I had at least one indigenous great grandma. her name was Filida Varela and I went to her funeral. she's hard to research because she barely has a last name and she's not in the official registry. her lived experience was light-years removed from mine. it would never occur to me to claim her indigenous identity. holy hell. shudder.
@evan maybe, but why would you do this?! maybe if my grandma and my dad and myself had grown still near the community, had contact with the old family, had kept participating in the life of the indigenous group. but none of that happened! it may be "reglamentary" but it still sucks
I think a couple of generations ago in North America, say the first half of the 1900s, it was way easier to have fluid identity. Families split, people moved and changed names and never went home again. Foggy recollections and embellished stories were hard to justify.
We don't live in that world any more. Records are digitized, and genealogy is much easier to research. And we have DNA testing that is pretty good.
@lzg I am pretty interested in my great grandparents. Half of them lived in Jerusalem, half in New York and New Jersey. I've visited most of their homes, have photos, records (some in Turkish with Arabic script). I've also done DNA tests.
I think we live in a time where if you're going to invest your identity into your heritage, you have a lot of options for getting general info and details. I think you have to work to stay ignorant.
@lzg I find stories like this sad in the way I find stories about addiction sad. Somehow something that mattered a lot to this person and filled a hole for them went really wrong, and they didn't fix it, and it ended up hurting other people too.