Peter Lloyd, Native American

Holding my annual X-ray in his hand, my dentist recently asked me, “Do you have any American Indian ancestors?”

I was born in the United States of America, sometimes presumptuously called America. Canadians, Mexicans, and other people in the Western Hemisphere rightly consider themselves born in America as well.

Since I was born in the USA, I can justify calling myself a Native American. So can just about anyone native to this hemisphere. Which makes the politically correct designation Native American rather innocuous for the descendants of the people who were here before various European tribes began their ethnic cleansing. The name distinguishes their descendants as nothing different from the rest of us.

Indigenous Americans might serve as a more descriptive collective name for the progeny of the Cherokee, Miami, Dakota, Navajo, Zuni, Pueblo, Ojibwa, Winnebego, Shawnee, Montauk, Apache, Chippewa, Blackfoot.... But in some strict definitions or to an ET happening upon our hemisphere, all of us could be considered indigenous to the Americas.

“It’s funny you should ask,” I answered my dentist. “My mother used to joke about us being part Indian, because her people came through Quebec in the frontier days. And I’ve always thought that her mother and one of her sisters had American Indian facial features. Why do you ask?”

“Every time I see multiple canals in a lower bicuspid, the owner claims to have some sort of American Indian heritage.”

So, you see, I just may carry Native Indigenous American Indian blood. Or more precisely, DNA. I’ve scanned the literature on bicuspid canal morphology but found no conclusive evidence of multiple roots as a trait specific to American Indians. But if my French Canadian ancestors did mix chromosomes with the indigenous people they encountered, I want to be called American Indian, until I find out whether I’m Cree, Huron, Kahnawake, Odanak, Timiskaming, Weymontachie....

Labels: american indian, Cree, dentist, Huron, Kahnawake, native american, Odanak, quebec, Timiskaming, Weymontachie