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The Un-Comfort Zone II by Robert Evans Wilson, Jr. Native American or Not: a DNA Challenge When I was growing up, my mother frequently spoke of her Native American ancestry. She claimed to be one-eighth Cherokee; and often said this qualified her to live on the reservation. I loved knowing I was part Native American; and it contributed heavily to my sense of self-esteem. I always took the Indian side during neighborhood games of Cowboys and Indians. I collected arrow- heads, learned archery, and dressed as an American Indian on Halloween. My most prized possession was an authentic arrow which was handmade by a Native American with flint arrowhead, reed shaft, and real feathers. As I got older, I wanted to authenticate my Cherokee heritage. One day when I was a teenager, I got my mother to sit down with me at the kitchen table and map out her family tree on a piece of paper. I was surprised by how little she knew about her family. I had heard the story about her grandmother being half Cherokee hundreds of times, so that day I asked her for details. She said when she was around five years old she thought her grandmother Ida looked like an Indian because of her dark hair, dark eyes, dark complex- ion, and high cheekbones. She told me she said to her grandmother, “You look like an Indian,” and her grandmother said, “Shhh, we don’t talk about that.” Mother told me, over the years she would press her grandmother for answers, but she was always put off. I asked her which of her grandmother’s parents was the Indian, and she said she didn’t know. Nevertheless, without any proof, my mother maintained a stead- fast belief until her dying day that she was of Cherokee descent. Something created the belief in her, and I was moti- vated to find out. I got the “genealogy bug” after my mother passed away, and I found among her possessions a box full of very old photographs I’d never seen before. I sorted the pictures and found some photos of Ida’s parents. The Native American was clearly not Ida’s mom who was a blue- eyed blonde. The black-and-white photos of Ida’s dad showed a grizzled old man who looked like he could’ve been any nationality: Native American, European American, even African American. I then got down to the hard work of research. It turned out Ida’s father was of German descent; I found the paper- work which traced his family back more than a hundred years to Bavaria in Germany. I thought this was the end of it, then I heard an oral history that Ida’s husband Ryle had a great-grandfather who had been born on a Indian reserva- tion inAlabama, and someone by that name was on one of the official Cherokee name rolls. Mother’s great-great-great-grand- father may have been Cherokee. This was the end of the road for my research, and left a big “maybe” as to whether my mother and I had Nat ive Amer ican ancestry. Wilson cont’d on page 24. 12 OCTOBER 2017 WorldWide Drilling Resource ®