In January, at a campaign event at the University of Georgia, Republican Senate candidate Herschel Walker boldly announced that he had just found out through his mother that he is “40 percent Native American.”
In the following months, the former NFL star would repeat the claim several times, with slightly different twists, though each time he said he had just learned the news.
HuffPost’s Jennifer Bendery reported that Walker said he had just learned his mom is “a big part Native American” at one campaign event in May, described himself as “other” and said he found out “a year and a half ago” at another May event, and at a south Georgia meet-and-greet the same month claimed he is “proud to be Black but... I may not be Black” because he had just learned “my mother is part Native American.” At a June 20 campaign event in College Park, he made similar claims but added that he made the discovery using a 23andMe ancestry test. “I don’t care what color you are,” Walker said after stating he wanted to “acknowledge all of my family.”
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His latest, boldest announcement came at a campaign event last month, but this time he claimed his grandmother was “full-blood Cherokee.”
“My mom just told me… so I’m Native American. I was like, ‘Oh, hello,’” he said, describing himself as a “super mutt.” Speaking on stage to his supporters at the Sept. 28 event in Forsyth, he said: “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.’”
Walker and his campaign have provided no evidence for his claims, and some digging by Bendery has shown no links to Walker and the Native American community so far.
Cherokee Nation, the largest of three recognized tribes in the U.S., told HuffPost it had no record of Walker in its database. The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians did not respond to HuffPost’s request for comment.
Walker’s mother, Christine, spoke to the site and said “she has no idea if an immediate ancestor was full-blooded Cherokee.”
She said she grew up hearing stories about her father’s mother being “kin” to the tribe, clarifying that “her grandmother was believed to be related to Cherokee peoples in some way, but she didn’t know how.” She told HuffPost that “I don’t know how far back” the family’s Cherokee heritage went. “See, my grandmother, she passed when I was quite young. I don’t know too much about how she was connected.”
Walker’s campaign did not respond when contacted with a follow-up request for comment.
