You’ve probably heard it before. Perhaps from your friends or some random person you met. More often than not, many Black people say that they have “Indian” in their family. So much so that it’s become a running joke in the Black community.
But some really do believe that they do have a lineage of Native American in their bloodline because of the grade of their hair and/or high cheekbones.
But in looking at the true line of African Americans, the truth is, many do not have “Indian in their family”. Here’s why:
Those high cheekbones and that straight black hair derive from our high proportion of white ancestors and not, for most of us, at least, from our Cherokee great-great-grandmother on your daddy’s side (*sigh*). DNA doesn’t lie (just ask Maury).
But seriously, according to genealogist and scholar, Henry Louis Gates, Jr, a small percentage of African Americans do have significant amounts of Native American ancestry, though almost no black American person today has as much Native American ancestry as they do European ancestry, by quite a long shot. (This does not include black people of Hispanic origin, in that Hispanic Americans tend to have far more Native American ancestry than African Americans do.)
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Here are the statistics: Whereas virtually all African Americans have a considerable amount of European ancestry in their genomes, only 19 percent have at least 1 percent Native American ancestry, and only 5 percent of African American people carry more than 2 percent Native American ancestry. How do these percentages translate into ancestry?
Well, if you have 5 percent Native American ancestry in your mix, that means you had one Native American ancestor four to five generations back (120 to 150 years ago).
If you have 2 percent Native American ancestry, you had one such ancestor on your family tree five to nine generations back (150 to 270 years ago). One percent of Native American ancestry means that this ancestor entered your bloodline six to 10 generations back (180 to 300 years ago).