Dogs, Horses, Natives and Slaves

According to oral tradition, my father was a small part Cherokee. That's a giant problem to talk about online because American history and law treats Natives literally like dogs, like it's entirely about skin color or ethnicity and not culture, identity or nationality.

When I was a seventeen year old brunette with unlayered shoulder length hair, there were a few photos of me that looked Native. My German relatives generally feel I look Native while Americans typically feel I look German. 

I got married at nineteen (to another nineteen year old) and for most of my marriage I continued to be brunette, but for most of my life before and after the marriage, I have trended some shade of blonde without dying it.

My mother was a German immigrant. Like several of my cousins on my mother's side, I was blonde as a child and gradually turned brunette as I got older. 

My hair to this day readily bleaches out from exposure to sunlight, salt water or chlorinated water and I'm currently mostly platinum blonde.

I once posted an article to Hacker News called Indigenous Blondes because the concept resonated with me. The original article no longer exists but the submission to HN is evidence it once did.

Natives tend to be openly hostile to me taking an interest in anything Native and explaining my background doesn't change that fact. They dig in their heels and insist that I should NOT make ANY mention of my supposed heritage without researching it and getting paperwork clearly proving it.

I'm too White to be allowed to have a genuine personal interest in anything Native. 

Ask anyone. Natives and Whites alike agree on this point.

Why is that?

The American view is you can breed it out of them, so Indigenous Blondes becomes an oxymoron. Indigenous is supposed to be an ethnicity and only an ethnicity and if you don't have enough Native blood, everyone has a hissy fit about you having any interest in your Native heritage and everyone White and Native alike equally hates on you for speaking of it.

I once read a comment on one of the Native American Reddits that blood quantum only applies to dogs, horses and Native Americans. This isn't entirely accurate.

Black Americans also have a similar test applied to them but from the opposite direction. The reason Black Americans -- most of whom likely trace their ancestry to historic slavery -- are seventy percent European and many of them would be viewed as White in Brazil is because if you are BLACK and an American, you're not allowed to wash it off.

The Reason:

White slave owners raped slave women to get more slaves and that's why you can be merely one EIGHTH African ethnicity and you're STILL a Black American. 

I have heard someone credible say an octaroon -- someone only one eighth Black ethnically -- can still qualify for race-based college aid but have red hair and freckles. The redhead with cornrows who says "Check this out!" in the movie Take the Lead may be an octoroon character -- a poor Black guy, not a poor White guy in a mostly minority school.

In contrast, Redskins -- Native Americans -- need to live in fear of washing it off. They can cause their children to lose tribal membership by choosing the wrong partner.

Slaves had no human rights and were legally forbidden from learning to read. Generations later, their descendants fight to say "My ethnically related speech habits are not evidence I'm stupid. It's just a different form of English."

Being able to wash off Blackness would be an "easy" means to grant rights to the children of slaves, so we don't allow that. Similarly, being able to easily wash off Redness is a means to easily lose rights if you aren't careful.

It's an attempt to say you can breed it out of them and then they stop being Other. They become a generic American with no claim to a descriptor preceding that word.

I'm currently mostly platinum blonde. I've never been platinum blonde before and it's not something I did on purpose. The sun is simply stronger at altitude.

Someone recently complimented me on my hair, saying they liked the color I dyed it. Out of habit, I defaulted to saying "I didn't dye it. It just bleaches out in the sun though I've never been this blonde before."

Only after I walked away did I realize she probably thinks my snow white hair is all grey hair. She likely thinks the slightly yellow blonde bits are due to hair dye.

They aren't. It's because I cut it shorter and the sun here at altitude is so strong that my brunette roots are merely normal blonde not platinum blonde like the rest but also not brunette like my roots usually are.

My extreme blondeness while living in a bilingual, multicultural state with a much longer history than most of the US is essentially the inspiration for this post. I always feel more comfortable in multilingual, multicultural environments but at the moment I so do NOT blend.

I have this hypothesis that unflattering photos of gay men I've seen in magazines are unflattering because of societal homophobia. I suspect the same thing gets done to Natives.

I suspect that because I used to follow a Native American civil rights lawyer on Twitter (yes, ACTUAL Twitter, so some years ago) and he sometimes posted family photos. So I've seen more flattering photos of him than the one on his Wikipedia page.

That makes me go "Hmmm. Civil rights activist and people are essentially MAKING him look ugly. Why would anyone do that when stock publicity photos usually seek to be flattering?"

Anyway, when I followed him on Twitter, I got an education in this Blood Quantum crapola that seeks to make being Native something they can breed out of you, like you are a dog.

No Frenchman needs to worry that if he marries a German woman, their kids might lose their claim to French heritage or French nationality. But Native Americans have to worry about stupid shit like that because of American Blood Quantum laws for tribal membership.

No, I'm NOT trying to make a legal claim to tribal membership based on oral tradition of the family. But THIS BS is why Natives jump down my throat for trying to explain that I read Native subreddits due to an interest in my cultural heritage on my father's side of the family.