Warren: No Proof Of Native American Heritage Because Dad's Family Opposed It
BOSTON (CBS) - U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren once again attempted to put the controversy over her Native American heritage to bed on Friday.
WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Karen Twomey reports.
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The Warren campaign held one-on-one interviews in an effort to squash the controversy before Saturday's state Democratic convention in Springfield.
In her conversations with WBZ-TV's Political Editor Jon Keller and WBZ NewsRadio 1030's Karen Twomey, Warren tried to explain why she always believed she had Native-American roots, even though, as it turns out, there is no known documentation to prove it.
"I have talked about, from the beginning, my Native American heritage, and the reason I understand this, how I understand this, this is my family," Warren told Keller. "My mother and my father fell very much in love, but my father's family objected very much to my mother because my mother is part Cherokee and part Delaware. It was a sufficiently strong objection that my mother said they had to elope."
"This was very important to my mother," Warren told Karen Twomey. "My mother cared about this issue and I care about my mother. I'm never backing off from that, not for politics or for anything else."
In the past, the Warren campaign had reported that Warren was identified as Native American by Harvard University without her knowledge. She now says she supplied that information.
"I let them know about my Native American heritage, and then Harvard did whatever Harvard did," Warren told Karen Twomey. "I don't actually think the story changed. The story started in the same place, and that is, this is who I am."
Her likely opponent this fall, incumbent Republican Senator Scott Brown, has said this controversy has less to do with ancestry, and more to do with integrity and honesty.
"I've done the best I can with this," Warren told Karen Twomey. "This is about things that happened 25 years ago. I've done my best to go back and piece it together."
In Keller's interview, Warren said that affirmative action was never a factor in her own career advancement.
