The Song of Lieawatha By Tom Kratman

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

lieawatha

The Song of Lieawatha

By Tom Kratman

 

Part the First

 
By the banks of the Charles River,
Right across the shining gilt dome,

On the application job-worth,
Near the old prestigious brick yard,
Lieawatha, also known as
Spreading Bull and Fauxcahontas,
Filled her out the little boxes
Checked she off the lie, “Cherokee.”
Never thinking she’d be found out
Thinking much of salary bloated
Contemplating huge fees speaking
Prestige endless, public office.
Thought she, “What’s one little white lie;
Lesser still one little red one?”
In she turned the application.
Made she Harvard swoon in virtue
“Have we now our red professor!
Better still, red not in one way,
But in two, with massive virtue,
From her ancestors oppressed.”
Drew she then the massive salary
As her students became debt-slaves.
Ran she then for public office,
With her resume of virtue,
And she won but still some noticed
That her story didn’t add up.
Yet lived she in Massachusetts
Where the palatable lie is
Infinitely preferable
To the truth, hard and unvarnished,
Just provided that the students
And the professoriate loony
Can still feel their wondrous virtue,
Signaling it to the whole world.
 

Part the Second

 
Never ended then the questions
And the snickers from the knowing.
While the President, he pointed,
Laughing loudly, too, and sneering
At the worse-than-dumb presumption
That this white bitch was an Indian.
Then had she an idea brilliant;
“I shall take a DNA test,
Which will prove beyond a shadow
That my family’s half-remembered
Poorly researched anecdotals
Were still true and I am truly
Of the blood of Great Sequoyah.”
Then took she the DNA test
And released the answers given
To the fawning lefty papers
Globe and New York Times and WaPo
Whereupon those selfsame papers
Wrapped themselves in shrouds of virtue
Saying loudly, each and every,
That this proved beyond a single
Little nagging doubt forever
That our professorial injun
And our senatorial redskin
Was exactly what she had said,
And, in truth, a real live Indian.
Then the libertarian dummies,
Hating Trump beyond all reason
Loudly echoed just that feeling
Because even like the papers
The illiterate motherfuckers
Never realized that there is no
Possible test that could prove that
Anyone in any position
Was indeed a fucking injun.
 

Part the Third

 
“Opps,” she said, when it was pointed
Out, in every nook and crannie,
That the test so widely vaunted,
Not just failed to prove her truthful,
But made her and all the others
Look most stupid and dishonest,
And the best that she could hope for
Was that she might be an Inca.
“Oops,” said she, again, as soon as
She came to the understanding
That her highest aspirations
Had just disappeared in thin smoke,
And she’d given ammunition
In the form of sundry jokings
To whoever might oppose her
From the now to the forever.
Worse and worse it now did turn out
Or, more truly, was more noticed,
That her family’s sole connection
To the people called “Cherokee”
Was her multi-great grandfather who,
In manner most SS-like
Herded men, women, and children
Of the people called, “Cherokee,”
To the concentration camp whence
They were marched to Oklahoma
On the rout of which they perished
Men and women, little children,
In huge numbers all uncounted,
Buried by the trail unmarked
With their spirits long now fuming
That this white bitch with no linkage
Except that of crime and murder
Should still profit from their suff’ring.
Then the spirits laughed,
“Hahaha.”
*I did not want to detract from Tom’s magnificence, but I just want to ask: WHY is it always the whitest of the white who say they’re Amerindians?
Hint, this is not how any white supremacy has ever behaved.  The left might want to take note of that. – SAH*

 

222 thoughts on “The Song of Lieawatha By Tom Kratman”

        1. Speaking of which, I just saw – ahem, someone failed to tell me – that you had a baby girl, huge-eyed and sure to break many hearts. Congrats to the both of you, but especially to Rhys, who did all the hard work of the matter.

          1. *delighted laugh* Thank you, sir. I’ll pass it on to the proud papa. Jaenelle gets the big eyes – definitely a lovely dark blue-grey right now – from Rhys’s side of the family.

            I think the email I sent you was one of the ones that got bounced, possibly due to size issues. ^^; Is it still the same email address, if I may ask?

  2. Few dared claim she had any real political savvy. Those who live in the special alternate reality that has heretofore embraced her may continue to push her for a Presidential candidate.

    1. Also those who love our country. Remember, if you live in an open primary state, you can help put her in as the Democratic candidate in a few years. Donald will thank you.

    2. I think the best thing for the country would be for Hillary to run again – given that her This Time It’s Really Her Turn qualifications are irrefutable. The only downside would be that the FBI would have to try twice as hard, which might require the Secret Service to call in an armored division to help pry the FBI out of the White House grounds after they lose again.

      Second best might be this high cheekbone Inca Senatresss person, though the junior Senator from California will undoubtedly contest that. The Inca Senatress is basically using the Massachusetts Exception (“Hey, I might have lied for decades to get where I am, but at least I never drove a car off a bridge and killed a girl!”), where her opponent will be leveraging her I Slept My Way Into Politics Fair And Square track record combined with her disjointed and looney questioning of Kavanaugh.

  3. I am likely more “Indian” than she, and most all of my ancestors were still in Europe back just a few generations, and the few not, at least one I know of was supposed to have been married to a squaw of Chippewa and was a French Canadian of unknown background (ie maybe more native in him as well) and I think Mom had markers that were possible American native in her recent results. Also some Mongol. And Norse
    We be mutts

    1. Most people that have had “Native American” come back in their results, it is actually worded as “East Asian / Native American.” That is East Asian as in the Siberian tribes and Upper Mongolia, for which there are more samples than “Native American.”

      This is because the two groups are related, and have many of the same unique markers – the “East Asians” are the ones who stayed behind when the latest Bering migration happened.

      In fact, I really do wonder whether this person (who is not actually a geneticist) just found matches with known Peruvian, Colombian, and Mexican patterns, without knowing anything about the unique markers that indicate possible “Native American.” If so, those “matches” may very well be to Spanish sequences – especially considering the time frame he gave. Almost all of us “white people” have about that much Spaniard in us, if we have any ancestors from the Germanies, Austria, or the Low Countries.

      1. Or Huns. Or Mongols. Like my totally Finnish mother with her high cheekbones and more than a hint of epicanthic fold in her eyes. Yep, related to American Indians, maybe, by way of those people related to those who kept going east and crossed the Bering Straits who stayed in Siberia and then went west to trade or pillage.

      1. As the protagonist of Peter Bpwen’s Montana Mysteries puts it “We are the Metis. The mixed breeds. White men call us Indian, Indians call us White. Catch shit from everybody!”

