My Native American Ancestry
Written on May 1, 2026
My younger sister and I have disagreed on many things in the past. There is one thing that she and I never disagreed on, and that's our ancestry. We never really got along when it concerned anything else, even before I joined the military.
I haven't seen her or any of her children, physically, since sometime before I moved to the Philippines in 2006. That's despite the fact that I visited other siblings during trips back to the United States after that.
Native Americans
My siblings and I knew, based on what our mother told us when we were all young, that we had 1/16th Native American ancestry because her father was 1/2 Native American. Of course, we didn't use that terminology back then.
We didn't know when "American Indian" became politically incorrect, but that's the term we used until we were told to stop. My mother thought that it was the Cherokee tribe, but she was wrong.
My grandfather left my grandmother and my mother sometime around World War II and started another family. This was a family no one in my family knew about until Facebook became a thing. They have the same last name as my mother's maiden name.
I communicated with some of my cousins (or half cousins) several years ago, but I've long since stopped communicating with any of them. We had nothing in common except my grandfather, who had already passed away.
The Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
There are three Choctaw tribes. One is located in Louisiana and another in Mississippi. The third is in Oklahoma. The tribe resides on a reservation in the southeast corner of the state. My mother was born in Hugo, near the southern border of that section.
I don't know why she thought we descended from the Cherokee tribe, but it was probably because it was the largest tribe in Oklahoma. My mother never really talked to her father, other than how a child talks to a parent.
She never asked him which tribe was involved, and her mother never mentioned him. He left the family when she was young. Later in life, she didn't want to know anything about him.
Sometime after I joined the military, my younger brother and younger sister decided they wanted to locate him. They found him living on a Choctaw reservation, and that's all they ever told me. My mother, when she found out what they did, stayed angry with them for months.
My Ancestry Doesn't Matter
For the most part, it doesn't apply to me or any of my living siblings. It's something we know about, and that's about it. We've never talked about it outside the family, and I'm including my current family as well.
Unlike a politician I won't name, none of us has ever checked or written "American Indian" or "Native American" on any forms in order to obtain some kind of advantage. There are many Americans in the Western United States with Native American ancestry.
Image by Tcr25, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons