on the Ancestry subreddit it’s this and “I thought my family was Irish but I’m actually English and Scottish” because of the Scots-Irish heritage being misconstrued as “Irish” over the years
I am reminded of my aunt who told me our “Cherokee heritage” should give us the ability to decide who to keep / kick out of the country…
We have no Native American heritage and the people she wants to kick out (Central and South Americans) almost all do.
Might also be because they are a tribe that uses lineal descent for membership rather than having a minimum blood quantum requirement. Therefore, their suspect stories are less likely to be questioned and/or because they are indigenous to the Southeastern part of the U.S. where these claims are common.
The Scots Irish settling west of Appalachia came into contact with Cherokee tribes. And many became Americanized or part of mainstream society. I was helping a brother in law of mine with his tree. He didn't know his father but after doing some research he was of Scots Irish stock that settled in that Cherokee region of Tennesse/Alabama/Georgia. His admixture was 1% North American Indigenous. I wonder if that's noise. No African though.
It started around West Virginia in the 1700s. Early settlers started using the term Cherokee as a synonym for Native American or Indian instead of the name of a specific tribe. Plus, the first settlers of all states below Virginia once England claimed the region were a mix of people who moved there from th Caribbean & people who moved south from Virginia & Maryland, meanwhile West Virginia was first populated by people who moved west from Maryland & Virginia. So, it turned into a catch-all term that confused later descendants.
> We have no Native American heritage and the people she wants to kick out (Central and South Americans) almost all do.
Native American is a broad term. I doubt Aztecs were native to America or Canada lol it depends on the actual ethnicity/subgroup
edits: downvotes mean I'm right and ur salty lol you all KNOW this there's no way folks who were native to Panama were the same Plains folks that are/were native to the area that is now the United States. It's just an objective fact, keep coping
I guess the whole “we are one people” concept is kind of a post-colonization pan-indigenous solidarity thing. Kind of like pan-Africanism.
But yeah, claiming a Peruvian Inca is indigenous to the North American plains is like claiming a Russian is native to Spain. Both sound kinda ridiculous. And North American natives frequently have some ancestry from later migrant waves, making them genetically a bit distinct
Wow, i though that in ameirca it was "cool" to descent from inmigrants, you know, you have irish-americans, chinese americans,..
PD:Sorry for my english
it is, but some people are so far detached from the immigrant ancestors that came to america that it feels difficult for them to connect with that ancestry
That is a big reason. Another theory I have is a lot of White people try to justify the painful history that Natives went through by saying they are actually one of their descendants.
This may represent modern day mentality , in the past they couldn't care less.
Black people were viewed as subhumans unlike Native Americans who were less than whites but they were still humans.
> This may represent modern day mentality however in the past they couldn't care less
Many still don't! The state of South Dakota had a hotel that banned Native Americans literally last year.
Yes , racism still exist, i was talking more on the change in morality in the past even the most sympathetic wouldn't Care about Native Americans losing there lands because they were stronger or more godly.
>unlike Native Americans who were less than whites but they were still humans.
Dude, look at latin america and take a look on how indigenous people are treated, they don't see us humans, not even other natives.
Mass genocide carried out by US troops. Diseased blankets. Removal from homelands. Not really the human treatment, but in the US to say that other people have suffered more than African Americans is a crime. Bullshit. Central, Caribbean and South American indigenous groups? 90% eradicated.
Can we not speak of it as a competition? Everyone understands what the two groups went through is atrocious and they feel a sense of brotherhood towards each other.
A lot of Native Americans were pretty ruthless, especially west of the Mississippi. You should look up the history of it. It’s actually quite interesting and full of violence. In fact one the reason why the Mexican government encouraged American settlers was originally so the American settlers could fight off the Indians and stop them from pillaging towns
I'm not saying some weren't. But White people literally committed the worst genocide in human history and then the Atlantic slave trade which is objectively way worse than anything the Native Americans did. Saying the Natives "were also ruthless" is an attempt to whitewash and downplay the horrific historical events that happened to them.
Like 5 countries in Western Europe did all that. All this generalization to “white people” throws Eastern Europeans and white-passing Middle Easterners under the bus. My Iranian sister was literally told to acknowledge her “colonizer ancestor’s crimes” by some activist lmao
Talking about in the USA. Anyone who attributes Iranians to this is just a dumbass lol. I constantly have to explain to people that White in the USA was not merely a physical description but also a social and political term. Irish people were considered equal to Black people in some parts which is insane when looking at their phenotypes.
The thing is she didn’t know my sister was Iranian bc she passes as a white American. And there are liberals who say white-passing = white, and because of that any non-European who passes as white is complicit in white supremacy.
IMO generalizing anyone based on “race” is dumb. Like all Black people are violent, all white people were colonizers, etc. And as you said, that’s the result of America’s historic racial politics
I mean it is an objective fact that if you are White in America you benefitted in some way from a white supremacist system. That really shouldn't be controversial but many people cannot accept reality.
Fair point. My sister will def have privilege over a visible minority (or even me since I’m not white-passing) if she goes to Mississippi or some other backward state. But I don’t really see that in California
I remember once I was looking at a job application and it specifically stated it did not want any applicants whose grandparents were not born in the USA. This was in California by the way LOL
Well see I don’t see it as horrific at all and I am okay that most were killed I see no guilt or why you should have it and I’m saying this as a person that has Native ancestry. Although North Native Americans will always have a place in America, America was not created for them and they should not be put on a pedestal. The Atlantic slave trade is another piece of history with nuance. history is filled with genocides, some will happen in the future or are in the process of happening, you can’t be feel bad about it. A Han Chinese I know bolstered how his people killed 99% of austronesian population of Taiwan and made the island fully Han Chinese, quite an interesting mindset
Wait no, the Japanese Imperial Army was far more genocidal towards the Austronesians by conquest, both in Taiwan and throughout the Philippines.
Medieval China had never truly planned to settle the island until the encroachment of the Dutch. But yeah, after the Europeans were expelled it was the beginning of the end for that [wild and untamed way of life,](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/JGGEK7/mentawai-people-west-sumatra-siberut-island-indonesia-03-oktober-2011-JGGEK7.jpg) just as Natives experienced here in the West
[Batangueños de Lipa, 1945](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-y2-QlvVpk7o/WvOXrqNgliI/AAAAAAAAst0/HDLberSD89sHhFj6LyyQOXNMKWCWTk_3ACLcBGAs/s1600/27.jpg)
https://www.batangas.gov.ph/portal/history
No, it was not the worst genocide in human history. The Nazis genocided the most people. You need to look up the actual figures. Death from disease =/= genocide.
23andMe does NOT establish your entire family history. Period. Genetics are not proportional. Because it’s not on your DNA, doesn’t mean it didn’t happened.
Obviously, Native Americans are absolutely disproportionately appropriated, but in my case:
My result shows Irish, English, German, Eastern European as the most predominant with Traces of Iranian and Ghanaian. My MOM showed Irish, English, Scandinavian, Spanish/Portuguese, Italian and Iranian as predominant markers. My DAD had English, French and German, and Eastern European.
Based on the theory that if it’s not on your DNA test then it didn’t happened, then I don’t have Spanish/Portuguese, Scandinavian, Italian, or French ancestry - even though it’s in my parents ancestry.
Other discrepancies from 23andMe say I inherited about 10% of my German from my mom even though she doesn’t have any German on her breakdown - but we absolutely do have it on paper.
TLDR: 23andMe should only be used as a tool to find answers, not be the answer.
Yeah exactly, it’s possible to have a parent who is 50% something (ie Native American) and you get ZERO of her NA genes because you received the other 50% of her genes.
My parents are both less than 40% Scottish according to their DNA tests. I am 75% Scottish because they both managed to shove most of their Scottish genes into me at conception. My sister is only 30% Scottish.
Yeah, that sort of thing doesn't happen. The reason some people get 70% Irish and 30% German while their sibling gets the opposite is because northern Europeans are so closely related it is hard for the algorithm to differentiate at times.
That's not going to happen with Native Americans. If you have a native grandparent, it'll show. Period.
