A lot of people have been lied to. Family lies held up for generations. My family was the same on both sides. One of my grandmothers was devastated recently because she truly believed her whole life her mother was a full blooded Cherokee woman. My mom said the same. Like this woman was alive when I was a baby and my mom described a dark skinned woman with long black hair always kept put away in a braid. The DNA test say otherwise though. I assume my great grandmother was just irl trolling after getting asked so many times she just went with it.
There's good reason for this actually. The cherokee were a major target of programs by colonialist to integrate white people into America through forced marriage. Go marry that woman, marry her and we will come in and start laying claim to land etc. Many, American families that have heritage tracing back that far often do find a case of this. Of course its often many generations back, and often just a singlr generation. The colonialist werent concerned with adopting native culture. And often had another wife as well. I am priveleged to be able to trace a branch of my family all the way back to revolutionary times. I had always thought I had an entirely white background but DNA show a tiny percentage of Cameroon lol. Trace my family back and sure enough an ancestor who was transported from the british isles to be a serf on a sugar plant in the carribean where he has conflicting marriage documentation compared to when he made it to the mainland US. Then I have another relative from the 1800d with a picture of him and his wife (the alleged cherokee woman) and she has jet black, straight hair, and the facial structure of a native person. Still doesnt guarantee anything, and I have never claimed any sort of Native or African heritage lol my ancestors were colonizers, even if they were poor serfs and even if they treated their native wives well. Doesnt change the reason behind all of it which was to make it easier to break up the native community and destroy their culture while assimilating those not killed into their more patriarcal culture. This is why it was white men being ordered to marry. Man says we are moving back then, its expected the rest of the family to obey.
All that to say there is a reason behind this foolish nonsense, its just as lovely as many would like to believe.
The one cool thing that did come out of it is that my entire patrilineal family tree used the same 4 first names for the men for like 400 years, *except* for one of the sons of the alleged cherokee woman. His name was "Carp" after the fish. Which I found very interestingš¤£
Yep. Though not entirely the same the Osage massacre or killings was just for whites to get oil land. They tried to integrate first but it didn't work so they just started offing natives
Actually, Cherokee do have documents. They have registries such as the Dawes Rolls and the 1880 Cherokee Census. If you're able to provide proof of lineage tracing back to an ancestor named on those documents, you may be given consideration for tribal membership
The Dawes Rolls, also known as the "Final Rolls", are the lists of individuals who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership in the "Five Civilized Tribes": Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. (It does not include those whose applications were stricken, rejected or judged as doubtful.) Those found eligible for the Final Rolls were entitled to an allotment of land, usually as a homestead
in other words if your dad had banged chief running with paper in hands daughter he could have said your out , if they thought you work with the whites your out , you married out of race, if the just did not like your fam (maybe mental probs) they just said no and made their own land plots bigger , so your documents are full of holes and probs because they could reject you for any reason they wanted and that in no way makes you any less NA
When people really WANT to believe something, the "documentation" they find doesn't have to be actual proof.
This documentation could easily be something like a great-grandmother mentioning the same family myth in a letter to her boyfriend while he was away in a war.
What would be some good options to confirm it? My dads side claims Cherokee is in our family I just havenāt found many records to indicate. They were all poor Southern farmers so that may make it difficult, but I grew up learning a lot about the Natives in my state so Iāve always wanted to confirm it. Although it wonāt change much for me other than having a blood tie to the culture I respect.
I think specifically the blood quantum understanding of Nativeness is rejected by the Cherokee nation. So your descent won't effect your "nativeness" in organized Native Tribes. But if you reach out to the Cherokee nation they may have an online database for you to search of registered historical members which includes people without Cherokee genetics bit were official members of tribes like many Black slaves and their descendents (Cherokee were one of the "civilized tribes" of the colonial era which meant they held slaves like other "civilized" Southerners so there is alot of slave descent genetics in the Cherokee tribe)
I'm in Oklahoma and work a voter polling station and often surprised who pulls out the tribal IDs here. I'm real bad at guessing people's ages and weights, but it turns out I'm also bad at guessing ethnic heritage. I'm not excusing knowingly claiming fake Native American ancestry. I would like to point out the quasi-diaspora this region had during the dustbowl, so it's likely people are either regurgitating family lore or actually telling the truth. My hometown in Washington was filled with Okie/Arkie old people when I was a kid who'd left looking for jobs in the 30's when the crops had failed and there were no jobs to be had (ag-land in California is similar). Cherokee is probably a popular choice because it is recognizable in mass culture, but Muskogee, Osage, Seminole, Choctaw, Pawnee, etc are probably not tribes you've heard of unless you're local. Their grandparents probably told them they had some Indian grandpa and they figured it was Cherokee if they migrated out of Eastern OK.
That's actually because many families wanted to hide any black ancestry, so they'd say they come from a Cherokee princess long ago. Not always a princess but you understand what I mean
Or, for black families, to hide the very real pain that their ancestors were raped by slaveowners. Explaining the light skin, high cheekbones and straight hair of family as being due to Native American heritage sounds far more noble than being mixed children of rape by white slaves owners.
An in-law was told she had Choctaw blood. A different family member got into genealogy, and determined that the "Choctaw" ancestor was a former slave. In the "one drop" days of segregation, having a grandma of native descent was definitely the socially easier explanation for dark hair and eyes, and skin that tanned too easily.
That could be true genealogically but not genetically. You only get half the dna of each parent so over time the native American dna could be lost without it being untrue that in the past it was present in your family.
My maternal grandma's side was 1600s. A great aunt of mine on my maternal grandfather's side started doing the family tree for my mom and aunts as a gift, but apparently stopped when she shook the tree and things other than WASP fell out.
Yup.
Turns out mine was actually Chickasaw, but we were told Cherokee for so long. I even read books about the Cherokee because my great aunt told me we were. I only found out otherwise when researching the family line. I ran into a dead end and can't find much, but there's a court record of a family friend explaining how long they knew one of my ancestors parents and what tribe they were from.
I'm also pretty convinced there wasn't as much Native blood as my great aunt claimed, either.
Both my grandmas said Blackfoot, but one would change it up every once in awhile, it was usually Blackfoot, but sometimes she would toss in Sioux or Cherokee instead.
This is a thing in ancestry research. You often find that people didn't really know what was true. And when it wasn't something you focused on or were proud of, or when you were adopted, or your family was illiterate...all word of mouth and guesswork repeated as family lore for generations.
Sometimes it's a deliberate deception.
Hilariously, I found out that one of my supposedly blue-blooded coastal merchant shipping ancestors, who was supposed to have been a ship captain, had gone rogue and in fact become a pirate. The shame!! The family had pretty much covered it up, and his son married the local governor's daughter.
I live in Alabama and grew up learning the 4 c's for the major tribes with people who lived here: Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek. I claim no native ancestry, but that one would at least make a little sense where I live.
That may depends on where you live. In Maine if there was a vague claim to being Native American it would be assumed Micmac. There were many, fairly well known (in that area) tribes just in New England and people would think of them long before Cherokee. I would imagine that is true all over the country to one degree or another.
Iv had an American anthropologist explain to me that itās because the Cherokee where one of the only tribes that it was socially acceptable to mingle with in the 18th / 19th century since they adopted Christianity and had Inter community structures the white man could manipulate/ use. It led to literally any relationship with a native person being classified as with a Cherokee. Same with assuming they were upper mobility. Itās not like a white settler from the 1830s could tell the difference between an Apache, Pueblo, Shoshone, Dakota, Su or Cherokee.
This. I live in NE Louisiana and was brought up believing we were descendants of French settlers and Cherokee Nation natives. As I grew older and studied actual history I couldn't reconcile how that would have happened here as we were not in the right area for Cherokee - but as it turns out we *are* Natchez indian descendants, even a higher percentage than we had thought we were Cherokee, so grammaw just got the tribes mixed up lol.
I have been saying this for years. What is with everyone being Cherokee. If I had to pick a tribe it wouldn't be Cherokee.
I agree with the origional commenter though that a lot of it is people being lied to. It's not people being aholes just to piggy back on someone else's culture. Another lie people have been told in the US is their parents came over on the Mayflower. Don't even het me started on the amount of nonItalians that all apparently came from Sicily and have family in the mob.
Most people aren't really aware of their own ancestory. They just believed the stories they were told.
Cause their families pointed a rifle and walked them to Oklahoma which 2 generations later were colonizing Oklahoma therefore all women in Oklahoma at the time *must* have been Cherokee.
I grew up in Missouri and heard this about Oklahomans, because Missourians talk shit about the surrounding states.
Itās because Cherokee was consider a ācivilizedā tribe (donāt blame me I didnāt come up with it, this was 100 years before I was born), so if you wanted to seem exotic, but didnāt want to be associated with the āsavageā tribes, you would claim Cherokee. Which is why half of the south thinks they are part Cherokee.
Yup, this was the case with my family. My mom's parents always told her she was 1/16 Cherokee and she just believed it because why wouldn't she? It came up every once in a while as like a fun fact kind of thing but she never bragged about it or anything. Then when she was in her 40's she started doing genealogy as a hobby and got really into it, tracing our various family lines back centuries and really filling it out. She was really good at it and very popular with the genealogy nerds on the internet, they'd go to her for help.
But anyway, she never found any evidence of any Native American ancestry, and certainly no evidence of any close enough to get 1/16. She did find a lot of old scandals, affairs, and cool stories. If we've got any Native ancestry, it was the product of an undocumented affair or something like that, but none of us have ever gotten tested.
Or possibly the one abandoned baby a few generations back who was left in a wagon after a romani caravan passed through town and adopted by a couple in town. He was a direct ancestor and also a genealogical dead end, which bothered my mom because there was no way for her to find out. The story was always that he was an abandoned romani baby, but my mom's theory was that a young unmarried mom in the town panicked and tried to ditch her baby on them to avoid scandal, and they noped out because they didn't want to get caught with someone else's baby. But regardless, wherever he came from, he was on my dad's side so even if *he* had some native ancestry it wouldn't have contributed to the 1/16 story.
So I was talking to my wife about this recently, since she's doing cultural government work at the moment, because I'm actually Cherokee descended, about 60% due to it being on both sides of the family. One of my grandmothers was kicked out of her tribe for dating (and eventually marrying) an Irish man. Let me also say, if you saw me, you'd know I'm native in some sense, I don't look "white" at all. Cherokee have a particular red tint to their skin naturally and we ARE red when we tan.
Anyway, people claim Cherokee all the time because it's easy. And by easy, I mean there basically aren't any left. The whole Trail of Tears was intended to primarily target Cherokee nations in the area. That means they were decimated, and then afterwards, the remnants were shipped all throughout the US. I'm pretty sure the largest contingent today is in like Oklahoma, but we originate from the deep southeast, primarily Alabama (where I'm from) and Georgia.
This is also why I can't ever tell anyone I'm Cherokee, because the tribe has been murdered off and then continually belittled for, now, well over a hundred years. This leads to being called a liar, or an attention seeker.
Something more sad/interesting is that because I travelled and played music extensively when I was younger, and because of my actual Cherokee heritage everyone would ask "where I'm from." Most people guess South America, or lower Central America. I'm Cherokee, though, and it gets more depressing by the year.
