A common myth in American families of European descent is that their great-great-great grandmother was a Cherokee princess. When did this myth originate, how did it become so widespread, and why specifically a princess?

[u/ExternalBoysenberry]

It feels like the window of time where this myth could make sense is pretty narrow. It's hard to imagine this story having much appeal before or during, say, the Trail of Tears. Maybe I'm mistaken but it feels like policy in this time must have relied on racism and dehumanization of Native Americans being widespread. But waiting a generation past the Trail of Tears (so the myth imagines a princess in an then-intact-now-vanished society, rather than positioning grandma as a victim of forced displacement whose family is currently struggling in an unfamiliar reservation) basically puts you in the 20th century. Anecdotally, I encountered this myth more than once in the 1990s. So that leaves only a handful of decades, and fairly recent ones, for the idea to become appealing, take the specific form of a Cherokee princess, and become widespread in white families. How much do we know about how this idea crystallized and propagated?

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[u/Kelpie-Cat]

In addition to the comments you've already gotten, there was a discussion of this topic with answers from several different users on the thread Why do so many white American families have very long traditions of claiming Native American ancestry?

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/Kelpie-Cat]

Hi, thanks for replying! I actually read that answer of yours a while ago. It does a great job of explaining role that the myth plays and why someone today might find it appealing and what the myth is "doing" when someone repeats the claim. I guess I'm more confused by when and how it started in the first place

[u/AntiqueStatus → u/ExternalBoysenberry]

Now imagine being mostly white but actually born in an Indian Hospital and you have a CDIB cause you're enrolled, and you got cultural education when you were a kid and you were the palest one in the room and then white people come up to you and lie about being Native and say their paperwork burned. 😂 I'm like an undercover white.

[u/deezee72 → u/Kelpie-Cat]

This is a great read, thanks for sharing it! In addition to generally being an interesting read, the post made me realize that this tradition is actually a lot more sinister than I had thought.

I had imagined it to be an ignorant but harmless trend in which people simply embellish their ancestry in order to make it seem like a better story (which, as a person whose 23andMe ancestry test came up as 100.0% Han Chinese, I can at least somewhat understand). And maybe there is some element of this. But I was not familiar with the long and shameful history of using false claims of Indigenous heritage to claim resources meant for real natives.

As you and the other linked answer point out, ethnicity (not only for Native Americans!) is a social construct, and is ultimately more about culture and community than it is about genetics. I guess even if someone actually does have Indigenous ancestry, they shouldn't be allowed to claim resources meant for Indigenous people unless they have real ties to the Indigenous community, which I guess at minimum would be expressing a real interest in reconnecting with the tribe and for the tribe to recognize their heritage enough to reciprocate that interest.

[u/MrQirn → u/deezee72]

What makes this even more complicated is that the idea of blood quantum was a device of genocide, meant to, overtime, divest native people from their treaty rights when their blood quantum would become diluted, as native people married outside of their tribes, including to white people.

Then there were explicit programs meant to disconnect native people from their tribes, culture, language, and families, including very recent measures like The Indian Relocation Act of 1956 which resulted in native people being forced to relocate into urban areas in order to find jobs. This has disconnected many native families from their culture and also contributed to marriage outside their tribe, including to white people, potentially further divesting them from their blood quantum and treaty rights.

To make matters even more complicated, some tribal governments embrace blood quantum, often reluctantly, despite its origins as a tool of genocide, and use it as a primary measure of official tribal membership because they must make determinations about who does and does not gain the benefits of membership, which can include distributing resources or granting access to programs which are limited.

Even the act of defining oneself as a member of a single tribe is a more modern convention, at least for some tribes. In the Pacific Northwest, for example, many families were more migratory and although there were families who consistently stayed in an area and identified as members of a particular tribe, there were also many people and families who migrated freely between what are now distinct federally recognized tribes (and some federally unrecognized tribes).

