Interracial relations between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans is a complex issue that has been mostly neglected with "few in-depth studies on interracial relationships". [1] [2]
Interracial relations between Native Americans, Europeans, and Africans is a complex issue that has been mostly neglected with "few in-depth studies on interracial relationships". [1] [2]
Intertribal marriage is historically common among many Native American tribes, both prior to European contact and in the present. Historically, tribal conflicts might result in the eventual adoption of, or marriages with, captives taken in warfare, with former foes becoming full members of the community. Individuals often have ancestry from more than one tribe, and this became increasingly common after so many tribes lost family members to colonial invasions bringing disease, war and massacres. Bands or entire tribes were often reduced to very small numbers, and at times split or merged to form stronger communities in reaction to these pressures. [4]
Tribes with long trading histories with Europeans show a higher rate of European admixture, reflecting admixture events between Native American women and European men. [5] [4]
The Indigenous Peoples Council on Biocolonialism has also said that haplogroup testing is not a valid means of determining Native American ancestry, and that the concept of using genetic testing to determine who is or is not Native American threatens tribal sovereignty. [6] [7] Author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science, Kim TallBear (Sisseton Wahpeton Oyate), agrees, stating that not only is there no DNA test that can indicate a tribe, but "there is no DNA-test to prove you're Native American." [8] [9] Tallbear writes in Native American DNA that while a DNA test may bring up some markers associated with some Indigenous or Asian populations, the science in these cases is problematic, [8] as Indigenous identity is not about one distant (and possibly nonexistent) ancestor, but rather political citizenship, culture, kinship, and daily, lived experience as part of an Indigenous community. [9] She adds that a person, "… could have up to two Native American grandparents and show no sign of Native American ancestry. For example, a genetic male could have a maternal grandfather (from whom he did not inherit his Y chromosome) and a paternal grandmother (from whom he did not inherit his mtDNA) who were descended from Native American founders, but mtDNA and Y-chromosome analyses would not detect them." [10]
Given all these factors, DNA testing is not sufficient to qualify a person for specific tribal membership, as the ethnicity admixture tests cannot distinguish among Native American tribes. They cannot even reliably indicate Native American ancestry: [11]
"Native American markers" are not found solely among Native Americans. While they occur more frequently among Native Americans, they are also found in people in other parts of the world. [11]
The only use of DNA testing by legitimate tribes is that some, such as the Meskwaki, may use DNA for paternity tests, or similar confirmation that an applicant who was not enrolled at birth is the biological child of an enrolled tribal member. It is solely about confirming or ruling out biological paternity, and has no relationship to race or ethnicity. [12] [13]
DNA testing and research has provided some data about the extent of Native American ancestry among African Americans, which varies in the general population. Based on the work of geneticists, Harvard University historian Henry Louis Gates Jr. hosted a popular, and at times controversial, PBS series, African American Lives , in which geneticists said DNA evidence shows that Native American ancestry is far less common among African Americans than previously believed. [14] [15] Their conclusions were that while almost all African Americans are racially mixed, and many have family stories of Native heritage, usually these stories turn out to be inaccurate, [14] [15] with only 5 percent of African American people showing more than 2 percent Native American ancestry. [14]
Gates summarized these statistics to mean that, "If you have 2 percent Native American ancestry, you had one such ancestor on your family tree five to nine generations back (150 to 270 years ago)." [14] Their findings also concluded that the most common "non-Black" mix among African Americans is English and Scots-Irish. Some critics thought the PBS series did not sufficiently explain the limitations of DNA testing for assessment of heritage. [16] Another study, published in the American Journal of Human Genetics , also indicated that, despite how common these family stories are, relatively few African Americans who have these stories actually turned out to have detectable Native American ancestry. [17] A study reported in the American Journal of Human Genetics stated, "We analyzed the European genetic contribution to 10 populations of African descent in the United States (Maywood, Illinois; Detroit; New York; Philadelphia; Pittsburgh; Baltimore; Charleston, South Carolina; New Orleans; and Houston) and in Jamaica ... mtDNA haplogroups analysis shows no evidence of a significant maternal Amerindian contribution to any of the 10 populations." [17] Despite this, some still insist that most African Americans have at least some Native American heritage. [18]
An autosomal study from 2019 found small but detectable amounts of Native American ancestry among African-Americans, ranging from an average of 1.2% in the West South Central region, to 1.9% on the West Coast. The median amount of Native ancestry in African-Americans was found to be 1% nationwide. [19]
An autosomal DNA study published in 2019 found evidence of minimal Native American ancestry among non-Hispanic White Americans, ranging from an average of 0.18% in the Mid-Atlantic region to 0.93% in the Pacific region. However, the majority of White Americans were found to have no detectable Native American ancestry, with the median amount of European ancestry being 99.8% in White participants. [19]
Hispanic Americans, on the other hand, were found to have a large and varying amount of Native American ancestry, with a median of 38% nationwide. This ancestry was the highest among Hispanics from the West South Central Region (Texas and Oklahoma) at 43.2%, and the West Coast, at 42.6%, reflecting the predominant Mexican-American population in these regions. Hispanics from the Mid-Atlantic, on the other hand, averaged only 11.1% Native American ancestry, reflecting the predominant Puerto Rican and Dominican-American populations among Hispanics from that region. [19]
Native Americans are more likely than any other racial group to practice interracial or intertribal marriage among the different tribes and non-Natives, resulting in an ever-declining proportion of Indigenous blood among those who claim a Native American identity (tribes often count only the Indian blood from their own tribal background in the enrollment process, disregarding intertribal heritages). [20] Some tribes disenroll those with low blood quantum. Disenrollment has become a contentious issue in Native American reservation politics. [21] [22]
Some tribes (particularly some in the Eastern United States) are primarily made up of individuals with an unambiguous Native American identity, despite having a large number of mixed-race citizens with prominent non-Native ancestry.
