| | | --...revealed this week he does not have Cherokee ancestry. After another celebrated figure in Indigenous
arts and culture was revealed to not have Indigenous ancestry...--
conflating cherokee ancestry with "indigenous" ancestry is naive, at best. there are various ways that
thomas king might have "indigenous" ancestry. the cherokee evaluation found that thomas king did not meet
the requirements for cherokee tribal affiliation. it didn't rule out ancestry in any other tribe, however.
as well, it's possible that thomas king had an ancestor with "mixed" tribal ancestry (e.g., cherokee father and
shawnee mother). it's possible that this ancestor was raised as a cherokee or shawnee or maybe adopted in
a different tribe. whichever tribe the child grew up in would become the child's tribe and the affiliation with
the other tribes would be lost. so, in this way someone's story about having a cherokee grandfather or
grandmother might be accurate in one way but also violate tribal ethics. or, said differently, someone who is
not a traditional tribal person might pass down family history in an honest manner, without realizing the tribal
affiliation does not apply.
oh, the notion that a physical blood sample determines tribal ancestry is not true, as evident by the cherokee
requirement that a tribal genealogist must evaluate and verify affiliation:
"...A genealogist with the Tribal Alliance Against Fraud, based in North Carolina, had done the research.
King’s grandfather, Elvin Hunt, who according to family lore was part Cherokee..".
theglobeandmail.com |
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