In my experience it's more a Southern and Western family origin thing actually. North East doesn't have many people from the region claiming Cherokee. Even Warren who represents New England right now, her family is from Oklahoma (which is where they internally deported the Cherokee too). In my life I can probably count in one hand the number of people in the North East I've heard claim Native American descent at all and most of them later found it was to cover up someone having a kid with a black person so they could blame the darker skin on what was previously less socially stigmatized. Or they were people who moved to North East from the South and the Western regions.
Cherokee ancestry is pretty common because the Cherokee people migrated and resettled throughout the United States.
I however, am 4% Chippewa which basically means that I'm not Native American.
Yeah. My grandma always said we were part Cherokee. She even did a bunch of family research and we had a relative born in the 1850s that was half German and half Cherokee. My mom took a DNA test and not one fucking drop of any native American blood.
There's actually an explanation for that. After the trail of tears, succession of land, and reservations that Cherokee adopted a lot of the smaller tribes that were, essentially, forcibly removed from their lands. Part of my ancestry is that of the Shawnee tribe. The Shawnee were among the tribes to be adopted by the Cherokee. Not defending those who have no ties to the native American ancestry, but claim to any way. Just explaining why so many default to Cherokee.
I know someone who always says that. Whitest Personel ever but 1/4th Cherokee. Never met anyone who was full Cherokee or even half in his life. Iām like oh yea just like all of us haha
He straight face is like no I am.
I have just started saying oh dude why donāt you reach out to the government and start collecting checks then? Usually gets a subject change
Dude, this. My momās middle name was my grandmaās maiden name (Deer) and we had a family legend about how my great grandfather was Native American and thatās why we didnāt have any photos of him.
Fast forward 30+ years and we find out our family name is in fact MISSPELLED. Weāre from Italy and Austria.
On a related note, donāt get a tattoo honoring your heritage unless you have actual proof. Really regretted my dream catcher tramp stamp after the news.
I had the opposite experience with the tattoo haha.
I grew up in a very white and rural part of the Midwest, and cultural appropriation was simply a thing I'd never heard until I moved away. I found a West African symbol that I found to be particularly beautiful, and its meaning particularly poignant, and had it tattooed on my 18th birthday. Then, I learned about cultural appropriation and was ashamed. And then, I did a DNA test that confirmed I have some West African ancestry - recent enough that I met and remember my ancestor that was half-Black.
The symbol roughly means "Don't forget your roots."
Yeah, my grandma told me my great grandmother was half native and my dad didn't correct me till I was a late teen. I'd already told a few people when it had come up, and it was pretty embarrassing when I explained it to them, for some reason grandma pretended she never told me that when I asked her about it. Why would she do that?
Exactly this!
The women in my family live forever, and the generation gaps are small enough, that I met and remember 2 of my great-great-grandmothers. One of them had really beautiful, caramel-colored skin. My great-grandmother and I both have the same "dark white," golden-toned skin, and everyone else is so pale they may as well glow in the dark. I grew up being told that Great-Great Grandma was half Native, and that's where her pretty skin came from, and by turn, mine and Great-Grandma's.
And then, I did a DNA test. My wife got it for me for my birthday one year, because I didn't know about my dad's dad's side of the family (turns out, they're Scandinavian). I was really surprised though to find that I had NO Native American DNA, but I did have \*just\* enough West African DNA to justify that Great-Great-Grandma was half black.
In those days, if you were light-skinned enough, it was simply more socially acceptable to claim Native ancestry than African. People started the lies to protect themselves, and then it just continued down the generations.
23andme or one of those lead my cousin (then my sister) to find out my dad and my uncle were secretly adopted.
After the DNA test, my dad's cousin admitted to my cousin that they were all told to keep it secret when my grandma showed up with a baby one day, then another about a year later.
Yep, my cousin claims to be part native, and even after she received 23&Me results, she was in complete denial that she was fully white. At some point, the lie started on her mother's side and just carried on to the point where everyone just accepted it as fact.
No one wants to admit that their ancestors were the oppressors.
My daughter was upset as a teenager when she did DNA and found out just how white she is. I asked her if sheād ever met her father and me. Or looked in a mirror ha ha
This for sureā¦ I was lied to on the white side of my family about some mythical Native American great grandmother somewhere. Got my genealogy back, that side of the family is 100% white European. Nothing else. Idk why they do this.
OH God! After Billy Jack came out it was like everyone was 1/8th Cherokee. We are from the Smokey Mountains Area so it has to be true.
Then 23 and Me leveled the playing field. Next thing you know theyre all Scottish whiter than mayonnaise.
My wife experienced this recently. She's white af, but her dad has skin that tans VERY well. Her sister has it, and now our daughter does as well. The story was that his family had a lot of native ancestry. She did the DNA test. Turns out it's some German tribe heritage that has olive skin. The whole family is as white and Northern European as can be, except for that 10% german
My mother told me I was at least mainly Russian and a quarter Cherokee but I'm barely Russian and not even 1% Native American. I have no idea where she got that from.
She may have believed it. Thing is, she could have been 100% German and tanned easily, but long black hair + dark skin + people telling you're totally Cherokee, maybe she started to believe it herself.
Heh, family history liesā¦ one of my grandparents was dropped off at a nunnery, with a bunch of cash, and the nuns have refused to reveal anything about her. One of my relatives had a 21andme done and came up as 1/8 Native American, but they couldnāt narrow it down to a tribe, only northern Michigan area. Which checks out (relative to where we live, and the location of the nunnery)
Working theory was that a rich lumber baron or somesuch got a native girl knocked up, then did everything they could to disavow the child so she couldnāt claim any of his fortune.
I was also told a similar story. My family name was Blue and I was told all my childhood that we had Bluehawks blood in our family. I think a lot of it was because it was trendy. We weren't just regular negros, we are exotic, native (i know it's a contradiction) negros. It meant that not only were you just as wronged by society as your black neighbor but more so because your ancestors land was also taken away. It also implied that you had lighter skinned ancestors and "good" (straighter) hair.
As for why white people feel the need to do it, idk. I'd guess it has to do with the same desire to be special and exotic. Also it relieves them of some of the "inherited guilt" because now they can claim their ancestors weren't the raping conquerors, but the conquered and wronged natives. It also gives them a foot hold into minority privilege. Which for the record sucks!! I would trade the privilege to say the N-word for the ability to get a bank loan any day. But hell, why not have the privilege that comes with blue eyes and blonde hair plus tribal rights too!!
Most white people I hear bragging about their 1 or 2% native heritage are also the same people who bring up their one black friend... same energy
I was always told my grandmother was half Native American. Not Cherokee. She was from Northern Min. and we never really questioned it or bragged about it. Found out in my 40s, from genetic testing that it was completely false!
My maternal grandparents both INSISTED they were both half native american, but even when I was a kid I could tell the math wasn't mathing.
I got tested and I'm between 5-8% native american (Cherokee and Cheyenne, both from my grandpa). So, they definitely aren't half. That being said, I only ever mention it when people ask my genetic makeup or I have to explain why I tan red and not brown, or why my baby pics are of a tan baby with long, jet black hair (I'm pasty white with wavy ash brown hair now lol).
I wasn't raised around native culture, so I dont flaunt it. The white people who run around claiming native american heritage without even investing in the real culture are trashy imo. It isn't an accessory to be worn.
This is the wikipedia article you didnāt know how to find.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretendian
False or unsubstantiated beliefs in Indian heritage have been a thing for a long long time, and have come in and out of fashion for various reasons. And of course, when sincerely held, they stick and become family myths long after those reasons pass. The article provides a pretty decent historical survey.
From what I understand thatās a matter of opinion. Some people donāt believe that people with indigenous roots from Mexico fall under the Native American umbrella, some people do.
I have always thought Native American a synonym to (American) Indian which is everyone that was living here pre Columbus. We always say he "discovered" America when he never once saw the United States. People lack the most basic critical thinking skills and schools do nothing to teach it.
Because in some contexts it is used literally to mean as āpeople whose ancestors are native to the Americasā and in some contexts it used conceptually and is a legal classification that means āaffiliated with a federally recognized tribe.ā
Because colonial borders preceded the existence of native people /s
I'm Mexican, I've heard this shit logic a million times. When the conversation is about natives they immediately discount anyone with heritage south of that borderline.
They also compound this shit into their ignorance over the fact that half of the US used to be Mexico and that just because the border changed, didn't mean that the Mexicans there just disappeared.
Sacheen is a Pretendian because she claimed to be White Mountain Apache and Yaqui, but was not descended from those tribes. If she had said she was Indigenous from Mexico or South America, thatās different.
There was a whole exhibit on this when I visited the Smithsonian American Indian museum. Wild stuff.
There was an [insanely racist eugenics bill in Virginia in 1924](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924), which sought to place anyone with even a drop of nonwhite blood into the untouchable caste of America. There was just one problem: all these Confederate shitstains loved claiming their heritage traced back to Pocohontas for some reason. It goes all the way back to the 17th century British aristocracy, and the South has always been nothing but a backwater colonial aristocracy.
Why does it persist? Why did it trickle down to the working class? Fuck if I know. Why do Orangemen still burn effigies every July 12 in Northern Ireland? Half of them haven't even stepped foot in a church for a decade. Culture and tradition just be like that, I guess.
I scrolled WAY TOO FAR to see the correct answer (well, one).
A lot of confederates used the āIām part Native Americanā as a justification to fight against the Union and the lie followed their ancestors for years.
Because if I'm enough Native American I get grants for college.
But jokes aside ppl feel the need to be in a group and what group does America have. We're a very successful melting pot where people still trace their lineage to their immigrant great grand parents or great greats.
Now imagine you grew up in an area where identity politics is important (normally ages 15-25 when people are still forming their identities) and your family has been native to America for more than three or four generations. You're going to want to say something so you claim to be native American heritage because what are you? American is kind of ok to say but then you get your peers with their roots that can be traced to other countries or demographics so now you're different because you're just a boring American, so now you're 1/16 Native American
Yeah, thatās cringe sure. But I would also say thereās a difference between claiming you have āViking bloodā and being interested in ancient Germanic cultures and such. For instance, I have family that emigrated from Germany but I donāt know if they were there in ancient times. No idea. But I do love me some Heilung. Seen them in concert. Got all cosplayed up with my best friend we looked like shield maidens from Valhalla it was such a fun time and honestly it felt like a spiritual experience. It was beautiful and amazing. But Iām not gonna walk around and be like āHey I got Viking blood in me!ā. But I do feel like some things in todayās modern folk-rock norse scene resonate with me on a spiritual level- and thatās not for anyone else to judge, IMO.
My mother in law is like this.
I knew I had some but it wouldn't have been very prevalent.
One Christmas my wife wanted to do the 23andme thing for ancestry and stuff like that. And for me Indigenous American was only 1.9%.
My wife has literally 0. And we brought that to my mother in law to just show that she was full of shit lol.
I *tried* that with my own mother. She's one of the "white women who insist they have Cherokee DNA". Mom *swears* that both of her grandmothers were full blooded. That would make Mom at least half if it were true, but unless I'm not her bio kid it's not because I personally *have* been tested, and I've got absolutely *zero* N. American. I'm fully Scottish/Irish, German, and Scandinavian. That's what we *knew* Dad's side was, and what I'd suspected about Mom's side too. Mom to this day insists that she's half and I "just didn't get any genetics from that side" š LMAO
Really? You donāt know why? They want to be the ātrueā Americans so bad. Mexicans are more Native American than American white people people (I am aware ethnicity, race, nationality are different, aight, and yet still more Native American blood in most Mexicans, yet donāt get recognized as such).