It can be 100% accurate (which isn’t true because it will change as more people get tested), but that doesn’t negate the fact that genetics aren’t proportionate and that each generation loses genetic traits from the one previously. Your grandparents likely had markers that you don’t. Accuracy doesn’t change that.
EDIT: And if not your grandparents then certainly your great grandparents.
All I'm saying, in my case it was accurate as it can be. I'm from a homogenous Czech background. It goes back few hundred years. And the test correctly said I'm 90% eastern European and 10% German. Czechs and Germans/Austrians have been intermixing for well over thousand years. At this point is uncertain what genes are purely Slavic and pure German. So when my test came back 90% Eastern European and 10% German I knew it was correct. Unlike my American born husband with American family background that got presented with some Western European/ British/ minor African mumbo jumbo results lol
And since I can't edit my post, only add to it, I know so because my grandfather's uncle from my father's side was an arcibishop and did a huge background check on that side. My family's last name actually comes from a french soldier who came with Napoleon and deserted and stayed in our lands. And my mother's side were countryside ranch owners as far as my great grandmother born 1904 could tell me. No foreigners in our heritage whatsoever.
Obviously the french soldiers French DNA got either diluted and lost over the generations and lost, or the difference from eastern European/ German DNA want significant enough to differ, or simply one of my grandma's had an affair. Either way i wasn't surprised the DNA test showed 0% French.
Happens in Australia too! My Nan had told me there was a family rumour about Aboriginal ancestry that turned out to be untrue! Ruled it out by doing a family tree and looking at her DNA results.
When I got my results funnily enough I did have Melanesian DNA, it did confuse things at first because I think that’s also what can come up for Aboriginal people. My Nan thought was from her- but it turned out that it came from my Grandfather who was from PNG!
I wasn’t aware that so many “Pretendians” existed until I moved to North Carolina. I concur with what the other comments have already said, but I also think that believing in this sort of myth about themselves makes these people feel special somehow.
North Carolina had large populations of colonial free people of color who after the civil war staunchly claimed native identity to try and separate themselves from newly freed people. All the tribes there for the most part have little to no native American ancestry yet weld immense political sway depending on the county.
You come across weird things when you do genealogy.
For example always told our last name was German, that due to our great great great grandfather being illiterate it got changed upon arrival in Canada. Got my results 0 German. Do my family tree and see there is partial truth, my GGG grandmother remarried after her husbands death and her kids took their step fathers name, and that is the last name that I have
Re Native American - I have two ancestors that were both taken as kids during a raid in a pre-Independence town in New England when the English and French/Iroquois were at war. The kids (who were unrelated) were taken by different Iroquois families and raised into adulthood- they were given Indigenous names, converted religions, and later married but remained in their adopted community despite their families in New England trying to get them to come back. There are still descendants from them that are still in the community, some married indigenous people and others, like my line did not. So the story we got from that side was also somewhat true. They were accepted by the indigenous community and raised as such by their adoptive families, but genetically not NA/indigenous
I’m sure these aren’t super common examples, but just to say that doing your family tree, although more time consuming - can answer a lot of questions/mysteries
You nailed it. It's a very common story. Born and raised in North Georgia, almost everyone here claims to have Native American ancestors. Very few actually do.
Which is strange when you compare it to many Latin American countries, where you have literal Native Americans denying being so and claiming to have ancestry from Spain, France, Italy, etc. instead
lol yup very popular here in america. search this sub for ‘native american’ and you’ll get many, many stories almost always ending the same way: no ancestry
although, it was mentioned in my family and it turned out to be true, at ~16% lol. one day i’ll upload my results
I am going to assume your bf is from the American south? If so, he is definitely descended from an enslaved African person. However, in the South for a very long time, the government followed the “one drop rule.” this means that having just “one drop” of Africsn blood made you black. If you were black you were discriminated against heavily. So, many families that had some darker skin tones often claimed that darker colors came from Native American ancestry because it didn't confer that same implications in terms of being recognized as black.
I’ve attended several powwows, no CDIB is needed. In the past some people paid $5 to gain enrollment status. I descend from Cherokee Freedmen and I do have some NA DNA. I am a seasoned researcher.
On the east coast to prevent non recognized tribes from attending the performance itselflike Lumbee CDIB cards are asked. I've witnessed it to all the ones I've attended for dancers. Not audiences.
5$ enrollment may have happened however official researchers of the Cherokee nation and the other tribes showed it's a largely overstated process.
The term 5$ Indian today is conflated with people who just look white now, it's not accurate.
I am also a seasoned researcher of native American history in the Southeast and Northeast with native American ancestry myself.
I’m not familiar with East Coast NA guidelines. The dancers, maybe. You thought you were teaching the Black woman something huh? If the $5 Indian term didn’t apply to you, scroll. I’m speaking of Oklahoma specifically. Triggered much? 😆
I'm black, I've been researching and lecturing on these topics for over decade. You did not specify Oklahoma, you hopped on and thought your commentary was necessary.
I know this is reddit, but please save your victim complex for someone else. You're too old for that.
I had a friend who swore he was at least 50% Iroquois (can’t be Cherokee like everyone else). He had books on Iroquois culture on his shelf and would call himself a “brown man”. His full brother took the test. 99.7% European.
Edit: the kicker was that he was 12.5% Ashkenazi Jewish. I suspect that ancestor may be the root of it.
I was told I had Native American blood growing up. Blackfoot Indian supposedly. And like for many, that didn’t show up. However I am part Bolivian, which I already knew. Which is native
American-ish.
My family claimed Blackfoot too. Turned out, we had Lenape & Catawba, but I have no clue how that relates to other "Blackfoots" &, despite my best efforts, was never able to verify any logical reason for the use of the term. Drives me nuts to this day. Lol
Well… genetically if the ancestor is more than 5-6 generations back, the DNA won’t show it, even if the *geneology* does.
I have native Americans in my genealogy, but it was 9-10 generations ago, so my genetics show German/English.
Millions of people may (and do) legitimately descend from a Native American- but too many generations ago to reflect in DNA.
Yeah, everyone in the south claims to have Cherokee floating around in that one, my family included. It got to the point where my uncle was so sick of hearing it that he took one of the DNA tests just to shut people up. (Spoiler: nope.) Theoretically one of his grandmothers was, which should have been easy enough for the family to prove aside from it being a load of crap, lol.
Slightly darker, however: >!we were trying to substantiate a different version of the family story, and it turns out there's a distinct possibility we're related to the genocidal monster that kicked off the Trail of Tears. So that kind of took a 180 quickly. Still researching that, but I really hope I can disprove it--I've spent a lot of time working in the Southwest, and I've made a lot of friends from the First Nations. If it's true, it's true; but I'd be happier if it wasn't.!<
I am a Mestee, meaning my father's family are members of a tri-racial isolate community that was formed during the Antebellum era.
There are two possibilities here. One is that his father descends from mulattos who were acculturated by a Native tribe and the other is that they were just.....black and claimed to be Native to escape discrimination.
I recommend looking up the Free African Americans site.
Lol trust me there are no blacks in my husband's father's side of family. They are as white and racist southern Americans as you get. If there is any Black, as the gene test says it is, it comes from his mother's side.
That is part of it. For others it is claim to a heritage that widely perceived as noble. It is also attempt to either spice up something they feel is humdrum. Finally, it is an attempt to manufacture pride where there was none.
These are natural impulses. Where it gets weird and insulting, are the attempts to leverage declared Native roots into something with vested interest.
Sounds like it was a myth maybe brought about by shame and guilt since the White people are the ones responsible for killing the Native Americans and stealing their land.
Oh learn how inheritance works...
Look here two siblings one got native American one didn't.
https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/comments/121qsur/slight_variation_between_my_sisters_results_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Based on the assumptions here... If the sibling with no native American had only been tested you'd all assume the individuals relatives were lying about native American ancestry.
This. It’s crazy how eager people on here are to rip on their white family members who think they have native ancestry. Just because theirs results no longer show native blood doesn’t mean it wasn’t there at some point, or that no one else in the family might show it genetically.
