The Cherokee people have disassociated themselves with Lizzie Warren. To be a member of the tribe, you must be at least 17 Cherokee. That is about 1/6th. That means that if you have to go back 3 or more generations, you cannot be considered a member of the tribe. Warren goes back between 6 and 10 generations. On top of that, DNA tests are not accepted as proof of tribal membership.
DNA tests can only be used to determine parentage. But, of course, MSNBC stepped forward in the personage of political analyst Zerlina Maxwell, who claims the Cherokees used DNA to deny black people as members of their tribe and that the Cherokees are racist for not embracing Lizzie Warren as one of their own. Of course, Maxwell lied. DNA tests are forbidden by Cherokee law to be used to determine tribal membership. This is just like Ward Churchill. He used fake Indian membership to get a teaching job. He and Warren took jobs that could have gone to real Indians.
Newsbusters reported that MSNBC political analyst Zerlina Maxwell, who is also the director of progressive programming at SiriusXM, decried the Cherokee Nation as racist for their statement condemning Warren’s unproven claim to be of Cherokee descent, ludicrously linking that rather specific condemnation of a white woman to instances in the past of tribes excluding blacks with Native ancestry from becoming members.
MSNBC host Craig Melvin, in setting up the discussion of Warren’s DNA test and the Cherokee Nation’s response to it, asked, “Do we think that the decision (to take the DNA test) itself was a mistake? Do we think that the timing was a mistake? What do we make of the political calculation of Elizabeth Warren releasing these DNA test results 20 days away from the midterms?”
Maxwell answered:
“I think it’s a complicated answer. I think that it wasn’t fully a smooth rollout of the DNA testing and the video,” before she laughably asserted that the controversy was now “put to bed” and even more hilariously suggested that Warren’s DNA test results had somehow put President Donald Trump — one of Warren’s most outspoken critics — “on the defensive.”