this post was submitted on 29 May 2026
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Why so many white Americans claim to be native? (lemmy.zip)
submitted 1 day ago by choihanna@lemmy.zip to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml
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For some reason when I'm talking to an American from the North East and the fact that I'm mixed comes up they always say they aren't white they're actually native because his grandpa once mentioned something about a Cherokee ancestor.

It's always Cherokee, no other tribe but that one. And it's always the whitest looking person ever, straight up 6ft tall blue eyed and blond guy.

I get it, I'm mostly white too, Spanish and Slavic. But even tho I'm not mostly native American I still look native enough that people think I'm Asian.

But when your ancestry has been so diluted over the generations... You're not native. It's not just that you don't look native, it's also that you don't even participate in the culture.

Dude you're just a farm boy from Philadelphia you're probably more Amish than Cherokee, if that supposed ancestor is even real at all and not just some random claim by some of your ancestors to have a "right over these lands".

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[โ€“] daannii@lemmy.world 12 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) (2 children)

Pretty sure it's White guilt.

My family always said we had like a great great grandmother who my mom remembers who was 100% Blackfoot native.

Im legit the 2nd lightest shade of white for makeup.

Like I have a big patch of vitiligo on my abdomen and it's barely visible.

I have green eyes and was blonde until I got older.

Yet supposedly I'm like 1/16 native.Now I realize physical traits like skin eye and hair color are only a small part of genetics. But my looks don't offer any support for any native limeage.

So I do a DNA test. Not for that reason but just general curiosity.

Apparently I am 1% northern native American.

One. Percent.

That means it's a straight up lie that I have a close maternal ancestors who was native.

Every now and then someone in the family mentions this mysterious native great grandmother. I don't argue. I don't say shit. But science says no way.

I'm mostly English with some Irish, Welsh, Scottish and German.

All the basic white peoples mixed in.

[โ€“] choihanna@lemmy.zip 1 points 1 day ago

Your family could embrace some Celtic heritage then ๐Ÿ˜‚

It's always funny to me when someone mentions to me that they're not white because they're actually that random 5% that showed up in their DNA test.

Maybe us Southern Europeans are just used to have random percentages of DNA that we don't consider our identity.

Through my Bulgarian side of the family I'm 13% Central Asian.

So yeah I'm not going to claim some Turkic ancestry from the 7th century expansion.

To me this just means that Americans are barely mixed despite being a country of immigrants, even if legal segregation doesn't happen anymore Americans of different races don't date outside their racial group.

If Americans were actually melting pot they wouldn't pay that much attention to small percentages of random ethnicities.

[โ€“] evasive_chimpanzee@lemmy.world 0 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Not that I think you are wrong, but DNA tests dont necessarily paint the whole picture the way they companies selling them would like you to believe.

They've gotten better over time, but unless you have a bunch of samples you know for a fact are 100% Blackfoot (which already inherently doesnt make sense because the Blackfoot are a confederacy of different peoples), you have to just do your best to reconstruct what you consider to be "Blackfoot DNA". People groups are also never static the way racists think they are.

In your case, for all you know, you could have had a few different Blackfoot ancestors who had offspring with French traders in the 1700s, or an English frontiersman in the 1800s. The offspring could have just been born and raised in the tribe and considered 100% part of the tribe, even if it turns out their DNA was 25% "Blackfoot".

[โ€“] daannii@lemmy.world 1 points 14 hours ago* (last edited 14 hours ago)

That's fair. I am aware that there is lack of a genome for a diverse group of people like the Blackfoot to compare my results with.

I'm just very suspicious of a white family claiming native ancestry.

For Xmas I got my grandfather's ancestry done. On my mother's side. The side claiming the native.

Now I do know for a fact that family members did geneology tracing many years ago and it was determined that line was German.

Like they have documents and stuff. Was a group of family members who did the research. (Funny thing is they first thought we were dutch because the origin country was Deutschland.)

Anywho. My grandfather's report said he was only like 7% German. And mostly from Cambria (English/Welsh area).

It did make me a little suspicious of the accuracy since this German ancestry was verified independently.

I went through a different company for his compared to mine. You can import the DNA from one test to another company and they will run it through their system. For a fee.

Probably won't be doing that. But did consider it.