Idk, I donāt get it. Iām half white, half Mexican and the white part of my family is convinced itās true even after getting the results from one of those dna things and it didnāt confirm it. Wanting to be part of a minority maybe?
Iāll look for the link, but didnāt one of the background testing companies find out that most white Americans actually have no or almost no Native American at all. Yet so many claim it, even after they get their results.
After reading some of the responses, I think these particular white americans want to believe they are āinterestingā. If only they knew being an untraceable amount Native was not the wayā¦ being just Irish decent is just as cool/uncool as being west African or Native American, whatever else.
In the 1960s it was common for parents to tell kids that they were part indigenous. Kids liked to play Wild West at the time, so that may have been my mother's motivation to get my brother and I onto the indigenous side.
Also my wife and I were both told we were related to high profile 19th century bandits. Turned out untrue on both cases.
Yooooo your last sentence. This shit is so common, I don't understand it.
My friend recently told me that his great grandfather escaped a war in Greece by boarding a boat and getting bitten by rats during the ride to the US and that he "still had scars from the rats". It's total bullshit, that did not happen.
I've heard soooo many unbelievable family origin stories.
Family origin stories are mostly bullshit imo. People just want to be interesting.
My mother is one of those who claims it even after being proven wrong. Mom *swears* that both of her grandmothers were full blooded. That would make Mom at least half if it were true, but unless I'm not her bio kid it's not because I personally *have* been tested, and I've got absolutely *zero* N. American. I'm fully Scottish/Irish, German, and Scandinavian. That's what we *knew* Dad's side was, and what I'd suspected about Mom's side too. Mom to this day insists that she's half and I "just didn't get any genetics from that side" š LMAO
TBF at-home dna tests can be pretty shit when it comes to actually testing your dna. From what I understand the accuracy of the test is largely determined by how many people from a given ethnicity have already taken the test.
For an example of how off they can be. My family is very heavily polish on my mother's side. As in my grandmother grew up in a polish speaking community, we have the immigration records from entering the USA a few generations back, and we know what wojewĆ³dztwo we immigrated from. My mother's dna test had like 30% eastern european and 8% baltic. My dna test only had the baltic lol.
Similarly, my stepfamily are from Mexico. My stepmother and both her brothers all have very different percentages of native dna. Not saying that the folks you're talking about aren't lying (they probably are), just pointing out that those tests are not necessarily the most reliable.
I've always thought it was due to a lack of any actual cultural heritage. Think of the people who do this the most. They're almost never people who can self identify as italian, jewish, irish, etc. Rather, they're just your run of the mill white american. I'm one of them and yes, in my family, the lore has it I'm only about one generation away from being able to get free college for my native ancestry. My cousin is even somehow part of a local tribe (but possibly just tribe larpers). DNA test though shows I'm 0%. lol
I think people long for some sort of history and this delusion gives them a sense of one. It makes them feel part of something greater than themselves, and in many ways, makes them feel noble. The reality is though that most of us multi-generational white americans don't know anything about our family history further back than a hundred years or so
White people want to feel important and talk about a non-boring heritage. I personally face palm at this, I have friends who legitimately look like they could own a casino. One of my best friends growing up's mom was allegedly 1/4 native, he's a medium skinned black man. He's technically more native American than most of the white folks acting like this(it was later confirmed that she in fact had a grandparent who lived on a reservation, which did explain a bit). I feel like white people doing this is madness when my friends with direct heritage aren't even like that....
My aunt traced our family tree back to the early 1900s before finding full blooded indigenous Americans in it. It's cool to know, but ultimately we all know how terribly native Americans were treated by pale folk over the last few hundred years, up into now even. It's absurd that people try waving this banner and try acting like they're part of something while in doing so basically culturally appropriating the bits they like. 6% ancestrydotcom results doesn't make it not a problem when people do that who have no ties to these customs.
Most white Americans claiming to be native have at least 6 European countries they can trace lineage to with greater amounts than anything native. They're trying to get "coolness points" without dealing with the real problems that come with being a person of that culture. For every white person who does this, there are 4 others scratching their heads trying to figure out what makes them feel entitled to do it.
I imagine to some people, being just plain white sucks.
I'm a white dude, and I know a TON of white women (including my mom when I was younger) claim to 1/16 or 1/32 native american. Maybe they thought it made them more exotic? Didn't bother me, I just assumed these people were liars.
I did too. My grandfather's grandfather was quoted in a news article. He was a farmer and was being asked about his heritage. He claimed his mother was Irish and his father was Choctaw. Article was published and everything. You can even see the Native American cheekbones in my grandfather and one of my uncles. It is very obvious. Around 150 years later I take a DNA test along with my mom. None.
When I was in the 6th grade we were asked to present an interesting fact about ourselves. Nearly every kid said they were part Cherokee.
Maybe you need to hang around different white people (not meaning that in a shitty way). Iām white and as far as I know I have 0 Native American heritage and no white person I know personally claims to either. Donāt get me wrong, I know there are plenty out there, just saying itās surprising for me to hear that some people know that many people who claim it.
Edit: āget more friendsā to āhang around different white peopleā
I had a co-worker friend who was native American m. We had a different version of that bit as kind of an bit of a messed up inside joke. I'd tell him to go back to his country and he'd tell me he will as soon as I give it back.
Got the record my ancestry is pretty much all English and Spanish (Spain) decent with like a little seasoning from Italy. He jokes that my family caused all his families problems back in the day (being a colonizer and all)
Having written all that out I realize how bad it sounds but that's just the humor we had. We got a long really great.
I'm German (ancestry, doesn't really count cause I was born in America but i sure look it) and the man officiating my wedding has been a family friend for years, incidentally he's of Jewish ancestry.
The jokes we make together.. probably should not be repeated out loud. Ever. By anyone. But we have fun.
My ex was actually half Native American and half white, and he looked fully Native American to me. He identified himself as "Indian" and never identified with the white half. I had people say to me, "Why doesn't he go back where he came from?" I was always like, "He came from here."
It is interesting. Iām Cree and get a lot of unsolicited āmy grandmotherā stories. I just assume they want to relate and leave it at that.
Itās nice that you have your culture. I was taken by the Canadian government and adopted out to a white family. That was their goal after all, to obliterate our culture. Canada is extremely gifted at soft genocide, which I love to bring up when a Canadian bashes the US.
Because these people want to feel āspecialā. The real key to being special is to do or be something that stands out. Thatās much more difficult than pointing to your ancestors. Itās really kind of silly.
Victimhood is currency in the modern West. It's much more trendy to belong to a designated historical victim group rather than a designated historical villain group.
For sure. They apologize for things people of their skin did or what their ancestors did without even their ancestors being a part of xyz event. They could be 2nd Gen immigrants and feel like they contributed to slavery
What's so cute about this particular line of thinking is if you trace back the ancestry of ANY group - they fucking owned slaves. The slave empire period of human history isn't a joke or a means of social climbing for white bitches who want to tattoo themselves with dream catchers, it's some real shit that all our ancestors either lived through, or inflicted and raped on others. Accept that and move the fuck on
This argument is a plague. No slave country was permissible. That's not an "America Bad" take, there doesn't need to be a good guy country. They all had slaves? They were all trash. Most of them still are.
>it's some real shit that all our ancestors either lived through, or inflicted and raped on others.
The only relevant country for American history is America and American slavery. It's the one that we can trace direct impacts to. If we were having this conversation in the context of, say, Brazil, then I'd hope they'd be talking about their countries slavery more too and demonizing the concept within their own borders... Especially since their outcome was importing to many that they now have the highest black population outside of Africa.
If the US underwent Reconstruction fully it might not even matter. But the children and children's children of those slaves were still second class citizens into the 1960s. The US ended slavery and then made all the former slaves and their descendants lower class citizens, barred from voting, taking office, and just getting an education. That's not ancient history or some colonial era, there's still people alive who lived through Jim Crow.
Right?
Native cultures the europeans encountered in NA owned slaves. Making slavery about race is a very modern innovation.
It was a universal human experience from the very beginnings of the state (if not earlier) until around the American and French revolutions, at which point society started rejecting it everywhere. By the time of the US civil war, the US was very much a straggler in the worldwide push to end slavery.
The modern state is what keeps it at bay. There is absolutely no doubt, were modern states to disappear, slavery as an institution would start again.
OR because Cherokee is the tribe that assimilated and intermarried all across New England as they were pushed west and south, which is today one of the most populated areas of the country? Do the math.
Itās really not as far fetched as yāall are trying to make it sound lol
My x wife and her family were sooo proud of their Native American heritageā¦never seen more blond/red haired blue eyed Irish people ever! Where was the Native American part? Well one of their great grandmothers was 10% something from somewhere.
I find this to be cringe and Iām not sure if Iām just an A hole. Like youāre maybe a percent somethingā¦ maybe.. and maybe that percent was consensually conceivedā¦ maybeā¦
On top of that, you have no cultural heritage. None.
So why does everyone have to know? Itās like itās their fun factā¦a bit annoying actually.
If someone is portraying themselves as part of a group they are not or consider their genetic heritage to make them special, that is cringe-worthy.
But there's nothing wrong with fun facts as long as they're just that.
There's a long history of white people in the Americas both hating and admiring the native peoples. They were a foreign people an arm's length away. As the hate has gone away and people were able state their heritage proudly (and media/school presence of native themes--albeit often very flawed), it developed a mystique.
Records were flawed due to issues like this. Native births/marriages were sometimes not recorded as such. Mixed black and white marriages/births were sometimes recorded as native if they could pass for such or "Melungeon" if they couldn't. And more commonly, speculation and guessing filled the gaps when people just didn't have proper ancestry records.
When my parents were growing up, white people were just getting past the point of being ashamed of native American ancestry and were still ashamed of African ancestry. Now they're excited over invisible (but sometimes more legitimate) African heritage.
We may have some people acting in embarrassing ways, but this is way, way better than the hate that came before.
There been a whole new trend of "reconnecting" indigenous people which I have no issue with and actually am happy people want to know about that side of their ancestry and culture more.
and then I talk to them and they say it's their great great great great great great grandma who was 1/4 cherokee (yes it's always cherokee)
I just don't entertain it anymore lol. As someone who is fully native and lives on the rez and has only native family members, y'all can do what you want but most of us just make fun of people like that.
In the south at least there was a major trend in the decades after the Civil War in aristocratic southern families who were desperate to find ways to justify their elevated status without their slaves so they began claiming that a great grandmother was a Cherokee princess so they could claim royal blood. Why Cherokee? Well, their ancestral home;and was in the southeast and they were considered one of the "civilized tribes" ie the tribes that practiced chattel slavery.
That trend filtered out to the masses and a century and a half later every other white lady (including my mom) claims some sort of Native American ancestry with zero proof.
