Remember, because of intermarriage with individuals in other tribes you can be 100% Indian and not actually qualify for membership in many of the tribes who might lie in your background.
What the genealogist has to do is PROVE Elzbet has an ancestor who was on the Dawes Rolls. According to the Boston Globe's full article "But he said Warren’s family is not included in the official Dawes Commission rolls, a census of major tribes completed in the early 20th century that Cherokees use to determine tribal citizenship."
Now that doesn't mean she wasn't a Cherokee ~ it just means she doesn't qualify for membership. There were well over 20,000 people who followed the Cherokee West to Oklahoma who were rejected for inclusion in the rolls by the Dawes Commission.
The observation that the woman was identified in an old document as Cherokee is suggestive of her being, at the least, an Indian of some sort, and possibly even a Cherokee. Or, she might have been a gypsy ~ or a mulatto ~ or whatever.
It would have been quite unusual for someone to identify someone as an Indian if 'white' was available.
Many amateur genealogists have come up against that problem ~ that an ancient but certainly loved ancestor was identified in the census as 'NOT WHITE' ~ not realizing that took place during a period where Indians were not even part of the census!
“Or, she might have been a gypsy ~ or a mulatto ~ or whatever.”
Elizabeth Warren might be a “black” Caucasian. We know for sure she’s a stinking DemoRAT.