When I was a girl my father told me his grandmother was Cherokee, his father’s family French – “DuBois became DuBose somewhere along the line,” he said. My grandmother had distinct Native features as did one of my sisters. There was no reason to question it.

I grew up playing outdoors like most children of my generation.  The neighborhood kids and I ran, jumped on a horse that was a petroleum tank, and pretended to be Annie Oakley or Calamity Jane, even though we shot with homemade bows and arrows. When my family finally got television, my father watched Westerns, and, for the first time, I began to have a picture of “Indian-ness.” My father’s words along with the view from the black and white TV set become a part of my identity. I thought my father’s ability to sit on the river in his fishing boat all day without a single bite and still enjoy it or to sit in the front yard, saying hello to everyone who passed, was his way of communing with nature and was a sign of his Native bloodline. Even now as I weed the gasoline grass (wildfire fuel) from a small flower garden behind our house in the mountains of the North Central Cascades, my back turned away from the hillside where last year I saw the face of a mountain lion as it ambled across and he or she saw me, I secretly think it’s my Native blood that brought us within proximity, that it protects me still. Indeed, “Indian-ness” has been greatly over-represented in the popular media for a long time.

Recently, a family member told me she had old courthouse records stating that my father’s people were Creek not Cherokee. That mattered for about a minute as I wondered what else my father was wrong about, remembering the cougar. I was raised in neither culture and knew little more than most do about Cherokee, that they invented a written language called a syllabary. With respect to the possibility that my father was Creek instead, it made sense. Many resided along the Alabama River near Coffee County where he was born. And yet, that piece of information made an impact, though not in the ways you might think.  Rather, it caused me to confront my own popularized constructions of identity.

Still, the point I want to make here is that we are all mixed. If you don’t believe it, provide a DNA sample to one of the ancestry sites. I do not mean to disparage ethnicity testing – pride in one’s heritage is important, but I do wish to suggest that we are much more than the sum of our bloodlines. In fact, I cling to the notion that we are whom we’ve decided we are, whom we’ve told others and ourselves we are.  After all, who else would we be?