News flash for the Fauxcahontas tribe

[Legion]

“People think there is a DNA test to prove you are Native American. There isn’t”

People think that there’s a DNA test that can prove if somebody is Native American or not. There isn’t. I worry about the way Native American identity gets represented as this purely racial category by some of the companies marketing these tests.

Before the second world war, most Native Americans lived on reservations. Biological children would be enrolled as tribal members, but so would adopted children and spouses, if you were legally married.

But as people moved away to urban areas, tribes started to get more rigorous about documentation. That’s when they also started to move towards only enrolling biological relatives. They started to focus on what’s known as “blood quantum” as a way of counting ancestors who were enrolled as Native American. In most US tribes, you have a specific blood quantum needed for enrollment – often one-quarter. That means you have to be able to show with paper documentation that you have one out of four grandparents who is full blood. Or you might have two grandparents who are half blood – however you can make those fractions work.


https://www.newscientist.com/article/mg22129554-400-there-is-no-dna-test-to-prove-youre-native-american/

[Legion]

No matter what Elizabeth Warren’s DNA test shows, there’s no genetic test to prove you’re Native American.

There is no DNA test for being Native American because DNA and genetic ancestry are not the same as culture and identity.

Carlos Bustamante, a prominent Stanford University geneticist and MacArthur fellow, led the analysis, so it’s far more likely to be accurate than direct-to-consumer DNA tests that sometimes botch results. He concludes that “the results strongly support the existence of an unadmixed Native American ancestor” six to 10 generations ago. If her ancestor is fully 10 generations back, she would be only 1/1024th Native American.

Warren should never have made this claim to begin with. It doesn’t mean anything to possibly have 1/1024 Native American ancestry if she has no ties to Native American culture or politics otherwise, Kim Tallbear, a University of Alberta professor and author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science told The Atlantic. Tallbear noted that it’s popular for white people to claim Native American ancestry, but “tribe” is a federally recognized status.

Tallbear pointed out that Warren shouldn’t continue to defend her ancestry claims despite refusing to meet with Cherokee Nation members that challenge her. “This shows that she focuses on and actually privileges DNA company definitions in this debate, which are ultimately settler-colonial definitions of who is indigenous,” Tallbear writes. “She and much of the US American public privilege the voices of (mostly white) genome scientists and implicitly cede to them the power to define indigenous identity.” Similarly, the Cherokee Nation said in a statement that “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”


https://www.theverge.com/2018/10/15/17978144/elizabeth-warren-dna-test-native-american-genetics-ancestry-culture-identity-politics

[Irish Exit]

The more rigid the tribe's requirements, the more likely there is casino money to be had.

[Irish Exit]

I miss Bill Moyer. There are no good in-depth interviewers left with his retirement and the #MeToo movement ravaging the industry.

[Legion]

[NiftyNiblick]

Five more presumably stupid posts that I didn't have to read.

[Legion]

Five more presumably stupid posts that I didn't have to read.

Yet here you are.