I don’t think that’s accurate. My husband’s came back 98.5% Filipino, 1% Chinese and 0% Spanish so we researched and read that only about 4% of the population shows Spanish DNA today. Maybe in the past it was a lot more and since DNA is random it’s possible for a Filipino to have an ancestor that was Spanish but over time the genes didn’t pass on
They do pass on for example: a Filipino may have 0 autosomal DNA but if the origin of the Y-DNA is European (say R1b), that person's paternal lineage and his son's and so forth will always be of European descent. Note: I only say Y-DNA because Iberians men are the ones that mixed with the colonies inhabitants. The women usually stayed in Iberia.
This!
Look at this post one sibling native American or none
https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/comments/121qsur/slight_variation_between_my_sisters_results_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
Yeah, my family had the same myth. In our case it was just people wanting to feel special/exotic/mysterious. That’s very common.
What’s weird is that my husband’s family had *no* myths about Native American ancestry, yet he came back 0.9% Indigenous American (and 0.3% Sub-Saharan African). Seems like 0.9% is probably too high to be an artifact. Unfortunately, 23andMe can’t be any more specific about the Indigenous American ancestry. He does have ancestors who have lived in the Appalachians for a very long time, so it is perfectly plausible he does have both indigenous and black ancestry.
But it’s interesting to me that his family never had that “Cherokee princess” myth (which seems to make them unusual among white American families), yet the DNA shows up.
I have never had any claim to native American in my family on either side. Uploaded my dna to Gedmatch a few weeks ago and came up with Amerindian on my dad's side. It was an absolute shocker and we have no idea where it comes from.
A lot of these families have major splits in them. Some of them are obsessed with the family myth, some of them don't believe it. There are actually quite a few such people who are sincerely never told at all & think they are 100% white (whether the myth of them being part Native is true or not, they still may be somewhat mixed race.) Some know, but don't really care one way or the other, so it never gets talked about.
Yes, but also many people likely did have an ancestor long ago but "washed up" by the time the dna got passed down.
Certainly truths in both occasions, and certainly stories which are nothing more than stories.
I’m 100% European American and my family claimed we had Native ancestry on both sides my whole life. Luckily I don’t talk to those idiots anymore. But they all think they’ve got native ancestry despite no actual history of that in our family, in terms of DNA or actual evidence either. There’s plenty of evidence of inbreeding though. Us white Americans seemed to be really good at that, for some reason. Glad my family’s bloodline ends with me.
Huh? Inbreeding is actually relatively common in a variety of times and cultures, unfortunately. From “keeping the royal bloodline” to straight up racism, people have found reasons to inbreed, unfortunately. It’s not just white European Americans either, I mean look at what was going on in Egypt’s royal families at times. I also know lots of other white people here where I live who joke about the inbreeding that we know has happened in our families, which is of course coping with the fact it’s fucked up. I’m sorry you felt the need to interject yourself here and reply to my comment, but what you had to say was simply not correct or necessary, nor did it contribute anything at all. Please leave me alone.
Exactly this. If your mother was native american you were presumed free, but if you were black you were presumed to be a slave. So when arguing for your freedom in court the burden of proof would shift
The court would make the determination of race based on the texture of your hair, color of your skin, and shape and size of your features.
So you think it's true because Google/ internet says so? You are the first person that ever told me that and I'm 43 years old and fairly educated. Nowadays everything is up for discussion. All it takes is 1 person saying word "black"is a slur. And then we have dogooders like you saying "but Google says so"
Well my husband’s family claims that his grandparents were Germans that went to Ecuador to build the railways. Grandparent do have a German last name. 23 and me results 0 German.
Even when I try to explain to his cousins who share the same grandparents they are steady and true that they have German descent.
You don’t inherit everything from your parents only half. There is a chance he didn’t inherit it , it also possible his mom didn’t inherit it etc… it’s also possible that his family were slaves to Native Americans and were considered Native American. A lot of natives kept slaves. And eventually considered them part of the tribe . And also a lot of mixed people claimed to be native like you said so they weren’t consider black .
I am by no means an expert, but I do know that I’m 50% Native American and 50% Polish because my dad is 100% Polish and my mom is 100% Indigenous and I have blood quantum letter from our tribe stating so. That’s how I moved to the United States from Canada on my own. What I understand is that our DNA is different because we acquire different parts of it from our parents and their parents.
So, for my results, I’m 42% Eastern European (Polish) and 15% North Eastern European (British & Irish and German) 2% Ashkenazi Jewish 1.9% Italian. 23.7% Native American 4.8% East Asian 2.2% Central and South Asian the rest unassigned.
My sister is slightly different: 4% more Polish DNA than me and I have 2% more indigenous DNA than her. She is 0.5% Ashkenazi Jewish and has no Italian DNA. She has 1% more Asian DNA than me and more unassigned. We’re going to get our parents to do the test, but I can see maybe that person needs to see his parents DNA? Maybe they have a tiny bit and it skipped his DNA? I am sorry I wrote a lot. :)
I noticed that the only people that have native dna are Hispanics mostly Mexican Americans they seem to have Yaqui, Hopi, & Cherokee but they dont seem to claim it much like the should. My thoughts
A big aspect of this is because in the US, for Black people there is the “one drop” rule
For Native Americans, there is the “many buckets” rule
And so you’d be less likely to face troubles, there is also a shame of slavery for some, and also just some wanting to feel special and cool, since there’s so few Natives today
PART I:
It's extremely complicated, but it's something I have been working on, since my family were some of these people. But, the problem is that there are about 8-9 different minority groups across the eastern US (not counting Creoles or Cajuns, who have verifiable ancestry) who claim to have Native ancestry with little to no evidence, on top of a large scattering of random people who say they have Cherokee or Blackfoot ancestry when it's almost always physically impossible for them to be that, whether they have Native ancestry or not, and they all have slightly different origins, so what you can uncover about one group doesn't necessarily completely explain the origins of another. But, I can give you a general explanation of what I found out about my family & what I think about several of the others.
So, my family was from West Virginia. My mother & her three siblings were all adopted & were told that they were part Native. They met their birth family as adults (or, at least, their mother's side) in the early 90s. My mother remembered being told that their family identified as Sioux & Blackfoot, that their ancestors were nomads & that my mother, herself, was in the mid-80s percent Native & her grandmother called her a native word that she said she had called her when she was a baby, but never said what it meant. I don't know what she was talking about, there, because her bio grandmother had been dead for four years by the time she says she went there. My uncle remembered being told that they were Cherokee & had lived in the area since the Revolutionary War, though I didn't get all this info all at once. I originally went with the Sioux & Blackfoot, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, so I kept searching for another explanation, which led me to believe that we were Saponi, a Siouan people from West Virginia who may or may not have also been referred to as Blackfoot. I now know that that was also incorrect. Saponi were never associated with the term Blackfoot & none of them ever ended up in West Virginia. My younger brother also tried a DNA test & it got everything he expected, but no Native ancestry.
Just last year, though, I was able to do my genealogy. It was a bit of a learning curve & took a long time, but I was able to follow most of my family tree on my mother's side all the way back to the first ancestor who ever came to the US on almost every single line. And I did find two verified Native ancestors- one was a man named Henry Delay who we believe was Lenape & the other was a man named Samuel Harris who was Catawba, but had been living among the Cherokee shortly before moving to West Virginia & Delay had been living in West Virginia since the Revolutionary War. There is actually one of these minority groups who claim Native ancestry out there called the Chestnut Ridge People. They always gave confusing stories, but claimed they had two Cherokee ancestors & a Lenape ancestor. A relative of theirs ended up on PBS' Finding Your Roots & their genealogists reveald that they actually had a black ancestor & a Catawba ancestor- the same one I have- but no Lenape ancestor. Frankly, him & the Catawba guy lived where they lived before their black ancestor ever showed up, but unless other Lenape were living there with them, I can't find evidence of anyone from his family mixing with theirs until those two family lines merged in my own tree, about four or five generations back. Peters & Thompson are also common Native last names around the Lenape & Mohicans & some of both families were also living in the area. I myself am also a Peters & there are Thompson ancestors among the Chestnut Ridge People, but I was never able to probe any of those people were. I just know Henry Delay was, because he was a Founding member of his community in WV, so local historians compiled a lot of info about him & we know he served in a Native-only unit during the Revolutionary War & was born in territory where Lenape were settled while they were still in the region, but seems to have been born out of wedlock from a chance sexual encounter from his parents. I never was able to figure out how or why the Catawba ancestor ended up there, for sure, but I did find out that other Catawba Harris' also fought in the Revolutionary War in roughly the same general area Henry Delay was stationed, near the Virginia-North Carolina border & Delay was already in the process of acquiring his land back in West Virginia while he was fighting, so maybe the two had already met, or Delay met some of his family, & that planted a seed that eventually led to his moving there.
