Letting Go of My "Indian Princess" Ancestry Narrative

I'm an amateur genealogist, and I LOVE it. My family tree has over 10,000 people in it. I write about being a genealogist every month for our local newspaper. I help other people with their family trees. But as much as I love my hobby, I'm embarrassed about one of my reasons for getting into it. I wanted to confirm a family story that my grandpap was descended from a Native American woman. These "Indian Princess" narratives are common among white people in the USA, and we are susceptible to fetishizing our connection to the Native identity, without recognizing the role of our white ancestors in genocide and land theft. My journey into genealogy started out with a misplaced desire to distance myself from my white ancestors, but over time I learned to fully claim my European ancestry in all its complexity.

Ancestry research changed how I see myself and how I see history. I am still on this journey, and I invite you to join me.

When I look deeply at any one person or event, I find connections. Ten years ago, when I joined an online genealogy website, I had one major goal: finding out which Native American tribe my ancestor came from. This was an odd goal for someone who is a white person of European ancestry, but it had roots in the childhood stories of my family.

As I became better at researching, I discovered a big difference between the simplistic stories I had in my head and the reality that my ancestors lived.

I remember when I was in grade school, my friends and I would talk about what fraction of each ethnicity we each were. We would speak in broad terms of “I’m a quarter this and half that.” It seemed simple. Our family lore had it that on one side we were Native American, by a woman named Rose, from the Seneca Corn Planter tribe. So, in my elementary school head, I thought I must be 1/8th or 1/16th Native, or something like that. Today, I realize how naive my understanding was. The truth is slowly sinking in, as I sit with it and the thousands of documents piling up. The short answer is: I am overwhelmingly white and European, and I need to come to terms with that before I focus on any other ancestries I might have.

I’m white.

Finding my Indigenous roots was also a major reason that I had my DNA analyzed. Umm... My DNA test revealed 0.00% Native American DNA, and I have yet to discover documents connecting me to any Indigenous person or tribe. It might still be there, but before I look deeper at my genealogy for a single Native American person, I need to first connect with the multitude of white immigrants who came to this continent and led to my existence.

There were Germans, Welsh, Irish, and English people who arrived and had big families, and then their children produced big families. In the 1800s, the population of white Europeans grew exponentially, and expanded geographically very quickly, covering almost the whole continent. This displaced Indigenous people, destroyed ecosystems, and built wealth for families and corporations. I am a product of — and a beneficiary of — that expansion.

For me to have been fascinated by a potential tiny fraction of Native American ancestry, while ignoring my white ancestors, is part of the problem in this country. I don’t see white, because white is the default in this area. We all need to see what it means to be white if we want to make this country a place that is truly equal for everybody.

One reason I don’t like to think of whiteness is because of what white people did when they encountered Indigenous people. These human beings had the resources (land) we needed, and we did not treat them as equal trade partners in securing those resources.

When I look at those armies of white people who lived and died in my family tree, I undoubtedly see evidence of hard-working people. No question. My people worked. Nothing was given to my people on a silver platter. There are farmers and miners and preachers and small business owners.

On the surface, it is hard for me to see how my people lived a life of white privilege, but as I dig only a little bit deeper, I see that much of the wealth of this nation was built on the exploitation of land and resources that were taken from Indigenous people. This is wealth that my people participated in.

The access to land for immigrants was a major factor in their success and their ability to raise those large families. Sitting with these truths of my white heritage leads me to conclude that some sort of reparation is due to the original caretakers of this land — Indigenous people, the descendants of whom are still struggling to survive on small reservations throughout this continent.

All land in the U.S. goes back to treaties that were forced on Indigenous people, and then eroded, or flat-out broken by our government. It doesn’t matter if a white person bought the land from the government, homesteaded it, got it as payment for military service, or acquired it secondhand (or thirdhand) from a white-owned lumber company or railroad company, it all goes back to land taken from Native people. So, my hard-working farmer ancestors directly benefited from this unjust land grab, and therefore I benefit, for the simple reason that I would not exist here without that heritage.

On one side of my family, hard-working Germans came and settled as a group in one small part of central Illinois. For generations, these Lutheran farmers labored on the land. The records and DNA connections show that I am related to hundreds of people in that area of Illinois. The original German immigrants left their country partly because there was no land available there.

My family came to Illinois just twenty years after Native American people of the confederated Illini tribes were pushed out of the territory. They were forced out using the legal justification of treaties, negotiated by future president William Henry Harrison in 1803 and 1818. One of those Illini bands, the Peoria, suffered more broken treaties, including two additional removals and an allotment policy that left them with no remaining land by 1915.

My ancestors plowed the prairie and produced crops, and I am the direct beneficiary of both the hard work of these Germans and their access to this incredible land that was taken from Indigenous people.

The land was converted from a resource available to support all humans for eternity, according to the original instructions for living here (held by the Native tribes), into valuable “property.” This created an amazing amount of monetary wealth in this country.

The “White Pine’’ treaty in 1837 gave the Ojibwe people the equivalent of $1.60 for the quarter section (160 acres) of land where I live currently in New Haven township in Northwest Wisconsin. That land was granted in 1860 to a white man who had bought a “scrip warrant” from the family of a veteran of the War of 1812. That scrip was payment for service in the war and entitled the holder to government-owned land. This land was later valued in 1880 at $400. This is a 25,000 percent increase in value compared to what was promised (and never even fully given!) to the Ojibwe people.

I challenge everyone to learn about the treaties that transferred the land you live on into private and public property. In this area of Wisconsin, the White Pine Treaty of 1837 is a good place to start.

If you would like to discover more about your own ancestry and discover the part your people have played in forming our current society, there are many tools available on the internet. I am experienced with a few of those tools, and I am available to build family trees and help you look into your family’s connection to important historical events that shaped how you came to be in this time and place, on this land.

I would like to thank my friend Anahkwud (AKA Wendy Stone) for her help editing this piece. Chi Boozhoo! We discovered that our families share a connection which brings the topic of this piece home: my ancestors in Illinois directly displaced her Peoria ancestors.