Proud to Be a Remix: Karen Davis Comes Out As A Mixed-Race Native American (Possibly!)

A Proverbial Cherokee Great Grandmother Giving Rise to the Fabled "Generokee Princess"

I kid, I kid. The story of America is wending and nuanced, with many patches of eternal and inaccessible blindness. For the last several weeks, due to the fact that I chose to conclude our not-a-friendship, Karen Davis has been calling me various names, hoping to attract attention, and two of those names are “pretendian” and “Pocahontas.” These are a reference to my own “family lore” from a time sufficiently distant as to make DNA tests unhelpful due to the reality of an evolutionary biology concept known as genetic drift, which is the tendency of two isolated populations to diverge genetically. One reason this happened in my family was that the assimilation project, and leaving the tribal system, possibly in part due to the reality of love in a time of smallpox, meant subsequent generations were whitewashed by subsequent generations of intermarriage as other waves of my mixed family from various locales entered the great American melting pot. I'm descended on one branch from the New France assimilation project, which I've written about in the past (Proud to be a Remix), and will remain descended from this population no matter if I share not a single gene with anyone alive in that time and place. Genetics are NOT ancestry. You only inherited half your parents’ genes, and the other half held your ancestors too.

Mixed, AKA métis (metisse f.) or mestizo (mestiza f.) depending on where in Europe, refers here to any mixture including indigenous and European contributions. Lower-case métis(se) is not to be confused with upper-case Métis Nation, a specific group of métis (mixed European and NA indigenous) people with a specific merger culture which I'm not descended from to my knowledge but which I've also studied and which contributed to my cat’s name in part (I wanted to live in Rupert’s Land but I have to settle for the Terror of Rupert instead). Some people tease my pronunciation. I was first called this label by my French-speaking Scandinavian grandmother (as it is a French word) and the s isn't silent because it is a second morpheme. Omitting it would be like shortening cats to cat. You lose meaning. And that’s true any time you round off and cut out. You can verify this pronunciation here: https://en.m.wiktionary.org/wiki/m%C3%A9tis#French