WASHINGTON — Forgetting someone, Peggy?
Democratic Minnesota Lt. Gov. Peggy Flanagan’s Senate campaign fundraising operation crowed in an email following her win in Tuesday’s primary that she could be the first Native American woman to serve in the upper chamber.
“Friend, in almost 250 years, there’s never been a Native woman serving in the US Senate. It’s time to change that,” read the message. “I’m Peggy Flanagan, the Democratic nominee for U.S. Senate in Minnesota.”
“I am Ojibwe and a proud member of the White Earth Nation.”
Mischevious critics with long memories pointed out that Flanagan was forgetting about Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), who was widely mocked for claiming Cherokee ancestry before and after her election in 2012.
In 1984, the Oklahoma-born Warren contributed recipes to a Native American cookbook and identified herself as Cherokee. Two years later, she identified herself as “American Indian” on a survey issued by the State Bar of Texas.
Between 1995 and 2004, Warren’s employer, Harvard Law School, identified her as Native American on federal affirmative action forms — though the future senator claimed to be unaware of this.
After Donald Trump’s first election win in 2016, he frequently mocked Warren with the nickname “Pocahontas,” offered a $1 million donation to a charity of the Democrat’s choice to prove her ancestry and eventually goaded her into taking a DNA test.
In 2018, with a presidential run in her sights, Warren rolled out an analysis by Stanford University professor Carlos D. Bustamante that concluded that she had a Native American ancestor “in the range of 6-10 generations ago.”
However, some geneticists argued the analysis was flawed due to the lack of information on Native Americans in genetic databases, and claimed Bustamante should have said Warren “potentially” had indigenous ancestry rather than making a definitive statement.
The Cherokee Nation condemned Warren over the stunt, calling it “inappropriate and wrong,” and she issued an apology in early 2019.
There have been four male Native American senators in US history, the most recent of which was Markwayne Mullin (R-Okla.), now the secretary of Homeland Security.
The others were Robert Owen (D-Okla); Charles Curtis (R-Kan.), who went on to serve as Herbert Hoover’s vice president; and Ben Nighthorse Campbell (R-Colo.).
