"Cannot document" is not the same as "lie". It means it's not documented.
"Lying" on the other hand requires that the subject (a) declares a fact while (b) knowing that fact is untrue. That does not exist here.
And I did read my own link, well before now, and that's not what the writer said. Let's roll that tape:
>> "If you want to understand Native American identity," Tallbear said, "you need to get outside of that binary, one-drop framework. Native Americans do not fit in that binary. We have been racialized very differently in relationship to whites."
How do we know Native Americans are racialized differently, Tallbear said? Because a white person -- say, Elizabeth Warren, for example -- can absorb a Native American ancestor and still maintain an identity as white. If Warren had a black ancestor, that fact would threaten her white identity.
The dominant framework for Native American identity, Tallbear said, operates on the level of citizenship: Cherokees know they are Cherokee because of a complex history of legal treaties, and because they can document a connection to tribes whose members were identified and listed in official rolls. Were those rolls, which date back to the 1800s and were largely dictated by federal agents, flawed? Certainly. "You have to imagine, you're literally lining up all the Native Americans in a tribe and inevitably it's 'Your dad's white, your mom's Indian, let's make a decision,' " Tallbear said. "Federal agents were also using non-tribal ideas about belonging. But those base rolls are what we have inherited, and that's what we use."
... The incessant, one-drop-rule focus on Warren's blond hair and blue eyes betrays how little her fiercest critics and the entire mainstream media understand about what Native American identity is, where it came from and what it looks like.
By little, I mean not at all: If Native American identity operates likes that of any other nation-state, then you can be Cherokee and look just like Warren. The same way that legendary soccer player Pelé and legendary supermodel Gisele Bündchen can both be Brazilian.
"Elizabeth Warren doesn't not look Cherokee by Cherokee Nation standards at all," Tallbear said. "Going back eight, nine, 10 generations, there are Cherokee that look Asian, Cherokee that look black and Cherokee that look white." <<
(emphasis added to the pertinent)
So what she's talking about in the first part is
citizenship in the Cherokee Nation. That's a different concept from
ethnicity -- which is what being "1/32nd" (or whatever proportion) Cherokee means. It doesn't refer to citizenship.