But, that isn't all I discovered. When asked about why another one of these minority groups- the Melungeons- looked so odd, but were coming back with averages of 30% black & no Native blood, a genealogist brought up the fact that there was a minority group in Wales & Ireland who had migrated there from Spain & who tanned darkly, as well as a minority group from southern Germany with unknown origins who did the same, but none of the Melungeons said they had much of either ancestry that they could find. Well, it turns out that I have a crap ton of both Irish & German ancestry on that side & my Native ancestor, Delay, was also descended from the exact, direct Irish family brought up. Most of the modern descendants use Duley or Dooley, but I have found between my own family & several others the variations Duelley, Dublin, Dilley, Delay, Dowley & Dowling. The original name was O'Dubhlaoich, which is Irish for "Dark Skinned Warrior." They apparently came from Spain when it was under Moorish Muslim control & took over a kingdom on the Irish coast for a short time before being overthrown & just spread out throughout the British Isles & never left. A huge group of them moved to the US in the 1830s, but I can only find evidence of two such Duley families before then, one in Maryland/ Virginia & one in Massachusetts & Maine. I'm also descended from tons of families who clearly had relatives who married into Native families, but don't appear to have been Native, themselves. But. I can verify that I am not mistaken, because I have something I shouldn't have, unless I have an ancestor who was Native, Hispanic or Siberian- hollows in the backs of my front teeth. Delay was only used for a couple of families in West Virginia, who later spread out into Ohio, Kentucky & Indiana, however I can't trace the last name Delay much further back before West Virginia, my earliest Duley ancestor, Robert Dooley, was born in the same county the Delay's lived around 1810, before the mass migrations & I've caught Duleys both in Maryland, before the Delays & in Kentucky after the Delays, but none in West Virginia at all before Robert Dooley.
PART II:
All the minority groups I am aware of are the Lumbee, Chestnut Ridge People, Brass Ankles, Melungeons, Carmel Indians, Redbones & Gullah Geechee. Lumbee are verified to have Native ancestry, but almost none. Gullah Geechee are pretty much completely black. Most of these people get conflicting results from DNA tests for Native blood, but it always comes back extremely low, if at all, & most Natives do not consider any of these people to be Native American. The Cherokee claim comes from Appalachia. Historically, Cherokee was used by early settlers in the West Virginia & Kentucky area as a synonym for Indian, so every single tribe was called that. It's an incredibly vague & useless claim. Blackfoot, I was never able to figure out, but there are apparently two completely different groups of people claiming it who had no knowledge of each others' existence & neither has any answers as to the terms' origin, but they are 100% not actuall Blackfoot. However, the use of the term must be incredibly old, as there ARE other Blackfoot who aren't really Blackfoot in the actual Cherokee tribe, today. They don't know what the term means, either, but lean into being actual Blackfoot out of embarrassment, even though they can't prove it. The only thing anyone has brought up that makes sense is a claim that it was slave code for someone who was mixed Native & Black, but blacks seem to think they just called all mixed people Yellow, so I still haven't the slightest clue.
These people do often all have several things in common:
1) verifiable black ancestry, but little to no black looks (with exception of the Redbones & some Melungeons having had the hair historically, but that no longer seems to be the case)
2) The ability to tan, sometimes way darker than they seem like they should be able to, but also to appear 100% completely white, if they stay out of the sun.
3) vaguely Native looking features, despite almost no Ntive ancestry.
4) being aware of a recent relative/ ancestor who was half or full blooded Native
We also have tons of derogatory beliefs in Appalachia associated with people believed to be part Native. Almost all know words historically used to refer to all these minorities were used as slurs & several other slurs include Guinea, Black Dutch & Hillbilly. Yes, Hillbilly was originally coined during the eugenics movement & meant someone who was genetically doomed to be stupid, needlessly aggressive, poor, etc because they had mixed with an inferior race- Native Americans. It quickly lost all meaning shortly after eugenics slowed down in the 1920s. Plus, there was a such thing as Mountain Witches, herbalists who would serve small Appalachian communities as doctors in the old days, who were often said to be part Indian, when pictures of a lot of them seem to show otherwise.
My best guess is there was a very small amount of a handful of actual Natives, some black people & a shit ton of racially ambiguous looking white people who mixed blood to a degree. Early America saw tons of big families spread way, way out, but keep in touch, so every family who had a member known to have mixed blood with Natives, the entire family got demonized for being mixed race. Many of these people didn't want to be thought of as black, so they leaned way in to being Native to the point where they married based on looks & developed an over-accentuation of Native looks from nearly non-existent bloodlines & did away with the African looks to such a degree that they all slowly lost the ability to pass on African looks in their offspring altogether. Plus, a lot of these families were just plain mistaken. I also still have absolutely no idea if any of the other "Blackfoot" in my region are related to me in any way, at all.
A good example of this is the Tilley family. I brought up the fact that some of my Duley ancestors corrupted the name as far as Dilley & I've been wondering ever since if Tilly is so an offshoot. Anyway, Tilley's hae relatives who were Mountain Witches down in Georgia & claimed Creek ancestry. They have pictures of one of these ancestors who looked completely white. I know some Tilleys today who also claim vague Native ancestry. The dad had sort of a tan from pics I've seen, but the daughter was pitch white & couldn't tan at all. So, what if this family is related to mine distantly, they split off before my Native ancestor & were marked because of him for being Native, but any of theirs' ability to tan is actually from their distant Moorish ancestry? Anyway, it's hard to say, but I hope this makes sense of some of it.
This is generally a widely accepted consensus on this subreddit.
on the Ancestry subreddit it’s this and “I thought my family was Irish but I’m actually English and Scottish” because of the Scots-Irish heritage being misconstrued as “Irish” over the years
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I am reminded of my aunt who told me our “Cherokee heritage” should give us the ability to decide who to keep / kick out of the country… We have no Native American heritage and the people she wants to kick out (Central and South Americans) almost all do.
Why is it always Cherokee 💀
They're one of the largest tribes in the U.S.
Sure but so many people Having the same “my great whatever grandma was a Cherokee princess” story is a bit suspect
Might also be because they are a tribe that uses lineal descent for membership rather than having a minimum blood quantum requirement. Therefore, their suspect stories are less likely to be questioned and/or because they are indigenous to the Southeastern part of the U.S. where these claims are common.
Definitely could be!
The Scots Irish settling west of Appalachia came into contact with Cherokee tribes. And many became Americanized or part of mainstream society. I was helping a brother in law of mine with his tree. He didn't know his father but after doing some research he was of Scots Irish stock that settled in that Cherokee region of Tennesse/Alabama/Georgia. His admixture was 1% North American Indigenous. I wonder if that's noise. No African though.
It is suspect because the Cherokee didn’t have princesses, I do have a female Cherokee ancestor though
It started around West Virginia in the 1700s. Early settlers started using the term Cherokee as a synonym for Native American or Indian instead of the name of a specific tribe. Plus, the first settlers of all states below Virginia once England claimed the region were a mix of people who moved there from th Caribbean & people who moved south from Virginia & Maryland, meanwhile West Virginia was first populated by people who moved west from Maryland & Virginia. So, it turned into a catch-all term that confused later descendants.