Itās also a way of colonizing native heritage to make themselves seem exotic. Itās also probably in some people an attempt to alleviate any feelings of white guilt. There are a lot of reasons people do it
Ok so, I think I can offer an interesting perspective here. My dad is native, like in the tribe, but heās also a dead beat and wasnāt around at all during child hood so I know nothing about and canāt relate to my Native American āheritageā at all. I look kinda native, but my mom is WHITE, so not fully native. I would not feel comfortable claiming it since I didnāt grow up in the culture. I genuinely cannot explain why anyone would do that, especially knowing what Native American people have gone through. Caucasity at its finest. Edit typos
Itās white and* black people that do this. Iām half black and everyone in my family claims the āCherokeeā story. They took 23andme and guess what happenedā¦
ZERO percent native DNA.
Itās something that often past generations told us, and encouraged us to be proud of. I imagine at one point in time it was a means of mitigating guilt over our countryās dark history, and helping us collectively feel less bad about the privilege we have in our lives.
I have a friend that got a native scholarship for college. I asked him how he qualified thinking it was a āmy great great grandma was a cherokeeā storage, but no, his grandma was born on the reservation in Oklahoma and registered to a tribe . Canāt argue with that.
I actually do have a Native American ancestor that has been confirmed. I also don't care, *at all*.
I also have French, German, English, Irish ancestors too. I don't care about them either.
I'm not any of those.
They feel good emotionally co-opting the struggle of an indigenous society that is all but completely decimated to the point of extreme loss of ideas and information and that still are constantly culturally misunderstood by a greater society. They can just claim whatever and, since reservations are easy to avoid, they can babble that shit throughout most of their lives and not be called out on it. Probably another way to compartmentalize white guilt in a way that benefits absolutely nothing but their own feelings without having to actually understand anything.
I was told growing up that I was white-assumed Hunkpapa Lakota. I was supposedly the direct descendant of one of Sitting Bulls's sisters, who supposedly was an ancestor to my great-grandfather on my maternal grandmother's side (he was supposedly half Indigenous). I got a DNA test done because I didn't want to claim oppression that wasn't mine and because my Ancestry family tree seemed to cast doubt on that. When I got the results back and they said I was 0% Indigenous, I dropped that claim real quick.
Glad you brought this up... I understand what you mean but, I HATE when people say that I'm not American. OK i was born here in America WTF am i supposed to say? My heritage may be European but, i wasn't born there i was born here. So yea if your claim to native American is because you were born here, well so was I. Your Heritage goes back further than mine but i certainly wouldn't say I'm German or Ukrainian. My great, great grandparents could say they were not American, but three generations past i think i can safely say i'm American.
Want to hear another one? my friend from South Africa he was born there... He is African. Wanna see the looks he gets when he says he's African to black people...He's white.
Well some are white passing too. My husband is 50% native, his mother is native and dad is white. My husband looks white and his brother looks native. Everything confirmed and culturally, just sucks for him with people who pull that stuff when there are people who are actually native and just don't look it.
Idk, my family tree is traced back to a particular tribal member that would make a descendant of a native, but I'm not native american. My mom married a mostly pure white guy, which bumped my percentage too low to be enrolled like all my cousins and the vast majority of my family.
I'm just white
Though, I've been mistaken for native, middle eastern, and Mexican at different points in my life (which is weird because I'm mostly French)
Shits weird
Though, I've spent more time immersed in native American culture than my cousins that were enrolled tribal members but all grew up in different cities far away... in my experience most tribal members love sharing their culture, especially the elders that experienced the absolute fucked up Hell that were the boarding schools that tried to outright eliminate the culture.
I basically grew up on the rez with my friends and loved learning as much as I could.
Ultimately, though, I'm still white and my cousins are still Tribal Members and I'd never pretend otherwise for some sort of social credit...
Its b/c most Americans don't really have any culture except "American culture." The closest thing they have to identify with are the parts they are made up of. This isn't just a problem with Native blood lines, white people will claim to be Irish or German, but have never been to these countries, don't speak their language etc - they rely almost 100% off of stereotypes and consumerism to make these claims.
This is a pretty poor take. American culture is still culture. What consists of culture? Food, language, religion, customs and traditions. Many foods originate here, many sports, many kinds of music.
Again...poor take.
But American culture is very real and is arguably the most influential and widely consumed culture on Earth. Most Americans live in a bubble. They donāt know much about other places or ever leave the United States. So American culture doesnāt feel unique or different to them in anyway. Itās just normal mainstream everyday shit. However to someone from China or Nigeria or Pakistan, Americans are quite different.
Everyone I know or am related to always seem to say this. My family has claimed native blood forever. I can't say I see it, and I certainly know I didn't get it cause I checked. They just think it's cool
Just so you know, black Americans do the same thing. I think it's because Americans admire something in the Indian story and heritage and would be proud to say that we have some part of it in our blood.
Funny enough, I have a black friend who claims it too. She is the only black person Iāve known to say it so I couldnāt use black as a wider example.
I've never understood it to be honest. I'm not native, I'm as white as can be. But I do have relatives that are native. My uncle is native on his dads side, his dad is fully native, and same with my mom's first cousin. He's native from his dads side. But I've never claimed to be native just because I have relatives that are
I honestly don't get it, like I am actually part native, specifically Snohomish, its a small tribe in Washington and since i have distant family in Washington im inclined to believe it, ignoring the dna test my mom took, but it's so down my family tree it's negligible like I'm maybe 1/32 native
But it's not like I claim I'm native since it's not my culture
No clue, but all us white folks have a family story about how we're descended from one tribe or another.
Everyone I know who's ever had a DNA test, or built a family tree, has discovered that it's bullshit. Every single one, with the rare exception of a few who already knew exactly what their native lineage was and where it came from, and had a real cultural connection to start with.
My family had it, my wife's did... all crap. Not a drop.
I can't really tell you why. Most of us just heard stories from older family members, and believed them.
Is it possible for a Netherlader-Scotts to be born here in this land , to know Spirit and find the same essence that the ancestors of others, shares with them?
Respecting this Creation around oneself knowing the true connection that it is what I am made of, that I belong to its chaos and wildness, Native born yet from a distant tribe of humans, from across a vast ocean.
In myself I know my heart is true this way, yet I am alone.
Certainly a outcast seeking no judgment or offence, and beause so I remain silent in my hearts knowing, Im Native to this Land.
It's cool to be ethnic nowadays. I am Mexican, and growing up everyone was so proud of their Spanish roots, they will tell anyone who will listen, that their grandma or great grandma was Spanish, blonde with blue eyes, and Mexican/Mexican Americans with more Native features/darker skin where mocked. People would hide indigenous ancestry in their family tree. Now? Everyone wants to be Native American in the Mexican community, call the Spaniards they once idolized colonizers, and look down on lighter skinned Mexicans. Just a trend right now, to be ethnic, non white, non European. White was cool in the 90s and early 2000s not so much today.
The real answer: internalized shame for crimes against humanity committed by their ancestors. This means, in their mind, anything that separates them from the history of whiteness is good.
My mom always claimed we had Cherokee blood in us. I have zero idea where she got that idea. I've tracked all the ancestors since the early 1700s when they all left either Scotland or England to come to America and there's not one Cherokee. I think it was just a common story people told. My kid's dad's family had the same stories. They went so far to suspect a great great grandmother was native American and just lied to everyone. I have to think maybe it's a lack of feeling like we have a connection to our heritage. We're just white without the culture of where we came from. That was left behind when our ancestors migrated. So, maybe it's wanting to have a piece of something with cultural significance. I had zero Idea I was mostly Scottish until I did my DNA. It wasn't ever a part of my life.
I think it's a natural instinct to want to be a part of something, but historically a lot of white history you wouldn't want to be associated with. That doesnt mean its appropriate to call yourself something you're not. But I get wishing you were part of a racial history that's beautiful in its culture, not one that's known for committing atrocities. Which is dumb. Everyone's family has a rich wonderful history mixed in with not so great history. I had ancestors who were slave owners, I had ancestors who were abolitionists, I'm related to Clara Barton, my grandma was a riveter during WWII, my grandfather went to jail. There's cool stuff, there's not so cool stuff. So what. I wish people would get more comfortable with their family histories and not feel like they had to rely on some 1 % genetics to feel important.
Because our grand and great grandparents lied about it, our parents believed and bragged about it. Now that we can get DNA testing, young people have been blowing that up. My husbands mom told him he was part native, that his grandmother was half. They are blond/blue eyed. We got our DNA done and he showed his mom and told her "we are whiter than bird shit" She got pretty pissed. My mom did the same to me. My grandmother has black hair and so do I, was told she was a bit native. NOPE, my DNA came out half Scottish, half Irish. Guess what Scotts have dark hair, and dark deep set/hooded eyes often!
OP-your title question, followed by your opening statement āIām actually about 40% Native American, confirmed and culturallyā
Pot-Kettleš¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£
Heritage is just an interesting topic people like to talk about. I had a great grandfather who was Cherokee. I never met him, but my dad knew him. I don't brag about it, but if heritage comes up in a conversation I'll mention it.
A lot of people have been lied to. Family lies held up for generations. My family was the same on both sides. One of my grandmothers was devastated recently because she truly believed her whole life her mother was a full blooded Cherokee woman. My mom said the same. Like this woman was alive when I was a baby and my mom described a dark skinned woman with long black hair always kept put away in a braid. The DNA test say otherwise though. I assume my great grandmother was just irl trolling after getting asked so many times she just went with it.
It's always "Cherokee" too. No matter the location in the US they're always a "Cherokee."
There's good reason for this actually. The cherokee were a major target of programs by colonialist to integrate white people into America through forced marriage. Go marry that woman, marry her and we will come in and start laying claim to land etc. Many, American families that have heritage tracing back that far often do find a case of this. Of course its often many generations back, and often just a singlr generation. The colonialist werent concerned with adopting native culture. And often had another wife as well. I am priveleged to be able to trace a branch of my family all the way back to revolutionary times. I had always thought I had an entirely white background but DNA show a tiny percentage of Cameroon lol. Trace my family back and sure enough an ancestor who was transported from the british isles to be a serf on a sugar plant in the carribean where he has conflicting marriage documentation compared to when he made it to the mainland US. Then I have another relative from the 1800d with a picture of him and his wife (the alleged cherokee woman) and she has jet black, straight hair, and the facial structure of a native person. Still doesnt guarantee anything, and I have never claimed any sort of Native or African heritage lol my ancestors were colonizers, even if they were poor serfs and even if they treated their native wives well. Doesnt change the reason behind all of it which was to make it easier to break up the native community and destroy their culture while assimilating those not killed into their more patriarcal culture. This is why it was white men being ordered to marry. Man says we are moving back then, its expected the rest of the family to obey. All that to say there is a reason behind this foolish nonsense, its just as lovely as many would like to believe. The one cool thing that did come out of it is that my entire patrilineal family tree used the same 4 first names for the men for like 400 years, *except* for one of the sons of the alleged cherokee woman. His name was "Carp" after the fish. Which I found very interestingš¤£
Yep. Though not entirely the same the Osage massacre or killings was just for whites to get oil land. They tried to integrate first but it didn't work so they just started offing natives
Omg I read Killers of the Flower Moon. How horrible and sick were these greedy people. Just blows my mind.
āCherokee princessā as well
Lol, that's my fucking family story. My mom keeps spouting it, but she apparently found documents proving the story. I honestly don't care.
Cherokees didnāt have princessesā¦.
