Anonymous #1 17h

Yea like Italians or Arabs weren’t considered white 150 years ago. It’s just sad that like in the future no one will LOOK native yk like the features they and their ancestors have will all be diluted away.

1

Anonymous #3 17h

Any attempts to enforce stuff like this ends up excluding people, and there are still major legal battles going on about who legally counts as Native American. But really ethnicity is a social construct and there’s no concrete way to define it. Historically some tribes based membership off of culture and would adopt people (including white people) into their tribes, while others had strict patrilineal or matrilineal rules.

1

Anonymous #1 17h

Like my friend is Cherokee mixed with Swedish American and all he has to show his native heritage is brown reddish hair instead of his dad’s blonde hair. Other than that he’s just a regular white guy

1

Anonymous #3 17h

What makes this particularly fraught in the modern day is how many native kids were adopted (sometimes forcibly) to white families and afterwards attempted to reconnect with their tribes. So it’s not easy enough to say “if you were raised in the tribe” AND furthermore the US government legally requires blood ancestry to be a member of a tribe (usually from the Dawes Rolls of the 1920s which excludes many native people)

1

Anonymous OP 17h

I mean the indigenous-descended population of Latin America is massive and still increasing

1

Anonymous #3 17h

Yeah definitely but I’m talking abt North America

1

Anonymous #3 17h

That’s very interesting, when I drove through Oklahoma I was very happy to see signs in the Cherokee language. Honestly after what’s been done to them i won’t fault them for trying to conserve their ethnicity from becoming mixed with white. The concept of xenophobia being bad is a western concept

1

Anonymous OP 17h

it’s important to remember that the Latin American population of North America is increasing more than the non-Hispanic white population. So statistically, indigenous-descended Latin Americans are going to keep becoming more and more common marriage partners for indigenous North Americans. They won’t look quite like their native ancestors, but increasingly native ancestry is going to be evident in the American population.

6

Anonymous #3 17h

Though I expect as Latin America shifts into high development and their birth and emigration rates decrease, Africa is going to soon become our primary source of new immigrants.

1

Anonymous #3 17h

I think for indigenous North Americans it’ll be a case by case basis and depend on the specific community. A lot of indigenous groups in the mid-Atlantic are already very ethnically mixed and are now black-white-native. While a lot of native cultures in the southwest were partially Hispanized in the colonial era and continue to integrate with new Hispanic immigrants.

1

Anonymous #3 17h

A lot of the very rural areas like in Alaska or northern Canada are probably going to stay pretty darn indigenous. There’s just not a lot of white people living out there. Though this could change if exploitation of the Arctic increases, and if the younger generation continues to move towards cities.

1

Anonymous #3 17h

And a lot of tribes have “blood quantum” where you are only allowed to be a member if you’re more than a certain ancestry percentage from that tribe. This disincentivizes marrying outside the tribe. But if native groups become more economically stable and people don’t rely as much on tribal welfare services, that will matter less.

1

Anonymous OP 17h

The Cherokee of Oklahoma are actually one of the tribes that doesn’t require a blood quantum. That’s why their membership is so large, a lot of that is mixed ethnicity people. The primary controversy regarding the Cherokee and membership is actually that for decades they were excluding the descendants of their black slaves (known as Cherokee Freedmen) from tribal membership (hence also from tribal healthcare and welfare). They partially amended this in 2021 (though still rely on the Dawes Rolls)

1

Anonymous #3 17h

The five main tribes affected by the trail of tears (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Seminole, creek) had black slaves and brought them with them to Oklahoma. This is partially why Americans called them the “five civilized tribes,” they had adopted American practices including chattel slavery. Everyone except the Cherokee still excludes Freedmen.

1

Anonymous OP 14h

My great-grandparents (Swedish and Italian) were accused of race mixing

1