Shelly Lowe, executive director of Harvard University’s Native American Program (HUNAP), told Breitbart News today that U.S. Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren had not, to her knowledge, participated in the program’s events while Warren was a professor at Harvard.
Last week, Warren explained that she had listed herself as Native American “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.” However, she had not been involved in HUNAP, the most obvious avenue for meeting fellow Native American faculty and students.
Warren, who is the Democratic challenger to incumbent Republican Scott Brown, claims that she has a great-great-great-grandmother who was Cherokee. That claim has yet to be substantiated by evidence beyond family lore, and Warren herself has no formal tribal membership.
She had listed herself as Native American in the 1980s, but stopped doing so in the mid-1990s, claiming that she never encountered others with similar backgrounds: “Nothing like that ever happened, that was clearly not the use for it and so I stopped checking it off.”
HUNAP is a visible presence at Harvard, a university whose 17th-century charter dedicates the school “to the education of the English and Indian youth of this country.”
Active across Harvard’s many departments and faculties, HUNAP helps Harvard fulfill its founding mission and provides opportunities for Native American students and faculty from across North America to build networks.
HUNAP’s calendar boasts several events a week, on almost a daily basis. One of the most popular events, which attracts Native American students and faculty from across campus and beyond, is the annual Powwow (pictured above), a celebration of various different cultures represented within the Native American community at Harvard.
Lowe says that Warren “may or may not have been in the audience” at the program’s many events at Harvard Law School, but that she was not otherwise involved.