In Custer Died for Your Sins, Vine Deloria writes:

Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear."

It doesn't take much insight into racial attitudes to understand the real meaning of the Indian grandmother complex that plagues certain whites. A male ancestor has too much of the aura of the savage warrior, the unknown primitive, the instinctive animal, to make him a respectable member of the family tree. But a young Indian princess? Ah, there was royalty for the taking. Somehow the white was linked with a noble house of gentility and culture if his grandmother was an Indian princess who ran away with an intrepid pioneer. And royalty has always been an unconscious but all-consuming goal of the European immigrant."

The early colonists, accustomed to life under benevolent despots, projected their understanding of the European political structure onto the Indian tribe in trying to explain its political and social structure. European royal houses were closed to ex-convicts and indentured servants, so the colonists made all Indian maidens princesses, then proceeded to climb a social ladder of their own creation. Within the next generation, if the trend continues, a large portion of the American population will eventually be related to Powhattan.

Also, I love the internet, which kept me from having to go find my copy of Custer Died for Your Sins and then type something.

We are taking Noah kayaking tomorrow. This will either be entirely too much stress, great fun, or completely dangerous (or perhaps all three!)

Oh! Let me know how it goes, because I am craving a kayak trip myself.

Tired. Iced coffee came too late.

Need that ride for the show tonight. Really need it. Because I really, really, really wanna show off my new dress.

OMG so tired. I MUST go to bed early tonight. Also forgot make-up this morning.

Mmmmm. Only gonna get the ride back home, not there. I guess I'll take the dress with me and change there - getting looks on buses on my way there is the last thing my mood needs now.

So I guess it's a 60%-win. And yes, the dress is that worthy.

-ma for you and Pico, Sue.

Pico ~ma!

OMG so tired.

This. A friend came into town last night with her kids and they are still in Western Time Zone way so we were up late.

Thanks Perkins. ETA: And Sparky. The vet just called actually, and there was no pus, so now he's going to do xrays and see if there's a tumour. I am voting, "It's not a toomah."

Whites claiming Indian blood generally tend to reinforce mythical beliefs about Indians. All but one person I met who claimed Indian blood claimed it on their grandmother's side. I once did a projection backward and discovered that evidently most tribes were entirely female for the first three hundred years of white occupation. No one, it seemed, wanted to claim a male Indian as a forebear."

That cracks me up because my mom's best friend in school actually had a grandmother who lived on a reservation. Of course, since the one quote I recall from her was "I always regretted not becoming a whore," I'm guessing not so much an Indian princess.

Good luck, Pico.

Oh dear -- I have heard a family story that some ancestor was the first white man to marry an Indian woman, too. (Although no one thinks that makes us Native American, 15 generations later....) The Indian ancestry thing was an interesting part of the African American Lives show, too -- I don't think anyone who thought they had Indian heritage actually did, once they did the geneology and DNA testing.