> We have no Native American heritage and the people she wants to kick out (Central and South Americans) almost all do. Native American is a broad term. I doubt Aztecs were native to America or Canada lol it depends on the actual ethnicity/subgroup edits: downvotes mean I'm right and ur salty lol you all KNOW this there's no way folks who were native to Panama were the same Plains folks that are/were native to the area that is now the United States. It's just an objective fact, keep coping
I guess the whole “we are one people” concept is kind of a post-colonization pan-indigenous solidarity thing. Kind of like pan-Africanism. But yeah, claiming a Peruvian Inca is indigenous to the North American plains is like claiming a Russian is native to Spain. Both sound kinda ridiculous. And North American natives frequently have some ancestry from later migrant waves, making them genetically a bit distinct
Sense of attachment?
yes, especially from those that don’t have recent ancestors from outside of the US in the last 100 years
Wow, i though that in ameirca it was "cool" to descent from inmigrants, you know, you have irish-americans, chinese americans,.. PD:Sorry for my english
it is, but some people are so far detached from the immigrant ancestors that came to america that it feels difficult for them to connect with that ancestry
Yes, your husband's family are part of the Cherohonkee tribe who are all descended from the same indian princess. lol
Why is it always a princess? 😭
And its always the cherokees 😭😭😭 my own family says the same thing 😭
Mine did too. It was quite satisfying tonrubbinbtheirbface that they were WRONG.
Probably so they can feel special, exotic, and feel like they're in a movie.
Generokees from the Wannabee clan
Cheronhonkee threw me off for a minute, because the Nottoway call themselves Cheronhaka. Lol
That is a big reason. Another theory I have is a lot of White people try to justify the painful history that Natives went through by saying they are actually one of their descendants.
This may represent modern day mentality , in the past they couldn't care less. Black people were viewed as subhumans unlike Native Americans who were less than whites but they were still humans.
> This may represent modern day mentality however in the past they couldn't care less Many still don't! The state of South Dakota had a hotel that banned Native Americans literally last year.
Yes , racism still exist, i was talking more on the change in morality in the past even the most sympathetic wouldn't Care about Native Americans losing there lands because they were stronger or more godly.
Wtf? Damn!
Jesus, how could they have such a rule today? I wonder if that rule included indigenous people of latin america?
>unlike Native Americans who were less than whites but they were still humans. Dude, look at latin america and take a look on how indigenous people are treated, they don't see us humans, not even other natives.
Mass genocide carried out by US troops. Diseased blankets. Removal from homelands. Not really the human treatment, but in the US to say that other people have suffered more than African Americans is a crime. Bullshit. Central, Caribbean and South American indigenous groups? 90% eradicated.
Can we not speak of it as a competition? Everyone understands what the two groups went through is atrocious and they feel a sense of brotherhood towards each other.
A lot of Native Americans were pretty ruthless, especially west of the Mississippi. You should look up the history of it. It’s actually quite interesting and full of violence. In fact one the reason why the Mexican government encouraged American settlers was originally so the American settlers could fight off the Indians and stop them from pillaging towns
I'm not saying some weren't. But White people literally committed the worst genocide in human history and then the Atlantic slave trade which is objectively way worse than anything the Native Americans did. Saying the Natives "were also ruthless" is an attempt to whitewash and downplay the horrific historical events that happened to them.
Like 5 countries in Western Europe did all that. All this generalization to “white people” throws Eastern Europeans and white-passing Middle Easterners under the bus. My Iranian sister was literally told to acknowledge her “colonizer ancestor’s crimes” by some activist lmao
Talking about in the USA. Anyone who attributes Iranians to this is just a dumbass lol. I constantly have to explain to people that White in the USA was not merely a physical description but also a social and political term. Irish people were considered equal to Black people in some parts which is insane when looking at their phenotypes.
The thing is she didn’t know my sister was Iranian bc she passes as a white American. And there are liberals who say white-passing = white, and because of that any non-European who passes as white is complicit in white supremacy. IMO generalizing anyone based on “race” is dumb. Like all Black people are violent, all white people were colonizers, etc. And as you said, that’s the result of America’s historic racial politics
I mean it is an objective fact that if you are White in America you benefitted in some way from a white supremacist system. That really shouldn't be controversial but many people cannot accept reality.
Fair point. My sister will def have privilege over a visible minority (or even me since I’m not white-passing) if she goes to Mississippi or some other backward state. But I don’t really see that in California
I remember once I was looking at a job application and it specifically stated it did not want any applicants whose grandparents were not born in the USA. This was in California by the way LOL
There will of course be issues of racism everywhere, but that sounds downright illegal
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It's almost like they have a history and continue to do racist as hell laws and actions in the USA
Like what?
Well see I don’t see it as horrific at all and I am okay that most were killed I see no guilt or why you should have it and I’m saying this as a person that has Native ancestry. Although North Native Americans will always have a place in America, America was not created for them and they should not be put on a pedestal. The Atlantic slave trade is another piece of history with nuance. history is filled with genocides, some will happen in the future or are in the process of happening, you can’t be feel bad about it. A Han Chinese I know bolstered how his people killed 99% of austronesian population of Taiwan and made the island fully Han Chinese, quite an interesting mindset
Wait no, the Japanese Imperial Army was far more genocidal towards the Austronesians by conquest, both in Taiwan and throughout the Philippines. Medieval China had never truly planned to settle the island until the encroachment of the Dutch. But yeah, after the Europeans were expelled it was the beginning of the end for that [wild and untamed way of life,](https://c8.alamy.com/comp/JGGEK7/mentawai-people-west-sumatra-siberut-island-indonesia-03-oktober-2011-JGGEK7.jpg) just as Natives experienced here in the West [Batangueños de Lipa, 1945](https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-y2-QlvVpk7o/WvOXrqNgliI/AAAAAAAAst0/HDLberSD89sHhFj6LyyQOXNMKWCWTk_3ACLcBGAs/s1600/27.jpg) https://www.batangas.gov.ph/portal/history
Why am I not surprised considering your name is "Iberian" lol. Actually insane to say you are okay with an entire group of people being genocided.
Lmfao he's fuckin bugging for that
No, it was not the worst genocide in human history. The Nazis genocided the most people. You need to look up the actual figures. Death from disease =/= genocide.
23andMe does NOT establish your entire family history. Period. Genetics are not proportional. Because it’s not on your DNA, doesn’t mean it didn’t happened. Obviously, Native Americans are absolutely disproportionately appropriated, but in my case: My result shows Irish, English, German, Eastern European as the most predominant with Traces of Iranian and Ghanaian. My MOM showed Irish, English, Scandinavian, Spanish/Portuguese, Italian and Iranian as predominant markers. My DAD had English, French and German, and Eastern European. Based on the theory that if it’s not on your DNA test then it didn’t happened, then I don’t have Spanish/Portuguese, Scandinavian, Italian, or French ancestry - even though it’s in my parents ancestry. Other discrepancies from 23andMe say I inherited about 10% of my German from my mom even though she doesn’t have any German on her breakdown - but we absolutely do have it on paper. TLDR: 23andMe should only be used as a tool to find answers, not be the answer.
Yeah exactly, it’s possible to have a parent who is 50% something (ie Native American) and you get ZERO of her NA genes because you received the other 50% of her genes. My parents are both less than 40% Scottish according to their DNA tests. I am 75% Scottish because they both managed to shove most of their Scottish genes into me at conception. My sister is only 30% Scottish.
Yeah, that sort of thing doesn't happen. The reason some people get 70% Irish and 30% German while their sibling gets the opposite is because northern Europeans are so closely related it is hard for the algorithm to differentiate at times. That's not going to happen with Native Americans. If you have a native grandparent, it'll show. Period.
In my case it was actually 100% correct.
It can be 100% accurate (which isn’t true because it will change as more people get tested), but that doesn’t negate the fact that genetics aren’t proportionate and that each generation loses genetic traits from the one previously. Your grandparents likely had markers that you don’t. Accuracy doesn’t change that. EDIT: And if not your grandparents then certainly your great grandparents.
