Warren conflated those concepts and should not have, and in doing so stepped over the line of tribal sovereignty. The Cherokee Nation is rightly aggrieved. Warren’s Native American ancestor may have spoken Cherokee, but she was not Cherokee. Needless generalizations help no one.
I don’t understand, how do we know Warren’s Native American ancestor wasn’t Cherokee? We don’t know anything about her. If she spoke Cherokee, isn’t that a good indication that she came from the Cherokee tribe?
I only know enough about tribal politics to know it’s convoluted. At the most basic level, tribes keep records, and the Cherokee Nation in particular has very extensive records. They track all the things other sovereign nations track. They have birth, death, and marriage records, and they have a vested interest in knowing precisely who’s a member and who’s not. There’s also one hell of a lot of politics going on behind the scenes, for those who care to look, but the superficial view may be adequate.
Not all Europeans who speak German natively are German. Similarly, not all Native Americans who speak Cherokee natively are Cherokee. If the Cherokee Nation has no records supporting that her Native American ancestor was Cherokee, then that’s that. Warren said her Native American ancestor was named O.C. Sarah Smith and we have an approximate timeframe for when she lived. So either O.C. Sarah Smith was in their records or not, that part is pretty simple.
Also, I’m only assuming the designation of Cherokee came from the language she spoke. It could very well be from an even less-informed place, such as “she was Native American and most of the other Native Americans living nearby were Cherokee, ergo…” But language was frequently used by outsiders as the way to distinguish tribes, so that’s what seemed most likely.