My father actively downplayed his 1/16th Cherokee blood quantum -- and a lot of Natives are quite vocal about hating the whole idea of blood quantum, but that's probably more than people here want to know -- and I grew up in a house in the 'burbs bought the summer I turned three with his military mortgage benefits.

In the New York and northern New Jersey suburbs 67,000 mortgages were insured by the G.I. Bill, but fewer than 100 were taken out by non-whites.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/G.I._Bill

He never said much about his Native heritage. I think he did so to be white-passing in a world where lynchings still happened.

I am actively trying to learn about the cultural heritage I was denied apparently largely due to fear of violent white supremacists, basically.

Dismissing the interest in their heritage of people like me is just more erasure of Natives and Native culture. It actively reinforces racism in subtle ways. The subtlety helps make it insidious and hard to combat, unfortunately.

Speaking as someone who is also 1/32, same as you, people like us need to stop pretending having a sliver of genetic material somehow entitles us to a "cultural heritage". 1/32 is five generations. That's three percent. For comparison, the average European-American's DNA is 3.5% African. White people are blacker than you and me are Native American.

With that in mind, tying cultural heritage to "where did my close ancestors come from" seems like a more sensible approach than genetic percentages, since that actually connects to a social context.

Having said that, cherry picking one out of thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents over the thirty-one others sounds pretty absurd. But I'm not from North America so I probably miss some social context to understand the logic behind that.

It's a combinational effect of many minor causes stacking upon one another. People wanting to feel special. The feeling modern society is destroying the world and the sense Native American culture is the opposite of that. The mild but persistent impression that white heritage isn't something to celebrate or positively self-identify with.

But I do celebrate my Finnish heritage, as well as my Irish and English ancestry.

White supremacy as the label being used by "progressives" has nothing to do with the ideology other than in sharing a name. The label is just one of the many applied to those who dare to divert from the narrative, often used in situations where the "progressive" has talked herself into a corner from where there is no getting out other than by creating a path of labels to escape on.

I think it is better to only use the term "white supremacy" when describing the former. Don't use it as a label for something you find distasteful, only use it as a term for a specific ideology. The same goes for words like "fascism", "racism", all the "-phobias" and more. Take back the language from those [1] who have used it to drive their own narrative.

[1] https://newdiscourses.com/tftw-derridean/

Heritage is actually a very common word used in modern klan and klan adjacent groups as they are very concerned with the racial purity of their lineage as well as the fact that they yearn for "the good 'ol days" of the antebellum south.

For hundreds of years, the idea of "whiteness" in America was used primarily to identify a group that for the most part had nothing exclusively in common except as that of oppressors.

Precisely. The breadth of Native American genetic and cultural diversity was every bit as large as that of Europeans, and compressing it into a single category has the same problems as compressing all the cultures constituting "white" into a single category. If your connection to your tiny fraction of native ancestry is so insubstantial you can't be more specific than "someone from north or south america", you're unfortunately just not a member of that culture.

Many white Americans are unsatisfied with not having a specific ancestral identity and hence play these games with distant ancestors.

The complaint two comments up about the "mild but persistent impression that white heritage isn't something to celebrate or positively self-identify with" is an even stronger one.

EDIT: downvote all you want, it doesn't take away the contradiction of insisting on hanging on to an identity of "whiteness" while denying the history behind it.

In the modern day, it has lost much of its explicitly racist connotations (except, obviously, when explicitly used in the original context by racists,) but just tends to mean "a person who looks white (until proven otherwise)" or "of European descent," the former of which isn't really related to culture, and the latter being so vague as to be useless as a cultural referent.

Isn't black exactly the same thing? A completely madeup racial category invented by white slavers to conveniently deny a group their humanity? And isn't it further possible that, after these racial groups were invented, actually real cultural identities began forming around them to the point where the invented categories had reified into something kinda real?

