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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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The US is a little different because unlike Canada and Mexico/Central America there are almost no purely American Indian peoples left. Even in deepest reservation land in Oklahoma everyone has some European ancestry.

There are some fully native people in Alaska and and there are a handful in Hawaii (in the 1950s it was estimated that maybe 10,000 Hawaiians were of pure native descent), but in the 48 states I don’t think there are any (well, maybe one or two, but you get the point) 100% native Americans, whereas there are (as the previous user said) still aboriginal Australians with zero European admixture.

If you look at old 19th century photographs of many American Indian tribes in the Southwest (many in the rest of the country had already largely assimilated) there are pretty much no people with that full phenotype alive today in the continental US.

I think this is not true out west -- definitely in the eastern states there was substantial intermixing, but given that the Western tribes were mostly only crushed a few years before being put on reservations, I'm not sure when the mixing would have taken place? Prior to the reservation system it would have been pretty limited due to the generally tense (up to extremely hostile) relationship between settlers and settl-ees, and afterwards interbreeding with reservation Indians was pretty uncommon both due to geographical concerns and people being quite racist.

Unless your definition of 'full phenotype' is unusually fussy, I'd be surprised if folks like this were not substantially descended from pre-Columbian bloodlines -- and you see folks like that everywhere in the rural west.

There are pure blooded Sioux and Navajo left. You’re right that the typical casino Indians are all heavily mixed, the majority are white-passing and are mostly European by ancestry, and their organizations are dominated by 90% white types. But you’re overstating it immensely- the reservations in South Dakota and some in New Mexico have pure Amerinds.

I'm not saying they're all heavily mixed or white-passing, I'm watching Reservation Dogs now and there are clearly cast members who are of predominantly (although far from entirely) Amerind descent (although some are actually native Canadian, perhaps tellingly). But are you sure there are 100% pure Sioux left? Are there DNA results from currently alive (and not extremely elderly) people that confirm this? I'd be very surprised, but I'm willing to concede if there are.

Don't have any genetic tests, but I have unusually large amounts of exposure to both the Sioux and the Navajo reservations through work.

Pure-blood natives are rare, but they do exist. Somewhere around 1/100 maybe. They're usually easy to spot in that they speak very differently (not sure how to describe this, it's like they struggle with making certain sounds and so replace them with similar but different sounds) and look quite different (similar to the Aboriginal examples above)

Additionally, they're all quite old, and will be gone within a few decades. None I've known were married to a pure native.

Unlike with whites, no one I've met seems to care about this racial mixing. Most see it as a cultural identity more than a blood identity (though non-zero blood relation is typically a requirement, and some have stricter rules)