According to reporting from HuffPost, during a campaign event in Forsyth, Georgia, in late September, Republican Senate nominee Herschel Walker proclaimed that his mother told him his grandmother was “full-blood Cherokee,” adding, “So, I’m Native American.”
To make matters even worse, the Trump-backed Heisman Trophy winner went on to call himself a “super mutt” and added, “I don’t know what I am, but this was so funny. This was so funny. I said, ‘Mom, why you never said anything to us?’ She said, ‘Back in my days, a lot of the Native Americans were treated worse than Blacks.’”
At another rally, he told the crowd he was “proud to be Black’ but he ‘may not be Black” because he said he had just learned his “mother is part Native American.”
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HuffPost reports that Walker claimed to have Native ancestry at a slew of campaign events in the past few months but has never provided any evidence. He’s told crowds that his mom is 40% Native American after learning that his grandmother was supposedly 100% Cherokee.
So, the HuffPost did its own investigating and spoke with Walker’s mother, Christine Walker, as well as a spokesperson from the Cherokee Nation.
“There is no one listed in Cherokee Nation’s Registration database with that name and birthdate,” the tribe’s spokesperson said.
When the outlet asked Walker’s mother about the claims, she said simply that she’d heard about her father’s mother (Walker’s great-grandmother) being “kin” to Cherokee. “Back when I was a little child running around, she was kin to the Cherokee,” she told HuffPost.
When HuffPost asked what being “kin” meant to her, she said she believed her grandmother to have had some relationship with Cherokee but wasn’t sure what that was.
She added, “See, my grandmother, she passed when I was quite young. I don’t know too much about how she was connected.”
“Tribes have all kinds of … ways to determine whether somebody meets particular criteria to be a citizen of a particular government,” according to Dr. J. Cedric Woods, director of the Institute for New England Native American Studies at the University of Massachusetts Boston. “You have some tribes who use blood quantum. You have some tribes that are still strictly matrilineal or patrilineal. You have some tribes who accept descendancy from either line. How much of that blood quantum is required is all across the map,” Woods said in an interview with Diverse: Issues in Higher Education.
So, why is Walker trying to claim lineage to the Indigenous community? It appears to be another way he can veer away from the complex and painful issue that many white Americans (especially in Georgia) refuse to face—an issue Walker does not want to discuss.
Walker has long had a disturbing take on race; as Daily Kos has reported, Walker took full advantage of his “minority business” red seal while running his company but has spent a lot of time on the campaign trail condemning the very federal programs that offer Black business owners a fair chance at success, as first reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution (AJC).
Walker’s company, Renaissance Man Food Services, has taken full advantage of being “a certified minority-owned food company” and winner of “Marriott’s 2016 Diversity Supplier of the year” and the “Marriott International Diversity & Inclusion Award” in 2014, per their website. But during a Hall County, Georgia, Republican event in July, Walker launched into the usual GOP rhetoric of dragging the designation of “minority-owned” as “affirmative action.”
“They have regulations for everything … I found out that I was Black, so my company was a minority-owned business. Like wow, a minority-owned business, what does that mean? It means you’ve got to fill out all of these forms,” Walker said. “I was like, ‘I got to fill out forms to be Black?’”
The problem with Walker’s latest claim about being Cherokee is that he is a notorious liar. So much of what he’s said since launching his campaign has been false that without proof, it’s difficult to believe anything he says.
Since Daily Kos began reporting on Walker, we’ve covered lie upon lie about everything from his graduating from the University of Georgia, as reported by the Atlanta Journal-Constitution; to hiding the fact that he had any children other than his 22-year-old son Christian; to the mammoth exaggerations about his business acumen; to the tall tale about the time he founded (or co-founded) the veterans’ organization Patriot Support—which he did not. He recently tried to deny that former President Donald Trump ever said the 2020 election was stolen, and lies about his companies’ alleged charitable donations, nearly none of which were able to be verified by The Washington Post.
The fact is that Walker doesn’t seem to know how to tell the truth. He stands on the platform of Christian values, but as we know, when it comes to abortion, for example, there’s a long history of hypocrisy. If elected, he’d have no issues taking away a pregnant person’s right to terminate a pregnancy, but when it came to his own ex-girlfriend, there was another story altogether.
This latest claim by the Trump-endorsed candidate is just another example of his ubiquitous falsehoods.
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After an eruption of even more scandals among Republican Senate candidates, FiveThirtyEight’s Nathaniel Rakich returns to The Downballot to discuss the effect these sorts of scandals can have on competitive races; whether Democrats stand a chance to keep the House; and the different ways pollsters create likely voter models.
