The Elizabeth Warren stuff reminds me, my family’s got the reverse story, no legend of native heritage but then my mom got into genaeology and found some anyway.

(Which is one reason I won’t bother to go Mormon even if I’m realizing my prophetic Americanism comes close – if I die and it turns out they were right, I’m well-documented enough now that they’ll postmortem baptize and invite me in shortly after, anyway. The other reason is that as an Irish mystic, my prophetic power is strengthened by liquor.)

As in, one of my ancestors was a surveyor in the, this woulda been 18th or early 19th centuries, when the federal government was capitalizing itself by auctioning off land around the unsettled now-Midwest.

So land speculators would hire him, and he’d go west past the pale of settlement and report back what was there – “this area has shit drainage, this valley’s nice but the only route out is a river with bad rapids, there’s copper veins breaking the surface here, this looks okay but the trees suggest acidic soil, THIS is the quality farmland you want”, etc. So his patrons would buy that and turn around and flip it to a church congregation or for-profit “town promoter” to organize and recruit settlers.

And once he went out for 2 or 3 years and came back with a wife that the registry in his hometown church just put down as “an Indian Maiden”.

If I really dig into it I could maybe figure out where his route was that trip and guess at who she’s from but honestly it’s not meaningful to me. Anyone with roots deep enough in America (three signers of the Declaration of Independence, right here) usually has some native ancestry on a branch somewhere.