Asklemmy

54461 readers

616 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 7 years ago

MODERATORS

Why so many white Americans claim to be native? (lemmy.zip)

submitted 5 days ago by choihanna@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

51 comments fedilink hide all child comments

For some reason when I'm talking to an American from the North East and the fact that I'm mixed comes up they always say they aren't white they're actually native because his grandpa once mentioned something about a Cherokee ancestor.

It's always Cherokee, no other tribe but that one. And it's always the whitest looking person ever, straight up 6ft tall blue eyed and blond guy.

I get it, I'm mostly white too, Spanish and Slavic. But even tho I'm not mostly native American I still look native enough that people think I'm Asian.

But when your ancestry has been so diluted over the generations... You're not native. It's not just that you don't look native, it's also that you don't even participate in the culture.

Dude you're just a farm boy from Philadelphia you're probably more Amish than Cherokee, if that supposed ancestor is even real at all and not just some random claim by some of your ancestors to have a "right over these lands".

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] daannii@lemmy.world 1 points 4 days ago* (last edited 4 days ago)

That's fair. I am aware that there is lack of a genome for a diverse group of people like the Blackfoot to compare my results with.

I'm just very suspicious of a white family claiming native ancestry.

For Xmas I got my grandfather's ancestry done. On my mother's side. The side claiming the native.

Now I do know for a fact that family members did geneology tracing many years ago and it was determined that line was German.

Like they have documents and stuff. Was a group of family members who did the research. (Funny thing is they first thought we were dutch because the origin country was Deutschland.)

Anywho. My grandfather's report said he was only like 7% German. And mostly from Cambria (English/Welsh area).

It did make me a little suspicious of the accuracy since this German ancestry was verified independently.

I went through a different company for his compared to mine. You can import the DNA from one test to another company and they will run it through their system. For a fee.

Probably won't be doing that. But did consider it.