The "kinda" in that sentence is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It's a "real" social construct. It's not "real" in the sense of representing "real" human nature, or a "real" order of how things ought to be, which is how that social construct is wielded in practice.

Thinking differently -

5 generations is also (assuming childbirth at 25 and not carefully auditing for off-by-ones):

1 generation of 1:1 mix, 4 generations ago (b. 1897)

1 generation of 1:2 mix, 3 generations ago (b. 1922)

1 generation of 1:3 mix, 2 generations ago (b. 1947)

1 generation of 1:4 mix, 1 generations ago (b. 1972)

1 generation of 1:5 mix, now. (b. 1997)

In other words - 50% of your parenting influence descends from 4 generations of mixed marriages, and the entire mixed lineage begins approx ~100 years ago where it certainly would be a huge factor in daily life. It's quite possible that you may have even met the original couple or their immediate children, and very likely that you met or had extended contact with the 25% generation who in turn almost certainly was extremely impacted by the preceding 2 generations.

Pretty sure there is some cultural trace either overtly or in the form of inherited scars.

The reason many mixed don't know much about their fraction is because their ancestors were put in indian schools and married off to anglo settlers or any number of other far worse 'ethnic cleansing' atrocities. Whatever in-depth discussion remained was likely suppressed or downplayed to facilitate assimilation, leaving only hints and impressions behind in the people. At this point there is no way for them to know anything more about their past even if they wanted to.

pretending it's nothing only makes it worse and grows the divide to the past - which itself is a shift away from native views of history and connectedness to ancestors

Of course Native American isn’t a single ethnicity either, but you might be able to trace that back to say Inuit and actually have a specific culture to identify with. Where being say 1/16th black tells you little to nothing about the culture of that part of your ancestry.

That said, I don't like when people ask me where I grew up because I immediately feel judged for something I had no say in.

The only tribe I ever hear this brought up about is Cherokee lol

At something like the 1/16th level, it doesn't mean anything anyway (not even to white supremacists, but much less so as a real heritage). A heritage is the shared experiences, raising, and cultural connection, not about some miniscule bloodline/dna.

Unless we're talking about isolated inter-breeding populations, almost all people several 1/16ths of one or another ethnicity, that they have absolutely no connection with in any way (or ever cared about).

Your dismissive attitude is entirely inappropriate. I think it is commendable to be interested in learning about the parts of your family history that may have been suppressed out of racism or fear or racist retaliation.

There are many reasons why these stories aren't passd on (often is is just that younger generations don't ask enough questions) but there is no reason not to take Doreen at her word about why her didn't talk about that part of the family tree much.

There certainly is no call to belittle people's interest in their heritages and family history, especially when they could learn stories about their family history that might be lost.

I sincerely advise to to ask any older living relatives to tell you what they can about your great grandparents (and consider recording those stories). You might not care now, but those stories do disappear with time and you or future generations of your family could find them very valuable.

I think my great grandmother lived until I was somewhere in my teens. I inherited her TV when she died. I've still forgotten her name. Does it really matter? In the end we'll all be forgotten, and that is fine, because once you're dead you're gone. I wouldn't want my descendants to keep looking back, they should be looking forward.

> There are many reasons why these stories aren't passd on (often is is just that younger generations don't ask enough questions) but there is no reason not to take Doreen at her word about why her didn't talk about that part of the family tree much.

In your opinion, what would be the cut-off for "important" family history? How many dead and gone generations should we expect younger generations to remember?

I'm not saying Doreen is lying, I'm just saying that history naturally fades (unless you're Jesus or Hitler or something. Even then truth and myth will blur over time) and there usually isn't anything nefarious about that. Perhaps she's reading too much in it. With every generation you go back your number of new ancestors doubles (up to some point). Some of those people will be boring. Others maybe weren't interested in their family history (such as myself) and will effectively be a dead end.

> There certainly is no call to belittle people's interest in their heritages and family history, especially when they could learn stories about their family history that might be lost.

