How did you find out if you were Native American?

[Ruth4Truth]

Originally Posted by Salvatore Marciano

A person is suppose to know whether or not they are Native American/Amerindian just by looking in the mirror or by having at least one parent who clearly looks Native American/Amerindian. .

No, that is not the test, necessarily. It doesn't always show in facial features. One simple test is whether you or a parent has a tribal ID card. Otherwise, if you discover a) you were adopted out, or b) there's a whole side of the family that are tribal members, that you never knew about, or come upon some other similar revelation, you can research your history, and with the proper documentation in the tribal rolls or other accepted (by the tribe) historical documentation, you can apply for membership.

[censusdata]

Finding Your Roots show is changing my mind on this. I used to think most Whites had no non European ancestry but DNA is revealing otherwise. Even light complexioned people like John McCain and Anderson Cooper are 1% Native American. Jimmy Kimmel is 10% Black. Ty Burrell has a Black ancestor too. Many Black Amercans have higher amounts. Oprah is 8% NA

[AppalachianGumbo]

Originally Posted by believe007

^^^^ Lmfao

I've always known it, never felt the need to research it or broadcast it.....
A quarter Sioux, people have always stopped me to ask where my darker skin comes from,
or to tell me I look like a Blonde Indian.....
........:

I've always wondered what part of the [weird] US this is. People just stop people and ask where their dark skin comes from. We have Blacks, South Asian Indians, Southern Europeans, millions of Hispanics and many mixed raced people of all skin colors but people are hung up on stopping people and asking about where their skin color comes from.

A blonde Indian? Good grief. People must not get out much.

[AppalachianGumbo]

Originally Posted by believe007

^^^^ Lmfao

I've always known it, never felt the need to research it.....
A quarter Sioux.....:

Thousands of pretendians...same mantra applies. You people never do. You invent it.

[waviking24]

Originally Posted by censusdata

Finding Your Roots show is changing my mind on this. I used to think most Whites had no non European ancestry but DNA is revealing otherwise. Even light complexioned people like John McCain and Anderson Cooper are 1% Native American. Jimmy Kimmel is 10% Black. Ty Burrell has a Black ancestor too. Many Black Amercans have higher amounts. Oprah is 8% NA

I wouldn't take that show too seriously m8

[Alandros]

Originally Posted by waviking24

I wouldn't take that show too seriously m8

I wouldn't suggest not taking it seriously, just not as representative of the entire population. Even taking every person who has every been on the show is a small sample size... Refer to proper studies to get proper ideas of how common proportions are.

Plus most people on the show don't come up with DNA surprises anyways.

[Ottawa2011]

I recently found out via DNA testing that I'm positively descended from an indigenous woman who married a European in the late 1600s in Canada. That isn't enough for me to characterize myself as "native", however... I'd say that I have some métis ancestry on my father's side. Along with the rest of my diverse Euro ancestry.

If someone is raised in a mainly indigenous community where they're exposed to traditional culture, it's more obvious to me why and how they'd identify as indigenous.

[Ottawa2011]

Originally Posted by Alandros

I wouldn't suggest not taking it seriously, just not as representative of the entire population. Even taking every person who has every been on the show is a small sample size... Refer to proper studies to get proper ideas of how common proportions are.

Plus most people on the show don't come up with DNA surprises anyways.

Oh, I wonder how many are meant to be on the show, and get more DNA surprises than they bargained for... so they back out and their segment gets cancelled and never gets aired?

DNA testing turns up NPEs ("non-paternal events") and it isn't rare.

[Alandros]

Originally Posted by Ottawa2011

Oh, I wonder how many are meant to be on the show, and get more DNA surprises than they bargained for... so they back out and their segment gets cancelled and never gets aired?

DNA testing turns up NPEs ("non-paternal events") and it isn't rare.

Sure that's possible, still the sample size of a single show like that is statistically insignificant. On top of that you could easily argue that the DNA they often show is of the surprise variety because it makes far better entertainment.

In early seasons they tended to show more boring DNA results. The season with Stephen Colbert comes to mind, where they showed him he was 100% European in his DNA... Stephen and then Gates then joked about him being the whitest guy on the show, so it was entertaining, but I believe in that same season they shared a lot of boring DNA results.

It seems now they don't show them as much unless theirs something interesting... probably purely due to formatting the show to have the most interesting parts since it's so cramped.


Something like this is far better to rely on for how many European Americans have African or Native DNA:
http://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(14)00476-5

To improve the understanding of the relationship between genetic ancestry and self-reported ethnic and racial identity, and to characterize heterogeneity in the fine-scale genetic ancestry of groups from different parts of the US, we inferred the genetic ancestry of 5,269 self-reported African Americans, 8,663 Latinos, and 148,789 European Americans who are 23andMe customers living across the US, by using high-density SNPs genotype data from 650K to 1M arrays.

So almost 150,000 European American DNA samples used for extrapolations on white Americans.

Here they found on average European Americans only had 0.19% African DNA and 0.18% Native American DNA.

This is skewed by the fact that European Americans in the South have a higher proportion of African DNA (so they alone will look a bit higher) and in the West have more Native American DNA. This charge says most of what can be said though:



Some excerpts:

Consistent with previous anecdotal results,32 the frequency of European American individuals who carry African ancestry varies strongly by state and region of the US (Figure 3A). We estimate that a substantial fraction, at least 1.4%, of self-reported European Americans in the US carry at least 2% African ancestry. Using a less conservative threshold, approximately 3.5% of European Americans have 1% or more African ancestry (Figure S8). Individuals with African ancestry are found at much higher frequencies in states in the South than in other parts of the US: about 5% of self-reported European Americans living in South Carolina and Louisiana have at least 2% African ancestry. Lowering the threshold to at least 1% African ancestry (potentially arising from one African genealogical ancestor within the last 11 generations), European Americans with African ancestry comprise as much as 12% of European Americans from Louisiana and South Carolina and about 1 in 10 individuals in other parts of the South

Fitting a model of European and Native American admixture followed later by African admixture, we find the best fit with initial Native American and European admixture about 12 generations ago and subsequent African gene flow about 4 generations ago.

So as you can see there are a significant amount of European Americans with African or Native DNA, but not as high as you might expect. In fact I'd say it coincides moderately well with the occurrence on Finding your Roots.