        2. I’ll note we’re about to add this strain to the family, and are rather proud of it. Only question is if the kids come out blond and blue eyed or looking like Injun Joe. Or — more fun — a mixed batch, in which case son and lovely bride will spend rest of their lives saying “I swear they’re all ours.” (Or as Dan and I had to say since the boys outstripped us in height in their early teens and one became much darker than either of us: “no, they’re not adopted.”)

          1. I have a picture with kid & nieces & nephew, there are 8 in all. ONE of them is adopted, & no it isn’t the white blond ones …

            Even before it was required to carry a passport to come back from Mexico, I have cousins & an Uncle that did automatically. They regularly get harassed for being South of the US border (regardless of which southern country).

            We & they can all trace back to American Revolution & back to England, as well as Scotland (great-grandfather). Not a drop of local native Indian, unless some of the locals sneaked one in on the Applegate brood, between all the kids, nieces/nephew, & generational interlaced grandchildren & great-nieces/nephew, who’d have known? (nope, didn’t happen …)

            FYI. Totally stealing “Lieawatha”, not sure where I will use it, will give credit where credit is due.

        3. Eh. The great grands on both sides were “Cherokee.” According to family legend, some documents, birth records, marriages and suchlike.

          This also being the time where some ancestors of mine, whom I’m morally certain *are* blood relations, got separated (officially) into those that could pass for white, and thus legally own land, and those what couldn’t, a bunch of them were probably technically speaking black more than “Indian.”

          We’ve just got that dusky skin coloration that says “other” to most folks. In college they thought I was European. When I worked construction, they thought I was Mexican. *chuckle*

          My favorite one is the darling little asian girl at the local pancake house (the one with the absolutely *delicious* fresh blueberries and blackberries… I need to go back there soon). When she speaks she sounds like a classic Southern Belle. Makes the tourists heads’ spin. *grin*

          1. There was a fellow I used to know whose parents moved from Taiwan to Mississippi before he was born. It used to be really funny watching the double takes when people heard him speak.

            “When ah was a little boy, mah daddy used to tell me . . .”

            Even with the diploma from the University of Mississippi Pharmacy school he had on display behind his pharmacy, people had real trouble getting their head around it. Even my wife (born and raised in Hong Kong) was confused at first – she told me she was trying to figure which Chinese dialect home language would make you pronounce English like *that*.

            1. *snicker*
              I used this … appearance-and-uncongruent-accent for laughs in the latest Luna City installment. A character who is the perfect Eurasian in appearance … and speaks as a stereotypical Australian. Yes, I had fun with that, kicking preconceptions in the teeth. I like doing that – why do you ask?

            2. An elementary-school-aged girl. Parents from New York. Growing up South Carolina. Talked with a New York accent — until she was reading aloud. Southern then.

      2. yeah, and this is the only part of my tree that has been in North America for more than a few generations. Paternally My Great Grands were all born overseas. Maternally it is a few more back (except the Gagnons, Great Great Greats were immigrants iirc), but most relatively recent as well.

        1. All four of my father’s grandparents were born outside this country. Then, three were in Canada, so that’s the branch that goes back 13 generations in documents. (Though going back 11 generations to get to the first documented arrival.)

        2. I went and got a DNA test.
          It came back positive.
          Yes, I have DNA.
          And, evidently, I am also afflicted with RNA.
          There was also something of mitochondria.
          And something else showing chlorine.
          But no midichlorians.

          1. Darn! No midichlorians?

            I’m afraid that if I get one taken I *won’t* have any Neanderthal, and that would be so disappointing that I almost don’t want to find out.

            1. I’m afraid that if I get one taken I *won’t* have any Neanderthal,

              I have the exact same fear. My father is an odd-shaped man with arm a few inches longer than they ever should be. As I grew up, I became more and more convinced that he was the “missing link”. It would devastate me to find out there was no Neanderthal DNA to explain it. (for certain comedic definitions of devastate, of course)

              1. When young the men in my dad’s family look a bit like those pictures of Sami people, a little. When old they age to look like trolls. Well, the women, too. Sort of like those pictures of Russian villagers. You know who’s an old man or an old woman by the hat or the headscarf above their noses.

              2. We have a ton of Neanderthal characteristics between us, and older son IS a Neanderthal in all but height. (He’s a tall Neanderthal) but none of those are genes tested for.

                    1. Well, that’s how my osteo prof always pronounced it.

                      Of course, that yankee accent might’ve butchered it a smidge. To Southern ears at least. Could’ve happened.

              1. Orrin Hatch recently announced the results of his DNA test: a smidgen T-Rex and the remainder an assortment of other dinosaurs. (I can’t accuse him of lacking a sense of humor.)

                  1. I expect the kid to say “Dad is lava with a dash of granite, after all he’s older than dirt … so the stuff that the mantle is made of” …

        1. No, she is probably too much of a liability to get the Democratic nomination for 2020. Especially not if Hillary has any pull left then.

          1. IIRC There’s already been some Democrats telling her “why in the heck did you have to do that” regarding the DNA check.

        2. She needs to embrace her Scandinavian roots. She already pushes traditional Viking values: her polices would rape, pillage, and burn the economy while enslaving the population.

            1. And here I always thought it was “crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women.” 🙂

              1. No, no… that’s the ‘best things’. She’s got to get the basics first. Pillage, then burn. Then you can get to efficiently driving forth and lamenting women while you do the other two…

        3. Unlikely in the case of Warren; she and the Klan are opposites on every issue I can think of.

          (there are eleventy different Klans nowadays, you might fine one that agrees with her on *something*, at least until they re-organize…)

      3. My father’s shows no native American DNA. Thing is, up the Acadian branch of the family, there are a few women who appear out of nowhere on their wedding days, which usually indicates a local.

        Then, we had a family legend about an ancestor who arrived so early that he had to marry an Indian woman; there were no white one. Chasing up the tree found them. Also his second wife, the one who bore his children and so the only one with descendants.

      5. That someone from Portugal would test out as 0.5% Native American indicates to me that there is a certain amount of error in these tests. Which also indicates to me that the test doesn’t necessarily prove that Elizabeth Warren has ANY Native American/Indian ancestry, as her purported percentage of Native American/Indian ancestry probably falls within the error range of the test.

        OTOH, one of your ancestors might have gone to Brazil, with an offspring who returned to Portugal.

        But I tend towards error/precision. I am very doubtful that these tests are precise to 1%.

        1. Could also be someone from Asia. Actually my family is known for well… traveling. And half the kids emigrate at any given time. I have family all over the world. It wouldn’t be impossible. And in that percentage? Not even surprising.
          But yeah, they’re still relatively imprecise.

    4. I had ancestors living in early 19th century Ohio, where just about any genetic combination could happen and eventually did to somebody. I have no motivation to find out if any of it happened to my ancestors: what difference would it make to me? I prefer to identity as human.