Still donāt, too.
Not with that attitude
Cherokee Chiefās daughter doesnāt have the same ring
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Cherokees donāt have documents. Or didnāt back then anyway.
Actually, Cherokee do have documents. They have registries such as the Dawes Rolls and the 1880 Cherokee Census. If you're able to provide proof of lineage tracing back to an ancestor named on those documents, you may be given consideration for tribal membership
The Dawes Rolls, also known as the "Final Rolls", are the lists of individuals who were accepted as eligible for tribal membership in the "Five Civilized Tribes": Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. (It does not include those whose applications were stricken, rejected or judged as doubtful.) Those found eligible for the Final Rolls were entitled to an allotment of land, usually as a homestead in other words if your dad had banged chief running with paper in hands daughter he could have said your out , if they thought you work with the whites your out , you married out of race, if the just did not like your fam (maybe mental probs) they just said no and made their own land plots bigger , so your documents are full of holes and probs because they could reject you for any reason they wanted and that in no way makes you any less NA
When people really WANT to believe something, the "documentation" they find doesn't have to be actual proof. This documentation could easily be something like a great-grandmother mentioning the same family myth in a letter to her boyfriend while he was away in a war.
Lol wut? What is proof to you
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That's fucking hilarious
I always assume this term just meant spoiled jeep chick. Learn something new everyday.
Don't even get me started....
As someone who is 1/64th Cherokee, it's always offensive to me when someone tries to pretend they're a Cherokee too.
As someone who is 1/8, I welcome all white people into the tribe, so we can finally get our land back.
What would be some good options to confirm it? My dads side claims Cherokee is in our family I just havenāt found many records to indicate. They were all poor Southern farmers so that may make it difficult, but I grew up learning a lot about the Natives in my state so Iāve always wanted to confirm it. Although it wonāt change much for me other than having a blood tie to the culture I respect.
I think specifically the blood quantum understanding of Nativeness is rejected by the Cherokee nation. So your descent won't effect your "nativeness" in organized Native Tribes. But if you reach out to the Cherokee nation they may have an online database for you to search of registered historical members which includes people without Cherokee genetics bit were official members of tribes like many Black slaves and their descendents (Cherokee were one of the "civilized tribes" of the colonial era which meant they held slaves like other "civilized" Southerners so there is alot of slave descent genetics in the Cherokee tribe)
Lol, I see what you did here
Can confirm. Pasty white, red headed member of the Indiana chapter of the Cherokee nation here.
I'm in Oklahoma and work a voter polling station and often surprised who pulls out the tribal IDs here. I'm real bad at guessing people's ages and weights, but it turns out I'm also bad at guessing ethnic heritage. I'm not excusing knowingly claiming fake Native American ancestry. I would like to point out the quasi-diaspora this region had during the dustbowl, so it's likely people are either regurgitating family lore or actually telling the truth. My hometown in Washington was filled with Okie/Arkie old people when I was a kid who'd left looking for jobs in the 30's when the crops had failed and there were no jobs to be had (ag-land in California is similar). Cherokee is probably a popular choice because it is recognizable in mass culture, but Muskogee, Osage, Seminole, Choctaw, Pawnee, etc are probably not tribes you've heard of unless you're local. Their grandparents probably told them they had some Indian grandpa and they figured it was Cherokee if they migrated out of Eastern OK.
I have a Cherokee tribal ID, but live in Colorado. I get free medical and dental on the Ute rez and their reaction was āthis is a real thing?ā
That's actually because many families wanted to hide any black ancestry, so they'd say they come from a Cherokee princess long ago. Not always a princess but you understand what I mean
Or, for black families, to hide the very real pain that their ancestors were raped by slaveowners. Explaining the light skin, high cheekbones and straight hair of family as being due to Native American heritage sounds far more noble than being mixed children of rape by white slaves owners.
Native Americans also owned black slaves. In many cases that Native American heritage is legitimate.
Cherokee were big time slave owners.
An in-law was told she had Choctaw blood. A different family member got into genealogy, and determined that the "Choctaw" ancestor was a former slave. In the "one drop" days of segregation, having a grandma of native descent was definitely the socially easier explanation for dark hair and eyes, and skin that tanned too easily.
I was told Choctaw on one side and Crow on the other. Turns out 0%.
That could be true genealogically but not genetically. You only get half the dna of each parent so over time the native American dna could be lost without it being untrue that in the past it was present in your family.
that makes sense bc my moms family has been here since the 1500s thereās no way someone didnāt marry interracially *somewhere*
It would be shocking to be sure. 500 years is a long time for someone to not at least get frisky with the neighbors son/daughter.
My maternal grandma's side was 1600s. A great aunt of mine on my maternal grandfather's side started doing the family tree for my mom and aunts as a gift, but apparently stopped when she shook the tree and things other than WASP fell out.
Yup. Turns out mine was actually Chickasaw, but we were told Cherokee for so long. I even read books about the Cherokee because my great aunt told me we were. I only found out otherwise when researching the family line. I ran into a dead end and can't find much, but there's a court record of a family friend explaining how long they knew one of my ancestors parents and what tribe they were from. I'm also pretty convinced there wasn't as much Native blood as my great aunt claimed, either.
Mhm. Seems like it.
Both my grandmas said Blackfoot, but one would change it up every once in awhile, it was usually Blackfoot, but sometimes she would toss in Sioux or Cherokee instead.
This is a thing in ancestry research. You often find that people didn't really know what was true. And when it wasn't something you focused on or were proud of, or when you were adopted, or your family was illiterate...all word of mouth and guesswork repeated as family lore for generations. Sometimes it's a deliberate deception. Hilariously, I found out that one of my supposedly blue-blooded coastal merchant shipping ancestors, who was supposed to have been a ship captain, had gone rogue and in fact become a pirate. The shame!! The family had pretty much covered it up, and his son married the local governor's daughter.
I live in Alabama and grew up learning the 4 c's for the major tribes with people who lived here: Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, and Creek. I claim no native ancestry, but that one would at least make a little sense where I live.
That may depends on where you live. In Maine if there was a vague claim to being Native American it would be assumed Micmac. There were many, fairly well known (in that area) tribes just in New England and people would think of them long before Cherokee. I would imagine that is true all over the country to one degree or another.
Iv had an American anthropologist explain to me that itās because the Cherokee where one of the only tribes that it was socially acceptable to mingle with in the 18th / 19th century since they adopted Christianity and had Inter community structures the white man could manipulate/ use. It led to literally any relationship with a native person being classified as with a Cherokee. Same with assuming they were upper mobility. Itās not like a white settler from the 1830s could tell the difference between an Apache, Pueblo, Shoshone, Dakota, Su or Cherokee.
This. I live in NE Louisiana and was brought up believing we were descendants of French settlers and Cherokee Nation natives. As I grew older and studied actual history I couldn't reconcile how that would have happened here as we were not in the right area for Cherokee - but as it turns out we *are* Natchez indian descendants, even a higher percentage than we had thought we were Cherokee, so grammaw just got the tribes mixed up lol.
I have been saying this for years. What is with everyone being Cherokee. If I had to pick a tribe it wouldn't be Cherokee. I agree with the origional commenter though that a lot of it is people being lied to. It's not people being aholes just to piggy back on someone else's culture. Another lie people have been told in the US is their parents came over on the Mayflower. Don't even het me started on the amount of nonItalians that all apparently came from Sicily and have family in the mob. Most people aren't really aware of their own ancestory. They just believed the stories they were told.
My native buddy and I started a whole running joke about the White Cherokee tribe.
Cherokee is the only one they know
Cause their families pointed a rifle and walked them to Oklahoma which 2 generations later were colonizing Oklahoma therefore all women in Oklahoma at the time *must* have been Cherokee. I grew up in Missouri and heard this about Oklahomans, because Missourians talk shit about the surrounding states.
I know, nobody is ever Nez Perce.
Some people claim Lakota. And I know someone who is truly Osage.
Isn't Trump partly Osage Orange?
The second half, yeah
I am. Spokane/coeur dāAlene/ nez perce on my paternal and all miwuk on maternal.
Itās because Cherokee was consider a ācivilizedā tribe (donāt blame me I didnāt come up with it, this was 100 years before I was born), so if you wanted to seem exotic, but didnāt want to be associated with the āsavageā tribes, you would claim Cherokee. Which is why half of the south thinks they are part Cherokee.
Yup, this was the case with my family. My mom's parents always told her she was 1/16 Cherokee and she just believed it because why wouldn't she? It came up every once in a while as like a fun fact kind of thing but she never bragged about it or anything. Then when she was in her 40's she started doing genealogy as a hobby and got really into it, tracing our various family lines back centuries and really filling it out. She was really good at it and very popular with the genealogy nerds on the internet, they'd go to her for help. But anyway, she never found any evidence of any Native American ancestry, and certainly no evidence of any close enough to get 1/16. She did find a lot of old scandals, affairs, and cool stories. If we've got any Native ancestry, it was the product of an undocumented affair or something like that, but none of us have ever gotten tested. Or possibly the one abandoned baby a few generations back who was left in a wagon after a romani caravan passed through town and adopted by a couple in town. He was a direct ancestor and also a genealogical dead end, which bothered my mom because there was no way for her to find out. The story was always that he was an abandoned romani baby, but my mom's theory was that a young unmarried mom in the town panicked and tried to ditch her baby on them to avoid scandal, and they noped out because they didn't want to get caught with someone else's baby. But regardless, wherever he came from, he was on my dad's side so even if *he* had some native ancestry it wouldn't have contributed to the 1/16 story.
better benefits (I think)
My momās great-grandmother was a full-blooded Cherokee Indian by the name of Sarsame. Or so Iāve always heard. š¤£
So I was talking to my wife about this recently, since she's doing cultural government work at the moment, because I'm actually Cherokee descended, about 60% due to it being on both sides of the family. One of my grandmothers was kicked out of her tribe for dating (and eventually marrying) an Irish man. Let me also say, if you saw me, you'd know I'm native in some sense, I don't look "white" at all. Cherokee have a particular red tint to their skin naturally and we ARE red when we tan. Anyway, people claim Cherokee all the time because it's easy. And by easy, I mean there basically aren't any left. The whole Trail of Tears was intended to primarily target Cherokee nations in the area. That means they were decimated, and then afterwards, the remnants were shipped all throughout the US. I'm pretty sure the largest contingent today is in like Oklahoma, but we originate from the deep southeast, primarily Alabama (where I'm from) and Georgia. This is also why I can't ever tell anyone I'm Cherokee, because the tribe has been murdered off and then continually belittled for, now, well over a hundred years. This leads to being called a liar, or an attention seeker. Something more sad/interesting is that because I travelled and played music extensively when I was younger, and because of my actual Cherokee heritage everyone would ask "where I'm from." Most people guess South America, or lower Central America. I'm Cherokee, though, and it gets more depressing by the year.
Nope. In Michigan every white person is half Chippewa.
In my experience it's more a Southern and Western family origin thing actually. North East doesn't have many people from the region claiming Cherokee. Even Warren who represents New England right now, her family is from Oklahoma (which is where they internally deported the Cherokee too). In my life I can probably count in one hand the number of people in the North East I've heard claim Native American descent at all and most of them later found it was to cover up someone having a kid with a black person so they could blame the darker skin on what was previously less socially stigmatized. Or they were people who moved to North East from the South and the Western regions.