I think very few would object to people being interested in their family history (although some might find it a frivolous pursuit). It's the word "heritage" that makes me roll my eyes. If something wasn't part of your upbringing, then to me it's not part of your heritage.

> I sincerely advise to to ask any older living relatives to tell you what they can about your great grandparents (and consider recording those stories). You might not care now, but those stories do disappear with time and you or future generations of your family could find them very valuable.

Saving myself a lot of time now at the cost of potentially disappointing a curious member of a future generation seems like a good trade-off. Doubly so when it possibly prevents them from claiming a "heritage".

Not to be too rude about it, but everybody outside the US hates it. Go to any European forum and see how they roll their eyes when an American says "I'm half Irish, quarter Norwegian and 342/2636ths Italian."

There's a tendency to treat ethnicity as a clothing accessory rather than a culture.

It's also incredibly racist, when you get down to it. Does a white person need to be able to trace their lineage to claim they are white, or any other race, for that matter?

When you talk to Cherokee people, most of them are very clear that if you are part of the Cherokee culture, you're Cherokee. Throughout history, they have 'adopted' people of other races into their tribes, and those people married and had children. If an adopted white man married and adopted white woman, their children would be considered full blood, regardless of their skin color. So from a Cherokee perspective (and I assume any tribes that behaved similarly) the measure of a Cherokee is whether they are a part of the Cherokee culture, rather than what their genealogy shows.

More people are proud to proclaim being First Nations people.

... the great grandchild of a slave?

if that were me i'd have many questions about the situation and how it impacted the next generation, etc.

this is the problem with dismissal -

it facilitates or accelerates the process of suppressing the history.

It's hard to figure out how to publicly engage with someone I don't know on what is inevitably a touchy subject, so I try hard to not be one of those white assholes making demands. I try to listen and absorb instead of inserting myself. But I feel like listening to actual Natives is one of the better things I can do to learn about Natives.

I follow some Reddits. I read articles.

I keep notes and periodically try to do a little writing for my own edification, to help me process the info. Because there are two parts to the equation: someone "talking" and someone listening and it can be hard to clearly understand something when a lifetime of bias and what not is garbling your perception. I've done a lot of therapy and I'm familiar with the process of taking some time to let it sink in and become clearer to me what I'm looking at as opposed to what I'm projecting onto it.

In the theory under which “race” is meaningful, it is biological and distinct from (and orthogonal to) social “ethnic” categories, so claiming race on that basis is exactly as valid as the idea of race itself.

Now, if we admit that “race” is just a dishonest label assigned to certain ethnic categories...

But even on that basis, 1/16 is not very meaningful.

> Now, if we admit that “race” is just a dishonest label assigned to certain ethnic categories...

...then we're looking at demographic groups, like the earlier comment asked about.

To you... Many people find it meaningful including American Indian tribes which require ancestry of that amount.

People begin inquisitiveness and empathy after realizing they are part of a uniquely North American diaspora. Its really not about being a poser or trying to get an obscure scholarship. The inquisitiveness leads to finding relatives and members of a tribe thought disbanded or eradicated, reconnecting by fractional blood can lead to being eligible for recognition, land and some degrees of sovereignty.

1. Ulster-Scots, i.e. the Scottish people who moved into northern part of Ireland (now all of Northern Ireland plus a couple of counties in Ireland)

2. Some Irish and some Scottish, i.e. they have ancestors from both places and want a word to describe this

3. Generally celtic, i.e. they know it's Ireland or Scotland or maybe both and want to cover their bases

Neither is particularly harmful, but I kind of wish some people understood that #1 is a distinct thing

(People in those parts of the country are disproportionately likely to be Scotch-Irish, and therefore to have an ancestor who named a child after William III).

if society ever gets this right about northern ireland it will be a good day for everyone :)

This is covered in significant detail in "Albion's Seed", among others.