  5. Well, you know, it’s clear that if a person with an entirely white background (culturally) finds it advantageous to claim Indian identity based on a family legend, then being Indian/Native American must grant privileges that are denied to white people. There’s also black privilege and Hispanic privilege—but not so much Asian privilege, considering Harvard’s ongoing practice of discrimination against Asian-Americans. People don’t game the system to make themselves worse off.

    1. “People don’t game the system to make themselves worse off.”

      Just wanted to repeat that.

  6. Ohhh …. that was magnificent! *polite golf-clap*

    And yes, I also wondered how a woman who basically looked like a recruiting poster for the Hitler Youth could legitimately claim to be “a woman of color.”

    1. Well, that IS possible for those with mixed parentage (those siblings where one looks fairly black and one is a blond but they are full siblings – I think there have been at least a couple of stories in news through years).

      But then there should be at least some relatives who look more like the other parts in the mix. Does she have any family members who don’t look like pure Caucasians? I presume not, if there were they would have been marched out as exhibits by now.

      2. Last job I worked with a guy who was ‘whiter’ than I who was genealogically half Ojibwe, Dad was German as German could be, and apparently those genes ‘took’. He joked that the only time he was a redskin was when he got too much sun in the early summer. An another guy was as close to full-blooded Mandan as you could get and in summer I’d tan *way* darker than he, at least on face and arms.

      3. The Spouse worked with a woman who was of a very mixed heritage.  It was interesting to look at the photos of her family gatherings.  By appearances you would not have guessed they were closely related.  Her father took solidly after part of their central African heritage.  She took after the Amerindian heritage.  Her son could have been a poster boy for the perfect Aryan Hitler Youth.  The rest of the family, including her siblings, looked like they ranged from all over the globe.  It was a lesson in not judging by appearances.

        1. Heh. Also something to show those hysterical loonies who are all worried about ‘white people’ being bred out of existence because intermarriage. ::rolls eyes so hard they fall out::

          Look, I’m a freakin’ redhead. And people have been saying for CENTURIES that redheads are going extinct (Or trying to make them extinct, heh). And yet…

          1. Yep.

            And you can also use that to confuse those who make a number of cultural appropriation. “Are you SURE that person doesn’t have any of that heritage? Did you check out his DNA or family tree? Or ask him…?” 😀

  7. I had to admit to confusion about her story from the first. Cherokee heritage is traditionally matrilineal, for one… For another, the usual “family story” from someone her mother’s age who married into a more “white” family would be, “Yes, we are, but we never talk about it, because….”

    Ahem. Among other things, miscegenation laws made it illegal for “people of color” to marry outside that group in many states until the ’60s. So if it happened anyway, the family shut up.

    But the actual test results are both cringe- and laugh-worthy.

      1. If your ancestors weren’t on the tribal rolls in – I think it was 1900 – you’re not Cherokee by Federal law, even if 100% of your DNA says so. Or you might get adopted, which is a lot rarer for Cherokee than for some of the northeastern tribes.

        1. *Nod* That, too. The family didn’t record “Grandma Bird’s” last name, if she had one. And the other last names involved… just try tracking down Smiths.

          The whole thing is ridiculous anyway. We’re Americans. Some of us just have ancestors who got here later than others.

          What really boggles me is, interracial marriage made my family a mess – my other surviving relatives won’t talk to my family. And yet this woman got special treatment at Harvard.

            1. Harvard probably wanted to be fooled, but I’m not sure the expectations for plausibility would be wrong in Oklahoma. Remember, Oklahoma was originally where they put portions of a number of tribes. Lots of Indian tribes in Oklahoma, lots of white people of Indian descent living fairly white lives.

              Yeah, sure, Little Dixie does seem to have had, and maybe has, serious attitudes about race. That’s southeast Oklahoma, I vaguely recall Warren was northeast.

              Oklahoma is a weird state where racial politics are/were concerned. Norman was segregated. Paul’s Valley, very near to the south, was very much not. Yes, the Tulsa race riots of 1921 argue for classification as being The South. I think the more correct model is of a mixed border area.

              1. IIRC One thing about “colored blood” is that “having Indian Blood” wasn’t seen as being as bad as “having Black Blood”.

                Yes, you had things like Mark Twain’s Injun Joe (a murderous half-breed) but a respectable White Man could reasonably talk about having an Indian ancestor.

                1. Though from some things I’ve heard from some older Kentuckians, Hoosiers, and Buckeyes, it appears that “having Indian Blood” stopped being something “refined people” admitted to during a period of the mid/early 20th century (maybe 1920-1960?).

                  1. I think that’s regional: Mom’s mother’s father in Upstate New York always claimed Indian ancestry.
                    The family geneologists’ consensus is that this claim is not documentable, so probably nonsense, but he had to say SOMETHING to one-up his wife’s verifiable Mayflower claims! He was that sort of person. On the other hand, my family always has been mostly pro miscegenation, as long as the proposed spouse was of their own class or better, so . . . we’re going to poach your best genes and make you enjoy it!

                  2. My biological father was from Indiana, and there was speculation of the possibility of Native blood in the family tree. That speculation usually vanished when I tried to pursue the subject. He certainly looked the part more than Fauxahantus, and after working construction for a summer I’ve had INS request that I speak for them when crossing checkpoints.

                    Speaking with my full biological sister about our biological mother turned up some interesting data that her adopted mother supposedly learned from CPS. Our bio-mom had been adopted as well, out of California, and there was speculation that our bio-mom had Native blood (which my sister’s adopted mom hinted as a negative, she’d tell my sister that she came from “bad seed.”). Now, we have no way of knowing if this supposed Native blood comes from California tribes or from Okies who migrated during the Dust Bowl.

                    With all this speculation, but no hard data, I’ve never been tempted – at least not seriously – to check anything by “white” on ethnicity questions.

                    In case you were wondering from that narrative, yes I and my sister were adopted by different families, because CPS lost track of her after our bio mom abandoned us.

                    2. I drew different cards, not necessarily better. My mom was my biological father’s older sister. My sister was adopted outside the family.

                  3. Certainly during the 20s, when the Mid-west, NOT the South, played host to the largest KKK membership ever.

              2. Bob, I grew up in extreme southeast Oklahoma (Idabel) and can verify the serious ideas about race down there. There were 3 distinct racial groups – white, black, and Indian. We all played together as kids, but the adults all self-segregated into their own sections of town. The black community was located west of the railroad tracks and white people to the east. I can’t remember any black families east of the tracks although there were some poorer white families west of the tracks. Indians seemed to live wherever they could and were accepted (but not necessarily welcomed) on either side of the tracks.

