Monday, October 15, 2018

i'm having some feels around the EW thing and i want to talk about it [edited]

now
i'm a little put off to be honest
by the whole one ancestor 6 to 10 generations back
i can't explain exactly
but
maybe if i tell you why i don't want to take a dna test
it'll make more sense


i might be as much as 1/8 native american
which is not a whole lot
but
i figure
if my grandfather's father
was a full blood indian
he probably would have passed on some specifics
some practices
tribal knowledge
specific stories
but
i never heard anything like that
so
i figure he must have been half
but
he could have been less, i guess
he looked indian
indian enough to be killed for being an indian
and my grandfather looked indian
so
i figure that he must have been half indian
and that makes me an eighth  [no it doesn't, it makes me a sixteenth]

but
i worry that that might be wrong
but
i figure
he did have a red headed sister
so maybe he was less than 1/4
there's all that recessive and whatnot
but
at the outside i figure i couldn't possibly be less than 1/32
which is like
hardly statistically relevant
but is still something, ya know like 3%

and that's why i don't want to take a dna test
they aren't even terribly good at the native american dna
because the tribes don't like to participate in the dna testing
so they have to extrapolate from mexico and central america
it tends to get lumped into asian
because
that's where the indians came from
long time ago on the bering strait
and
i cannot handle
if i don't show up
or if it's 1% or 3% asian
so
i don't want to do it

i understand i don't count as indian
i don't have tribal registry
or affiliation or even a very sure guarantee
that my grandfather was not fucking making up blackfoot
just because it sounded cool to him


now
maybe i'm wrong
maybe he was
i keep saying he
because i don't know his name
maybe he was full blooded indian
and his wife wouldn't let the kids learn indian stuff
maybe

so then my grandfather was half
my father a quarter
and me
then i'm an eighth
that's like my best case senario then, huh, 12.5%


but
it won't tell me for sure what tribe
and it won't help me learn anything about anything
so
all it can do really
is take my 12.5% and make it 1%
ya know
why do that?

it might say

50-ish% german
20-ish% scottish
20-ish% irish
10-ish% asian/native american
or maybe i would be surprised

but
in the end
i don't see what difference the surprise would make
what difference does it make
what countries your ancestors came from
if you don't know them
aren't they really just abstractions
and then you're just telling yourself stories about what any of it means

it's not gonna tell me i'm 50% sub-saharan-african
or japanese
that would surprise me
but
it wouldn't really tell me anything about myself, ya know