Georgia Republican Senate candidate, Herschel Walker has been claiming for months on the campaign trail that he has significant Native American ancestry because his grandmother was a “full-blood Cherokee.”
According to a report from Huffpost, Walker initially made the claim at a campaign event at the University of Georgia in January, where he said he had just found out that his mother is “40% Native American.”
He repeated the claim at several campaign stops in the following months, but each time he added a twist and pretended as if he had just heard the news.
At a campaign event in May, he told his supporters that his mother is “a big part Native American” and it means he is “part Native American, too.” At another event later that same month he said he may not even be Black because he just learned “my mother is part Native American.” During a campaign stop in June, he said he found out through a 23 and Me ancestry test that “I’m part Native American.”
Walker repeated the claim at a campaign event last month in Forsyth, Georgia. But, this time he said his mother had just told him his grandmother was full-blooded Cherokee which makes him “Native American.”
“My mom just told me that my mom, grandmother, was full-blood Cherokee,” Walker said, according to video obtained by Huffpost. “So I’m Native American!”
“I’m a super mutt,” he continued. “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.’”
Neither Walker nor his campaign provided any evidence to support his claim. Cherokee Nation, the largest of three recognized tribes in the U.S., told HuffPost that there’s no one listed in their database with Walker’s name. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians did not respond to Huffpost’s request for comment.
In a phone interview with Huffpost on Wednesday, Herschel’s mom, Christine Walker, did not confirm her son’s story. She told the outlet she has no idea if an immediate ancestor was full-blooded Cherokee.
Walker said she grew up hearing stories about her paternal grandmother being ‘kin” to the tribe. Asked to clarify, she said her grandmother was believed to be related to Cherokee peoples in some way, but she didn’t know how.
“I don’t know how far back” the family’s Cherokee heritage went she said. “See, my grandmother, she passed when I was quite young. I don’t know too much about how she was connected.”
