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Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsI bet I know why Warren claimed Native American heritage.
Because she was proud of it -- like most people I know, including my own children, who have even a small amount of Native American "blood." She wasn't trying to get some special privilege -- just acknowledging the complexity of her background, as she understood it.
And when I mention my own background, I don't just say Irish-American, because that's not precisely true. We have a couple Brits in the family tree, and it doesn't seem right to leave them out.
When it comes down to it, most people who have been in the U.S. for generations have multiple cultures and even races in their family trees. And Warren, like millions of others, is proud of that.
AverageJoe90
(10,745 posts)My maternal grandfather grew up in S.D. not far from one of the Sioux reservations. I do occasionally wonder if I may have a little Native in me......=)
Scootaloo
(25,699 posts)There's of course the "Generic West European" blend - France and those Islands - but also claims of Native American (Choctaw) on my dad's side which no one's been really able to back up. Also, there's my maternal great-grandmother, and the one picture of her I've seen definitely looks as if there may be some African heritage as well (hard to tell with a painted tinplate, though). Through on the fact that oftentimes in the south, "Indian blood" was either an outright lie, or was a mask for having African heritage (a lot of those "Cherokee Princesses" were probably more Mandingo than Tsalagi).
So I don't know what's going on back in my family tree. Record-keeping was terribly spotty at best, most of the older generations of my family are deceased, and the handful that are left are on the other side of the continent. I self-identify as "white," but plenty of people have thought I was "Mexican" before (though with the perpetual cloud cover of Puget Sound, that hasn't happened in a few years...) , I have tooth structure that is apparently most common among East Asians and Native Americans (but not necessarily exclusive) and... well, yeah. After years of trying to puzzle it all out, I've kind of accepted that whatever's going on in my ancestry, here I am.
Still, I think that I've learned an awful lot, even if I haven't been able to "tag" my own background. If it weren't for my dad telling me "you know, you're part Choctaw" I'd have probably never gotten interested in America's racial history and currents; hell, I might still be just another white dude with a chip on my shoulder like I was brought up to be.
bigtree
(85,915 posts)My own family either downplayed the clear and obvious lineage. or made self-deprecating jokes about it. I understood from my father that it was a disadvantage, socially, to be known as an 'Indian' in the town where he grew up. Good for her for stepping up and identifying with that part of her heritage.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)he wished he had more Indian blood, so he wouldn't have that hair!
. . . lots to be enamored of among the Native American cultures.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)Warren and genealogical groups have not been able to provide documentation of her heritage. Warren says knowledge of her heritage was passed down to her through "family lore."
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/ticket/elizabeth-warren-admits-identifying-herself-native-american-employers-150158503.html
i think there's a hell of a lot more people claiming NA heritage than actually have it.
bigtree
(85,915 posts). . . maybe under-reported. Lots of blending of cultures over the ages in the U.S..
My own family likely grew out of the push which found runaway slaves and Native Americans abandoned and chased away after they helped build the railroads, pushed together in the thick woods in the hills of North Carolina. Those tribes were accepting of outsiders, as they were fleeing a common enemy for a time, and adopted many non-Indians into their tribes. My grandmother was clearly Native American in appearance; future generations, less so.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)in those days.
My husband doesn't have any documentation personally, but his cousin collected enough information on a common ancestor that the cousin's family was able to prove a tribal connection.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)population was NA, and the percentage was lower in the east (New england was pretty much NA-free after king philip's war 1676).
Even if every NA coupled with a non-NA person, the numbers don't work.
As for the PNW:
After European explorers reached the West Coast in the 1770s, smallpox rapidly killed at least 30% of Northwest Coast Native Americans. For the next 80 to 100 years, smallpox and other diseases devastated native populations in the region.[54] Puget Sound area populations, once estimated as high as 37,000 people, were reduced to only 9,000 survivors by the time settlers arrived en masse in the mid-19th century.[55]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_Americans_in_the_United_States#Impact_on_native_populations
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)We haven't always lived in the PNW. The areas my husband's family lived in were quite remote, and there were a lot more white men around than white women.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)ancestry don't have any. As has been demonstrated on some of those genealogy shows, where folks come in talking about their half-Indian g-grandma & the dna shows they are whitey from whitesville.
warren claimed her dad's family was upset because of her mom's indian ancestry, yet she can't prove any indian ancestry. smells to me.
