A Fighting Chance

I was stunned by the attacks. How do you prove who you are? My brothers and I knew who we were. We knew our family stories. But the Republicans demanded documentation and, back at the turn of the century, nobody in my family had registered any tribal affiliation. In Oklahoma, that was pretty common. But knowing who you are is one thing, and proving who you are is another.

Republicans also accused me of using my background to get ahead, but that simply wasn’t true. It wasn’t a question of whether I could have sought advantage—I just didn’t. I never asked for special treatment when I applied to college, to law school, or for jobs. As the story broke and people dug through my background, every place that hired me backed that up 100 percent—including the Harvard hiring committee. Harvard told the media that they didn’t know about my background when they hired me; they offered me a job because they thought I was a good law professor. Period.

But the facts didn’t slow the Republicans down, and their attacks continued. Right-wing blogs took to calling me “Fauxcahontas.” Someone took out a billboard with a picture of me in a Native American headdress, declaring, “Elizabeth Warren is a joke.” One sunny afternoon, as I marched in a parade and shook hands and waved at people, a group of guys standing together on a corner started making Indian war whoops—patting their mouths as if they were some kind of cartoon braves. It was appalling.

As the storm continued, I talked with one or the other of my brothers nearly every day. They were getting calls from reporters and Republican operatives. People came to their homes, and someone put our mother’s death certificate on the Internet. Don Reed was shocked that so many people seemed to fancy themselves experts, without knowing our family. John was hurt, wounded by vicious name-calling. David was so furious he was ready to punch somebody. I felt terrible for my brothers; they never asked for any of this.

About the same time, the story broke that JPMorgan Chase had lost billions of dollars in high-risk trading in a scandal involving a trader known as “the London Whale.” It seemed pretty clear that three years after the crash and the TARP bailout, the giant bank and its CEO, Jamie Dimon, hadn’t given up their high-risk trading.

This should have been the moment to draw the sharpest difference between Scott Brown and me. Brown was “one of Wall Street’s favorites,” and he had worked to save the bankers $19 billion through his last-minute negotiations on Dodd–Frank. And I had been fighting for bank accountability for years. But my encounters with the press during this period were dominated by questions about my mother’s background—almost nobody asked about Jamie Dimon’s recklessness.

And then, just as the controversy seemed to be winding down, Scott Brown called out my parents, suggesting that they hadn’t told my brothers and me the truth about our family.

He attacked my dead parents.

I was hurt, and I was angry. But, as I saw it, there was nothing to do except keep on pushing ahead, fighting every day for what I believed in.

The controversy never went away completely, but it got better. Over time, reporters asked more about financial regulations and student loans and less about bloodlines. And people on the campaign trail wanted to talk about what was going on with their families, not mine.

A few months after the controversy had finally quieted down, an investigative reporter with the Boston Globe dived deep into my ancestry, tracking down every possible far-off relative she could locate, many of them people I’d never even met. In September, a long piece on the front page that quoted two distant cousins who said their families had never talked about any Native American ancestry, while other cousins and my three brothers were quoted saying they had grown up knowing this was part of their families’ lives. Ina Mapes, a second cousin from Arizona whom I’d never met, gave a long account about our family’s background, concluding that she had no doubts. “I think you are what you are,” she told the reporter. “And part of us is Indian.”

That sounded about right: You are what you are.





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