I knew a guy named Willie, who claimed to be a full-blooded Seminole. He would say, “Look at these cheek bones–you don’t see Blacks with cheek bones like this.”
Maybe so, but Willie was also one of the darkest people I’ve ever known. He was so black, you could see him at night.
Oh, my comment wasn’t a slam. I was just mentioning that there was and wasn’t a lot of co-mingling of bloodlines. I lost a friend a while back because his whitebread wife decided that she needed to become one with the Native Americans, and I called her on it.
I’m originally from a city next to a reservation. My step-sister is Iroquois – not part, not half, but damn-near completely, with a fully Iroquois father. She was raised as if my father’s but from early on it was obvious how little she looked like us, and in her teens, her mother admitted she’d cheated with a guy from the rez.
The point is, she never says a word about it. Doesn’t tell anyone, doesn’t claim any benefits. She looks exotic but in a non-specific way, so people tend to make all kinds of guesses at her ancestry.* And she’s damn near the only person I know who doesn’t consider herself or claim to be partway an American Indian.
*Yes, she is very hot. No, I am not posting a pic.
I can’t speak for other parts of the country, but there was a lot of co-mingling going on in the South, and particularly with the Creeks and Cherokee. (Again, this is probably why so many people can legitimately claim Cherokee ancestry.)
Creek leader William Weatherford (1781-1824) is a good case study of the phenomenon:
John Ross, the principal chief of the Cherokee at the time of the Trail of Tears, had a similar family history:
A lot of people could legitimately claim black ancestry too, yet far fewer white people do. Clearly what’s happening is that people whose lives are entirely unaffected by whatever small amount of AmerInd heritage they have nevertheless wish to to co-opt the mystique, and there just aren’t enough Indians around, for some damn reason which slips my mind at present, to call them on the bullshit or make them feel uncomfortable making the claim.
True enough. But I was responding to the assumption that most claims of NA ancestry are bogus. On the contrary, I think a large swath of the American people have at least some Indian ancestry. So I work on the assumption that most claims of such ancestry are legitimate (if perhaps fuzzy in the details).
Whether or not it is appropriate to focus particularly on a random Indian in the family tree is a separate issue which I leave for others to debate.
My MIL use to swear up and down that my FIL’s people were Native American, because they all have dark hair, high cheekbones and deep set eyes. Also that their unusual surname was French.
Then I saw a documentary on the Czech Republic. Holy cow! It looked like the whole area was populated with my in-laws. And a lot of the surnames sounded like they had ours tacked on the end.
MIL was not pleased. I have no idea why it bothered her. Her own ancestors were German immigrants.
My FIL thought it was cool though.
I still don’t understand why “bullshit” need be claimed unless there is fraud at play, or if the attempts of these people to embrace or emphasize Native American ancestry somehow dilutes or disrupts the contemporary cultural and ancestral identities of “real” Native Americans. Is it threatening or demeaning to contemporary Native Americans for these people to acknowledge even slight ancestral ties? Native Americans have been subject to genocide and cultural eradication on a massive level. Yes there are strong tribal cultures and identities that have endured. At the same time there is a spectrum of “mixing” all the way out to the point where the ancestral ties are remote. And there are “full blooded” Native Americans who have elected to disengage themselves from their contemporary tribes, and for which their ancestry does not highly influence how they define themselves or live their lives. Both of these last two segments of the population exist regardless of what physical characteristics may or may not be expressed as indicating their Native American ancestry.
I fail to see how these three groups (an all stops between) are at all mutually exclusive. It seems to me as adding insult to injury to not only have these peoples largely annihilated and driven from their heritage and traditional lands, but to also, generations later, discourage the acknowledgement that some of their descendants continue to live on in the American melting pot.
Wait a minute. Laser eyes? Wouldn’t that make you part bear, too?
For full blooded bears, check out SuperVenusFreak and JayJay
Oh my god nothing makes me yawn and roll my eyes quite like a discussion of ancestry. Unless it affects the language you speak, the food you eat, the holidays you celebrate and your day to day life, I just don’t care.
Knowing that you are 18.7% Lithuanian is exactly as interesting to me as knowing that the woman who stood in line in front of me at the ticket counter last weekend has trouble snapping her fingers.
Watching you try to perform folk dances or learn some ridiculous language nobody in your family knows will make me laugh.
I guess I don’t privileged distant ancestors over anybody else. Why would I care? They probably had less effect on my life than Sesame Street did. I think it’s neat enough that King George the III lived without feeling like I need to find some meaningless personal connection.
It’s very common among Americans, yes. It can even be an unconscious part of courtship… I’ve had a lot of guys tell me about their %s within our first conversation. While I lived in Miami I just found it weird; when I moved to Philly (after spending years back home in Spain in between), I had as a “moving benefit” this “cultural acquainting seminar” where it’s one of the things that got mentioned as being an American peculiarity found strange and even shocking by Us Foreigners.
I’ve talked more about my genealogy in this board or in the US than in the whole rest of my life.
Oh, good god. What is her Indian name? She of the PasteyFaceFakeAncestry?
So is being Native American, even part, the chic thing to be nowadays? I’ll have to check my family tree a little more carefully…
Supposedly my great[sup]2[/sup] grandfather was given a ceremonial headress by some chief. Wonder if that means anything. The story goes that it was so infested with lice that he politely declined to put it on. “I’ll save it for later…”
My great-grandmother was Princess Land-O-Lakes.
If you’re ancestors were from Louth I believe they made the right decision in emigrating.
The “I’m Irish” thing used to annoy me but not so much anymore. Identity is complex and largely self-created so who am I to scoff? I don’t want to completely hijack this thread by going on about this so I might start a new thread if anyone wants to hear more of my babbling.
Here’s an interesting article, that left me with mixed feelings on the topic.
I’m perplexed at the idea that a person’s life is unaffected by where his ancestors came from, in a country enormously populated by immigrants and their children. My family’s background was massively significant in influencing our lives, where we lived, what jobs we had, what food we ate, our religion, and so on. Some people seem to have this odd idea that Americans, unlike any other human beings, are born in perfect little class vacuums and as they grow up become entirely the masters of their own destiny, entirely free from the bonds of history and culture.
My dad used to be obsessed with her knees.
Yeah, him and my great-grandfather.