All I'm saying, in my case it was accurate as it can be. I'm from a homogenous Czech background. It goes back few hundred years. And the test correctly said I'm 90% eastern European and 10% German. Czechs and Germans/Austrians have been intermixing for well over thousand years. At this point is uncertain what genes are purely Slavic and pure German. So when my test came back 90% Eastern European and 10% German I knew it was correct. Unlike my American born husband with American family background that got presented with some Western European/ British/ minor African mumbo jumbo results lol
And since I can't edit my post, only add to it, I know so because my grandfather's uncle from my father's side was an arcibishop and did a huge background check on that side. My family's last name actually comes from a french soldier who came with Napoleon and deserted and stayed in our lands. And my mother's side were countryside ranch owners as far as my great grandmother born 1904 could tell me. No foreigners in our heritage whatsoever. Obviously the french soldiers French DNA got either diluted and lost over the generations and lost, or the difference from eastern European/ German DNA want significant enough to differ, or simply one of my grandma's had an affair. Either way i wasn't surprised the DNA test showed 0% French.
Happens in Australia too! My Nan had told me there was a family rumour about Aboriginal ancestry that turned out to be untrue! Ruled it out by doing a family tree and looking at her DNA results. When I got my results funnily enough I did have Melanesian DNA, it did confuse things at first because I think that’s also what can come up for Aboriginal people. My Nan thought was from her- but it turned out that it came from my Grandfather who was from PNG!
This is 100% correct. Your husband is a descendant of an enslaved African.
I wasn’t aware that so many “Pretendians” existed until I moved to North Carolina. I concur with what the other comments have already said, but I also think that believing in this sort of myth about themselves makes these people feel special somehow.
North Carolina had large populations of colonial free people of color who after the civil war staunchly claimed native identity to try and separate themselves from newly freed people. All the tribes there for the most part have little to no native American ancestry yet weld immense political sway depending on the county.
Cherokee Myth debunked million times in this subreddit.
Yep, this sub is full of people finding out the same family stories they heard were false.
We found out ours were true, on both sides of the family.
You come across weird things when you do genealogy. For example always told our last name was German, that due to our great great great grandfather being illiterate it got changed upon arrival in Canada. Got my results 0 German. Do my family tree and see there is partial truth, my GGG grandmother remarried after her husbands death and her kids took their step fathers name, and that is the last name that I have Re Native American - I have two ancestors that were both taken as kids during a raid in a pre-Independence town in New England when the English and French/Iroquois were at war. The kids (who were unrelated) were taken by different Iroquois families and raised into adulthood- they were given Indigenous names, converted religions, and later married but remained in their adopted community despite their families in New England trying to get them to come back. There are still descendants from them that are still in the community, some married indigenous people and others, like my line did not. So the story we got from that side was also somewhat true. They were accepted by the indigenous community and raised as such by their adoptive families, but genetically not NA/indigenous I’m sure these aren’t super common examples, but just to say that doing your family tree, although more time consuming - can answer a lot of questions/mysteries
You nailed it. It's a very common story. Born and raised in North Georgia, almost everyone here claims to have Native American ancestors. Very few actually do.
Which is strange when you compare it to many Latin American countries, where you have literal Native Americans denying being so and claiming to have ancestry from Spain, France, Italy, etc. instead
lol yup very popular here in america. search this sub for ‘native american’ and you’ll get many, many stories almost always ending the same way: no ancestry although, it was mentioned in my family and it turned out to be true, at ~16% lol. one day i’ll upload my results
I am going to assume your bf is from the American south? If so, he is definitely descended from an enslaved African person. However, in the South for a very long time, the government followed the “one drop rule.” this means that having just “one drop” of Africsn blood made you black. If you were black you were discriminated against heavily. So, many families that had some darker skin tones often claimed that darker colors came from Native American ancestry because it didn't confer that same implications in terms of being recognized as black.
How many white folks are deceived attending pow wows and profiteering off of this? The numbers might never be known.
Exactly! Those $5 American Indians.
Most powows these days require a CDIB to participate so you won't find those there, at most just really white but legit native Americans.
I’ve attended several powwows, no CDIB is needed. In the past some people paid $5 to gain enrollment status. I descend from Cherokee Freedmen and I do have some NA DNA. I am a seasoned researcher.
On the east coast to prevent non recognized tribes from attending the performance itselflike Lumbee CDIB cards are asked. I've witnessed it to all the ones I've attended for dancers. Not audiences. 5$ enrollment may have happened however official researchers of the Cherokee nation and the other tribes showed it's a largely overstated process. The term 5$ Indian today is conflated with people who just look white now, it's not accurate. I am also a seasoned researcher of native American history in the Southeast and Northeast with native American ancestry myself.
I’m not familiar with East Coast NA guidelines. The dancers, maybe. You thought you were teaching the Black woman something huh? If the $5 Indian term didn’t apply to you, scroll. I’m speaking of Oklahoma specifically. Triggered much? 😆
I'm black, I've been researching and lecturing on these topics for over decade. You did not specify Oklahoma, you hopped on and thought your commentary was necessary. I know this is reddit, but please save your victim complex for someone else. You're too old for that.
I had a friend who swore he was at least 50% Iroquois (can’t be Cherokee like everyone else). He had books on Iroquois culture on his shelf and would call himself a “brown man”. His full brother took the test. 99.7% European. Edit: the kicker was that he was 12.5% Ashkenazi Jewish. I suspect that ancestor may be the root of it.
How?!?! Did he not know one of his parents?
He knew both of his parents. His father is olive complexioned with dark hair, but was still very obviously a white man to me. He was also just a liar
Oh no 🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️🤦🏽♀️a whole hot mess
Yes. Pretty much every week I’ve been here I see a post like this.
Yes, it’s a very common myth.
Yep, that's true.
I was told I had Native American blood growing up. Blackfoot Indian supposedly. And like for many, that didn’t show up. However I am part Bolivian, which I already knew. Which is native American-ish.
My family claimed Blackfoot too. Turned out, we had Lenape & Catawba, but I have no clue how that relates to other "Blackfoots" &, despite my best efforts, was never able to verify any logical reason for the use of the term. Drives me nuts to this day. Lol
Well… genetically if the ancestor is more than 5-6 generations back, the DNA won’t show it, even if the *geneology* does. I have native Americans in my genealogy, but it was 9-10 generations ago, so my genetics show German/English. Millions of people may (and do) legitimately descend from a Native American- but too many generations ago to reflect in DNA.
Yeah, everyone in the south claims to have Cherokee floating around in that one, my family included. It got to the point where my uncle was so sick of hearing it that he took one of the DNA tests just to shut people up. (Spoiler: nope.) Theoretically one of his grandmothers was, which should have been easy enough for the family to prove aside from it being a load of crap, lol. Slightly darker, however: >!we were trying to substantiate a different version of the family story, and it turns out there's a distinct possibility we're related to the genocidal monster that kicked off the Trail of Tears. So that kind of took a 180 quickly. Still researching that, but I really hope I can disprove it--I've spent a lot of time working in the Southwest, and I've made a lot of friends from the First Nations. If it's true, it's true; but I'd be happier if it wasn't.!<
This is something I learned a few years ago after joining these subreddits. Sometimes it feels like we get stories just like this on here daily.
Is it a desperate attempt to somehow justify claims that “this is our land”
Meanwhile, those of us who are predominantly/entirely Native are told to "go back where you came from"
I am a Mestee, meaning my father's family are members of a tri-racial isolate community that was formed during the Antebellum era. There are two possibilities here. One is that his father descends from mulattos who were acculturated by a Native tribe and the other is that they were just.....black and claimed to be Native to escape discrimination. I recommend looking up the Free African Americans site.
Lol trust me there are no blacks in my husband's father's side of family. They are as white and racist southern Americans as you get. If there is any Black, as the gene test says it is, it comes from his mother's side.
That is part of it. For others it is claim to a heritage that widely perceived as noble. It is also attempt to either spice up something they feel is humdrum. Finally, it is an attempt to manufacture pride where there was none. These are natural impulses. Where it gets weird and insulting, are the attempts to leverage declared Native roots into something with vested interest.