                I remember race riots in Idabel as a child in ’79, maybe ’80 – all the kids were taken out of school by their parents except myself and a black girl, so we had the whole day to play with the toys and read books. Very strange that we as kids (up until about age 15 or 16) seemed to have very little problem with race but as we grew up we learned – black, white, and Indian – that we were supposed to be suspicious of and not trust the others. I sincerely believe that racism is forced onto the kids in each generation by the adults, not just from the parents and not just by white people.

                I contrast that with where I live now, in north-central Oklahoma. Here most neighborhoods are racially mixed and there are quite a number of what you might call interracial marriages. We really don’t seem to have many race problems here except for the ones that are brought in from the outside, and even those very seldom gain any traction. The overall impression of most communities that I visit seems to be a live-and-let-live thing where things only really become a problem if it happens on my lawn. I believe that if the demagogues would quit beating the drums of racism that it would be more or less inconsequential within a generation or two.

                1. Thank you. That fills in some holes.

                  I’ve heard tell of racial issues in Oklahoma still being pretty serious around that time from a source with ties to other parts of Oklahoma, so I’m still curious how much I can nail down as regional, and how much as temporal.

                  I probably need to look into oral history a whole lot more.

                2. Nah, racism is not force.

                  We know because there are some children who are not racist at all. They also have no mistrust of strangers and have to be trained to consciously think that people might not mean well toward them.

              3. I grew up in Northeastern Oklahoma, left in the late 90s. I can say that as of then, that part of Oklahoma is still very segregated. That’s not to say I personally witnessed a lot of racist nonsense…but that’s also because a.) I lived in a part of town and attended a school that had *maybe* ten black kids in the whole school, and maybe only one or two Natives, if that, and b.) was lily-white myself and also introvert. Asians were pretty rare as well, but so far as I was aware (though I admit to being fairly oblivious) weren’t treated badly. I did have a good friend who attended a different school who was black, but most of her bitching about racism involved her own father, who hated white people. (I never asked about anything else, because as a teen I was of the opinion “I don’t care what color she is, she doesn’t care what color I am, so long as we can hang out and geek about nerdy things.”)

                Her brother never ran into much trouble at our church for flirting with/dating the non-black girls (which is good, since otherwise he’d have been out of options), and looking back I wish I’d been less shy and dated him myself. He was a great guy, and lots of fun.

                So…tldr, I guess it boils down to: I was aware that racism in many forms was alive and well in NE Oklahoma in the 90s, but also that it probably wasn’t going to get much worse than name calling if encountered. (Even my friend’s ‘I hate white people’ dad wasn’t about to tell us we couldn’t be friends.) But I was told, though I never witnessed it, that you were far more likely to encounter crap if you were Native even than if you were black. (And likely I never witnessed it because there just weren’t many Natives south of Tulsa…)

                2. Interestingly, I also grew up in NE Oklahoma… and saw exactly none of that. There was a much greater divide between ‘Trash’ and “not trash’ (and Trash came in EVERY color.)

                  1. Yeah, there was that as well. I think because I went to Jenks High, which is a *notoriously* wealthy and also 99% white school (I was not one of the wealthy kids) that rather informed my view of things.

                    To be fair, though, the one black kid in band with me was hardly an outcast.

                    I definitely agree on the trash vs. not trash. (And I had both in my family, heh, which was…interesting…)

                    2. Thanks and thanks again. Have some people in my family who are probably trash, and some who are not trash. I’m trying to not be trash myself.

              4. As an example of the “mixed” attitudes in Oklahoma, I present my grandmother from SW Oklahoma. Her two daughters-in-law were both 1/8 Indian, which as far as I can tell, was never an issue with my grandmother. Neither my grandmother nor my aunts ever told me it was, and both my aunts had no hesitation whatsoever expressing to me either positive or negative opinions about my grandmother.

                At the same time, my grandmother’s attitude towards the 1964 Civil Rights Act was typical of Southern whites of that era: she was against it. She told me that there were blacks in her town until the Depression, when they moved out.
                When I visited my grandmother before going to work in Trinidad, she warned me to not get involved with any black women there.Typical white Southern of that era.
                When my grandmother visited my parents in Florida, they took her to a church compatible with her views. After the service, she and a black woman member of the church hugged each other.

            2. Maybe Harward liked the combination: a “colored” professor who actually either isn’t or is so little that it doesn’t show. They could claim they had a Native American without having to hire a real one.

              1. Much of the Left is way into the “But Not TOO Black!” thing, preferring minorities with light skin, straight hair, and upper middle class background.

          2. Bless you. I too am American in defiance of my idiot ancestors’ refusal to come here.
            We’re mutts. What we specifically are doesn’t matter. (I got a DNA test to trace for a suspected illness. Actually I got both ancestry and 23 and me for that purpose. They are rather useless for ancestry as such.) Oh, except I found out mom is Early European Farmer.

    2. That might be more true back east. In Oklahoma, I think it might have been more widely accepted that some intermarriage has occurred.

      That said, I’m pretty white, and do have family lore of a Canadian and Indian pairing in my ancestry. But we (or at least I) don’t talk about the Canadian thing much. 🙂

      I figure lots of people have Indian ancestry. The ‘what I identify as’ is culture. It is blatantly obvious that I am not culturally Indian. Civis Americanum Sum. I may be way outside of the mainstream of American culture, but I do identify as American. In the past, my preference on the forms was prefer not to say, but nowadays it is white. I was willing to help try to move past those categories, but now that this is no longer an option, I will not be intimidated or shamed into denying an obvious fact.

    3. I seem to recall my Father telling me about Blacks in some Western states who married into various Tribes in part because anyone who could prove ‘one drop of’ Indian blood was accorded the rights of a White Citizen. I THINK it was Oklahoma he was talking about, but can’t ask him, as I don’t believe in Spirit Mediums.

      BTW; he was clear that the Tribes aided and abetted the ‘scam’ because they liked embarrassing bigots.

        1. Not just Oklahoma, though. Father taught for a while at the University of Kansas, during the 1950’s. There was a Native American who was a fixture on campus. He belonged to a tribe that had been pushed off of one patch of desirable land after another until they were stuck on a Reservation that (wait for it) sat on a huge oil reserve. He never needed to work, and liked to learn, so he lived near campus and at the beginning of each term you might find him sitting in the back of your class. If he liked your teaching style and was interested in the subject, he would stay. If he didn’t and wasn’t, then after a few days he would get up in the middle of class, say “Humph!” very loudly, and leave.

    5. The Daughter was waxing poetic on the stupidity of the Progressives yesterday.  While she was at it she referred to the following law that had been drafted by and passed by Progressive that later influenced a certain party in Germany.