BlueToTheBone
(3,747 posts)was a Cherokee woman who was only called Sarah and Sally. I say matriarch because when her husband arrived in the US, he arrived alone and either stole her (the family lore) or she came willingly. The picture of her was a very grim woman. But prove her? No way.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)they might not be 100% white?
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)settled on/stole indian land, killed indians, or helped move them to reservations than had ancestors who intermarried with them.
but even the "family lore" of a single indian ancestor is enough to make people claim indianness for themselves these days (albeit that within living memory they wouldn't have claimed it on a bet).
i think it's an interesting psycho-social phenomenon.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)What happened in America was a continuation of the same kinds of battles that had been going on in Europe for centuries. For example, Ireland was overrun by people from Scandinavia, England, Scotland, and Spain.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)to have killed indians than had sex with them.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)are not 100% pure white, but include people of other races among their ancestors.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)if you're talking about white americans, the majority of their ancestors arrived in the us after 1800, from europe. not much time for race-mixing, and the period of greatest resistance to race-mixing, and if were there it would be documented in public records.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)of people, in the face of a bigoted culture, to be honest about the presence of non-white and mixed race family members.
bhikkhu
(10,708 posts)I guess I haven't seen statistics on it, but somehow I doubt it. As far as bulk population numbers, the figure might have been 20 million NA before Columbus. A series of disease epidemics wiped out about 95%, but that was over a 300 year period, and the lifespans of settlers was pretty short as well; sex has always been how people survived. Mitochondrial DNA evidence says that intermarriage was common, with the most common pairing being caucasian male with NA female.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)Last edited Sat Jun 2, 2012, 04:45 AM - Edit history (2)
W. Indies during the Pequot War (1638) in the Mass. Bay. Did the colonists also intermarry with 700-1000 Indians during this period? I don't find that in accounts of the Ma. Bay colony.
Son of the chief the Pilgrims celebrated the first thanksgiving with was beheaded, drawn & quartered, & his head stuck on a pole for 20 years. That was the sexy love the pilgrims had for indians.
The biggest number of US wars were indian wars.
More than half of NA died from imported diseases before there was significant colonization in the US. When the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, the tribes there had already been decimated.
There were about 600K indians in the us in 1800 and about 250K in 1890 (not counting AK). Today NA (which includes some very, very white NA) are under 2% of the population.
Link me to this mitochondrial evidence.
I find, for example:
We have previously shown evidence of strong sex-biased genetic blending in the founding and ongoing history of the Brazilian population, with the African and Amerindian contribution being highest from maternal lineages (as measured by mitochondrial DNA) and the European contribution foremost from paternal lineages... We thus wondered if the same could be observed in American Caucasians. To answer that question, we retrieved 1387 hypervariable I Caucasian mitochondrial DNA sequences from the FBI population database and established their haplogroups and continental geographical sources.
In sharp contrast with the situation of the Caucasian population of Latin American countries, only 3.1% of the American Caucasian sequences had African and/or Amerindian origin.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17573655
That's 3.1% combined, not 3.1% each.
EFerrari
(163,986 posts)pnwmom
(108,925 posts)I'm referring to the deaths that were deliberately caused. Many of the deaths among Native people in America were caused by the diseases that white people brought with them from Europe that, for the most part, weren't spread deliberately.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Native_American_disease_and_epidemics
Origins of Native American Disease
An ill Native American in the 1800's being cared for by a medicine man.
