I bet I know why Warren claimed Native American heritage.

[Scootaloo]

2. I've often puzzled over my own heritage

There's of course the "Generic West European" blend - France and those Islands - but also claims of Native American (Choctaw) on my dad's side which no one's been really able to back up. Also, there's my maternal great-grandmother, and the one picture of her I've seen definitely looks as if there may be some African heritage as well (hard to tell with a painted tinplate, though). Through on the fact that oftentimes in the south, "Indian blood" was either an outright lie, or was a mask for having African heritage (a lot of those "Cherokee Princesses" were probably more Mandingo than Tsalagi).

So I don't know what's going on back in my family tree. Record-keeping was terribly spotty at best, most of the older generations of my family are deceased, and the handful that are left are on the other side of the continent. I self-identify as "white," but plenty of people have thought I was "Mexican" before (though with the perpetual cloud cover of Puget Sound, that hasn't happened in a few years...) , I have tooth structure that is apparently most common among East Asians and Native Americans (but not necessarily exclusive) and... well, yeah. After years of trying to puzzle it all out, I've kind of accepted that whatever's going on in my ancestry, here I am.

Still, I think that I've learned an awful lot, even if I haven't been able to "tag" my own background. If it weren't for my dad telling me "you know, you're part Choctaw" I'd have probably never gotten interested in America's racial history and currents; hell, I might still be just another white dude with a chip on my shoulder like I was brought up to be.