DNA test shows Elizabeth Warren has Native American ancestry

Well technically he is still the “real Indian”, as Warren ancestors weren’t actually from India…

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As others pointed out, DNA ancestry can be sketchy. But there are markers that can be used to help ID some ancestry.

One would think possibly a deep dive into one’s ancestry with court docs and church records might glean more details. I’ve seen the deed documents that allotted land to the Navarre family in Oklahoma in the mid 1800s. There is a show on PBS I have seen a handful of times where they dive into celebrity ancestors and they dig up some fascinating stuff.

I can trace my ancestry back to the Mayflower. There’s family trees and everything; my family is DAR so we have a lot of genealogical research. And in all that time, we can find two women who might have been Native. They were generally elided from documentation. So it might say that “John Porter” had a third son, but we know John Porter’s wife had died ten years prior and there’s no record of a remarriage so we can’t know who the mother was. We have two photographs of women who might possibly be all or part Native but they’re only given first names and “Jane” doesn’t tell us much.

Are there more? Probably. But they’re not in the records and like many people have said, DNA testing is pretty iffy.

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Once, at Plimoth Plantation, a lady asked one of the Wampanoag presenters “So … how did the Indians get here from India?”

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Why? He’s happy to have his garbage claim of “inventor of email” on it.

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Well maybe some of them did migrate from Africa, to India, to Northeast Asia, to eventually the North Americas over thousands of years and many generations… But that still is a face-palm question.

Though many indigenous beliefs place them always being there (like most beliefs, really.)

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Actually doing DNA tests on racists is loads of fun. Since this country is mostly mongrel, a “shocking” number of them have ancestry that would disqualify them form membership in their own organizations.

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Warren has only ever positioned this as a family story. She has not applied for membership to, or benefits from, any tribe.

The whole DNA thing came from Trump and his racist insults. So here’s the testing, put up or shut up.

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No it doesn’t. It’s a page about mixed marriages, and mentions that her father was Scottish and mother was Syilx. But having seen the copies of the documents where she and my great grandfather are labelled Half-Breed, and that she wrote in 1854:

“I would rather not go to Canada; how would I an uneducated dark halfbreed look among the fair and accomplished ladies?”

i was just being blunt. Mixed marriages happen a lot now, but 200 years ago it had big impact on people.

The museum could have referred to her as “Metis”, we probably count, but not every mixed marriage resulted in Metis.

Hmm - in googling I found this page. Seems to relate:

https://www.historymuseum.ca/cmc/exhibitions/aborig/fp/fpz4b01e.shtml

FTFY.

I’m biracial and your chosen terminology is archaic, at best.

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Hmmm. And I was just saying that you might wanna take that blunt and smoke it elsewhere.

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You’re not responsible for the website, obviously. But if you choose to continue using an offensive term after being told by those it offends that it’s offensive, you are responsible for that, and for 'splaining to them that the term which offends them isn’t offensive.

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I have a Black father, a White mother and Native American ancestry; and as a kid, I got called “half-breed” ‘jokingly’ by some bigot, more than once.

It wasn’t even remotely “funny” then, and it’s inappropriate as fuck now.

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An important distinction is that nobody dismisses Scotts as “immigrants”, even though they came from somewhere else originally. 10,000 years is an awful long time, but that’s not good enough for native people, part of a larger script where they don’t count.

Nobody can remember back 10,000 years, so “time imemorial” is a valid claim.

Why would he take it down? He’s happy to lie about inventing Email and threaten to sue any one that calls him on his lie. Would you expect him to be any less shameless about this?

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My family tree is very spiky. Yes-- there are lineages that go back to the 1600s-- and far beyond. But in terms of knowing the identities of every grandparent? That sort of completeness only goes back five or six generations.

I don’t know; I’m feeling pretty old these last few weeks.

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When I entered graduate school as an archaeologist in the late 1980s, I was told in no uncertain terms to discount the narratives from Native American oral history. Why? Largely because of the children’s game of telephone. (If case you’ve forgotten: Get a bunch of kids in a circle. Tell one a secret. Tell her to tell the person next to her. Repeat until you come all the way around the circle. By the time the secret gets back to you, it’s totally changed, if not unrecognizable.) Though it is a compelling and seductive argument by analogy, it’s overly simplistic and belies a fundamental misunderstanding of how oral history actually works in human societies. History is not kept by children playing games. It’s kept by specialists.

A few years ago, linguists and a geographer in Australia documented instances in which humans have maintained accurate oral histories over 400 generations and up to 10,000 years. And according to the historian Roger Echo-Hawk, Pawnee oral traditions document events that occurred during the last glaciation (at least 11,000 years ago), including humans crossing the Bering Sea into North America.

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