Blonde Haired/Blue Eyed Indians?

Factual Questions
1
      • A person I spoke with said that there were blonde-haired blue-eyed (American) indians along the East coast when the first European settlers began wrecking the neighborhood. I don’t recall ever seeing any photos or hearing mention of such people. The only photos of American indians I have seen are the western/desert-southwest types… -Is this true or not? - DougC
2

You might try searching on the boards for previous discussions using the term Melungeon.

Or, possibly he was referring to the theory about the original settlers in NC who disappeared, and some theories hold that they interbred with the Indians, producing your friends “blue-eyed, blonde-haired” Indians.

Search the web for “Croatan” and “Croatoan.”

3

Heather Locklear is an American Indian! But she’s a mix of Indian and Euopean. I don’t know of any full-blooded Indians that are blonde and blue eyed. I think they are all Indian-European mixes,

4

I’m not sure when photography was invented, but I’m quite certain that it was after 1500. Why would you expect to see photos from this time period?

As for later periods, even if you could find photographs, they’d be almost meaningless. It was not unheard of for a person of exclusively European ancestry to be considered an Indian (Blue Jacket comes to mind), and such a person could, of course, be lightly-pigmented.

5

This doesn’t add very much but I’ve seen Arab children in northern Israel with blonde hair and blue eyes. FWIW, they were described as ‘throw backs’ to the raping an’ pillaging Crusaders, although that was just idle speculation and was before DNA testing became more established.

However since then, I’ve also read that Jews (including the Diaspora) and Arabs of that region share remarkably similar DNA (presumably because of a pre-history common heritage). Which may confuse that question even more, or even clarify it.

Nonetheless, it’s at least possible that the East Coast Indians shared non-cultural encounters with the fun lovin’ Vikings and some of the offspring of those encounters gave truth to their heritage in their appearance – assuming the Viking’s made it…and I can’t quite recall current received wisdom on that point.
So, I guess my only point is that until the last 10 years or so, it hasn’t been possible to test these old non-academic speculations.

6

Here is a good peer reviewed article re the where and whys this came to be. Basically it was Elizabethian English propaganda to justify the New World conquest. i.e. the Blue eyes were Welshmen who had “claimed” N. America for Britian long ago.

The political import of this lie is long since lost, but the lie itself lives today.

http://www.ramtops.demon.co.uk/madocdee.html

7

Heather Locklear , as I recall, is of Lumbee descent. The Lumbee are a southeastern North Carolina tribe that is a mix of Native , European, and African-American. Just passed through that Rez last week, and there were a bunch of “Locklear For Sheriff” posters, so I guess her folks would be on the higher end of the spectrum of that quite poor county. Alla that mix happened after Euro settlement though.