      Wiki on the 1924 Racial Integrity Act of Virginia

      The Racial Integrity Act required that a racial description of every person be recorded at birth and divided society into only two classifications: white and colored (essentially all other, which included numerous American Indians). It defined race by the “one-drop rule”, defining as “colored” persons with any African or Native American ancestry. It also expanded the scope of Virginia’s ban on interracial marriage ( anti-miscegenation law) by criminalizing all marriages between white persons and non-white persons. In 1967 the law was overturned by the United States Supreme Court in its ruling on Loving v. Virginia.

      (The Daughter was addressing the fact that this redefinition of race made it impossible for persons of Native American decent in Virginia to be identified as such for consideration by the national government, who looked at birth records.)

      I find it amusing to think that under this law, with the knowledge of history and DNA testing we have today, everyone probably would be identified as ‘colored’.  I doubt that this would have gone over well with the persons who drafted the law.

  8. I wonder how many people who’d thought about doing it but hadn’t yet are rushing out to get a 23 and Me test. 🙂

    1. My DNA is still my confidential personal information… though back in the 20th century, there were some troubling stories of medical diagnostic centers who were building DNA databases of their own, using tissue and fluids that had been sent to them for analysis.

      That’s basically where the tissue used at the beginning of the Human Genome Project came from; the woman the samples came from had no idea someone was using her tissue, and after the Project started copyrighting their work, she was technically a walking copyright violation just for being alive…

      Funny, it was a big deal in the IT magazines of the day, but a quick web search shows bupkis. It did turn up a similar but much later case I’d never heard of, though: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/mar/31/henrietta-lacks-cancer-research-genome

      1. Okay, so I accidentally put my email address into the comment to which this comment is a reply, instead of my name, and the post is “currently awaiting moderation”. if you could deny the comment, I’d really appreciate it.
        ——————————————-
        The idea of copyrighting DNA is just abhorrent.

        The one who applied for the copyright, did not create the DNA, and if it came from another person, the copyright applicant is asserting their ownership over the other person in whole or in part.

        Copyrighting DNA is slavery.

      2. she was technically a walking copyright violation just for being alive…

        “Copyright Violation MY ASS!” She was heard to say in court, “No, Really your honor, my ass IS the prior art!”

      3. Made properly anonymous I think that a very large sampling of DNA would be a good thing, even if (and maybe especially if) it was attached to a medical history. Sure, that gets scary pretty darned quick but I’m rather appalled at all of the things we’ve got no baseline for and all the stuff we never even test. (Besides which, the Air Force and China have my info anyway, so there you go.)

          1. Yeah, mine too.

            If any one ever wonders why China needs Google’s help so badly, you just try searching through and matching up all the data they stole from the DoD hack with any specific need to get anything useful to the intelligence folks.

            Sure, they have SecDef’s last however-many DD-whatever forms, but he knows what they know, so not much there. But finding that bit of valuable information on that dude who works for that company on that project in that pile? Good luck with that.

            1. Gee, maybe the VA could ask them for some help… they seem to have enormous trouble finding service and medical records.

        2. Effective anonymyzation one of those problems that turns out to be way more difficult than it looks at first glance. Merging databases lets you get a handle on metadata and cross-connect “anonymous” to “known.”

          Even if there’s nothing but raw DNA with no source metadata – you know, like the police might pick up at a crime scene – you can match it to known DNA. And there’s a *lot* of that, and those datasets are never going to go away.

          1. Note the several recent cold cases solved by throwing crime scene DNA against the wall of various ancestry-and-DNA-relatives services and getting “we found a DNA relative!” hits on several uncles and aunts and cousins, enough to triangulate onto a suspect.

            This is exactly what the various PDs and agencies want as routine – scrape up any DNA sample, slam it against a massive nation-wide database, and use the hits to track down the most skeevy relative of all those people and ask them where they were that night at 10:53pm.

            Waiting for smart perps* to start scattering other people’s DNA around crime scenes…

            * I know, I know, contradiction in terms: The “smart perps” avoid street crime and go into politics…

            1. ” to start scattering other people’s DNA around crime scenes…” — sounds like an SF story idea: Assume for $X to black market, perp can buy not only stolen ID’s but also some DNA samples (loose hairs & skin cells). Gathering/delivering of the physical samples and coordination with ID’s makes an underground-business operation with story opportunities…

              1. People have done this. Not successfully as far as we know, because it is hard to make a crime scene look real instead of posed, but who knows?

                The creepiest one was the dental surgeon rapist who created a blood reservoir in his arm and put another patient’s blood in it, so the police would get somebody else’s blood and DNA when they took a blood sample.

                Yugh. But very skiffy, in a dark way.

            2. I confess I have mixed feelings on this. On the one hand–the two I’ve read about recently, I feel a definite “hooray, they caught the bastards, FINALLY!” (the Golden State Killer and a piece of s**t who raped and murdered a schoolteacher in the early 90s and who has also been tied to several other rapes now via DNA), but I also have Concerns regarding the inevitable abuse and/or problems inherent in this.

              And it’s kind of cool, the way they triangulated in on them via other relatives, science wise. So yeah, definitely mixed feelings.

              (But still: HOORAY THEY CAUGHT THE FRIGGING GOLDEN STATE KILLER.)

              1. Yeah. I feel that way about the GSK too. (And I know that neighborhood, and even have a friend who lived on that street. It would be creepier were it not for a couple of other high-profile cases within a mile from my house.)

    2. Mom Red has. 🙂 Great-grandfather was eligible for property in Oklahoma under the Dawes Act, but ran the fed off the property with a shotgun and forbade anyone to talk about what had just happened.

      1. My paternal greats did want to get some of the OK land grants, and quit being tenant ranchers for other folks, but Great-grandma Bass, despite having relatives on the rolls, didn’t have the right documentation herself, thus they “couldn’t prove up on it” — so they came to Texas instead!

    3. Actually, I was just thinking that I’d like to get DNA tests for my parents for Christmas. Which is the best service to use?

        1. I recommend FamilyTreeDNA, then Ancestry, then 23andMe, then MYHeritage, for people looking into genetic genealogy. FTDNA has YDNA, mtDNA, and autosomal DNA tests. Doesn’t require a subscription, and retains your sample if you want more tests. Ancestry has the biggest database,requires a subscription to keep accessing your matches and has poor tools for investigating your matches. 23andMe does genetic health testing more than the others, but is more expensive and limits your connections. MyHeritage is Euro-centric and will give you matches outside the US better than the other 3. Several of the houses will sell your annonyimized data to researchers. Read the Terms of Service to be sure you are comfortable with what rights you are giving up in exchange for your test. GEDMatch (where the GSK was identified) is not a testing house, but a place where you can upload your tests from one house to compare against tests from other houses. It does not come with the same protections that the commercial houses do. Each house will offer discounts on tests at various times of the year, usually near holidays. You can save money by being patient.

