A Native American tribe made the news when trying to disenroll a woman, the mother of several children, and remove her family from a tribal home at Christmas. The ‘tribeswoman’ never knew generations ago, one of her great-greats erroneously enrolled himself as a member of the tribe. Recently the mistake was uncovered and brought to the tribal council’s attention. Perhaps nowadays every single tribal person is having their DNA checked to confirm legitimacy as a Native American, down to the specific blood percentage. After all, certain tribes divide casino earnings, maintain tribal employment, and may receive government benefits like housing, college, and some tax exclusions.
I share the woman’s pain of banishment as a former Native American, though her ordeal brings much more sorrow while mine was inadvertent and self imposed. With a family hailing from Oklahoma, the story had always been we have some Native American blood. Mom’s side claimed Choctaw then later Cherokee which Dad’s side had claimed, too. Turns out, the Cherokee ancestry was either misunderstood or bogus, because I had my ancestral DNA analyzed. I simply spit in a vial and sent it on to a lab at a cost of $100. Wild with anticipation, eagerly imagining the possibilities, I sincerely hoped to confirm a Native American lineage of eight percent or more. I would have accepted one drop.
Uprooted
My DNA analysis was filled with surprises to me, even to my mother who half-jokingly responded I no longer seemed to be her child. Horse feathers! Not only am I 100 percent European (85 percent Western European), I have not one drop of Cherokee blood. I knew about the German, Irish and English roots but was amazed to find some small genetic blood lines from Italy, Greece, ‘Iberian Peninsula,’ Scandinavia, and even European Jew. Mazel tov!
The analysis supposedly goes back 2,000 years—and in my case, did not coincide with my own ancestral online research. In other words, I had found official government documents to prove at least one ancestral line was indeed Native American: a Chickasaw woman married to an Early American English settler in Virginia around 1768. Yet my own spit couldn’t claim a drop of Native American heritage.
I checked with the website handling this research and learned that often our individual DNA does not match the ancestral paper trail, mainly because a person only holds so much DNA. The vast majority of our true multicultural heritage will not show up in our current bodies of very set DNA proportions. And it gets even trickier. Siblings and parents may have totally different ancestral DNA in their spit. In other words, my father may indeed have five percent Native American ancestry or my mother ten percent, yet that strain may not be passed on to me or my sibling.
American Mutt
Right away I stopped claiming to be a little Cherokee or Native American as I used to do to explain a profile with a knotted nose and increasingly round face. Oh I could go on and on about my Cherokee roots in the old days. Doing so now would be a lie. What became true to me, however, are ancestral roots deep in American history from the nation’s beginnings—and no trails to Texas until the very late 1800s. But rest assured: I’m Texan through and through, born and raised. I found that three ancestors fought in the American Revolution. No one in my family would have ever believed that. And I found a couple who fought in the Civil War, of course for the Rebel side against northern aggression.
The branch of the Chickasaw Nation was unknown to any of my family. The lone Native American ancestor was only mentioned as an unnamed Chickasaw maiden. She had a name. It just wasn’t easy to say or spell like Mary or Ruth. So she, and even her parents, went down in Early American documented history nameless. Yet I exist, and my mother exists, and her father existed, and many others before him because of her.
Another discovery from more recent history was back in the 1930s when two of my paternal and maternal great-greats recorded on the U.S. census their race as ‘Indian,’ meaning American Indian now Native American. Perhaps this is the situation of the former Native American woman who was kicked out of her tribe. Why were people claiming to be American Indian in 1930 when previous census records indicate they marked themselves as white? Maybe there were some government benefits to Americans claiming Native ancestry, no questions asked? For a long time in American history, white-looking folks never claimed Indian heritage because of the ramifications including job and community loss, verbal and physical assault, and lifelong persecution and humiliation. Maybe the 1930 census takers encouraged folks to mark their race Indian, if they could claim it, for potential benefits to make up for the U.S. government’s treatment of Native people. American history clearly taught me our country screwed the ‘Indians’ time and again, breaking every promise and treaty.
I think modern Americans like my parents and grandparents never gave much thought to our ancestral past or heritage. It was ancient history. This mindset may have begun after the Civil War, with Southerners picking up the pieces of their ruined lives and moving away … to Texas … to California. The Old West was when I had figured my family ventured to America, like victims of the Irish potato famine or amidst the flood of European immigrants in the late 19th century. I was wrong. My roots run deep in the American soil, and not so much in my beloved Texas, ironic given the title of my blog.
Pssst. The real reason I did the ancestral DNA was due to one dead branch on my family tree. A great-grandfather presumably was living under an assumed name. I did find more than one name from his own census data in 1900, 1910, 1920, and he was one of my relatives who claimed to be Indian in 1930. In the only photo I’ve seen of him, he was dark or olive complexioned with dark eyes and hair. Maybe he was Native American, or Italian or Greek. But on all his census records, he never noted the names of his parents. He remains a mystery, but I thought I might unlock it through my DNA. But his secrets remain in the grave.
Americanized
I think all that Native American blood talk among my Oklahoma family may have been from grandparents and great-grandparents who supported the underdog, their self perception of economic struggles linked to being among the underclass, living in a ruling Anglo-centric society and culture but not reaping the benefits of what minorities today call ‘white privilege.’ There is a hillbilly attitude among my kin, proud outsiders who tend to their own. We are—and have been for many generations—Americans, fighting in every war, independent, with instincts more cowboy than communal. As a kid I once asked my grandmother about our heritage. She didn’t know, figuring herself to be Cherokee and Dutch (she was mistaken) and my grandfather “not much, more Irish than anything.” But she was the one with Irish roots, only one generation before heading to the New World in the 17th century.
The most rewarding revelation from my ancestral DNA was to learn I am 25 percent Irish. I never knew it … yet always sensed it, deep in my bones, especially around St. Patrick’s Day and singing songs like Danny Boy, a melody so beautiful and lyrics so sad they touch the soul. If I have some underdog in me, it is mostly Irish. Weren’t the Irish the underdogs when pouring into America just a little more than a century ago, called epithets unfit to print?
My parents are essentially one-generation Oklahomans, some of their parents and grandparents not born there at all, except that grandma with whom I conversed about our nationalities. She was born in Indian Territory 1901. Maybe having grown up in Oklahoma—where the motto is ‘Native America’ and license plates feature a dream catcher—knowing about and living in the aftermath of the injustice, the filthy lies, the historical mistreatment of the Native people by our own ancestors was too painful. So a little white lie was created and passed down. My family never relayed a thing about being Irish, German or British but instead boasted or at least mentioned with a smile of pride a belief in a trace of Indian heritage. Even so, my folks doubted we had much Native blood. All could be lost with a finger prick. More honestly, none of us look Native. Who would believe we were even a bit Cherokee, least of all the Natives themselves?