After years of being told I was part Cherokee, someone was mad that I wasn't. - eviltoast

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…

      • IninewCrow@lemmy.ca
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        6 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@lemmy.world
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        6 months ago

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

    • njm1314@lemmy.world
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      6 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@lemmy.world
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      6 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@lemmy.world
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        6 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.

    • s_s@lemm.ee
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      5 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@lemmy.world
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        5 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.

        • s_s@lemm.ee
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          5 months ago

          That’s generally how these things are always communicated to later generations. 😂