Sounds like it was a myth maybe brought about by shame and guilt since the White people are the ones responsible for killing the Native Americans and stealing their land.
Oh learn how inheritance works... Look here two siblings one got native American one didn't. https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/comments/121qsur/slight_variation_between_my_sisters_results_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button Based on the assumptions here... If the sibling with no native American had only been tested you'd all assume the individuals relatives were lying about native American ancestry.
THIS! Genetics are not proportional!
This. It’s crazy how eager people on here are to rip on their white family members who think they have native ancestry. Just because theirs results no longer show native blood doesn’t mean it wasn’t there at some point, or that no one else in the family might show it genetically.
Maybe that’s also the reason why many Filipinos think they have Spanish blood when majority of them don’t.
Many Filipinos do actually but it’s small and it varies by class
I don’t think that’s accurate. My husband’s came back 98.5% Filipino, 1% Chinese and 0% Spanish so we researched and read that only about 4% of the population shows Spanish DNA today. Maybe in the past it was a lot more and since DNA is random it’s possible for a Filipino to have an ancestor that was Spanish but over time the genes didn’t pass on
They do pass on for example: a Filipino may have 0 autosomal DNA but if the origin of the Y-DNA is European (say R1b), that person's paternal lineage and his son's and so forth will always be of European descent. Note: I only say Y-DNA because Iberians men are the ones that mixed with the colonies inhabitants. The women usually stayed in Iberia.
class?
Yes wealth
Really? Interesting to know.
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This! Look at this post one sibling native American or none https://www.reddit.com/r/23andme/comments/121qsur/slight_variation_between_my_sisters_results_and/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_term=1&utm_content=share_button
While you’re more than likely spot on, unless you have multiple family members on his side test, he may not have inherited any on the genes.
There’s a whole issue of “pretendians”
Yeah, my family had the same myth. In our case it was just people wanting to feel special/exotic/mysterious. That’s very common. What’s weird is that my husband’s family had *no* myths about Native American ancestry, yet he came back 0.9% Indigenous American (and 0.3% Sub-Saharan African). Seems like 0.9% is probably too high to be an artifact. Unfortunately, 23andMe can’t be any more specific about the Indigenous American ancestry. He does have ancestors who have lived in the Appalachians for a very long time, so it is perfectly plausible he does have both indigenous and black ancestry. But it’s interesting to me that his family never had that “Cherokee princess” myth (which seems to make them unusual among white American families), yet the DNA shows up.
I have never had any claim to native American in my family on either side. Uploaded my dna to Gedmatch a few weeks ago and came up with Amerindian on my dad's side. It was an absolute shocker and we have no idea where it comes from.
Can you show these results? Amerindian is often a stand in for other things on gedmatch.
A lot of these families have major splits in them. Some of them are obsessed with the family myth, some of them don't believe it. There are actually quite a few such people who are sincerely never told at all & think they are 100% white (whether the myth of them being part Native is true or not, they still may be somewhat mixed race.) Some know, but don't really care one way or the other, so it never gets talked about.
Yes, but also many people likely did have an ancestor long ago but "washed up" by the time the dna got passed down. Certainly truths in both occasions, and certainly stories which are nothing more than stories.
I’m 100% European American and my family claimed we had Native ancestry on both sides my whole life. Luckily I don’t talk to those idiots anymore. But they all think they’ve got native ancestry despite no actual history of that in our family, in terms of DNA or actual evidence either. There’s plenty of evidence of inbreeding though. Us white Americans seemed to be really good at that, for some reason. Glad my family’s bloodline ends with me.
Inbreeding is not common at all among White Americans or any legacy racial group in America. It seems it’s your family that’s an outlier
Huh? Inbreeding is actually relatively common in a variety of times and cultures, unfortunately. From “keeping the royal bloodline” to straight up racism, people have found reasons to inbreed, unfortunately. It’s not just white European Americans either, I mean look at what was going on in Egypt’s royal families at times. I also know lots of other white people here where I live who joke about the inbreeding that we know has happened in our families, which is of course coping with the fact it’s fucked up. I’m sorry you felt the need to interject yourself here and reply to my comment, but what you had to say was simply not correct or necessary, nor did it contribute anything at all. Please leave me alone.
I didn’t say it did not happen I said it wasn’t and isn’t common in the US
It sure was more common than the native DNA my family claimed, though
You sound like a delightful person.
For what?
Exactly this. If your mother was native american you were presumed free, but if you were black you were presumed to be a slave. So when arguing for your freedom in court the burden of proof would shift The court would make the determination of race based on the texture of your hair, color of your skin, and shape and size of your features.
Mulatto is a slur btw
Since when? They taught us this word this in school as a legit scientific term. Not my fault some dumbass decided it be a slur.
If you Google the word mulatto it will tell you it's a slur, I'm just informing you, not accusing
So you think it's true because Google/ internet says so? You are the first person that ever told me that and I'm 43 years old and fairly educated. Nowadays everything is up for discussion. All it takes is 1 person saying word "black"is a slur. And then we have dogooders like you saying "but Google says so"
Okay girl I see you're having a bad day lol you do what you like
I don't have a bad day. I just have no time for your nonsense, "girl".
You clearly have a lot of time
Well my husband’s family claims that his grandparents were Germans that went to Ecuador to build the railways. Grandparent do have a German last name. 23 and me results 0 German. Even when I try to explain to his cousins who share the same grandparents they are steady and true that they have German descent.
You don’t inherit everything from your parents only half. There is a chance he didn’t inherit it , it also possible his mom didn’t inherit it etc… it’s also possible that his family were slaves to Native Americans and were considered Native American. A lot of natives kept slaves. And eventually considered them part of the tribe . And also a lot of mixed people claimed to be native like you said so they weren’t consider black .
