Elizabeth Warren’s Indian Story IS Reasonable

NOTE: If you don’t like numbers skip to the end.

Additionally, I am not affiliated with her campaign in anyway. I just like to look at numbers to see if things make sense as others are jumping to conclusions.

Here is what I found when I really looked at the number and her claim that she was told that she had a Native American ancestor.

I wanted to figure out how far back this ancestor would be if she is 1/64 American Indian.

It looks like this:

1/2: Parents

1/4: Grandparents

1/8: Great Grandparents

1/16: Great, Great Grandparents (Her Native American Relative’s Grandchild)

1/32: Great, Great, Great, Grandparents (Her Native American Relative’s Child)

1/64: Great, Great, Great, Great Grandparents (Her Native American Relative)

Her claim looks absolutely horrible this context, right? The relative would be her great, great, great, great, grandparent.

BUT, we need to consider generational overlap because she was told this by others (older people in her family). Most people know their parents and at least some of their grandparents. Some even know some of their great grand parents but for the sake of this, I will just use parents and grandparents as an example.

So now:

Warren would know her parents and grandparents.

Her grandparents would have known Warren’s great grandparents and her great, great grandparents.

And her great, great grandparent would have been the grandchild of the Native American had one parent who would have been half Native American. Therefore, it is very likely that this grandchild was very aware of his/her roots.

In fact based on these assumptions, her grandparents parents would have likely known the grandchild of his relative directly and would have had known people who knew this child’s parents and even grandparents.

This makes her story and her statement that she was told that she had a native American relative understandably accurate, doesn’t it?

For people who have to visualize: