After years of being told I was part Cherokee, someone was mad that I wasn't.
After years of being told I was part Cherokee, someone was mad that I wasn't.
He is now denying the validity of dna tests. I don’t want to say the past 35 years of having him treat me worse than he treats his sister had anything to do with his assumptions of my dna, but he was upset to learn that I am more Irish than him. I wonder what he thought of my mother before these results…
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I've heard before that there is a tendency of these tests to over-report European ancestry and under-report or misidentify ethnic minorities. Something to do with the underlying datasets not being inclusive enough because those populations are smaller and don't purchase these DNA tests at the same rate as Western Europeans.
There also seems to be a weird fetishisation of First Nations ancestry in parts of the US. I've also been told I have Cherokee ancestors, but it didn't show in my dna ancestory either.
I was also told our family was part Cherokee. It's apparently a super common claim
I'm struggling to process that this is so common... Also had this in my family growing up
I'm up in northern Ontario in Canada and I had a French Canadian neighbor who loved watching John Wayne movies. He often told me that he had Cherokee ancestry too.
I told him a hundred times that this wasn't Cherokee territory because I was full blooded Ojibwe Cree from this area and we had never heard of Cherokee. I kept telling him that he was probably part Ojibwe or Algonquin which is who the French mixed with in our area .... but he really wanted to be a John Wayne movie Indian.
That's hilarious!
Mixed race / olive skinned people trying to find something more acceptable in order to avoid being outcast. Also, edgelords.
You hear it so much that frankly when I hear it I assume they're lying. Like it's become that stereotype.
My mother always claimed that some amount of greats-grandmother was a Cherokee princess, but I've always thought it was bunk.
Definitely bunk because there were no Cherokee princesses. Could still have some sort of Native American ancestry but that whole Cherokee Princess thing was so overused at one point that it became a trope.
It's unstated racism.
If someone in your past could get a good tan, it was common to say that they were part "< insert native american tribe from your area>" because you definitely didn't want to be perceived as part black.
Look up the "one-drop rule".
I'm sure that was a factor in many of these instances. That said in our family my impression was it was more of a "here's something special about us" type thing, like there's nothing otherwise noteworthy.
That's generally how these things are always communicated to later generations. 😂