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Oh, I forgot about the princess thing. You are so right! Always a princess, with occasional 'chief' thrown in.
LOL, I hit all these memes.
I'm part Cherokee. I have a chief or 2 in my family tree. They had daughters, thus there were princesses. (I'm being a little flip regarding the princesses. I'm not sure they referred to themselves as such...but they were daughters of chiefs.)
And my great great grandpa, and his siblings, and his children are on the Dawes Rolls.
My great great grandpa was considered a chief and a judge. His brother was a more prominent judge.
The Cherokee were not only one of the tribes that embraced "white" culture the most (maybe the most overall) but also one of the most with European DNA. John Ross, the Principal Chief of the Cherokees (and with the support of the traditional and more likely to be pure bloods) during the trail of tears was only 1/8th Cherokee. Much of the leadership of the Cherokee was mixed blood.
They embraced "white" culture as a defense, it sort of worked temporarily but in the end didn't stop their land being taken. Hence people associating that mixed Native American with "Cherokee" almost as a term for mixed.
Well...also, when a European man married a Cherokee woman, he was recognized by the tribe as Cherokee. Soooo...as a descendant, you COULD be Cherokee...but it won't show up as much as you might think in a DNA test.
I'm in my early 50s and for all my life I was told my dad's side of the family had Cherokee dating back to my GGGG grandmother (early 1800s). It was family lore that was perpetuated by letters on old paper written in cursive about a full-blooded Cherokee woman who married a white pioneer in western North Carolina. The story goes that her tribe was angry and they kidnapped her and took her back. It always struck me that my GGG grandfather (who was, supposedly, 1/2 Cherokee) was always the dead-end in my genealogical research, but never gave it a ton of thought.
I did a 23andMe DNA test last year which showed 0.1% East Asian/Native American. I thought that was weird--I should be 1/64th, so shouldn't the proportion be more like 1.5%? But I took it as more or less confirmation that I was partly NA.
My mom just did her 23andMe test and we linked accounts. Linking accounts gave better resolution to my ancestry makeup and broke out the portion of my ancestry on both sides and lo and behold the 0.1% NA on my dad's side was gone. Vanished! I have no Native American ancestry!
As a youth I joined my high school's Native American club. I was always interested in my NA ancestry but my dad was totally fixated on it and tried several times to get my siblings and I registered and investigated benefits that we may be able to receive. It never came through though, probably because there was no proof of a link.
Now, 35 years later, I find out that I likely have NO Native American ancestry. I'm neither happy nor disappointed (hey, I am what I am!), it's more humorous to me that it was always such a big deal in our family only to find out it never was true!
Just thought I'd share that. What's next--that I'll find out that my immigrant grandfather really wasn't a Polish prince?
I learned that many white southerners do indeed have Cherokee Ancestry. I can definitely see it in some of them. I walked into a store in North GA once and saw a "white woman" with dark hair and a facial bone structure that looked a lot like the indigenous people of the 4 Corners area. I knew instantly she was part Native American. The facial bone structure gave it away even though she was mostly white. Sometimes I can see it like that.
You walked in the store, determined she was White but she looked Indian?......Wait for it....
Quote:
Originally Posted by grad_student200
Other times it is not obvious. I had a blonde coworker who was 1/8 Seminole. She looked like a typical white southern female. But the history was there. So the gene pool of the "southern whites" has definitely overlapped with tribes that had once been in the area. My opinion is that those with true roots going back to the 1600s and 1700s in the east coast and southeast would more likely have some legitimate Native American history.
You don't say? You move from Arizona which has a high populous of NDN's to GA and you're a historian of the southeast...........Wait for it......
Quote:
Originally Posted by grad_student200
The white southerners intermarried with Native Americans very frequently. The Confederate Army actually had mixed-blooded Cherokee regiments. But so did the Union Army. John Wayne revealed the history in his classic Western "The Undefeated". Wayne was ahead of his time in showing the reality of interracial marriages between white Confederates and Native Americans. In the film a Cherokee Scout for the US Army rides off with the daughter of a Confederate Colonel.
A "Native American" from rural Arizona mentioning John Wayne and more interested in what happened "East" of O'l Miss? How peculiar. We give Marlon Brando more kudos for not accepting his Academy Ward in support of Natives, than John Wayne.
DNA testing has shown colonial White autosomally have little to no Native or SSA admixture. MtDNA and Ydna testing, shows no "white southerners intermarried with Native Americans very frequently." If this were the case, you would see the results like the Latin Americas..........So Wait for it....
Quote:
Originally Posted by grad_student200
It's still like that. I had a blonde southern white girlfriend in North FL. She taught me to appreciate "Chick-fil-A" (lol). The south surprised me. I even had a female friend from a "traditional white southern sorority" in Georgia - a southern "WASP" but very liberal. The south was actually tolerant of diversity in a lot of ways. Many of the white Floridians revere the survival story of the Seminoles. A lot of those "whites" are part Indian anyways going way back.