Native Americans have been affected by disease and health concerns throughout their history, but a major turning point in Native American disease presence was with the arrival of Europeans. This ushered in what is termed the Columbian Exchange. During this period European settlers brought many different technologies and lifestyles with them, but one of the most harmful effects of this exchange was the arrival and spread of disease. Native Americans, due to the lack of prior contact with Europeans, had not previously been exposed to the diseases that were prevalent on the distant continent. Therefore they had not built up internal immunities to the diseases or formed any medicines to combat them. Europeans came into the New World bearing various diseases. Those infected with diseases either possessed them in a dormant state or were not quarantined in such a way that distanced them enough from Native Americans to not spread the diseases, allowing diseases to spread into epidemics.[1]
The diseases brought by Europeans are not easily tracked, because there were numerous outbreaks and all were not equally recorded. The most notable disease brought by Europeans was the destructive smallpox disease. Smallpox was lethal to many Native Americans, bringing sweeping epidemics and affecting the same tribes repeatedly. Within 1837 to 1870, at least four different epidemics struck the Plains tribes. Numerous other diseases were brought to Native American tribes, including measles, scarlet fever, typhoid, typhus, influenza, whooping cough, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, chicken pox, and venereal diseases.[2] Each of these diseases brought destruction through sweeping epidemics, involving illness and extensive death. Many Native American tribes experienced extensive depopulation, averaging 2550 percent of tribal life lost due to disease. Additionally, singular tribes also neared extinction after facing severely destructive spread of disease.[2] The significant toll that this took on Native populations is expounded upon in the Population history of American indigenous peoples.
Certain cultural and biological traits made Native Americans more susceptible to these diseases. Emphasis placed on visiting the sick led to the spread of disease through consistent contact.[3] Smallpox specifically led indirectly to higher rates of suicide. Many Native American tribes prided themselves in their appearance, and the resulting skin disfigurement of smallpox deeply affected them psychologically. Unable to cope with this psychological development, tribe members were said to have committed suicide.[4]
hfojvt
(37,573 posts)Joseph Loomis was born about 1590. He had 8 children, 88 grandchildren, 405 great-grandchildren, 1405 great-great grandchildren, 3768 in the next generation, 8284 in the next, 14,439 in the next and 17,651 in the next.
Those are just the ones I knew about say a year ago (I have added people since (seemingly only 659))
For the next generation I have only 12,270 and for the next 5,525. It's harder for me to track descendants after the family historys, which were written in the 1880s.
But if you look at the 17,651 people in my great-great-grandfather's generation, and then look at one of my great-great-great grandparents, he had 13 children, 72 grandchildren, 214 great-grandchildren, 347 great-great grandchildren, and 483 in my generation. So taking those 17,651 and the 6300 marriages, if each couple did what my ancestor did that would be 3,042,900 descendants in my nieces generation.
A very much minimum estimate. Which the same numbers could be true if Joseph had had a native American spouse.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)chance of mating with NA. That's just mathematically. Socially, NA are an increasingly reviled and segregated fraction of the population.
Loomis is a New England name. NA were virtually exterminated in NE before 1700.
rox63
(9,464 posts)My grandmother and great-aunt told me had Native American in our background. But back in the 1800's, it was rarely documented. So I've never been able to pin down which ancestor was Native American. I have an idea it may have been one of my great-great grandmothers. But I have no proof.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)rox63
(9,464 posts)My ancestors came down to New England from Quebec after the person I think was Native was born.
Edit to add: We think she was Abenaki. There are other Abenaki in New England with the same last name as many of my ancestors. But the connections with them go back to the 1700's in rural Quebec.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)to document, just that it's not quite as difficult as made out.
rox63
(9,464 posts)Nothing there indicating Native heritage. Nothing except family stories and old B&W pics of ancestors that look sort of Native.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)Few documents exist prior to 1750 which are of any assistance in genealogy research - the use of names is the problem here, not the records themselves.
Scattered documents exist between 1750 and 1825 which are helpful - this is where we need to concentrate our efforts.
From 1825 to present, enough documents exist to piece together many Abenaki families.