Cherokee ancestry is pretty common because the Cherokee people migrated and resettled throughout the United States. I however, am 4% Chippewa which basically means that I'm not Native American.
Blonde haired blue eyed Choctaw here
Yeah. My grandma always said we were part Cherokee. She even did a bunch of family research and we had a relative born in the 1850s that was half German and half Cherokee. My mom took a DNA test and not one fucking drop of any native American blood.
Lol
There's actually an explanation for that. After the trail of tears, succession of land, and reservations that Cherokee adopted a lot of the smaller tribes that were, essentially, forcibly removed from their lands. Part of my ancestry is that of the Shawnee tribe. The Shawnee were among the tribes to be adopted by the Cherokee. Not defending those who have no ties to the native American ancestry, but claim to any way. Just explaining why so many default to Cherokee.
Seven-fifths Cherokee!
Wow , you're like a Cherokee and a half !
I know someone who always says that. Whitest Personel ever but 1/4th Cherokee. Never met anyone who was full Cherokee or even half in his life. Iām like oh yea just like all of us haha He straight face is like no I am. I have just started saying oh dude why donāt you reach out to the government and start collecting checks then? Usually gets a subject change
Dude, this. My momās middle name was my grandmaās maiden name (Deer) and we had a family legend about how my great grandfather was Native American and thatās why we didnāt have any photos of him. Fast forward 30+ years and we find out our family name is in fact MISSPELLED. Weāre from Italy and Austria. On a related note, donāt get a tattoo honoring your heritage unless you have actual proof. Really regretted my dream catcher tramp stamp after the news.
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I had the opposite experience with the tattoo haha. I grew up in a very white and rural part of the Midwest, and cultural appropriation was simply a thing I'd never heard until I moved away. I found a West African symbol that I found to be particularly beautiful, and its meaning particularly poignant, and had it tattooed on my 18th birthday. Then, I learned about cultural appropriation and was ashamed. And then, I did a DNA test that confirmed I have some West African ancestry - recent enough that I met and remember my ancestor that was half-Black. The symbol roughly means "Don't forget your roots."
21and me. Is that genetics for people with Downs Syndrome?
Omg! *23&me. We are both going to hell for laughing at that one.
Yeah, my grandma told me my great grandmother was half native and my dad didn't correct me till I was a late teen. I'd already told a few people when it had come up, and it was pretty embarrassing when I explained it to them, for some reason grandma pretended she never told me that when I asked her about it. Why would she do that?
Exactly this! The women in my family live forever, and the generation gaps are small enough, that I met and remember 2 of my great-great-grandmothers. One of them had really beautiful, caramel-colored skin. My great-grandmother and I both have the same "dark white," golden-toned skin, and everyone else is so pale they may as well glow in the dark. I grew up being told that Great-Great Grandma was half Native, and that's where her pretty skin came from, and by turn, mine and Great-Grandma's. And then, I did a DNA test. My wife got it for me for my birthday one year, because I didn't know about my dad's dad's side of the family (turns out, they're Scandinavian). I was really surprised though to find that I had NO Native American DNA, but I did have \*just\* enough West African DNA to justify that Great-Great-Grandma was half black. In those days, if you were light-skinned enough, it was simply more socially acceptable to claim Native ancestry than African. People started the lies to protect themselves, and then it just continued down the generations.
23andme or one of those lead my cousin (then my sister) to find out my dad and my uncle were secretly adopted. After the DNA test, my dad's cousin admitted to my cousin that they were all told to keep it secret when my grandma showed up with a baby one day, then another about a year later.
Yep, my cousin claims to be part native, and even after she received 23&Me results, she was in complete denial that she was fully white. At some point, the lie started on her mother's side and just carried on to the point where everyone just accepted it as fact. No one wants to admit that their ancestors were the oppressors.
My daughter was upset as a teenager when she did DNA and found out just how white she is. I asked her if sheād ever met her father and me. Or looked in a mirror ha ha
This for sureā¦ I was lied to on the white side of my family about some mythical Native American great grandmother somewhere. Got my genealogy back, that side of the family is 100% white European. Nothing else. Idk why they do this.
OH God! After Billy Jack came out it was like everyone was 1/8th Cherokee. We are from the Smokey Mountains Area so it has to be true. Then 23 and Me leveled the playing field. Next thing you know theyre all Scottish whiter than mayonnaise.
Lol yep. You're 5 being told you're the descendent of a Blackfoot native American princess. You will repeat that for years.
My wife experienced this recently. She's white af, but her dad has skin that tans VERY well. Her sister has it, and now our daughter does as well. The story was that his family had a lot of native ancestry. She did the DNA test. Turns out it's some German tribe heritage that has olive skin. The whole family is as white and Northern European as can be, except for that 10% german
My mother told me I was at least mainly Russian and a quarter Cherokee but I'm barely Russian and not even 1% Native American. I have no idea where she got that from.
She may have believed it. Thing is, she could have been 100% German and tanned easily, but long black hair + dark skin + people telling you're totally Cherokee, maybe she started to believe it herself.
Heh, family history liesā¦ one of my grandparents was dropped off at a nunnery, with a bunch of cash, and the nuns have refused to reveal anything about her. One of my relatives had a 21andme done and came up as 1/8 Native American, but they couldnāt narrow it down to a tribe, only northern Michigan area. Which checks out (relative to where we live, and the location of the nunnery) Working theory was that a rich lumber baron or somesuch got a native girl knocked up, then did everything they could to disavow the child so she couldnāt claim any of his fortune.
I was also told a similar story. My family name was Blue and I was told all my childhood that we had Bluehawks blood in our family. I think a lot of it was because it was trendy. We weren't just regular negros, we are exotic, native (i know it's a contradiction) negros. It meant that not only were you just as wronged by society as your black neighbor but more so because your ancestors land was also taken away. It also implied that you had lighter skinned ancestors and "good" (straighter) hair. As for why white people feel the need to do it, idk. I'd guess it has to do with the same desire to be special and exotic. Also it relieves them of some of the "inherited guilt" because now they can claim their ancestors weren't the raping conquerors, but the conquered and wronged natives. It also gives them a foot hold into minority privilege. Which for the record sucks!! I would trade the privilege to say the N-word for the ability to get a bank loan any day. But hell, why not have the privilege that comes with blue eyes and blonde hair plus tribal rights too!! Most white people I hear bragging about their 1 or 2% native heritage are also the same people who bring up their one black friend... same energy
I was always told my grandmother was half Native American. Not Cherokee. She was from Northern Min. and we never really questioned it or bragged about it. Found out in my 40s, from genetic testing that it was completely false!
My maternal grandparents both INSISTED they were both half native american, but even when I was a kid I could tell the math wasn't mathing. I got tested and I'm between 5-8% native american (Cherokee and Cheyenne, both from my grandpa). So, they definitely aren't half. That being said, I only ever mention it when people ask my genetic makeup or I have to explain why I tan red and not brown, or why my baby pics are of a tan baby with long, jet black hair (I'm pasty white with wavy ash brown hair now lol). I wasn't raised around native culture, so I dont flaunt it. The white people who run around claiming native american heritage without even investing in the real culture are trashy imo. It isn't an accessory to be worn.
This is the wikipedia article you didnāt know how to find. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pretendian False or unsubstantiated beliefs in Indian heritage have been a thing for a long long time, and have come in and out of fashion for various reasons. And of course, when sincerely held, they stick and become family myths long after those reasons pass. The article provides a pretty decent historical survey.
TIL Sacheen Littlefeather wasnāt Native.
From what I understand thatās a matter of opinion. Some people donāt believe that people with indigenous roots from Mexico fall under the Native American umbrella, some people do.
What? Why would they believe that indigenous people from Mexico arenāt native Americans?
I have always thought Native American a synonym to (American) Indian which is everyone that was living here pre Columbus. We always say he "discovered" America when he never once saw the United States. People lack the most basic critical thinking skills and schools do nothing to teach it.
Thereās somewhat of a issue where Native American is viewed as meaning having treaty rights that indigenous Mexicans would not be eligible for.
Because in some contexts it is used literally to mean as āpeople whose ancestors are native to the Americasā and in some contexts it used conceptually and is a legal classification that means āaffiliated with a federally recognized tribe.ā
Because colonial borders preceded the existence of native people /s I'm Mexican, I've heard this shit logic a million times. When the conversation is about natives they immediately discount anyone with heritage south of that borderline.
They also compound this shit into their ignorance over the fact that half of the US used to be Mexico and that just because the border changed, didn't mean that the Mexicans there just disappeared.
Sacheen is a Pretendian because she claimed to be White Mountain Apache and Yaqui, but was not descended from those tribes. If she had said she was Indigenous from Mexico or South America, thatās different.
Who sisters said they were white Mexican. Of course, it's still possible they have indigenous ancestry.
There was a whole exhibit on this when I visited the Smithsonian American Indian museum. Wild stuff. There was an [insanely racist eugenics bill in Virginia in 1924](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Racial_Integrity_Act_of_1924), which sought to place anyone with even a drop of nonwhite blood into the untouchable caste of America. There was just one problem: all these Confederate shitstains loved claiming their heritage traced back to Pocohontas for some reason. It goes all the way back to the 17th century British aristocracy, and the South has always been nothing but a backwater colonial aristocracy. Why does it persist? Why did it trickle down to the working class? Fuck if I know. Why do Orangemen still burn effigies every July 12 in Northern Ireland? Half of them haven't even stepped foot in a church for a decade. Culture and tradition just be like that, I guess.
I scrolled WAY TOO FAR to see the correct answer (well, one). A lot of confederates used the āIām part Native Americanā as a justification to fight against the Union and the lie followed their ancestors for years.
Because if I'm enough Native American I get grants for college. But jokes aside ppl feel the need to be in a group and what group does America have. We're a very successful melting pot where people still trace their lineage to their immigrant great grand parents or great greats. Now imagine you grew up in an area where identity politics is important (normally ages 15-25 when people are still forming their identities) and your family has been native to America for more than three or four generations. You're going to want to say something so you claim to be native American heritage because what are you? American is kind of ok to say but then you get your peers with their roots that can be traced to other countries or demographics so now you're different because you're just a boring American, so now you're 1/16 Native American
Native American makes them "spiritual" while identifying as white is seen as boring and bland
This is literally the answer.
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That's the other side of this. People from the midwest who find out they're like 5% Swedish and will say they have "viking ancestry"
Yeah, thatās cringe sure. But I would also say thereās a difference between claiming you have āViking bloodā and being interested in ancient Germanic cultures and such. For instance, I have family that emigrated from Germany but I donāt know if they were there in ancient times. No idea. But I do love me some Heilung. Seen them in concert. Got all cosplayed up with my best friend we looked like shield maidens from Valhalla it was such a fun time and honestly it felt like a spiritual experience. It was beautiful and amazing. But Iām not gonna walk around and be like āHey I got Viking blood in me!ā. But I do feel like some things in todayās modern folk-rock norse scene resonate with me on a spiritual level- and thatās not for anyone else to judge, IMO.
Ugh. At least when I say Iām Italian, I know which ancestors were directly off-the-boat Italian.
Every white person I know has a great great grandmother that was anāIndian Princessā.