    1. *Bows toward the master* Will be done tomorrow, with attribution. (And a link to the original for those not familiar).

    2. Wonderful. My hat’s off to you, Sir. I have a riff on ‘Money For Nothing’ running through my head, but it won’t jell.

      ‘The little Princess with the Indian in her make-up
      She’s sure, but she don’t know where

      That Little Princess got Presidential ambitions
      That little Princess wants you to vote her in there.’

      and

      “I want my
      I want my
      Want my DNC’

      Anyone want to pick it up and run with it?

    3. Well! It was ONLY the best Hiawatha parody since Lewis Carroll put him behind a camera, and IMO the single best reaction to the whole ridiculous issue. Take a bow, Colonel. (Must admit that I looked for, but could not find, the fine but short “Hiya, Watha” from MAD Magazine sometime back in mid-century, which would have been fun to send to you. I can only remember the last line exactly: “Falls across the bar, unconscious.”) Thank you.

  10. I’m not sure if the Cherokee who denied Warren’s claim were east or west Cherokee.

    If eastern, they obviously don’t have jurisdiction over an Oklahoma matter.

    If western, those Okies are all alt-Right neo-Cons, and are denying her claim for purely political reasons.

    1. Yeah, the press release is from Oklahoma.

      Hey, New York and California. You aren’t going to let a bunch of rednecks who voted for Trump boss you around, are you?

  11. I’d note that the Trail of Tears guard thing has been known for some years now.

    I recall hearing it from William Jacobson at Legal Insurrection.

  12. What I don’t get is why she keep picking at this scab. If she had come out when they first started calling her on it and said something like “OK, I admit, claiming Cherokee status based on family tradition probably wasn’t too smart when you look as white as I do. I was young and dumb enough too think it didn’t matter. I’ve learned better.”

    And by now, most people would have dropped it. Instead she keeps trying to justify it, and keeps prat-falling in public.

    I felt the same way about John Kerry. Why the hell couldn’t he see that his anti-war protesting and testifying to congress along with men who proved to be frauds was going to be an issue? All he had to do was make a statement, early in his campaign, to the effect of, “When I came back from Vietnam I was a very angry young man and did some things that weren’t very smart.” No details, just a blanket “I was young. We all do stupid shit when we are young.” kinds statement, and move on. That’s essentially what his opponent did; Bush issued a statement early in in his campaign, saying, “I’m an alcoholic. As a young man I had trouble with alcohol and drugs. I’ve been clean for years, but I’m still an alcoholic and will be until I dies.” (or words to that effect)/. And then when somebody tried to ‘October Surprise’ him by digging up an old DUI conviction, he didn’t even bother to address it himself. He had his press secretary ask the MSM “Excuse us, but what part of ‘I’m an alcoholic’ wasn’t clear?”

    This kind of bad judgement does more to disqualify Kerry (and Warren) than the actual behavior it’s about. If they can’t see that these issues are going to come back and bite them far enough ahead to defuse them, and keep blundering about them, I don’t want either to be in charge of the military. Or a dog pound, for that matter.

    1. I just want to be clear from the beginning that when I was in third grade I put glue on my palm and let it dry and then peeled it off in one piece to save in a collection of glue-skin in my desk.

    2. “And by now, most people would have dropped it. Instead she keeps trying to justify it, and keeps prat-falling in public.”
      What part of “they really are that stupid” does their campaign staff not understand?

        1. So someone told her that, and she ignored them. My own guess is that her staff either agreed with her, or were more interested in riding the gig as long as possible than telling the boss what the boss needed to hear.

    3. Second reply: “This kind of bad judgement does more to disqualify Kerry (and Warren) than the actual behavior it’s about.”
      Note their projection of their own behavior onto other people.
      They kept tearing into Bush for admitting past mistakes despite him changing; therefore,THEY won’t admit to being wrong, because they expect us to hammer them about it.
      They do not recognize the nature of repentance and reformation.
      They tear into Trump for reprehensible behavior* and he brushes them off, because he knows his voters are more interested in his policies than his purity; however, Warren and Kerry don’t actually view what they did as reprehensible, and don’t understand why other people do, and thus they have to justify themselves because they see no need to change.

      *(in some cases, he has actually admitted, as you suggest, that he did dumb stuff and sort of apologized; other accusations are just snowflakery pearl-clutching, and they are rightly ignored by everyone else)

    4. Someone might count it as academic fraud or something, though, and “I was young and stupid” doesn’t usually get you a pass for being untruthful about your hiring qualifications in that sphere. If Harvard did hire her for that diversity tick-mark, it could still be very bad for her.

      1. The people who hired, for example, Ward Churchill probably didn’t give a rat’s arse whether he was part American Indian (as he claimed) or all unreconstructed Hottentot. They hired him because he could be counted on to have The Right Opinions, and to cause a stir on a regular basis.

        Now, whether Warren was hired for similar reasons is something I don’t know, but we can be pretty sure than, as she is shaping up be An Important Candidate (and has been since her claim became an issue) that the Lefty institutions will assert that her claim had no bearing on her being hired.

        And we can believe as much of that as we want.

        It would still have been better for her, politically, to say ‘I was young, romantic, and stupid, and made the claim becuase of family traditions I believed, which no longer seem likely’.

        1. Ah, infamous Professor Ward Churchill!
          Let’s list some of the fun things associated with him:
          –created and sold “Native American” art, made by himself but copied (i.e. plagiarised) from real Native American art.
          — fired for plagiarism, as documented in multiple occasions by his University, but claimed it was for racism.
          — had a full professorship, but no PhD (which is nearly always required for that position).
          — held no actual status in any tribal rolls, but claimed he was Native American anyway (because of hair length? high cheekbones?)

          1. Knowing academia as I do, I would bet that most of that was known, or at least suspected, by the hiring committee….not that they would admit it now. Some people are hired by a certain kind of college simply to BE generators of outrage. I think that’s why Pete Singer is employed by Princeton. Qualifications don’t matter, and controversy is a benefit.

            In addition to what you mentioned, a lot of these Professors of Outrageousness publish papers in which they cite papers they themselves wrote under other names. I believe Churchill is believed to have done that, too.

            The interesting thing about Churchill’s case is that what he said annoyed enough people with enough weight that he actually got canned. That only happens rarely, if my late Father was to be believed.

      2. When you combine “untruthful” with “profit” you get “fraud.”

        The slot she got at college, and the financial support, were gained fraudulently from the college, and at the expense of others for whom the programs were intended.

