Sen. Scott Brown's staff find it so insensitive that his challenger, Elizabeth Warren, may have mislead people about having Native American heritage that they showed up at one of her campaign rallies to express their outrage with war whoops and tomahawk chops. The Brown staffers were deputy chief of staff Greg Casey and constituent service counsel Jack Richard, and they appear to be protesting Warren's seeming insensitivity to Native culture displayed when she said her family had always talked about their Native heritage and the "high cheekbones" they got from it. Warren  counts her great-great-great grandmother as Cherokee, but the New England Genealogical Society said earlier this year that they could not document her ancestry. Brown has highlighted this discrepancy in his campaign, airing ads that argue Warren unfairly claimed to be a minority when she was up for jobs, and indicting her character at their debate last week: "I think character is important. ... Professor Warren claimed she was a Native American, a person of color. And as you can see, she’s not."

When you're attacking a political opponent's character, it's usually best to be on your best behavior. As the video of the Brown rally shows, Casey and Richard were not. They appear to be about as culturally sensitive as a couple of 9-year-olds playing cowboys and Indians. Brown has already condemned their display. "It is certainly something that I don't condone," Brown told WCVB in Boston, before clarifying what the real outrage is. "The real offense is that [Warren] said she was white and then checked the box saying she is Native American, and then she changed her profile in the law directory once she made her tenure."

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Elspeth Reeve