Raise your hand if you’re reading this and were told you had Native American ancestry at some point in your life.
An undefinable and hazy recollection, passed down from generation to generation.
A persistent, unprovable assertion…no names, tribes or customs.
Hand raised.
This claim was made so boldly that I went to elementary school envisioning an invisible line down the middle of my body: on the right was some amalgam of Northern European DNA, on the other: Native.
It was neat like that. A half and half.
Becoming a Record Seeker
But the lack of evidence coupled with the dogged belief that we were Native took me from claiming Creek to unpacking the whole human lot of us to get a closer look.
The conceit that we were Native was a convenient narrative for much of my life until I started taking my family history more seriously.
I strive to be some sort of memory keeper in my family. This has turned me into an amateur genealogist. I like the act of investigation, searching census and naturalization data, piecing together who was kin and who got divorced and remarried. Where they lived and left.
Errant claims still trickled in over the years. I’d forget and a phone call would fish out a claim, this time rooted in a weird physiognomy: high cheekbones and shovel-shaped incisors meant something, no?
Another: a note from a loosely connected relative on a genealogy website – a grandmother claims they’re Native, might there be any truth to this?
Why White Americans Claim Indigeneity
What is it that draws white Americans to commit acts of theft against cultures they know nothing about?
I suppose it’s an ache for exceptionalism. Sometimes it’s a grift and a money grab.
Where there is no culture, one must be made up or latched onto. White culture, that is the dominant culture and like the air that we breathe, lacks a sort of texture to cling to. It is an influence. It damns and rules us, but it has no definable characteristics. And it is not contained by the color of our skin. It confounds by:
- Languages and names being bastardized and Anglicized fresh off the boat.
- Holidays woven into the “mainstream”. Customs broken down into consumable knick-knacks.
- General intolerance for behavior that deviates from the WASPY norms (expecting perfection, intolerance for conflict, desire for constant quiet)
People across the world scratch their heads over all this American ancestry-talk. They don’t get our fascination. Why do you care who your ancestors are? Perhaps for many of them it’s a foregone conclusion. They are from Brazil and their parents and grandparents and so forth are from there too. Their kids will go on to become grandparents, cousins, and uncles from Brazil. It is a known web. A climbable family tree.
For many in the US, we’re pulling at threads in the dark and creating fairytales.
This isn’t to excuse appropriation, but rather to understand it. When a dominant culture takes over it extinguishes nuance, hues of the same scale, language, and stories. And we are creatures that want to belong, so we subsume our particulars for a broader stroke to be understood amongst many, even if we only want to be loved by a few.
The Guion Miller Roll
The sad and ironic thing about this claim in my family is that eight of my ancestors applied for financial compensation from the federal government through what is known as the Guion Miller Roll, which contains over 45,000 applications representing roughly 90,000 to 125,000 individuals.
The Rolls were an application for financial compensation to verified Eastern Cherokee tribal members. My family members applied and all were denied. Those family members were unable to name a single tribal member in the family. I can only conclude then that their application was, like other white families in these territories, a craven attempt to steal, yet again, unearned and undeserved resources from Native people.
It wasn’t enough that they lived in Indian Territory uninvited, on a wedge of terrible land given to tribes forcibly removed from their homelands. It wasn’t enough that that piece of land was not chosen by those tribes, and that the land carried none of their familial memories and traditions. No, these people, my ancestors, needed to take it a step further and pretend to be Indians for financial gain.
These land and financial claims, combined with a yearning for a “culture” are the reasons for the explosion in Native cultural appropriation and the rise of the Pretendian. I can’t speak on the behalf of Native people (and they aren’t a monolith even if I could), but I can say that it’s embarrassing the amount of academics, artists, politicians, poets claiming indigeneity only to later be revealed as white people faking it.
It feels generational. The Boomers and GenXers of the world clung to these myths, but perhaps the younger generations can put a stop to this tomfoolery. Perhaps we can point to the records and say, “enough is enough.” Maybe, eventually, identity markers will be used less and less as a tool for people to weaponize for their own and not the common good.
Constructing Truer Stories
There are so many things I don’t know about my family. I still don’t know my third great-grandparent’s origins. Being Jewish, they left a lot. I don’t know how militant my Northern Irish ancestors were in the Troubles. I don’t know just how hard it was for my grandfather, hunting his own food during the Great Depression. I don’t know what it was like when my great Uncle lost his sister to murder.
But what I and many of us do with that unknowing is important. I don’t try to make stuff up anymore. I don’t try to make them out to be better people, or more worldly than they were. There are no Indian Princesses, there are no landed and gentried Treibers. Most likely my ancestors were just like me: a worker, sometimes able to enjoy creature comforts. There was madness and car crashes and customs and name changes and abuse and creativity and wonder, but it was never Native.
To know this about my people is to keep them true. To insist on that trueness is an attempt to understand their lives and familial customs. To insist on that trueness is also to insist that no further theft should be perpetuated against Native people. We’ve done enough.
