Faux-cohontas: Massachusetts Senate Candidate Elizabeth Warren Claims of Native American Ancestry Under Scrutiny

Bay State Democrat Senate hopeful Elizabeth Warren's campaign is facing questions over whether she had embellished claims of being of Cherokee ancesrty this week. At issue is whether or not the Harvard professor, one-time nominee by President Obama for the newly-formed Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and self-professed creator of 'Occupy Wall Street' leveraged claims of her native American background to get preferential treatment from school.

The Harvard Law professor is now claiming she knows she has American Indian blood because a female relative told her that her grandfather had “high cheek bones like all the Indians do.”

The Democratic candidate’s troubles began last week when it was revealed that Harvard once described Warren as a Native American minority. Warren doesn’t publicly refer to herself that way.

Warren listed herself as Native American in Harvard's law-school directories from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. Aside from the alleged family lore of high cheekbones, a noted genealogist found an Oklahoma marriage certificate from Warren's great-great-great grandmother that listed her as Cherokee- baiscally accounting for 1/32nd of her total ancestry. For Harvard's most recent diversity census report, the university listed only one Native American as a member of the faculty but delined to clarify whether or not it was Warren.

While numerous individuals were having fun attempting to come up with Indian names for Warren a spokeswoman from the Warren campaign took the opportunity to rip Sen Scott Brown for 'sexism' over the inevitable follow up questions posed by Warren's own fudging her ethnic background.

Although the most recent available polls were taken before the Warren flap was made public, polling showed both Warren and Brown in a virtual dead heat. The Massachusetts Senate race is shaping up to be the costliest US Senate Campaign in the USA this election year.