There it is.....You sound like a "wannabe" or a complete *Apple* pushing the southeast Indian Blood Myth Agenda. It reeks of it.
I did a 23andMe DNA test last year which showed 0.1% East Asian/Native American. I thought that was weird--I should be 1/64th, so shouldn't the proportion be more like 1.5%? But I took it as more or less confirmation that I was partly NA.
That's about right.
A person with 1/64 N.A ancestry should test anywhere from 1.5% to 0% N.A
I can trace indigenous ancestry in Canada going back to the 1600s, several native women who were married to early Acadian explorers. They were baptized, and sometimes their Christian names were listed on the marriage documentation (Anne Ouestnordouest, Marie Christine Aubois, and an unnamed "esquimaux" woman listed as the wife of an explorer and the mother of his son). That was 7 generations back, though. And even taking heavy Acadian consanguineous marriage rates into account... and perhaps a couple more native ancestors too, since some records were lost, and there are the occasional dead ends in the family tree... I'm maybe 1% indigenous at best.
It's quite possible that there's a significant percentage of Cherokee, Seminole, etc. ancestry among whites in the Southern states. Just distantly -- due to the whole Trail of Tears era forcing a rapid decline in such marriages. I'd believe it.
Due to the clusters in rural areas where there are groups such as the Lumbees, the Creoles, "brass ankles", etc., I'd guess that the percentage of African ancestry would be at least as prevalent, and probably more so. There were many tri-racial groups and still are, so it had to have been pretty common for intermarriage to happen among the poorer residents of more remote areas. If anyone with that background turned out to have more caucasian in appearance, the pressure to "pass" for white and move away to the city must've been intense. And so it goes.
I have the usual Southern family myths on both sides about Cherokee ancestry leading me to think I must be 1/8. Took three different DNA tests over the last two years. National Geographic's Geno 2.0 Project shows nothing but European. 23andMe show 1.9% Native American. Ancestry DNA in its "Low Confidence Trace Regions" show 1%. There may be a Native American ancestor way, way back, but its inconsequential genetically speaking. My older sister who always fancied herself as Indian (Indian knick-knacks and paintings all over her house, always trying to get her kids benefits they aren't entitled to, etc...) was pretty upset and told me she didn't believe the results.
It seems from this forum that it's almost always a Cherokee and almost always a great-grandmother and often a "princess". It's very strange, and it makes me wonder if this wasn't some bedtime story once popular to tell children, who grew up thinking it was real.
I feel left out. We never had the Cherokee Indian Princess story. Our biggest surprise was to find out that the g-great-grandmother who came from Manchester, England was born in Dublin. Probably shouldna called my Irish ex-husband those names.
You are right, it's always a Cherokee princess. Isn't that what Senator Warren claimed too?
I was watching the show "Long Lost Family" and an adopted woman thought her mother was half Native American and half French Canadian. When she got her DNA results neither of those was true, she was from Europe. The only thing she found 'disappointing' in all of her results was she had no Native American genes. Why are those so much more valued than genes from any other source? I've never understood it.
I have the usual Southern family myths on both sides about Cherokee ancestry leading me to think I must be 1/8. Took three different DNA tests over the last two years. National Geographic's Geno 2.0 Project shows nothing but European. 23andMe show 1.9% Native American. Ancestry DNA in its "Low Confidence Trace Regions" show 1%. There may be a Native American ancestor way, way back, but its inconsequential genetically speaking. My older sister who always fancied herself as Indian (Indian knick-knacks and paintings all over her house, always trying to get her kids benefits they aren't entitled to, etc...) was pretty upset and told me she didn't believe the results.
I know a family who claimed their daughter was 1/4 Cherokee, her great grandmother was supposedly a Cherokee Princess, despite the whole family being very blonde and blue eyed. Since it couldn't be proven one way or the other the mother registered her daughter in school as a Native American. She was accepted into gifted programs and the elite, competitive, public school in the area. When it came time for college she was offered many scholarships that are designed for minority students. She chose an excellent private college which was all but free because of her minority status. At college she was placed in the dorm with other minority students. She was the only blonde white woman in the dorm.
So I would advise parents to registered their children as Native American or any other minority. Get lots of benefits that way.
Lots of whites in the south think they're part Cherokee. Most are either 100% European or have a little bit of African blood. It make sense considering that 90% of the Native population was wiped out (due to diseases from the Spanish, war etc.) before the Mayflower arrived. Even in colonial times there weren't that many Natives for all the mixing that people claim to have.
My family came to Jamestown VA in 1619. I have not a drop of Native American or African American blood according to my DNA results. Darn. I was hoping I could claim to be a princess!
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