Canadian documents are more likely to list "indian", a tribal affiliation, or "sauvage" after a persons name than New England documents.
rox63
(9,464 posts)An excerpt below:
While Native People where adapting to the demands of European culture, name changes were common. As town clerks began recording vital statistics for their communities, spelling and pronunciation created problems. Some are reasonably easy to spot, as they are just phonetic spellings or Anglicized versions of a name. Some are not so obvious, unless you are familiar with common Wabanaki names. The Wabanaki pronounce Marie as Mali, so you can be reasonable certain that any Native women from this neck of the woods with the name Molly will be found as Marie in Catholic records.
Examples
Groundin becomes Grounder
Dostie becomes Dusty or Dustin
Thomas is often Tomer or Tomah
Joseph is often Susep
Alice is often Tellis
Jacques/Jack is often Sac
Pierre Paul was Anglicized to Pierpole
Marie Agatha was Anglicized to Mollyockett
John Baptist was Anglicized to Sabattus
The Abenaki name Wionitamente is shorten to Tahamont and sometimes anglicized to Thompson
Did you notice the number of French names in the examples? Yes, many Abenaki were baptized in the Catholic Religion and received French baptismal names. These names were often used in documents and other formal occasions. However, a person may have had a native name and/or a nickname that they were known by to friends and family and this common name could change several times during the person's lifetime.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)to determine from census data. Women, especially, keep changing their names as one husband after another dies in an accident. (The women die in childbirth, but the man's name doesn't change.) And spellings are inconsistent. And people don't always tell the government more than they want them to know -- having an Indian relative wasn't something to be especially proud of back then.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)pnwmom
(108,925 posts)HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)NA populations. In the 1800s, contrary to the poster's claim. It's not that obscure or difficult as everyone's making out.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)inconsistencies, omissions, misspellings, and other problems to puzzle over. My father did it for years, and every time he reached a confusing fork in the road, and had to make a decision, I knew that everything after that might actually be wrong.
Even recently, when I signed up for Ancestry.com, the first thing I noticed was they had my father-in-law's father wrong -- a completely different man in another state! And there was nowhere on the site that I could find to document the error. If some other family member were to start there, or from whatever source it originally came from, everything after that point would be completely wrong.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)ancestor they can't document.
as stated before, this plethora of NA ancestors is mathematically impossible.
- Most white people are descendants of folks who immigrated after 1800.
- NA were an outcaste class until fairly recently; race-mixing was the exception, not the rule.
- Ratio of NA to whites after the initial colonization period was highly discrepant (3:100 in 1800).
and finally, in what sense does having an NA ancestor 5 or 6 or 7 or 8 or 9 or 10 generations back make one NA anyway?
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)Do you have a link for that? The people responding to this thread are a self-selected group, many of whom responded precisely because they have heard about an Indian branch somewhere in their family tree -- they're not representative of DU as a whole.
Having a Native American ancestor doesn't "make" a person Native American . . . but it does provide a link to a culture that many people admire. What is your problem with that?
RockaFowler
(7,429 posts)A lot of this was information passed down from generation to generation. Hi Great-Grandmother on his Mother's side was 1/2 Cherokee. But because we don't have the information from his Grandmother (or his Mother for that matter) he has no way of proving it. Just the word of his Grandmother when she would tell stories to him passed down from her Mother.
Heck I have the most convoluted backgrounds myself:
I'm an Irish-English-Ukranian-French-Morroccan-Italian-Egyptian-Jew. I have a constant war going on within myself!
TBMASE
(769 posts)would you make the claim to a prospective employer?
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)and indicated that he had a small fraction of Native American blood. We talked about it, and it seemed right. As far as he knew, he wasn't "pure" anything -- so why shouldn't he acknowledge that? And he thought it was interesting, and was proud of it.
He knew that without any official tribal connection (and there was no question on the form about that), that he wouldn't benefit from any claims of being N.A.
Major Hogwash
(17,656 posts)So a lot of Southerners have trouble tracing their ancestry, as well.
A lot of Blacks also have trouble tracing their ancestry because they weren't even considered human beings by the census takers before the Civil War.
So, no official records exist for many of them before the 1860s.
Native American Indians have the same problem with no existing records because they weren't considered human beings for many years after the Civil War.