        She’s a thief, same as if she’d picked their pockets.

        1. Since ‘thief’ and ‘Democrat’ have been synonymous for decades, we already knew that. And we already knew that – unless she kept calling attention to it – the media wouldn’t care unless indictments were being handed down. And probably not then.

    5. Or just “I really thought I had the blood, because there were family stories, but I fully admit that using it in official documents without verification was dumb.” Then to the “young and dumb” part.

      And she could also have used it as a proof of her being not-even-a-little-bit-racist: see, I thought I had Indian blood, and I was so very proud of that idea, and very disappointed now I found out I really don’t.

      There would have been a lot of ways to spin it so that she would have looked good. But no, she has to stick to the claim that she is, no matter what, and no matter how good the proof against, and no matter what the actual Indians say. And that does make her look pretty damn dumb. Maybe her Indian name should be Doesn’t Have a Clue.

      Or Really Not Presidential Material.

      2. Yeah. Cherokee were totally not racist, which is why black slaves underpinned the economy of the Cherokee Nation, and were so valuable they took them along on the Trail of Tears.

        “Nothing to see here, move along.”

        (to be fair, the Cherokee also kept slaves of other Indian tribes, and for a while, white slaves, until they got clued in that It Simply Wasn’t Done.)

        1. Hey, haven’t you heard that only whites can be racist, any other group, especially the downtrodden and mistreated true victims like Native Americans never. Never ever. Not even a little bit. Doesn’t matter how they speak or behave it’s not real racism. 😛

        2. I have a friend who is registered Cherokee, who once said, “My ancestors didn’t care what color your ancestors were. They’d make slaves of them regardless.”

          (She’s very much the sort of person who doesn’t think we should rest on historical laurels or victimization.)

    6. “Never wrong” is an essential part of their ideological expression. Makes ’em vulnerable to this kind of thing…

    7. > What I don’t get is why she keep picking at this scab.

      Because she’s not sane, by any reasonable definition. If she can get people to agree with her, then she can change her subjective reality.

      Why, yes, it *is* the same thing as moving phantom divisions around from inside your underground bunker.

    8. With Kerry, his problem was that Vietnam was central to his campaign. W could shrug off the DUI because he wasn’t running for president based on what he’d done in his 20s. Kerry, on the other hand, was essentially presenting a biography that suggested he went straight from preschool to his Swift Boat command, and then as soon as he was wounded started his presidential campaign.

      If he had said, “When I came back from Vietnam I was a very angry young man and did some things that weren’t very smart” and then never mentioned Vietnam again, maybe people would have let it go. But if he had said that and then considered to run the “I won three purple hearts in Vietnam” campaign, he still would have been hammered on the contradiction.

      1. Not necessarily. He went to Vietnam, and served in a moderately dangerous unit. He came back angry at how good men were being sed (this is his narrative, not mine). He did some foolish stuff that doesn’t take away from his service.

        The MSM would totally have gone with that.

        I still think the best summation of Kerry was the guy who wrote of him, “He looks like Lurch’s cousin who went to Choat.”

  13. I can’t remember the character or the book where he says, “Your body is yours, your genes belong to humanity.” Just seems so appropriate as we start inching into the age of designer genetics.

    I noticed earlier today one of the paid bloggers started picking up on something I’d commented about yesterday or the day before in a Fox News commentary: Warren’s adherence to her story of being native American and Cherokee based on a probable 1/1024s was promoting and reinforcing the historical U.S. racist notion of a single drop of African in their ancestry making someone black. Which of course means that Elizabeth Warren is an unrepentant racist.

    But we knew that already, didn’t we?

    2. Heinlein. I thought it was “Beyond This Horizon” or “Methuselah’s Children”, but it turned out to be from “Time Enough for Love.”

      **The point is, beloved brother of ours, you don’t own your genes–nobody does. We’ve heard you say so, in discussing how Minerva was constructed. Genes belong to the race; they’re simply lent to the individual for his-her lifetime. And all of us–knowing you were going to try this reckless thing–decided that, while you were free to throw away your life, you weren’t free to waste a unique gene pattern.”**

  14. Given the discussions about the mixed nature of pretty much everyone’s DNA, can we finally stop belaboring the “cultural appropriation” thing?
    Everybody’s culture is belong to us!

    1. Whenever Cultural Appropriation used to come up, my friends and I would joke that, being a Viking, “Cultural Appropriation” IS the ancestral culture of my people.

      1. Well, there’s a difference between Cultural Appropriation and Cultural Identification.
        The difference is this: in our house we love Korean food, and we have Korean decorations (and even some hanbok, the traditional Korean clothing). We like some Mexican foods (not Taco Bell Mex) and Vietnamese food, too. I also make a pretty good pasta from scratch (semolina flour and eggs and olive oil)
        But we never claim to be Korean, and we respect and appreciate much in Korean culture. And we’re not Mexican, either, in spite of however many tamales we may eat and how much pozole we fill our bellies with. (I learned to make pozole because it tastes so good, but I haven’t learned how to do a good tamale yet.)

        So we happily appropriate those cultural foods, rotating through them on a weekly basis, and in December we proudly culturally appropriate the German Christmas Tree (although, if truth be told, we do have German ancestry that came to the USA in the early 1700s).
        Anybody who tells me that I have done wrongthing ™ by culturally appropriating things will be slapped upside the head with some fresh spaghetti.

        1. I appropriate German and Austrian clothes and food and language. I identify as an American mutt or, if pushed, a Person of Pallor.

      3. One of my great-grandmother’s was an immigrant from Denmark so I joke that I’m a Viking American.

  15. Far be it from me to defend Elisabeth Warren, but you can’t always go by looks. I dated a girl many years ago that was really big into her Native American heritage. According to her, what really matters is what you can prove on paper (copies of birth certificates etc.).

    She was a read-head with pale blue eyes and pale skin but because she had copies of paperwork that linked her directly to a Native American ancestor, she was “official”.

    That, of course, doesn’t help EW because if she had such paperwork, or even if such paperwork existed somewhere, it would have come out a long time ago.

    1. Sure. MMike’s wife is Choctaw and is a blue eyed blonde. BUT you don’t hear her ranting and raving about her people and the wrongs done to them, or writing only about that. EVERY person I know who is blond, blue eyed and does that is spurious.

      1. Blue eyes and blonde or red hair pop up in the damnedest places. Nobody believed Heyerdahl when he reported encountering them in Polynesia, then they wrote them off as “obviously the result of prior European contact.” They simply ignore places like Chichen Itza, which have such people painted on some walls…

      2. The girl I dated didn’t talk about “wrongs done” either. There was some talk about history and what tribes ended up where and why, but it was more historical interest rather than anger. She mostly loved drum circles, native dance/costume, and history.