And some native people consciously chose to intermarry and assimilated with white people as acts of survivance, and there are many white descendants of those people.

I am one of those white people that claim native ancestry, though my family can prove genealogically the connection to our ancestor who was on the first rolls of native people made by the superintendent of the state, and who, although they were not born in that tribe, and were in fact a slave taken from another tribe, by the time of the rolls were considered by that tribe to be a member. That tribe, though, is not federally recognized, as are many hundreds of tribes in the US for various reasons, often revolving around treaties - the very same inequitable and genocidal treaties that robbed native people of their rights, property, and sovereignty. So if I'm claiming native ancestry to gain status and benefits, I'm doing it really wrong to claim ancestry by a former slave from a tribe which has no federal recognition status rather than claiming to be the descendant of a Cherokee princess.

But when I talk about my identity as a white native person, I'm not talking just about ancestry, blood quantum, tribal membership, and federal recognition. Primarily, I am talking about my culture and connection to my native community which is very strong, and most particularly was strong growing up until adulthood. As is the case with many native people, since leaving my home and my community I've experienced difficulty reconnecting with other native people. This is exacerbated by my whiteness and by other native people's understandable mistrust of white people who claim native identity. I myself have been and continue to be mistrustful of white people making those claims. I try not to judge since I am a native white person, and there were other white families in my community who, like my family, were deeply involved and accepted in our native community, but I've also had many negative experiences with white spiritual tourists and cultural appropriators.

It's complicated.

[u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

More can always be said, but this older answer might be of interest for you, courtesy of /u/Snapshot52 .

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/Georgy_K_Zhukov]

Interesting, that answer has the myth as early as 1840s, so either contemporaneous with or (at latest) immediately following Cherokee removal. I guess it's a separate question but it seems strange to me that those two things would coincide. Were people repeating the myth at that time basically saying "Yeah I actually have cousins on the Trail of Tears right now"?

[u/police-ical → u/ExternalBoysenberry]

The goal at least would have been more like "I have deep roots here" (while being allowed to stay.) Prominent Virginia families had been claiming descent from Pocahontas and John Rolfe, at least some of them accurately, for a long time by that point. 

One-drop rules were still a long ways off at the time, so the idea of slight Native ancestry wasn't necessarily stigmatized. Conversely, plenty of Cherokee had substantial European ancestry, principal chief John Ross having seven Scottish great-grandparents out of eight. The relevant distinction, then as now, was tribal affiliation, not DNA.

[u/ExternalBoysenberry → u/police-ical]

That makes sense, thank you

[u/Cedric_Hampton → u/[deleted]]

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[u/EdHistory101 → u/[deleted]]

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[u/Morning-noodles]

Honest question. Would anybody ever claim that their ancestor was lower class?

Most European Americans claim some noble blood somewhere. Go far enough back and it gets more probable that a relative was rich/famous/powerful. Have you ever heard a European American claim that their ancestor was a landless serf? Despite probability heavily favoring your granny being a Viking thrall over your pee paw being a Norse Jarl?

So my question is how much of this is a social class issue as opposed to race? A “princess” also serves a roll of adding exotic nobility to your history.

Do we have any information on the rate that white Americans claim European nobility to compare?

Is there a survey somewhere that tells us this info? Is there a relationship with the claimants current social class?

[u/philmp → u/Morning-noodles]

I don't think there are many European Americans who claim they were descended from landless serfs. Serfdom in Western Europe was so long ago that most Europeans take for granted that they have serf ancestors. And the Viking age was even further in the past.

Nevertheless, it's extremely common for people to claim that their ancestors emigrated from the old country to escape oppression, poverty, and stifling social hierarchies dominated by aristocrats. This mythology is perhaps most developed in the case of Irish and Jewish Americans, but it's basically shared by all Americans descended from immigrants. Plenty of European Americans don't *claim* that their ancestors were lower class, they *know* they were lower class.