfather, José de Reina y Tosta, got his law degree from Spain's University of Granada in 1786. The ancestor went on to become a public prosecutor in Seville by 1793.”
“Two centuries later,” Gates said, “Rubio's parents immigrated from Cuba to the U.S. in 1956, and Rubio was born in Miami in 1971.”
Rubio also reflected on the revelations in a Twitter post, where he stated:
Thank you for including me; it was one of the most amazing things I have ever been a part of.
My Native American heritage was an amazing discovery.
According to Scher, the Republican official “had never made any claims of Native American ancestry during his career,” which was “in sharp contrast with Warren,” who took “a DNA test to prove her claims last year.”
While the test results bolstered the assertion that Warren had a Native American in her family tree dating back 6 to 10 generations, it actually showed that she’s only between 1/64th and 1/1,024th Native American.
The Democratic candidate’s claims of being a member of a minority took another hit on Tuesday, when the Washington Post reported that she self-identified as an “American Indian” on her registration card for the State Bar of Texas.
If you want to see the entire episode of this PBS program, just click on this link.
