U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s mysterious Native American back story could inflate the voter distrust already plaguing Hillary Clinton’s campaign — and even overshadow the former first lady as Donald Trump ratchets up his “fake Indian” rhetoric.

“It’s like we’re cannon fodder,” said Cherokee Twila Barnes of the explosive exchanges between Warren and Trump that have dominated the 2016 campaign. Warren’s claim of Native American heritage, first reported by the Boston Herald, has become a flash point in the race and Trump has even dubbed the Bay State senator, “Pocahontas.”

READ: Two-day special report on Sen. Elizabeth Warren

Barnes added, “We’re being hurled back and forth, but no one is listening to our voice.”

What’s been lost in the political clashes, said Barnes, is that Warren refuses to release university records that would clear up whether she used her heritage to benefit her career.

Warren, whose 2012 campaign appeared to be broadsided by the controversy, changed her story several times about whether she had listed herself as a Native American and whether she told Harvard Law School and other universities about her heritage.

The senator listed herself as Native American in the Association of American Law Schools directory between 1986 and 1995, a publication used by law schools as a hiring tool. She later admitted that she told faculty at Harvard Law School and the University of Pennsylvania about her heritage, but said she didn’t tell them until after they hired her.

“More than any racial issue, it goes back to credibility,” said Barnes, who added that even if Warren has a small amount of American Indian background, she shouldn’t have listed herself as Native American while law schools were hungry for minority hires.

“It was wrong. She just shouldn’t have done it,” said Barnes. “And there’s something troubling about the fact that she won’t admit that.”

Stephen Burbank, the former dean at Pennsylvania Law School, and Harvard Law Dean Robert Clark have released statements saying that Warren’s heritage wasn’t a factor when she was hired at the Ivy League schools.

“Her appointment was based on the excellence of her scholarship and teaching. I do not know whether members of the faculty were even aware of her ancestry, but I am confident that it played no role whatsoever in her appointment,” said Burbank.

But the senator has declined to release university applications that would dismiss concerns that she “checked the box.”

Former U.S. Sen. Scott Brown, who lost to Warren in 2012 and has recently demanded she take a DNA test to prove her ethnicity, slammed the first-term senator yesterday as, “not who she claims to be.”

“When you have someone like Elizabeth Warren hijacking the party, you know … her positions are completely at odds with Hillary Clinton’s and quite frankly she may overshadow Hillary and I’m not sure if she wants that,” Brown told Boston Herald Radio’s “Morning Meeting” show.

Talk of Warren as a potential vice presidential pick has died down since Clinton tapped the Harvard Law professor to kick off the Democratic National Convention in a prime-time speech, but Warren is likely to remain a key Clinton surrogate.