Using My Own "Pocahontas" Family Story to Search for Truth

As a child, I was fascinated by our family story of Native American heritage. One of my goals as a genealogist is to distinguish (to quote mixed-race author Darnella Davis) “who we are” from “who we think we are.” I was told we were descended from a woman who was part of the "Cornplanter" tribe in Pennsylvania. Although I am pale white, my late brother, Peter, had darker skin and higher cheekbones, and he turned olive-brown in the summer. We assumed that was due to the presumed Native DNA. No. I have done a DNA test and it shows 0.0% Indigenous North American DNA. My story is not unusual.

Many white people in the U.S. have real or imagined connections to Indigenous ancestors. To a greater or lesser extent, white people with these family stories run the risk of becoming "Pretendians." I did. As a kid, I told my friends about my Native ancestry with a certain amount of pride. The problem was that I knew next to nothing about present-day Indians and only thought of Native people in the past tense.

Even imagined stories are rooted in some reality. This land is, after all, Native land.

The stories can be problematic. I want to forget that I ever told people I was even a little bit Native. I want to erase that part of my history. But we can also use those stories to begin the process of learning about the people and cultures who were here first and who are still here.

As I go after a deeper understanding of who I am, I have come to mostly focus on understanding — and attempting to own — my European heritage. I am white, and seeing the impact of my white identity is an ongoing challenge for me. However, that family story is still there, and to ignore it entirely risks erasing the true stories of Indigenous people to whom I am connected, both past and present. Erasure is also a problem.

As a genealogist, I pay close attention to family stories. They are the beginning, middle, and end of a journey of discovery. There is usually some truth in there, and small details from a family story can unlock new branches of a family tree, corroborating sometimes ambiguous documents.

One family story: My grandma told us that my great-great-grandfather went out for a loaf of bread and never came back. This event had a big impact on the life of my grandma and was the starting point for my search through online documents. I eventually found evidence of this ancestor, living in Cleveland with a new wife and child. Without the story, I would have never known to look or would have assumed he was a different person.

I encourage everyone to get a tape recorder, or a notebook, and interview your oldest relatives. Bring your family tree and old photo albums along and ask about specific people and places. Even small details can prove vital to research and to your connection with your family history.

In my attempt to verify my Indigenous ancestry, I have not found a documented connection to any tribal ancestor. Nor did my DNA test reveal even a tiny fraction of Native American DNA. That does not necessarily mean my family stories are not true. There may be no documents available. Documents from the 18th and 19th centuries also tend to cluster around white land-owning males. Before 1850, censuses only listed the male head of household. Also, because of the way DNA recombines, our genetic ancestry can emphasize one line over another. With the current sophistication of online DNA analysis, an ancestor who is six or more generations back may not show up at all. So there is a small chance that my family is not making it up.

DNA is a terrible way to measure if someone is Indigenous, anyway. It reenacts centuries of times when white people tried to decide who was — and was not — Indigenous, usually to justify their own purposes. Specifically, it is reminiscent of the blood quantum rules, where percentages of ancestry and tribal registrations were used to deny thousands of tribal members their rights, payments, and land, as stipulated by the treaties the government agreed to follow.

A better way to claim Indigenous identity would be to look to tradition, family, and relationships, none of which I have, possibly due to the assimilation forced on Native Americans throughout our nation’s history. So, even as I focus most of my genealogy research on my white European ancestry, the persistence of my family story continues to compel me to investigate my potential Indigenous connection, not to claim anything, but to fight against the erasure of Indigenous people that is so common in white narratives.

Despite me having 0.0% DNA connection, the Cornplanter tribe itself is not made up by my family. My curiosity about my family story led me to the true stories of the Seneca Nation leader known as Cornplanter, who has an extensive Wikipedia page. Cornplanter helped keep the Iroquois people (now known as the Haudenosaunee) neutral in the Northwest Indian War (1785–1795), which was waged by the newly-minted USA against Indigenous people in the Ohio River Valley. In 1796, he and his people signed a treaty guaranteeing them permanent ownership of 1500 acres in Western Pennsylvania. Cornplanter died in 1836, but his band continued to grow and live on and near what became known as the Cornplanter Tract. The Cornplanter tract is near where my Pennsylvania ancestors lived in the early 1800s.

Many of Cornplanter’s descendants died in the pandemic of 1918, which then (as with the current pandemic), hit Native American communities especially hard. The band’s lands were then flooded during a hydroelectric project in the 1960s, and the remaining people were forced to relocate. This was their ultimate repayment for not waging war against the USA during its early years! The Seneca Nation is still here, and the Haudenosaunee people are among the leaders in the ongoing fight for the recognition of the rights of Indigenous people.

In seeking out the history of the Indigenous people I may be connected to, I stumbled upon a disturbing pattern. When engineers needed to find a site to build a dam for electric power generation, or for flood control, they often chose to flood reservation land. In the case of the Chippewa Flowage (in the area where I currently live in Wisconsin) the dam was built in the 1920s, creating a 15,000-acre system of lakes in areas that had once been prime wild rice and hunting lands for the Lac Courte Oreilles band of Ojibwe. Despite strong opposition, the dam project went ahead. This is an example of the literal erasure of people and land that comes when white people think of Native Americans as only existing in the past. Mental erasure leads to physical harm.

In researching the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in North Dakota, I found that the construction of the Oahe dam forced the eviction of 190 families and reduced the land available to the people there to support themselves. This is a danger of erasure: people and their claims to land are not valued.

An antidote to erasure, and stereotypical ideas about Indigenous people, is to learn the specific stories, histories, and present status of the people whose land you occupy. Along with those stories comes a recognition that the descendants of those original displaced people are still here, and are still fighting for rights and recognition. What is deeply in the past for most white people is a present-day reality for many Indigenous communities fighting to retain or reclaim resources vital to their basic survival (and guaranteed under the US Constitution’s treaty provision).

For people who grew up white, like myself, by bringing Indigenous people into our minds as present-day people from specific places with specific histories, we can begin to free ourselves from harmful stereotypes and erasure. We can begin to see our common cause. Our stories are shared and interlocking. By ignoring that, we risk repeating the injustices of the past.

Ancestry research changed how I see myself and how I see history. I am still on this journey and would like you to join me. Each month, as I examine family tree research and connect it to history, I will be creating these stories. I start with my own story and I invite readers to send me questions about their family histories.