It’s not just Canadians. Sooooooo many people south of the border tell me they had a “great grandmother who was a [pick a tribe, usually Cherokee].” Even my wife believed it because her mother swore it until she took a DNA test. Her mother still swears it after the DNA test.
lol … I’m up in northern Ontario in Canada. I’m Indigenous and I know because its my family and community that my area is completely Ojibway. Parts our area can also be known as Ojibway/Cree or Oji-Cree because we start mixing with the Cree in the north. Then down below us are the Algonquins and closer to the Great Lakes everything gets terribly mixed but there is a large majority of Ojibway throughout.
I have had several people in my area in Sudbury / Timmins / North Bay come up to me and tell me that they have Native ancestry and more than a few of them have claimed to have Cherokee, Sioux or even Mohawk ancestry, claiming that their family has always been in the north for generations. All tribes that had never been part of our part of the country. I had an old French Canadian friend who proudly told me that his grandmother was a Cherokee princess even through his French Canadian family had never come from the American midwest.
Personally I’ve given up on all this crap and just nod, don’t argue and just treat people nice and never ask them about it all again. I grew up being made to feel less than others because I was 100% Native only to end up at this point in my life where I meet lots of people with no ancestry wanting to be 10% Native.
I just… why is it almost always Cherokee? You’d think North America was 99% Cherokee before Europeans came.
Yep
Goodbye, Cherokee Princess: Extractive Settler Genealogy and the Transmission of a Toxic Trope | Harvard University Native American Program - https://hunap.harvard.edu/event/goodbye-cherokee-princess-extractive-settler-genealogy-and-transmission-toxic-trope
But why Cherokee? That just summarizes the program. I just don’t understand why it’s specifically Cherokee. You’d think the trope would just be “Native Princess” and they’d just name whatever tribe was nearby where their forebears grew up. So like you would think people who’s family lived in Arizona for a few generations would claim to be descended from a “Hopi Princess” or a “Navajo Princess.” But it’s almost always Cherokee.
Edit: This article goes into it- https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2015/10/cherokee-blood-why-do-so-many-americans-believe-they-have-cherokee-ancestry.html
Edit 2: From that article:
Recent demographic data reveals the extent to which Americans believe they’re part Cherokee. In 2000, the federal census reported that 729,533 Americans self-identified as Cherokee. By 2010, that number increased, with the Census Bureau reporting that 819,105 Americans claimed at least one Cherokee ancestor. Census data also indicates that the vast majority of people self-identifying as Cherokee—almost 70 percent of respondents—claim they are mixed-race Cherokees.
To put that in perspective, this website claims the estimated total population of Cherokee in the 19th century was 36,000. Either there was a lot of fucking after the Trail of Tears or a lot of people are wrong.
https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/e9913eb717dc4e68aebe7a7c7d3f42c3
Right, it was Slate that article was on. I remembered it as Salon. No wonder I didn’t find it.
In the Appalachians especially, it became a thing to claim native ancestry to try and hide black ancestors, both as an ancient claim to the place they’re proud to live in and, yes, as some pretty blatant racism.
Interesting. I had never heard that before.
