Easy... They check-off Native American.
Many Americans believe they’re part American Indian.
My wife had that impression from her father's side of the family. An ancestor was an orphan named Mary Jane Pheasant. As she continued her research for DAR, she uncovered the parent of Mary Jane to be a rogue Englishman named Edward Pheasant. Edward's documentation was all over the place.
After doing the DNA sequencing, it turns out that we both have Scottish and Welsh ancestry. I have Irish/Finnish as well. She has some German ancestry. No "native American" ancestry at all.
My paternal family believed they were part Choctaw... I was disabused of that idea by ancestry DNA... not even a drop of native blood.
Elizabeth Warren got away with the lying.
If she had been taken to court and had her credentials stripped and salaries clawed back the youngsters would have to reconsider the costs vs the benefits of faking it.
Since there were no consequences for her lying the message is clear.
You can lie and get away with it—easily.
My 95-year-old FIL, now in memory care, used to tell the legend of there being a full-blooded Cherokee somewhere in his ancestry in the mid-late 1800’s. When my wife got her ancestry.com DNA analysis it suggests that there is no native American lineage. We mention this to him and he says “Well, I don’t know about you, but I have Cherokee ancestry!”
I really do not know why this topic could surprise anyone. You create an incentive for certain behavior, and lo! that behavior increases!
I am, according to Ancestry = 8%
But I did not know this when I went to college in 1963.
However I check Native American evert chance I get and I believe everyone should do the same.
I’m a native american.
I was born here.
“It's not a lie... if you believe it.” — George Costanza, Seinfeld, Season 6: The Beard