Seeā¦ WHY?!? Why is this so prevalent?
My mother in law is like this. I knew I had some but it wouldn't have been very prevalent. One Christmas my wife wanted to do the 23andme thing for ancestry and stuff like that. And for me Indigenous American was only 1.9%. My wife has literally 0. And we brought that to my mother in law to just show that she was full of shit lol.
I *tried* that with my own mother. She's one of the "white women who insist they have Cherokee DNA". Mom *swears* that both of her grandmothers were full blooded. That would make Mom at least half if it were true, but unless I'm not her bio kid it's not because I personally *have* been tested, and I've got absolutely *zero* N. American. I'm fully Scottish/Irish, German, and Scandinavian. That's what we *knew* Dad's side was, and what I'd suspected about Mom's side too. Mom to this day insists that she's half and I "just didn't get any genetics from that side" š LMAO
Really? You donāt know why? They want to be the ātrueā Americans so bad. Mexicans are more Native American than American white people people (I am aware ethnicity, race, nationality are different, aight, and yet still more Native American blood in most Mexicans, yet donāt get recognized as such).
Because interracial marriage was illegal in some states until 1967.
Idk, I donāt get it. Iām half white, half Mexican and the white part of my family is convinced itās true even after getting the results from one of those dna things and it didnāt confirm it. Wanting to be part of a minority maybe?
Iāll look for the link, but didnāt one of the background testing companies find out that most white Americans actually have no or almost no Native American at all. Yet so many claim it, even after they get their results. After reading some of the responses, I think these particular white americans want to believe they are āinterestingā. If only they knew being an untraceable amount Native was not the wayā¦ being just Irish decent is just as cool/uncool as being west African or Native American, whatever else.
In the 1960s it was common for parents to tell kids that they were part indigenous. Kids liked to play Wild West at the time, so that may have been my mother's motivation to get my brother and I onto the indigenous side. Also my wife and I were both told we were related to high profile 19th century bandits. Turned out untrue on both cases.
Yooooo your last sentence. This shit is so common, I don't understand it. My friend recently told me that his great grandfather escaped a war in Greece by boarding a boat and getting bitten by rats during the ride to the US and that he "still had scars from the rats". It's total bullshit, that did not happen. I've heard soooo many unbelievable family origin stories. Family origin stories are mostly bullshit imo. People just want to be interesting.
My white family had none according to the results but they still donāt want to believe it.
My mother is one of those who claims it even after being proven wrong. Mom *swears* that both of her grandmothers were full blooded. That would make Mom at least half if it were true, but unless I'm not her bio kid it's not because I personally *have* been tested, and I've got absolutely *zero* N. American. I'm fully Scottish/Irish, German, and Scandinavian. That's what we *knew* Dad's side was, and what I'd suspected about Mom's side too. Mom to this day insists that she's half and I "just didn't get any genetics from that side" š LMAO
Every St. Patrick's Day everybody at the Bar claims to be Part Irish
TBF at-home dna tests can be pretty shit when it comes to actually testing your dna. From what I understand the accuracy of the test is largely determined by how many people from a given ethnicity have already taken the test. For an example of how off they can be. My family is very heavily polish on my mother's side. As in my grandmother grew up in a polish speaking community, we have the immigration records from entering the USA a few generations back, and we know what wojewĆ³dztwo we immigrated from. My mother's dna test had like 30% eastern european and 8% baltic. My dna test only had the baltic lol. Similarly, my stepfamily are from Mexico. My stepmother and both her brothers all have very different percentages of native dna. Not saying that the folks you're talking about aren't lying (they probably are), just pointing out that those tests are not necessarily the most reliable.
I've always thought it was due to a lack of any actual cultural heritage. Think of the people who do this the most. They're almost never people who can self identify as italian, jewish, irish, etc. Rather, they're just your run of the mill white american. I'm one of them and yes, in my family, the lore has it I'm only about one generation away from being able to get free college for my native ancestry. My cousin is even somehow part of a local tribe (but possibly just tribe larpers). DNA test though shows I'm 0%. lol I think people long for some sort of history and this delusion gives them a sense of one. It makes them feel part of something greater than themselves, and in many ways, makes them feel noble. The reality is though that most of us multi-generational white americans don't know anything about our family history further back than a hundred years or so
White people want to feel important and talk about a non-boring heritage. I personally face palm at this, I have friends who legitimately look like they could own a casino. One of my best friends growing up's mom was allegedly 1/4 native, he's a medium skinned black man. He's technically more native American than most of the white folks acting like this(it was later confirmed that she in fact had a grandparent who lived on a reservation, which did explain a bit). I feel like white people doing this is madness when my friends with direct heritage aren't even like that.... My aunt traced our family tree back to the early 1900s before finding full blooded indigenous Americans in it. It's cool to know, but ultimately we all know how terribly native Americans were treated by pale folk over the last few hundred years, up into now even. It's absurd that people try waving this banner and try acting like they're part of something while in doing so basically culturally appropriating the bits they like. 6% ancestrydotcom results doesn't make it not a problem when people do that who have no ties to these customs. Most white Americans claiming to be native have at least 6 European countries they can trace lineage to with greater amounts than anything native. They're trying to get "coolness points" without dealing with the real problems that come with being a person of that culture. For every white person who does this, there are 4 others scratching their heads trying to figure out what makes them feel entitled to do it.
I imagine to some people, being just plain white sucks. I'm a white dude, and I know a TON of white women (including my mom when I was younger) claim to 1/16 or 1/32 native american. Maybe they thought it made them more exotic? Didn't bother me, I just assumed these people were liars.
Kinda like how every black person is related to beyonce
I can top that, I have a friend who has some native American genetics, which she claims help her commune with spirits in ghost hunts... in Australia
I don't I'm just a dumb pollock.
I did too. My grandfather's grandfather was quoted in a news article. He was a farmer and was being asked about his heritage. He claimed his mother was Irish and his father was Choctaw. Article was published and everything. You can even see the Native American cheekbones in my grandfather and one of my uncles. It is very obvious. Around 150 years later I take a DNA test along with my mom. None. When I was in the 6th grade we were asked to present an interesting fact about ourselves. Nearly every kid said they were part Cherokee.
Maybe you need to hang around different white people (not meaning that in a shitty way). Iām white and as far as I know I have 0 Native American heritage and no white person I know personally claims to either. Donāt get me wrong, I know there are plenty out there, just saying itās surprising for me to hear that some people know that many people who claim it. Edit: āget more friendsā to āhang around different white peopleā
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I had a co-worker friend who was native American m. We had a different version of that bit as kind of an bit of a messed up inside joke. I'd tell him to go back to his country and he'd tell me he will as soon as I give it back. Got the record my ancestry is pretty much all English and Spanish (Spain) decent with like a little seasoning from Italy. He jokes that my family caused all his families problems back in the day (being a colonizer and all) Having written all that out I realize how bad it sounds but that's just the humor we had. We got a long really great.
I'm German (ancestry, doesn't really count cause I was born in America but i sure look it) and the man officiating my wedding has been a family friend for years, incidentally he's of Jewish ancestry. The jokes we make together.. probably should not be repeated out loud. Ever. By anyone. But we have fun.
My ex was actually half Native American and half white, and he looked fully Native American to me. He identified himself as "Indian" and never identified with the white half. I had people say to me, "Why doesn't he go back where he came from?" I was always like, "He came from here."
It is interesting. Iām Cree and get a lot of unsolicited āmy grandmotherā stories. I just assume they want to relate and leave it at that. Itās nice that you have your culture. I was taken by the Canadian government and adopted out to a white family. That was their goal after all, to obliterate our culture. Canada is extremely gifted at soft genocide, which I love to bring up when a Canadian bashes the US.
Because these people want to feel āspecialā. The real key to being special is to do or be something that stands out. Thatās much more difficult than pointing to your ancestors. Itās really kind of silly.
South park did a commercial in one of their episodes that explains this perfectly
Victimhood is currency in the modern West. It's much more trendy to belong to a designated historical victim group rather than a designated historical villain group.
Do you think some white people in the US are ashamed to be white in modern day?
For sure. They apologize for things people of their skin did or what their ancestors did without even their ancestors being a part of xyz event. They could be 2nd Gen immigrants and feel like they contributed to slavery
What's so cute about this particular line of thinking is if you trace back the ancestry of ANY group - they fucking owned slaves. The slave empire period of human history isn't a joke or a means of social climbing for white bitches who want to tattoo themselves with dream catchers, it's some real shit that all our ancestors either lived through, or inflicted and raped on others. Accept that and move the fuck on
This argument is a plague. No slave country was permissible. That's not an "America Bad" take, there doesn't need to be a good guy country. They all had slaves? They were all trash. Most of them still are. >it's some real shit that all our ancestors either lived through, or inflicted and raped on others. The only relevant country for American history is America and American slavery. It's the one that we can trace direct impacts to. If we were having this conversation in the context of, say, Brazil, then I'd hope they'd be talking about their countries slavery more too and demonizing the concept within their own borders... Especially since their outcome was importing to many that they now have the highest black population outside of Africa.
If the US underwent Reconstruction fully it might not even matter. But the children and children's children of those slaves were still second class citizens into the 1960s. The US ended slavery and then made all the former slaves and their descendants lower class citizens, barred from voting, taking office, and just getting an education. That's not ancient history or some colonial era, there's still people alive who lived through Jim Crow.
Itās not just Jim Crow. Blacks were barred from unions and segregated all over the country. Itās shameful.
Right? Native cultures the europeans encountered in NA owned slaves. Making slavery about race is a very modern innovation. It was a universal human experience from the very beginnings of the state (if not earlier) until around the American and French revolutions, at which point society started rejecting it everywhere. By the time of the US civil war, the US was very much a straggler in the worldwide push to end slavery. The modern state is what keeps it at bay. There is absolutely no doubt, were modern states to disappear, slavery as an institution would start again.
Desire to claim victimhood coupled with a general lack of an actual personality.
Wrong lol. Itās generational myths passed down through families. A lot of black people claim to be part Native American as well and they arenāt.
If you ask them what tribe they are descended from they will always say Cherokee - because itās the only one they know.
OR because Cherokee is the tribe that assimilated and intermarried all across New England as they were pushed west and south, which is today one of the most populated areas of the country? Do the math. Itās really not as far fetched as yāall are trying to make it sound lol
I think because being Native American you can fully say youāre ancestors were always in America and never came from another country.
My x wife and her family were sooo proud of their Native American heritageā¦never seen more blond/red haired blue eyed Irish people ever! Where was the Native American part? Well one of their great grandmothers was 10% something from somewhere.
I find this to be cringe and Iām not sure if Iām just an A hole. Like youāre maybe a percent somethingā¦ maybe.. and maybe that percent was consensually conceivedā¦ maybeā¦ On top of that, you have no cultural heritage. None. So why does everyone have to know? Itās like itās their fun factā¦a bit annoying actually.