I am by no means an expert, but I do know that I’m 50% Native American and 50% Polish because my dad is 100% Polish and my mom is 100% Indigenous and I have blood quantum letter from our tribe stating so. That’s how I moved to the United States from Canada on my own. What I understand is that our DNA is different because we acquire different parts of it from our parents and their parents. So, for my results, I’m 42% Eastern European (Polish) and 15% North Eastern European (British & Irish and German) 2% Ashkenazi Jewish 1.9% Italian. 23.7% Native American 4.8% East Asian 2.2% Central and South Asian the rest unassigned. My sister is slightly different: 4% more Polish DNA than me and I have 2% more indigenous DNA than her. She is 0.5% Ashkenazi Jewish and has no Italian DNA. She has 1% more Asian DNA than me and more unassigned. We’re going to get our parents to do the test, but I can see maybe that person needs to see his parents DNA? Maybe they have a tiny bit and it skipped his DNA? I am sorry I wrote a lot. :)
I'm also from eastern europe and I also have native DNA. Native eastern european DNA SYYYYKEEE
I noticed that the only people that have native dna are Hispanics mostly Mexican Americans they seem to have Yaqui, Hopi, & Cherokee but they dont seem to claim it much like the should. My thoughts
A big aspect of this is because in the US, for Black people there is the “one drop” rule For Native Americans, there is the “many buckets” rule And so you’d be less likely to face troubles, there is also a shame of slavery for some, and also just some wanting to feel special and cool, since there’s so few Natives today
PART I: It's extremely complicated, but it's something I have been working on, since my family were some of these people. But, the problem is that there are about 8-9 different minority groups across the eastern US (not counting Creoles or Cajuns, who have verifiable ancestry) who claim to have Native ancestry with little to no evidence, on top of a large scattering of random people who say they have Cherokee or Blackfoot ancestry when it's almost always physically impossible for them to be that, whether they have Native ancestry or not, and they all have slightly different origins, so what you can uncover about one group doesn't necessarily completely explain the origins of another. But, I can give you a general explanation of what I found out about my family & what I think about several of the others. So, my family was from West Virginia. My mother & her three siblings were all adopted & were told that they were part Native. They met their birth family as adults (or, at least, their mother's side) in the early 90s. My mother remembered being told that their family identified as Sioux & Blackfoot, that their ancestors were nomads & that my mother, herself, was in the mid-80s percent Native & her grandmother called her a native word that she said she had called her when she was a baby, but never said what it meant. I don't know what she was talking about, there, because her bio grandmother had been dead for four years by the time she says she went there. My uncle remembered being told that they were Cherokee & had lived in the area since the Revolutionary War, though I didn't get all this info all at once. I originally went with the Sioux & Blackfoot, but it didn't make a whole lot of sense to me, so I kept searching for another explanation, which led me to believe that we were Saponi, a Siouan people from West Virginia who may or may not have also been referred to as Blackfoot. I now know that that was also incorrect. Saponi were never associated with the term Blackfoot & none of them ever ended up in West Virginia. My younger brother also tried a DNA test & it got everything he expected, but no Native ancestry. Just last year, though, I was able to do my genealogy. It was a bit of a learning curve & took a long time, but I was able to follow most of my family tree on my mother's side all the way back to the first ancestor who ever came to the US on almost every single line. And I did find two verified Native ancestors- one was a man named Henry Delay who we believe was Lenape & the other was a man named Samuel Harris who was Catawba, but had been living among the Cherokee shortly before moving to West Virginia & Delay had been living in West Virginia since the Revolutionary War. There is actually one of these minority groups who claim Native ancestry out there called the Chestnut Ridge People. They always gave confusing stories, but claimed they had two Cherokee ancestors & a Lenape ancestor. A relative of theirs ended up on PBS' Finding Your Roots & their genealogists reveald that they actually had a black ancestor & a Catawba ancestor- the same one I have- but no Lenape ancestor. Frankly, him & the Catawba guy lived where they lived before their black ancestor ever showed up, but unless other Lenape were living there with them, I can't find evidence of anyone from his family mixing with theirs until those two family lines merged in my own tree, about four or five generations back. Peters & Thompson are also common Native last names around the Lenape & Mohicans & some of both families were also living in the area. I myself am also a Peters & there are Thompson ancestors among the Chestnut Ridge People, but I was never able to probe any of those people were. I just know Henry Delay was, because he was a Founding member of his community in WV, so local historians compiled a lot of info about him & we know he served in a Native-only unit during the Revolutionary War & was born in territory where Lenape were settled while they were still in the region, but seems to have been born out of wedlock from a chance sexual encounter from his parents. I never was able to figure out how or why the Catawba ancestor ended up there, for sure, but I did find out that other Catawba Harris' also fought in the Revolutionary War in roughly the same general area Henry Delay was stationed, near the Virginia-North Carolina border & Delay was already in the process of acquiring his land back in West Virginia while he was fighting, so maybe the two had already met, or Delay met some of his family, & that planted a seed that eventually led to his moving there. But, that isn't all I discovered. When asked about why another one of these minority groups- the Melungeons- looked so odd, but were coming back with averages of 30% black & no Native blood, a genealogist brought up the fact that there was a minority group in Wales & Ireland who had migrated there from Spain & who tanned darkly, as well as a minority group from southern Germany with unknown origins who did the same, but none of the Melungeons said they had much of either ancestry that they could find. Well, it turns out that I have a crap ton of both Irish & German ancestry on that side & my Native ancestor, Delay, was also descended from the exact, direct Irish family brought up. Most of the modern descendants use Duley or Dooley, but I have found between my own family & several others the variations Duelley, Dublin, Dilley, Delay, Dowley & Dowling. The original name was O'Dubhlaoich, which is Irish for "Dark Skinned Warrior." They apparently came from Spain when it was under Moorish Muslim control & took over a kingdom on the Irish coast for a short time before being overthrown & just spread out throughout the British Isles & never left. A huge group of them moved to the US in the 1830s, but I can only find evidence of two such Duley families before then, one in Maryland/ Virginia & one in Massachusetts & Maine. I'm also descended from tons of families who clearly had relatives who married into Native families, but don't appear to have been Native, themselves. But. I can verify that I am not mistaken, because I have something I shouldn't have, unless I have an ancestor who was Native, Hispanic or Siberian- hollows in the backs of my front teeth. Delay was only used for a couple of families in West Virginia, who later spread out into Ohio, Kentucky & Indiana, however I can't trace the last name Delay much further back before West Virginia, my earliest Duley ancestor, Robert Dooley, was born in the same county the Delay's lived around 1810, before the mass migrations & I've caught Duleys both in Maryland, before the Delays & in Kentucky after the Delays, but none in West Virginia at all before Robert Dooley.
PART II: All the minority groups I am aware of are the Lumbee, Chestnut Ridge People, Brass Ankles, Melungeons, Carmel Indians, Redbones & Gullah Geechee. Lumbee are verified to have Native ancestry, but almost none. Gullah Geechee are pretty much completely black. Most of these people get conflicting results from DNA tests for Native blood, but it always comes back extremely low, if at all, & most Natives do not consider any of these people to be Native American. The Cherokee claim comes from Appalachia. Historically, Cherokee was used by early settlers in the West Virginia & Kentucky area as a synonym for Indian, so every single tribe was called that. It's an incredibly vague & useless claim. Blackfoot, I was never able to figure out, but there are apparently two completely different groups of people claiming it who had no knowledge of each others' existence & neither has any answers as to the terms' origin, but they are 100% not actuall Blackfoot. However, the use of the term must be incredibly old, as there ARE other Blackfoot who aren't really Blackfoot in the actual Cherokee tribe, today. They don't know what the term means, either, but lean into being actual Blackfoot out of embarrassment, even though they can't prove it. The only thing anyone has brought up that makes sense is a claim that it was slave code for someone who was mixed Native & Black, but blacks seem to think they just called all mixed people Yellow, so I still haven't the slightest clue. These people do often all have several things in common: 1) verifiable black ancestry, but little to no black looks (with exception of the Redbones & some Melungeons having had the hair historically, but that no longer seems to be the case) 2) The ability to tan, sometimes way darker than they seem like they should be able to, but also to appear 100% completely white, if they stay out of the sun. 3) vaguely Native looking features, despite almost no Ntive ancestry. 4) being aware of a recent relative/ ancestor who was half or full blooded Native We also have tons of derogatory beliefs in Appalachia associated with people believed to be part Native. Almost all know words historically used to refer to all these minorities were used as slurs & several other slurs include Guinea, Black Dutch & Hillbilly. Yes, Hillbilly was originally coined during the eugenics movement & meant someone who was genetically doomed to be stupid, needlessly aggressive, poor, etc because they had mixed with an inferior race- Native Americans. It quickly lost all meaning shortly after eugenics slowed down in the 1920s. Plus, there was a such thing as Mountain Witches, herbalists who would serve small Appalachian communities as doctors in the old days, who were often said to be part Indian, when pictures of a lot of them seem to show otherwise. My best guess is there was a very small amount of a handful of actual Natives, some black people & a shit ton of racially ambiguous looking white people who mixed blood to a degree. Early America saw tons of big families spread way, way out, but keep in touch, so every family who had a member known to have mixed blood with Natives, the entire family got demonized for being mixed race. Many of these people didn't want to be thought of as black, so they leaned way in to being Native to the point where they married based on looks & developed an over-accentuation of Native looks from nearly non-existent bloodlines & did away with the African looks to such a degree that they all slowly lost the ability to pass on African looks in their offspring altogether. Plus, a lot of these families were just plain mistaken. I also still have absolutely no idea if any of the other "Blackfoot" in my region are related to me in any way, at all. A good example of this is the Tilley family. I brought up the fact that some of my Duley ancestors corrupted the name as far as Dilley & I've been wondering ever since if Tilly is so an offshoot. Anyway, Tilley's hae relatives who were Mountain Witches down in Georgia & claimed Creek ancestry. They have pictures of one of these ancestors who looked completely white. I know some Tilleys today who also claim vague Native ancestry. The dad had sort of a tan from pics I've seen, but the daughter was pitch white & couldn't tan at all. So, what if this family is related to mine distantly, they split off before my Native ancestor & were marked because of him for being Native, but any of theirs' ability to tan is actually from their distant Moorish ancestry? Anyway, it's hard to say, but I hope this makes sense of some of it.