I really wanted to find this gif but I couldn’t
I had lib friends that would do this native American thing. Their parents would lie or maybe have been lied to and say they had a lot of Cherokee in them. So these libs will make it part of their identity until the 23 and me results come in and they realize they’re not that native after all. They take these identities on and off like they were fucking hats. Like, if a full blooded native American came up to me, said he was my dad, gave me all the documents to prove it, and it turned out I was over half Cherokee it wouldn’t make me native American, that’s just not my lived experience. If you think DNA factors into it you may as well break out the calipers and starting measuring your skull to see of you’re allowed to celebrate Kwanzaa.
Unfortunately many native tribes have been pulled into the blood quantum bs too, it’s not just settlers. One of my closest friends grew up on the res, speaks her tribes language , and looks native and even holds tribal membership, but because her dad was white, she was heavily ostracized.
On the opposite side of the spectrum, my half brothers are 1/4 native alaskan, from their dad, but they get treated like family by all the full blooded members of their tribe, even though they’re white as hell, and live in a white city multiple states away. They get free healthcare for life, and when their grandparents and dad die, they’ll get payments for the rest of their lives from the state of Alaska.
I kinda went off topic here, but I hate discussions of blood quantum entirely. Like you say, indigenieity (indigenous-ness? Idk…) is cultural more than anything. Some cultures have integrated the racism of the settlers into their culture though, and it only hurts themselves.
A lot of white people are actually that stupid, because especially Southerners spent years starting in the 19th century claiming they had “Cherokee royalty” in their ancestry. It was some weird shit where they wanted to claim a genealogical connection to the land, and they figured that chiefly/noble/royal blood would sort of cancel out the inherent inferiority of its non-whiteness. A strange artifact of the times, when people still took royal bloodlines so seriously I guess it could overpower their racist little minds?
So tons of white people have had their grandparents spouting off stupid shit their grandparents told them
My understanding is that a lot of the “Cherokee blood” mythical ancestors for us whites were actually black, and for whatever racist reason it was more acceptable to say you had a Cherokee ancestor than a black one.
I think it was because there were some Cherokee slave owners, historically
I think also that being white in America you kindnof have no culture, which is depressing, so white people are constantly trying to find some excuse to have anything more going on with them and their bloodline than just “assorted crackers”.
