Your Own Indian Princess

He’d been surprised, wrote a friend, when a DNA test came back without any Native American DNA, because his family had rather detailed traditions on both his father’s and his mother’s side family of Native ancestry.  My family has them too, though I’ve never investigated them.

The American Indian scholar Vine Deloria (whose father and grandfather were Episcopal ministers) wrote in Custer Died For Your Sins that white families tended to think they had some Indian ancestry. He said (if I remember right, having read the book as a teenager) that whites tended to claim that their ancestor was an Indian princess. I thought he was exaggerating but over the years I’ve met several people who claimed Indian ancestry and almost all of them did claim that their ancestor was a princess.

My guess is that people naturally want to claim an exalted ancestry and claiming a chief or even a prince seems too obvious an attempt to do so, so people choose a princess instead. Not that this is conscious, really: it’s the product of that molding of the story that most of us do almost unintentionally when telling stories about ourselves, and when once told our memory converts the molded story into established fact.