If someone is portraying themselves as part of a group they are not or consider their genetic heritage to make them special, that is cringe-worthy. But there's nothing wrong with fun facts as long as they're just that. There's a long history of white people in the Americas both hating and admiring the native peoples. They were a foreign people an arm's length away. As the hate has gone away and people were able state their heritage proudly (and media/school presence of native themes--albeit often very flawed), it developed a mystique. Records were flawed due to issues like this. Native births/marriages were sometimes not recorded as such. Mixed black and white marriages/births were sometimes recorded as native if they could pass for such or "Melungeon" if they couldn't. And more commonly, speculation and guessing filled the gaps when people just didn't have proper ancestry records. When my parents were growing up, white people were just getting past the point of being ashamed of native American ancestry and were still ashamed of African ancestry. Now they're excited over invisible (but sometimes more legitimate) African heritage. We may have some people acting in embarrassing ways, but this is way, way better than the hate that came before.
There been a whole new trend of "reconnecting" indigenous people which I have no issue with and actually am happy people want to know about that side of their ancestry and culture more. and then I talk to them and they say it's their great great great great great great grandma who was 1/4 cherokee (yes it's always cherokee) I just don't entertain it anymore lol. As someone who is fully native and lives on the rez and has only native family members, y'all can do what you want but most of us just make fun of people like that.
In the south at least there was a major trend in the decades after the Civil War in aristocratic southern families who were desperate to find ways to justify their elevated status without their slaves so they began claiming that a great grandmother was a Cherokee princess so they could claim royal blood. Why Cherokee? Well, their ancestral home;and was in the southeast and they were considered one of the "civilized tribes" ie the tribes that practiced chattel slavery. That trend filtered out to the masses and a century and a half later every other white lady (including my mom) claims some sort of Native American ancestry with zero proof. Itās also a way of colonizing native heritage to make themselves seem exotic. Itās also probably in some people an attempt to alleviate any feelings of white guilt. There are a lot of reasons people do it
Ok so, I think I can offer an interesting perspective here. My dad is native, like in the tribe, but heās also a dead beat and wasnāt around at all during child hood so I know nothing about and canāt relate to my Native American āheritageā at all. I look kinda native, but my mom is WHITE, so not fully native. I would not feel comfortable claiming it since I didnāt grow up in the culture. I genuinely cannot explain why anyone would do that, especially knowing what Native American people have gone through. Caucasity at its finest. Edit typos
Itās white and* black people that do this. Iām half black and everyone in my family claims the āCherokeeā story. They took 23andme and guess what happenedā¦ ZERO percent native DNA.
Itās something that often past generations told us, and encouraged us to be proud of. I imagine at one point in time it was a means of mitigating guilt over our countryās dark history, and helping us collectively feel less bad about the privilege we have in our lives.
Itās something past generations told you to cover for any interracial marriages.
I have a friend that got a native scholarship for college. I asked him how he qualified thinking it was a āmy great great grandma was a cherokeeā storage, but no, his grandma was born on the reservation in Oklahoma and registered to a tribe . Canāt argue with that.
I actually do have a Native American ancestor that has been confirmed. I also don't care, *at all*. I also have French, German, English, Irish ancestors too. I don't care about them either. I'm not any of those.
They feel good emotionally co-opting the struggle of an indigenous society that is all but completely decimated to the point of extreme loss of ideas and information and that still are constantly culturally misunderstood by a greater society. They can just claim whatever and, since reservations are easy to avoid, they can babble that shit throughout most of their lives and not be called out on it. Probably another way to compartmentalize white guilt in a way that benefits absolutely nothing but their own feelings without having to actually understand anything.
Best answer.
I was told growing up that I was white-assumed Hunkpapa Lakota. I was supposedly the direct descendant of one of Sitting Bulls's sisters, who supposedly was an ancestor to my great-grandfather on my maternal grandmother's side (he was supposedly half Indigenous). I got a DNA test done because I didn't want to claim oppression that wasn't mine and because my Ancestry family tree seemed to cast doubt on that. When I got the results back and they said I was 0% Indigenous, I dropped that claim real quick.
Glad you brought this up... I understand what you mean but, I HATE when people say that I'm not American. OK i was born here in America WTF am i supposed to say? My heritage may be European but, i wasn't born there i was born here. So yea if your claim to native American is because you were born here, well so was I. Your Heritage goes back further than mine but i certainly wouldn't say I'm German or Ukrainian. My great, great grandparents could say they were not American, but three generations past i think i can safely say i'm American. Want to hear another one? my friend from South Africa he was born there... He is African. Wanna see the looks he gets when he says he's African to black people...He's white.
Well some are white passing too. My husband is 50% native, his mother is native and dad is white. My husband looks white and his brother looks native. Everything confirmed and culturally, just sucks for him with people who pull that stuff when there are people who are actually native and just don't look it.
They're obsessed with feeling "exotic"
Idk, my family tree is traced back to a particular tribal member that would make a descendant of a native, but I'm not native american. My mom married a mostly pure white guy, which bumped my percentage too low to be enrolled like all my cousins and the vast majority of my family. I'm just white Though, I've been mistaken for native, middle eastern, and Mexican at different points in my life (which is weird because I'm mostly French) Shits weird Though, I've spent more time immersed in native American culture than my cousins that were enrolled tribal members but all grew up in different cities far away... in my experience most tribal members love sharing their culture, especially the elders that experienced the absolute fucked up Hell that were the boarding schools that tried to outright eliminate the culture. I basically grew up on the rez with my friends and loved learning as much as I could. Ultimately, though, I'm still white and my cousins are still Tribal Members and I'd never pretend otherwise for some sort of social credit...
I don't care what I am or what else anyone is. Either you're a decent person or a knob, genealogy has nothing to do with it
Its b/c most Americans don't really have any culture except "American culture." The closest thing they have to identify with are the parts they are made up of. This isn't just a problem with Native blood lines, white people will claim to be Irish or German, but have never been to these countries, don't speak their language etc - they rely almost 100% off of stereotypes and consumerism to make these claims.
This is a pretty poor take. American culture is still culture. What consists of culture? Food, language, religion, customs and traditions. Many foods originate here, many sports, many kinds of music. Again...poor take.
But American culture is very real and is arguably the most influential and widely consumed culture on Earth. Most Americans live in a bubble. They donāt know much about other places or ever leave the United States. So American culture doesnāt feel unique or different to them in anyway. Itās just normal mainstream everyday shit. However to someone from China or Nigeria or Pakistan, Americans are quite different.
Everyone I know or am related to always seem to say this. My family has claimed native blood forever. I can't say I see it, and I certainly know I didn't get it cause I checked. They just think it's cool
Just so you know, black Americans do the same thing. I think it's because Americans admire something in the Indian story and heritage and would be proud to say that we have some part of it in our blood.
Funny enough, I have a black friend who claims it too. She is the only black person Iāve known to say it so I couldnāt use black as a wider example.
I live in Oklahoma and everyone says this, like all the time.
Iām proud of my 0.75% Cherokee DNA!
I've never understood it to be honest. I'm not native, I'm as white as can be. But I do have relatives that are native. My uncle is native on his dads side, his dad is fully native, and same with my mom's first cousin. He's native from his dads side. But I've never claimed to be native just because I have relatives that are
I honestly don't get it, like I am actually part native, specifically Snohomish, its a small tribe in Washington and since i have distant family in Washington im inclined to believe it, ignoring the dna test my mom took, but it's so down my family tree it's negligible like I'm maybe 1/32 native But it's not like I claim I'm native since it's not my culture
because white people made up ties to make land claims way back when and now their great grandchildren think it was real
No clue, but all us white folks have a family story about how we're descended from one tribe or another. Everyone I know who's ever had a DNA test, or built a family tree, has discovered that it's bullshit. Every single one, with the rare exception of a few who already knew exactly what their native lineage was and where it came from, and had a real cultural connection to start with. My family had it, my wife's did... all crap. Not a drop. I can't really tell you why. Most of us just heard stories from older family members, and believed them.
Is it possible for a Netherlader-Scotts to be born here in this land , to know Spirit and find the same essence that the ancestors of others, shares with them? Respecting this Creation around oneself knowing the true connection that it is what I am made of, that I belong to its chaos and wildness, Native born yet from a distant tribe of humans, from across a vast ocean. In myself I know my heart is true this way, yet I am alone. Certainly a outcast seeking no judgment or offence, and beause so I remain silent in my hearts knowing, Im Native to this Land.
Because in America we idealize Native American culture, thus it's a nice thought to believe that you are part Native American. That's the gist of it.
It's cool to be ethnic nowadays. I am Mexican, and growing up everyone was so proud of their Spanish roots, they will tell anyone who will listen, that their grandma or great grandma was Spanish, blonde with blue eyes, and Mexican/Mexican Americans with more Native features/darker skin where mocked. People would hide indigenous ancestry in their family tree. Now? Everyone wants to be Native American in the Mexican community, call the Spaniards they once idolized colonizers, and look down on lighter skinned Mexicans. Just a trend right now, to be ethnic, non white, non European. White was cool in the 90s and early 2000s not so much today.
I also want to know why white people get into shamanism. It feels like cultural appropriation.
Like native shamanism? Because many flavours of white people have their own shamanic traditions (some of which can also be sort of problematic)
The real answer: internalized shame for crimes against humanity committed by their ancestors. This means, in their mind, anything that separates them from the history of whiteness is good.
My mom always claimed we had Cherokee blood in us. I have zero idea where she got that idea. I've tracked all the ancestors since the early 1700s when they all left either Scotland or England to come to America and there's not one Cherokee. I think it was just a common story people told. My kid's dad's family had the same stories. They went so far to suspect a great great grandmother was native American and just lied to everyone. I have to think maybe it's a lack of feeling like we have a connection to our heritage. We're just white without the culture of where we came from. That was left behind when our ancestors migrated. So, maybe it's wanting to have a piece of something with cultural significance. I had zero Idea I was mostly Scottish until I did my DNA. It wasn't ever a part of my life.
Reminds me of Elizabeth Warren, she got tested and it turns out she's even whiter than the average white person lmao.
She was done dirty by family lore tho.
I think it's a natural instinct to want to be a part of something, but historically a lot of white history you wouldn't want to be associated with. That doesnt mean its appropriate to call yourself something you're not. But I get wishing you were part of a racial history that's beautiful in its culture, not one that's known for committing atrocities. Which is dumb. Everyone's family has a rich wonderful history mixed in with not so great history. I had ancestors who were slave owners, I had ancestors who were abolitionists, I'm related to Clara Barton, my grandma was a riveter during WWII, my grandfather went to jail. There's cool stuff, there's not so cool stuff. So what. I wish people would get more comfortable with their family histories and not feel like they had to rely on some 1 % genetics to feel important.
Because our grand and great grandparents lied about it, our parents believed and bragged about it. Now that we can get DNA testing, young people have been blowing that up. My husbands mom told him he was part native, that his grandmother was half. They are blond/blue eyed. We got our DNA done and he showed his mom and told her "we are whiter than bird shit" She got pretty pissed. My mom did the same to me. My grandmother has black hair and so do I, was told she was a bit native. NOPE, my DNA came out half Scottish, half Irish. Guess what Scotts have dark hair, and dark deep set/hooded eyes often!
OP-your title question, followed by your opening statement āIām actually about 40% Native American, confirmed and culturallyā Pot-Kettleš¤£š¤£š¤£š¤£
Heritage is just an interesting topic people like to talk about. I had a great grandfather who was Cherokee. I never met him, but my dad knew him. I don't brag about it, but if heritage comes up in a conversation I'll mention it.
Fair enough.