He is now denying the validity of dna tests. I don’t want to say the past 35 years of having him treat me worse than he treats his sister had anything to do with his assumptions of my dna, but he was upset to learn that I am more Irish than him. I wonder what he thought of my mother before these results…

  • @LesserAbe
    link
    347 months ago

    I was also told our family was part Cherokee. It’s apparently a super common claim

    • @thesporkeffect
      link
      147 months ago

      I’m struggling to process that this is so common… Also had this in my family growing up

      • IninewCrow
        link
        fedilink
        English
        387 months ago

        I’m up in northern Ontario in Canada and I had a French Canadian neighbor who loved watching John Wayne movies. He often told me that he had Cherokee ancestry too.

        I told him a hundred times that this wasn’t Cherokee territory because I was full blooded Ojibwe Cree from this area and we had never heard of Cherokee. I kept telling him that he was probably part Ojibwe or Algonquin which is who the French mixed with in our area … but he really wanted to be a John Wayne movie Indian.

      • @PriorityMotif
        link
        6
        edit-2
        7 months ago

        Mixed race / olive skinned people trying to find something more acceptable in order to avoid being outcast. Also, edgelords.

    • @njm1314
      link
      97 months ago

      You hear it so much that frankly when I hear it I assume they’re lying. Like it’s become that stereotype.

    • @Passerby6497
      link
      English
      77 months ago

      My mother always claimed that some amount of greats-grandmother was a Cherokee princess, but I’ve always thought it was bunk.

      • @TexasDrunk
        link
        47 months ago

        Definitely bunk because there were no Cherokee princesses. Could still have some sort of Native American ancestry but that whole Cherokee Princess thing was so overused at one point that it became a trope.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      16 months ago

      It’s unstated racism.

      If someone in your past could get a good tan, it was common to say that they were part “< insert native american tribe from your area>” because you definitely didn’t want to be perceived as part black.

      Look up the “one-drop rule”.

      • @LesserAbe
        link
        26 months ago

        I’m sure that was a factor in many of these instances. That said in our family my impression was it was more of a “here’s something special about us” type thing, like there’s nothing otherwise noteworthy.