"Warren, a Harvard Law School professor who is running for Senate in Massachusetts against Scott Brown, has said that she is one thirty-second Cherokee—which, under tribal rules, could be enough—and there is apparently genealogical evidence to back her up. What makes her identification with the tribe feel scattershot, if not outright opportunistic, is that she reportedly only listed herself publicly that way from about 1986 until the mid-nineties, in her first academic posts, and then stopped doing so after getting the appointment at Harvard. This is why the Boston Herald, which broke the story, has taken to calling her 'Fauxcahontas.'
"When first asked about the directory listing, she told the Herald,
I listed myself in the directory in the hopes that it might mean that I would be invited to a luncheon, a group something that might happen with people who are like I am. Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.
"She put herself down as Native American for the lunch invitations, and stopped when none were forthcoming? Hearing that from a woman who knows how to be straightforward—and who would now surely be able to issue some invitations on her own—one can’t help but wince. ... The problem is that even if you accept Warren’s explanation entirely at face value—that this was all about a Native American woman looking for other Native Americans to talk to—it doesn’t sound good. She doesn’t appear to have looked very hard, for one thing. No one has an obligation to be a spokesman or advocate for any ethnic group, or to turn one’s life into a readable catalog. And yet what Warren is saying is that when she was a junior faculty member, and relatively powerless, she opened herself up, waiting to be asked; as a senior professor, and in a position to be the asker, or at least a resource, she took her name off the list."
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