well i was always told i had some native american in me but i just did a deep dive into my genealogy and its so disgustingly white american theres not a single non-white person that i can tell all the way back like 8 generations. half of the Tree Branches are fuckin 1600s original american colonists even
theres extremely mixed in and irrelevant german, scottish, norwegian, swedish, irish, and english of course. i am WHITE
- they/them
- telnaga.neocities.org/
I'm some kind of art dude. lesbian, 20s, white, disabled
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in reply to @telnaga's post:
I feel like most sufficiently rural families have this myth or some myth along those lines. Idk exactly why, there's probably some big anthropological explanation why these myths arise. It's just, like, "who makes that kind of thing up? There must be some truth to it!" (it's 100% made up).
it's especially weird because, well my dad gave me a very generic "yeah we totally have blackfoot in us", but my mom's side was very specific, she was always told her grandmother was a major part pawnee. but i can just go online and find a picture of her and census entries of all her grandparents and great grandparents and theyre all white!!
I think that's most likely, but it's hard to be sure. It was beneficial to pretend to be white if you could at all get away with it, even if only on some stupid federal government document. And names on official documents aren't a very good lead by themselves, as almost any Native participating in white society adopted a "Christian name". If a branch of your genealogy is Anglo-sounding but mysteriously unsourced before the 1800s, chances are real that you might be looking at Native Americans; that's how mine is (well, swap in Spanish), and we know our stories to be accurate as it's essentially borne out by photographs too. (On the other side of the family, my Cherokee ancestor is not on the Baker or Dawes rolls, and we believe it's because he was a bastard child raised by a white mother for the first part of his life and then unofficially renaturalized into the tribe at a later date as a teen or young adult, having been "adopted" by someone in it, involving a move to Arkansas before returning to the area he was raised in. That's about all we know.) The point is that it's not always as simple as "definitely", "definitely not", or "no clue". History has a way of being deceitful and if it happened on both sides of my family I imagine it's quite common.
As for why people would come up with a fib, cross comparing culturally, it might be covering up for Black ancestry or something considered more embarrassing than Native American (I have a sneaking suspicion that "Blackfoot-Cherokee" is a euphemism for Black, Black/Cherokee, or Cherokee-owned ex-slaves, seeing as Blackfoots didn't live anywhere near the South and we know of no band of Cherokee also known as the Blackfoots), the same way "Portuguese" became a euphemism for Jewish or anything else you didn't want to disclose in parts of Latin America.
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