More than 75% of those enrolled in the Cherokee Nation have less than one-quarter Cherokee blood. [23] For the Cherokee it has 819,000 individuals multiracial individuals, and it has 284,000 mono-racial individuals. [24] The former Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Bill John Baker, is 1/32 Cherokee, amounting to about 3%. [25]
The Navajo nation on the other hand has 286,000 with mono-racial individuals, is the largest tribe if only non-multiracial individuals are counted; the Navajo are the tribe with the highest proportion of mono-racial individuals, 86.3%. [24]
African- and Native- Americans have interacted for centuries. The earliest record of Native American and African contact occurred in April 1502, when Spanish colonists transported the first Africans to Hispaniola to serve as slaves. [26]
Sometimes Native Americans resented the presence of African Americans. [27] The "Catawaba tribe in 1752 showed great anger and bitter resentment when an African American came among them as a trader". [27] To gain favor with Europeans, the Cherokee exhibited the strongest color prejudice of all Native Americans. [27] Because of European fears of a unified revolt of Native Americans and African Americans, the colonists tried to encourage hostility between the ethnic groups: "Whites sought to convince Native Americans that African Americans worked against their best interests." [28] In 1751, South Carolina law stated:
The carrying of Negroes among the Indians has all along been thought detrimental, as an intimacy ought to be avoided. [29]
In addition, in 1758 the governor of South Carolina James Glen wrote:
it has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them [Indians] to Negroes. [30]
Europeans considered both races inferior and made efforts to make both Native Americans and Africans enemies. Native Americans were rewarded if they returned escaped slaves, and African Americans were rewarded for fighting in the late 19th-century Indian Wars. [31] [32] [33]
According to the National Park Service, "Native Americans, during the transitional period of Africans becoming the primary race enslaved, were enslaved at the same time and shared a common experience of enslavement. They worked together, lived together in communal quarters, produced collective recipes for food, shared herbal remedies, myths and legends, and in the end they intermarried." [34] [35] Because of a shortage of men due to warfare, many tribes encouraged marriage between the two groups, to create stronger, healthier children from the unions. [36]
In the 18th century, many Native American women married freed or runaway African men due to a decrease in the population of men in Native American villages. [31] Records show that many Native American women bought African men but, unknown to the European sellers, the women freed and married the men into their tribe. [31] When African men married or had children by a Native American woman, their children were born free, because the mother was free (according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrem , which the colonists incorporated into law). [31]
While numerous tribes used captive enemies as servants and slaves, they also often adopted younger captives into their tribes to replace members who had died. In the Southeast, a few Native American tribes began to adopt a slavery system similar to that of the American colonists, buying African American slaves, especially the Cherokee, Choctaw, and Creek. Though less than 3% of Native Americans owned slaves, divisions grew among the Native Americans over slavery. [37] Among the Cherokee, records show that slaveholders in the tribe were largely the children of European men who had shown their children the economics of slavery. [32] As European colonists took slaves into frontier areas, there were more opportunities for relationships between African and Native American peoples. [31]
. Burden of Proof. (b) To meet its burden to establish paternity, an applicant must submit a DNA test which uses a twelve- (12) marker protocol, or certified test results from another DNA company which has a degree of accuracy which is as great as or greater than that provided by a DNA test which uses a 12-marker protocol, certified by a competent court, and which establishes paternity necessary for membership. The cost of the paternity test shall be borne by the Tribe.