      3. Another dad in a YMCA youth program used that to his advantage. He moved across school attendance boundaries and told that his kids couldn’t go to the local within-walking-distance school since it was already full (including multiple in-district transfers) *unless* his kids were verifiable minorities.

        He was able to document, truthfully, that his pale blond blue eyed daughters were part Comanche (G2 grandaughters of Quanah Parker, if I recall correctly) so they got to attend their neighborhood school. He thought it was a stupid law – but since they met the qualifications, why not use it?

        1. He was able to document, truthfully, that his pale blond blue eyed daughters were part Comanche (G2 grandaughters of Quanah Parker, if I recall correctly)

          I interpret your statement to be that Quanah Parker was the great-great grandfather of the blue-eyed blond daughters. Quanah Parker was no more than 1/2 Indian/Native American, which would make the daughters 1/32 Indian/Native American.

          I said no more than 1/2, because for a long time Comanches had been taking prisoners and incorporating them into the tribe. Read Empire of the Summer Moon.

          1. Quanah Parker was 1/2 Anglo-American. His mother was Cynthia Ann Parker who was integrated into the tribe at age 10 after a Comanche raid of a settlement in Texas.

            1. Was recently in solemn discussion of a photo of Cal Coolidge being adopted as a Sioux. he, too, was wearing the headdress. I rebuked those who said it was appropriation for him — and also pointed out that the difficulties that this does for race.

  16. Honestly, the DNA stuff can be fun but probably the most useful information that came out of the test was that I’m a carrier for cystic fibrosis. Oh, and the amusement of having the big breasts gene which is apparently normal for Europeans.

    2. My wife just had a non-malignant wossname removed from one breast.

      The surgeon was tap-dancing around “and there might be a small scar” and seemed put off when we both started laughing. My wife has several *feet* of scars; it looks like I put her together from a kit…

  17. By the (non)standards of Warren’s claim, I must be Mexican now, since having that tequila.

    If that’s a problem, I can get back to being of the USA with a little rye or bourbon.

  18. It seems that White women claiming Cherokee descent often claim that their ancestor was a “Cherokee Princess”…small problem, there, since the Cherokee didn’t *have* princesses. I ran across this post with some theories, from an actual Indian, as to why this particular claim is popular:

    http://www.native-languages.org/princess.htm

    …at least Warren didn’t make the Princess claim

    1. The reason why the Pocahontas Exception is called that is that all the old Virginian families claiming Indian blood said they were descended from her.

      OTOH, King James thought she was a princess by status, and was peeved at her marrying a mere commoner.

    2. On the link — actually there were elective monarchs in Europe. so an elective chieftainship is not a bar. (It’s the rest of the stuff that is. 0:)

  19. “WHY is it always the whitest of the white who say they’re Amerindians?”

    It’s those high cheekbones — hadda come from somewhere!

    1. Like the only peoples in the world to have high cheek bones are Amerindians. The ignorance of these so-called woke people is profound.

  20. Hell, even my extremely Scots/Irish/Welsh family had the chestnut about a Cherokee something-or-other grandmother in the family tree somewhere. However, both my parents are avid genealogists, and have never yet found definitive proof of ANY Native in the woodpile. That’s not to say they aren’t there–there are any number of female relatives in particular that we only know by a “Mrs. + surname” or “Wife” because for whatever reasons her name wasn’t properly recorded (or we haven’t found the right link yet).

    But even if we did, none of us would have dreamed of claiming it for some kind of advantage. For one thing, most of us could be recruitment posters for the Aryans/the Vikings/(giant) Celtic raiders. The only people on this planet whiter than me (at least in terms of skin + sunburn potential) are albinos.

    The joke in the family has always been that if Dad *does* have indian blood in there somewhere, it’s all in the nose. And his curious inability to grow either a proper full beard or chest hair (he has two, and laments every time my mother yanks them out). But since a lack of body hair is also not unheard of in celts…

    1. My friend the registered Cherokee who is a professional tenor occasionally has to grow some facial hair for a role. It takes him months and is hilariously scanty. Like “could be a goatee in a good light and with some mascara” scanty.

    2. Heck, given the historical practice of sealed adoptions, reissue of birth certificates with the adopting parents name … what about adoptions before birth certificates? Where the babies were just part of the family & added to the family bible? How would one know? Granted, the family MIGHT make a notation in the bible of the adoption origin, but maybe they chose to not.

    3. Scots/Irish + American Indian is actually a pretty common combo. My wife’s family story has a Scottish sept-name ancestor marrying a Choctaw (or was is Chicksaw?) bride, about five generations ago, so she’d be 1/32 native. Our romantic-fantasy extension of the story has him likely being an escapee from the Suppressions following Culloden.
      She’s got long dark hair that won’t curl, very slightly dusky skin tone – but her sister is a blue-eyed blond Norse woman!

      1. I was reading a book on Scottish clans once, and one photo had two chiefs: the clan chief, and the Choctaw Indian chief who was also part of this Scottish clan.

    4. There was an old family story about possibly having some indian ancestry.

      My maternal grandmother thought they were ridiculous, and wasn’t afraid to say so. DNA tests show she was probably right – *I* certainly didn’t inherit enough to register. Even the .1% 23&Me reports as “East Asian or American Indian” doesn’t show in my mother’s test, so probably came from my fathers’s parents, who came via Ellis Island in 1921.

      I did have direct ancestors who were *killed* by Indians, but so far I’ve resisted the urge to go all Inigo Montoya about it. Somehow, “My name is Javahead! Your G9 grandfather killed my G9 grandmother! Prepare to die!” doesn’t have the same ring.

      1. Our DNA doesn’t turn up any of it. Still —

        Looking up to Quebec branch, where there was a family legend about an ancestor who married a local bride because the women hadn’t arrived from France yet — well, we found the couple. We also found his second wife, whom he married after the first wife died, and the women HAD arrived from France, and that was the marriage that had children.

        There are, however, some women up the Acadian branch who appeared out of nowhere on their wedding days, as far as the records went. (Remember when the Acadians were thrown out? It was earlier than that.)

  21. Pingback: Chicago Boyz » Blog Archive » Trump’s Secret Superpower

  22. Neandartall?

    Close.

    It’s German.

    So, it sounds more like: Nay-arnder-tarl. The name refers to the (Neander River) valley, ( “Thal”), where the remains were first found. German, like almost every other language on the planet has no “Theta’ (th) sound, unlike English and Greek.

    2. “”Dollar” derives from the German money unit “thaler”, e.g. the “Maria Theresa thaler”, coined in Austria since 1741, and spelled “taler”.since 1903.

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