Saying your part Cherokee is a way of communicating authentic white Southern identity.

"…let’s look at when white people started to claim Native American heritage in the Southeast. It was in the 1840s or 50s, as the federal challenge to Southern slavery was growing stronger and Civil War loomed on the horizon, that Southerners first started to claim “Cherokee blood.” In the decades prior to the Trail of Tears, Cherokee intermarriage with white settlers had dropped off, as white Southern public opinion had turned against Cherokees. For white people to claim distant Cherokee heritage in 1855 or so had the interesting effect of “legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South,” as Gregory Smithers writes in Slate. In a crucial moment of swelling Southern pride, pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity."

https:// timeline.com/part-cherokee-elizabeth-warren-cf6be035967e