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In New Mexico where I'm from and among the Hispanic families who have been in the area for a long time, it's safe to say that there has been a lot of intermingling between Native Americans and Hispanics over the past several hundred years. My dad did his DNA test last year and was rather surprised that the results showed him with 30% Native American blood. He does not look it, can't recall anybody in his family history having ever married a Native American. But his family line has been in the Southwest and Mexico for a few hundred years, so certainly there must have been a lot of interbreeding.
Merely anecdotal, but my father's side of the family arrived here in the late 1600's and eventually settled in the Eastern Kentucky mountains near the Cumberland Gap. My great, great grandmother was Cherokee, so we do have some Native American in our bloodline.
In most places the colonists saw the Native Americans as enemies, competing for the same land. They were much more likely to kill Natives than marry them, and vice versa. I had a maternal ancestor who was an English colonist in New Hampshire who was killed by a Native American, and after the Revolution, two paternal 3rd great-grandparents in Georgia who were massacred by Indians along with several of their children.
However I have Native American DNA according to 23andMe inherited from both of my parents, but we do not know what tribes they originated from. It totals just 1.4%.
seems like everybody has a cheokee grandmother, its always on the female side, instead of the male that y could be tested.
MtDNA goes back to the mother's-mother's-mother's-etc. oldest direct ancestor. Alas, no way to account for any Y DNA going back that far on the mother's side.
As someone else mentioned, the "noise" DNA from distant ancestors (10 generations or more) amounts to less than 1% and doesn't show up in the current tests. Doesn't mean it isn't there, though.
It probably is not that common. Historically, most Indians are pretty wary of whites (and do you blame them)? Not that there's much stigma associated w/ that in the tribes, but there has been w/ whites, and not only w/ Indian mixing. A lot would depend on the tribe, and what part of their stolen lands they were pushed off from. The Seminole and Cherokee have never been a part of any peace treaties to my knowledge, and there's surely others.
I like that line about the "original colonists". I'll bet the Indians get a big laugh out of that one.
I'd be interested to know how accepting Europeans would have been of a mixed race child/person back in the colonial days.
I would think it would be much more likely that a mixed race child would have been raised as Native American rather than with colonists.
Therefore, if an average American of colonial decent were to trace their lineage, very little Native American would likely show.
However, if a Native American were to trace their lineage, they'd likely find some trace of European ancestry.
As I mentioned in a previous post, there were many Native American raids in colonial New England in which, if the people weren't scalped, they were marched off to French Canada. Many were killed along the way if they couldn't keep up. They were often walking barefoot in snow. Some survived the trip and made it to the tribal home where they lived with their Native American captors.
These early settlers often assimilated with the tribe and although many were later ransomed back, sometimes they didn't want to go back. There was a woman from my own town who, taken by the Indians when she was a young child, and raised by them, never wanted to do anything except stay with them. She used to go back to her town to visit her relatives but she never wore "English" clothing and she would sleep outside, not in a house. Always, she returned to her tribe in Quebec. Her family never was able to re-convert her back to Christianity or to make her eat "English" food or adapt their ways.
She certainly wasn't the only one who stayed with the Native Americans instead of returning. Some had no choice but others definitely wanted that lifestyle and never went back to their original home even though they had the chance.
I think if more people in places like Quebec get their DNA tested, the traces of Native American blood would show up. Or maybe it wouldn't--these raids took place in the late 1600s, early 1700s--would it show up in DNA tests that long ago?
The settlers of the early New England colonies were very religious and would only marry someone else who was very religious. They were married by a minister in a church in their small village. Detailed church records were kept. They were intolerant of others' religions so it's hard to imagine one of them marrying a "pagan." If it ever happened, it would have been extremely rare as a Native American would not have been accepted as a member of their society--maybe as a friend to trade beads with, but not as a spouse who would marry and live among them.
(To answer the previous question, possibly white people who live in Quebec do have some Native American blood mixed in with the blood of colonial New Englanders who were captured long ago. It's also possible that white people living in the very northern reaches of Maine, VT, and NH could have some Native blood since they live so close to the Canadian border. In the early 18th C.my own family lived in northern VT and sometimes Quebec--the national boundaries shifted all the time--but I have no Native American names and I can trace each family back to where they came from. Yet we have the myth of the Native American ancestor. I don't think many Native Americans survived in this part of the country--they would have died off in wars or from smallpox or married into white families later on. It would be interesting to know what happened to the few that were left.)
Last edited by in_newengland; 03-03-2016 at 10:16 PM..
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