Elizabeth Warren says her opponent, Scott Brown, has launched attacks on her family. Warren: Native American? Ask Mom

An exasperated Elizabeth Warren told reporters Thursday that she’s certain about her Native American roots “because my mother told me so.”

Surrounded by a group of reporters, the Democratic Massachusetts Senate candidate was repeatedly questioned about why she hasn’t produced documentation to prove that she is part Native American. After several minutes of grilling, Warren said, “I am proud of my family and I am proud of my heritage.”


“And does it include Indian background?” one reporter asked, according to the first report by masslive.com that was aired on several local Boston TV stations..

“Yes! Yes!” Warren said.

“How do you know that?”

Warren answered, “Because my mother told me so. This is how I live. My mother, my grandmother, my family. This is my family. Scott Brown has launched attacks on my family. I am not backing off from my family.”

Warren, who is facing a tough battle against incumbent Sen.Brown, has been pummeled by her opponent as well as the press after it was first reported that she had previously identified herself as an ethnic minority. According to the Harvard law professor, she is 1/32nd Native American, and her campaign has maintained that Warren never leveraged her ethnic status to gain professional advantages.

Meanwhile, the Brown campaign is accusing Warren of “stonewalling.”

( Also on POLITICO: Poll: Still a dogfight in Massachusetts)

“In the absence of any facts, Elizabeth Warren continues to claim she is a Native American minority,” campaign spokesman Colin Reed said. “She needs to stop stonewalling and finally produce the records from the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard that will show whether or not she or these schools benefited in any way from this false information about her ancestry.”

A Suffolk University poll this week revealed that the controversy surrounding her ancestry hasn’t seriously damaged Warren, with 69 percent saying the issue of her Native American heritage is not a significant story.

And attacks on Warren over the ongoing controversy continued Friday, with the Boston Globe challenging the candidate’s claim that she didn’t know Harvard had promoted her Native American background until recently.

“For at least six straight years during Warren’s tenure, Harvard University reported in federally mandated diversity statistics that it had a Native American woman in its senior ranks at the law school. According to both Harvard officials and federal guidelines, those statistics are almost always based on the way employees describe themselves,” the Globe reported.

Warren spokeswoman Alethea Harney said Friday afternoon that Warren was proud of her family and heritage, and that it is a topic “her family talked about often when she was growing up.”

“The fact that Elizabeth noted her heritage in a professional publication has been made public and addressed by Elizabeth on multiple occasions,” Harney said. “It’s time to focus on the important issues facing Massachusetts.”