Update: Just got my kit today, and that’s not quite right. Guys get to choose either maternal or paternal line, gals have to go with maternal (no “Y” chromosome).
I’m excited. Now I can stick with my original plan. Bro is going to do Dad’s side-- I’ll do Mom’s.
I have occasion to work with aboriginal groups in Canada, all of whom are heavily funded by government grants. What I have come to realize is that there is a virtual “guilt industry” founded on the concept that the white man took over the lands of aboriginals and therefore owes them big time. And this industrustry is threatened by discoveries like Kennewick man, that complicate the simplistic “good Indian/evil white man” paradigm.
It is perfectly true that the American Indian was the victim of an agressive and merciless take-over of his lands by Europeans, within recorded history.
Hollywood used to show Indians as the agressive ones attacking innocent settlers. It does not take a rocket scientist to do the math and to realize that there were tens of millions of Aboriginals in the Americas before Europeans began robbing and killing them. It is not hard to figure out that the whites did most of the massacring.
But so too were the Roman Britons robbed of their lands by the invading Anglo-Saxons (see the Welsh). The lands of the Gauls were taken over first by Rome and then by the Gemanic Tribes, such as the Franks, after which France is named.
Do I really have to retrace human history for you? African kings actually sold entire nations in Africa to European slave traders, after conquering them and taking over their countries. The Japanese took over Japan from the Ainu; the Zulu were the Nazis of Africa, taking over and wiping out other black African tribes before the whites took them over, etc. etc. etc. ad infinitum.
Now, hold on to your hats, because I am about to make a horrible, racist statement about Indians: They were and are human beings just like any other human beings! No better and no worse. No more and no less noble.
This means that they could be and can be greedy and merciless, just like whites! It means they could attack other nations, take them over, enslave them, or whatever. To this very day, Mohawks in Canada are guilt-tripping whites over their loss of “their” lands when just a cursory glance at historical records shows that many of these lands were taken from the Huron and the Algonquin peoples in genocidal wars waged by the Mohawks in the 1600s and 1700s.
I once pointed this out to a Mohawk and was accused of racism. Short, simple answer. :dubious:
Do you have any idea how much Inuit (Eskimos) hate Indians for all of the massacres and atrocities they visited on them? One of these times, read a description of the incident in which explorer Alexander Mackenzie was in the Canadian north and his Indian guides with their guns fell on a village of unarmed Inuit. But try not to read it on a full stomach.
Now, if archeology and discoveries like Kennewick man are going to illustrate that modern Indian tribes are perhaps just one of many successive waves of invasion and settlment into North America, what happns to the “guilt industry”? What happens to the new image of the Indian, as the guiltless, noble, peace-loving harmless philosopher of nature who was robbed and massacred by the evil white man?