The rightwing smear machine is trying to do to Elizabeth Warren what they tried to do to Ward Churchill in 2005.
If Scott Brown wants to run on this issue, he's dead meat.
Warren is about 1000 times smarter than Brown.
That's why she isn't answering all of those questions all at one time.
She is dragging it out on purpose.
She wants people to see what a prejudiced asshole Brown is by him trying to make an issue out of this during the campaign.
His record in the Senate is abysmal.
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)and left out others who were living in other states. But you're not able to officially claim Cherokee lineage unless your ancestor is on the Dawson rolls.
Major Hogwash
(17,656 posts)I didn't know the Dawson rolls were the ultimate deciding factor to make it official.
I don't know enough about the Dawson rolls to comment on them.
cherokeeprogressive
(24,853 posts)Mister Ed
(5,895 posts)I might not have understood exactly how she felt until this year. An elderly relative who's gotten into genealogical research recently sent details of our lineage tracing back to a Shawnee woman whose name, in English at least, was Mary Sunfish Cornstalk. She lived in the mid-1700s, and served as a courier and translator between her people and the white regiment at the local garrison. She married one of the officers at the garrison, and they had two children.
I can't explain why I'm so tickled to learn that I have this droplet of Shawnee blood mixed in with all that European blood in my veins, but, for some reason, I am. If I had learned when I was younger, I surely would have mentioned it on occasion.
So now, if someone finds a genealogist who disputes the findings of my great-auntie's genealogist, will that make me unfit for public office?
pnwmom
(108,925 posts)Quantess
(27,630 posts)The earth would still be in excellent condition if all of us were Native Americans.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)racial or ethnic group living a traditional life.
Quantess
(27,630 posts)But the Native American spiritual beliefs are very nature loving. I say this as an outsider. Some cultures and religions are more respectful of nature than others. For example, the scandinavians had pagan nature worshipping beliefs, before Christianity was imposed upon them. Christianity is not an especially earth-friendly religion, from my understanding.
flyingfysh
(1,990 posts)The name Oklahoma comes from the Choctaw words for "red people".
I was born just across the border from Oklahoma (in Arkansas), and recently found out that my grandmother was Choctaw.
HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)Last edited Fri Jun 1, 2012, 10:45 PM - Edit history (3)
for their black ancestors?
OK has been majority white since before 1890. Whites were 80% of the population of Oklahoma in 1907. Blacks were 12%. Indians were 9%. So I think it's relatively easy to be from OK and not have Indian ancestry.
p. 8
http://www2.census.gov/prod2/decennial/documents/1907pop_OK-IndianTerritory.pdf
There are only 13 states today where the NA population is over 1%. Of those, there is only one (AK) where it's over 10%, and only 6 where it's over 5%, all except AK because of the presence of large reservations that were big enough and isolated enough and seemingly "worthless" enough to survive the land grabbers (OK, AZ, NM, AK, SD, MT).
BrendaBrick
(1,296 posts)<snip>
What Gates is finding and revealing in his work in genealogy -- the subject of his talk in Toledo -- could narrow the chasm that separates the races.
In the 10-part series, Finding Your Roots with Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard's Alphonse Fletcher University Professor presents notable Americans with details about their ancestry. The interest in ancestry has drawn millions of viewers, Gates said.
<snip>
The DNA testing companies Gates uses are 23andMe.com and Family Tree DNA. He is finding that the genetic background of an American citizen hardly remains within the confines of such overly simplistic racial descriptions as black and white.
"The diversity of America is reflected in our trees and in our genes. You should have your DNA done. Everyone should have their family tree done first," he said.
Source: http://www.toledoblade.com/Books/2012/04/29/Gates-studies-find-genealogical-patchwork-in-Americans-past-1.html
Maybe DNA testing might be one way to go...
athenasatanjesus
(859 posts)Both my parents said they had Native American blood because of a great grandparent,tho it doesn't show in either of them.
limpyhobbler
(8,244 posts)She's our liberal progressive hero and we all love her. This changes nothing.