this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Quite a few Americans have the whole "Indian Princess Ancestor" mythology going on. Always a princess, BTW.
The #1 thing you learn by watching Antiques Roadshow is that most family stories are nonsense.
Can confirm, my mom gave me that story when I was a kid.
Yes I don't understand the princess thing... Are they subconsciously copying Pocahontas life? Pocahontas was Powhatan not even Cherokee 😭
The kicker is, the folks claiming it don't even know. Just "Indian princess".
Yeah ironically there's a huge lack of knowledge about Native people in America. The amount of people who aren't aware that "Latino" isn't a race, us Latino people look a certain way because we're mostly Native American. But for some reason white Americans don't make the connection?
As a resident of the Pacific Northwest, there are so many Native names on everything, but the tribes themselves are unknown.
Example - Multnomah County:
The Multnomah were a division of the Chinook people, but I'd wager most folks aren't even aware that Multnomah were a people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multnomah_people
"In 1830, a disease generally thought to have been malaria devastated the Multnomah villages.[2] Within five years, the village of Cathlapotle was abandoned and was briefly inhabited by the Cowlitz tribe. The Multnomah people had nearly been wiped out by the year 1834 due to malaria and smallpox outbreaks. With only a few Multnomah left by the year 1910, the remaining people were transferred to the Grand Ronde Community which is also located in the Northwest of Oregon.[3]"
In school, even in 100 level US history at Uni, the “beginning of America” is like:
First it was a huge swath of land with a shit load of Indians on it. They lived in teepees, wore feathers on their heads, and used every part of the animals they hunted! Europeans came over, and put a swift end to that. In the 80s and early 90s at least, it was still presented as though they were the adversary somehow, and whites were only trying to “civilize” them. And we were all just like, oh ok.
Sometimes we would learn a little bit about the specific tribe(s) that the region we were in lived before we shuffled them off, but even then it was really reductive and not at all thorough.