I was at a family dinner recently and my grandparents OF COURSE brought politics up and they were talking about how us grandkids are more Native American than Elizabeth Warren, and I was like, “...I’m nearly 30 years old and have literally never heard anyone bring this up. What tribe are we from?”

Cherokee, obviously.…

My SIL attends graduate school (and received his BA) on a Oklahoma Native American scholarship and has blue eyes. His mom is also blonde with blue eyes. He’s 1/8 NA so the scholarship will end with him.

I have exactly ONE Native American foremother. Papers and all, she married into my hyperIrish Appalachian Hillfolk family by wedding the respectable preacher (the last one we ever produced!) If she was my great-great-grandgrandmother on my fathers side, I’m pretty sure we don’t count as Native American. Even though…

My family thought for generations we had German ancestry. A few years ago, my grandmother and a few of my aunts did a massive family genealogy project.

My mother is a daughter of the American Revolution. It’s a bunch of waspy white people. I never wanted to spend the money to get the certificate. But I guess it is cool to know who your ancestors were and how long they’ve been here. I think the daughter’s used to be kind of an elitist thing, now it’s just stuffy old…

I’m down here in the Choctaw Nation and there are a lot of “white skinned Indians” with verifiable proof of their bloodlines via their CDIB cards. It happens.

That’s a lot of bullshit right there. Acknowledging multiple parts of a person’s heritage is not a moral issue. Your anecdote about a custody dispute, while tragic for the woman and child, have fuck all to do with anything.

And that’s a fine attitude to have. Except for the Cherokee and Polish parts of my heritage, I assume my family is just spit-balling when they talk about where the bulk of our ancestors came from. My only point was that it’s pretty common here in Oklahoma for white people whose families have lived here since the late…

The answer to that question is multifaceted. Why the Indian princess story, why always in the distant past, why oh why? Part of it has to do with masculinist perceptions of conquered people. If you can think about a pairing of royals (to forge alliances), the sublimated or subsumed person is feminized. Why isn’t the…

This is my ancestral heritage, and yet I burn after 10 minutes in the sun.

I was always told that my dad’s family had Cherokee ancestry and it was easy to believe since all were dark, with high cheekbones and little body hair. But then a few years ago I did some genealogical research and the fact is that an Irish ancestor was conscripted by the King’s Army in the 1500s, walked away and left…

This is somewhat unrelated, but I do have documented Native American ancestry, specifically, my great grandmothers sister was listed as full blooded and lived on a reservation. But my ancestry.com DNA test shows zero Native American anything. So that DNA test that Scott Walker is so excited about is not actually the…

I agree with this. As a white person with Cherokee ancestry (1/16 to be exact, and I do have the paperwork to prove it), I’ve never felt comfortable checking the Native box on a form. My mom (who doesn’t have any native ancestry) tried to pressure me into doing it when I was applying for college, but I resisted…

I was 100% white as far as I knew until I was like 12. Like legacy member to Daughters of the Revolution white. Then I guess like all rich old white people, retirement gets super boring. My grandparents decided to get really into genealogy and it got real crazy real quick. A decade later they were leaders of a…

This article is a pretty good explanation of why so many Americans believe they are Native American, specifically Cherokee. I found it pretty interesting, because my grandfather has talked about our family having Cherokee ancestry and I always assumed it was true (not so sure now).

I feel you. I’m 1/4 Cherokee and white as the day is long and with blue eyes. My mom is 1/2 and has strawberry blonde hair and hazel eyes. ::shrugs::

I think there’s a lesson here for everyone. Unless you know...absolutely 100% for certain that you have Native American ancestors, don’t embarrass yourself by insisting you do. If if your grandma always insists that her great grandmother was a Cherokee princess, just nod and smile. She probably has no idea what she’s…

As a fellow Oklahoman (and one who grew up in a house two blocks away from where Senator Warren went to highschool), I don’t get what the issue here is. There are lots of white people here with Native American ancestry who look like Elizabeth Warren, including me and the current principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.…

🌟 Bonus star for “footstools.”

That’s the one. That’s why literally every tenured professor, as well as every student, at Harvard is a bilingual undocumented queer woman of color, and White men are only allowed on the premises as security guards and footstools.