That is a well designed map. Kudos to the creator.

It even has a filter for language distribution over geography!

That makes me so happy and sad at the same time.

Yeah the map is shit but I appreciate someone pointing this out right now while there is a peak in awareness of the struggle of colonized people.

It's unfortunate that people only start talking about it when something like what is happening in Palestine breaks news for being so especially horrifying.

The fact is that this shit is going on right in our own back yard and has been for centuries and we should absolutely have solidarity with Palestine and their fight against the genocidal Zionist entity but we must also recognize that we have an important responsibility to fight against the bigger genocidal settler colonial entity that enables them and that is the US.

Bookmarked, this is amazing

Also, the Anasazi died out centuries before Europeans arrived.

I also don't recall there being lines

And many more tribes and communities were outright murdered by colonizers before they could even be documented. There are plenty of tribes that are just lost to time or we know nearly nothing about because they have no surviving members.

Indigenous peoples also don't necessarily view tribes, nations, etc as rigid categories where you're either one or the other, no exceptions. That in fact is the European view where you can only be part of one empire and where every empire seeks to capture as much land and resources for themselves as possible. You'll notice that the native-land.ca map has tons of overlapping territories.

It's also wildly inaccurate as it's a fictional map of an uncolonized America in 2015

It's conceivable that someone could have been accepted into a tribe and grew up believing themselves to be Native American, but the whole confirmed-descent-from-primary-villain thing really blows that hypothesis out of the water.

My family (Appalachia) swears this one or that one was full Cherokee. My dna shows mostly what you’d expect. English, Irish, and Scottish. I also have 1% Nigerian dna. I figure that’s probably it. Someone was making an excuse for being a bit dark. That doesn’t explain how everyone I know is white as snow and claiming native ancestry though.

My wife shows 3% native ancestry, so her people didn’t make it up.

A lot of dna was lost to genocide though, so some can’t be tested for.

Elizabeth Warren

Yes, everyone in my small town in north Georgia made this claim.

Hah, that's wild. My dad has an incredible amount of genealogy research (he's the kind that will go to city halls in bumfuck middle of nowhere) and the instance of Cherokee in our family traces back to late 1800s. I believe it would be my great, great, great grandmother. Her family were survivors of the 1830-1850 genocide (aka the trail of tears), and she was born a while after in Oaklahoma. Her information was recorded because she married a Christian man, under pressure from her parents according to letters found. My grandmother is a member of the tribe in Oaklahoma, for all the good that it does as she never actually did anything with them.

That is exactly what happened to me. I didn't find out until I took a 23 and me test. I didn't believe the results, took the Ancestry.com test, got the exact same results. Had some interesting conversations with family after that, but basically, no one is willing to accept it's been a lie the whole time.

So there's a lot to unpack here but I'll give it a try:

1. You could have native ancestry even if it doesn't show up in a DNA test. Consider a person with ancestry A has a kid with someone of another ancestry, whose descendants do not reproduce with another person with ancestry A. Then that ancestry would logically show up in these percentages: 100 50 25 12.5 6.25 3.125 <2 <1... But this assumes that it divides evenly, which it does not. Even if it did though, in this example that ancestry might be undetectable after about 8 generations.
2. There's a lot of "I have a native ancestor" narratives out there. Why? Claims to American legitimacy, alleviation of colonial guilt, that one guy in a feathered headdress cried about littering and I'm sad about it too, etc.
3. It doesn't matter. Ancestry is pointless. Your DNA is just a listing of the traits your body was originally constructed on. If a native couple adopt a white kid and raise them on a reservation that child has had more of the native experience than a white passing person of native ancestry raised in Boston. Even more importantly though, none of it changes the fact that colonialism was a crime, we all should have empathy for its victims, and the way forward is by treating people with respect and dignity and trying to repair the damage while preventing it from happening again.

Yes, colonizing is much, much worse than "illegal immigration," which is a term conceived by colonists.

That was one of two that jumped out as absent for me. Seminole was the other.

Why is Haida Gwaii covering half of BC when the island they're from isn't even on the map?

Looks like a fictional alternative timeline map.

If I'm not mistaken, the name too means "Ancient Enemies" in Navaho.