Category: Ethnicity

Becoming Indian

Becoming Indian

by Justin Durand

I’ve been chuckling about this video for a few days now.

  • the1491s. “I’m An Indian Too“. YouTube <youtube.com>. Sep 21, 2012, retrieved Dec. 12, 2020.

So then. When the laughing subsides for a bit, I’m ready to go on with some more reading around this topic. There’s a particularly active faux Red community on Geni.com. I have a long standing interest in the subject of racial identity, but these folx really lit my interest. A wide variety of pipe carriers, and vision warriors, and chiefs of various standing. They couldn’t bear to hear that they might not be as NDN as they want.

I remember reading a few years ago about White folx with a tiny bit of Indian ancestry weighing in on whether the Washington Redskins name is racist. Invariably, they’d (a) assert their claim to Indian ancestry, then (b) say they aren’t offended by the name. Can people be less self-aware than that? I don’t think so.

I was pulled back to this issue recently by Darryl Leroux (no surprise there) and his latest article about indigenization.

There are also these older articles, still on my radar:

In other words, some people are making a very basic mistake of confusing ancestry and identity. It doesn’t have to be this hard–I have Swedish ancestry but I am not a Swede. So simple and obvious but it might be easy to lose your bearings if the only culture you know is your own.

Ultimately, this approach acquires an ersatz legitimacy from a related debate about the U.S. government using blood quantum rather than culture as a determinant of Indian identity. I wrote about that a few years ago. It should take only a few moments of reflection to see the difference between saying if you have the culture blood shouldn’t matter, versus saying if you have the blood you can claim the culture.

I’ll be watching to see where this goes. From the resistance I’ve encountered personally, I’d bet the ranch that rationality loses this round, this generation. There’s a powerful undercurrent in the dominant settler culture of wanting to be indigenized, some way, some how.

Update: Now here’s a book for my reading list: Circe Sturm, Becoming Indian: The struggle over Cherokee identity in the twenty-first century (2011). Looks like it’s still available from UNM Press for $27, but twice that used. Should be half that. Something hinkey, there. I’ll put it on my want list and wait for the market to play out.

Warren’s Cherokee Ancestry

Warren’s Cherokee Ancestry

by Justin Durand

I was at coffee with a friend a few days ago when we got mired in a debate about Elizabeth Warren. I was struck by how much misinformation I was hearing. It doesn’t need to be this hard.

There is a political narrative that says Warren lied about her Cherokee ancestry. That’s a story for suckers.

First, anyone with experience doing American genealogy will be aware that stories about Cherokee ancestry are a dime a dozen. It seems like half the people in the American South and West think there’s a Cherokee princess somewhere in their ancestry. And, the number is significantly higher in Oklahoma, where the Feds ultimately settled the Cherokee tribe.

Very few people who claim Cherokee ancestry can prove it. Many of them spend a lifetime trying to find some evidence, anything at all. It shouldn’t surprise anyone–except maybe an insular New Yorker–that Elizabeth Warren, who is from Oklahoma, would have a family tradition about Cherokee ancestry. It’s even less surprising that she can’t prove it. (Welcome to the club, Liz.)

Second, Warren made the mistake of taking a DNA test, in hopes of ending the controversy. That was probably just about the worst thing she could have done. The test ticked off Indians across America without producing an answer that would satisfy non-Indians.

Anglo America has defined tribal membership for Indians by using European kinship rules rather than Indian rules. Anglos ask how much Indian ancestry someone has. Indians nowadays generally want to ask whether someone is part of the culture of their tribe. One of Warren’s mistakes was exactly this. By taking a DNA test Warren was using Anglo rules to claim an Indian identity.

In an ideal world, the DNA test that showed Warren’s Indian ancestry might have satisfied non-Indians but it didn’t. The test showed she is about 1 / 1024 Indian. In other words, speaking very approximately her DNA is about what it would be if she had a 10th great grandparent who was Indian.

Except it doesn’t work that way. The science isn’t that exact. One of the problems (there are others) is that DNA gets shuffled. Percentages are an average. No one gets an exactly equal amount of DNA from every ancestor in a particular generation. After about 5 generations the DNA tends to wash out. In other words, there is no way to know whether Warren’s 1 / 1024 is luck of the draw from a 2nd great grandparent, or a miraculous survival from 10 generations ago, or even a false positive.

The Cherokee Tribe presents another wrinkle to the problem. Almost every Cherokee I know, including some close relatives, appears to be very Anglo judging only by physical appearance. One reason for that is membership in the tribe depends only on having an ancestor who appears on the 1906 Dawes Roll, a citizenship roll prepared by the Federal government. Neither biology nor cultural plays any role here. If Warren were to discover an ancestor on the Dawes Roll, the political debate would be resolved immediately.

Over and above these problems, there is another. Not all Indians are critical of Warren’s claim of Cherokee ancestry. There are competing schools of thought. One is that Anglo America can never be secure in their conquest until they have entirely exterminated or assimilated all Indians.

The other school of thought is that Indians gain increased security for the future by having White allies. The Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation in Oklahoma in reported to have said in 2012 that he wished “every congressman and senator in the U.S. had a kinship or felt a kinship to the Cherokee Nation.”

Elizabeth Warren’s case interests me because in my father’s family we have some contested Indian ancestry, although the details play out differently than Warren’s. For myself, I find the problem of Indian ancestry to be a reason to ask questions, to learn and grow, and not so much a reason to dig in. If Warren weren’t so busy with other things, that would be my advice to her.

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Scotland’s regional DNA

Scotland’s regional DNA

by Justin Durand

I’m still getting used to the new-ish research that shows ancient European populations were largely replaced by later invasions, but the most recent invasions (like the Anglo-Saxons in England) didn’t really replace the local population like we always thought they did. It takes a degree of mental agility to keep up.

Now there’s some DNA news to comfort my conservative soul. “Experts have constructed Scotland’s first comprehensive genetic map, which reveals that the country is divided into six main clusters of genetically similar individuals: the Borders, the south-west, the north-east, the Hebrides, Orkney and Shetland.

“These groupings are in similar locations to early medieval kingdoms such as Strathclyde in the south-west, Pictland in the north-east, and Gododdin in the south-east. The study also discovered that some of the founders of Iceland may have originated from north-west Scotland and Ireland and that the Isle of Man is genetically predominantly Scottish.”

You can read the full article at Medievalists.net, or take a look at the underlying study at PNAS. Either way, the part that amazes and pleases me is not just the evidence of regional continuity but the fact that the evidence comes from DNA.

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DNA Ethnicity, Problems

DNA Ethnicity, Problems

by Justin Durand

Whatever the definition of “ethnicity”, it does not fit comfortably into any of the present or past political boundaries of modern countries. 

Here is some food for thought.

Updated to add link.

Race vs Ethnicity

Race vs Ethnicity

by Justin Durand

Masaman asks, “What’s the difference between the terms race, ethnicity, culture, ancestry, heritage, nationality and other terms that seem like they all should more or less be discussing the same thing?”

What’s the Difference between Race and Ethnicity?

I’ve written about this before, including:

I come back to this subject over and over because it’s often a stumbling block for genealogists. Someone who doesn’t understand the differences will end up making mistakes when they interpret DNA results, and — very often — become confused about whether their own identity.

I’m going to keep posting and posting and posting.