Pretendian academics

September 7, 2022 2:43 PM

Michelle Cyca, an Indigenous writer, writes about a new(ish) hire at Emily Carr University as part of a restricted search for Indigenous faculty, and what happened when people started asking questions about her background.
posted by jeather (39 comments total)

Artist Gina Adams, whose claim to Indigenous identity raised doubts, has resigned from her post as assistant professor at Emily Carr University, according to a statement released by the school yesterday, September 6. (Hyperallergenic) Per the school's statement, Adams resigned on Aug. 25.
posted by Iris Gambol at 3:50 PM on September 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

That was a very interesting - and stirring - piece.

I thought this statement from near the end provided a good guideline for both thinking about this problem and acting on it:

“The university’s role is not to determine if someone is Indigenous,” Teillet said. “It’s to determine if they are being honest in whatever they are claiming.”

I appreciated Cyca's careful balancing and interplay of the bare facts of her experience (the emails she sent, the phone calls she made) with her emotional journey, and with the reactions of the other people in her story.

I wish the university's statement:

“We are actively engaged in a learning process to review and revise our criteria for assessing identity when hiring for positions designated for Indigenous candidates.”

had been a little more direct about their need to learn - a little more bluntly, "We are trying. It really looks like we failed here. We will keep trying - starting by listening, and by being open and honest about our mistakes - and we will do better."

May they try again, and fail ever better, until they are not failing at all.

May we all.

Thank you so much for posting this, jeather. I am very glad to have had the opportunity to read it.
posted by kristi at 3:51 PM on September 7, 2022 [9 favorites]

I think that I read a very similar story a few years ago about a new hire at a U.S.A. academic institution who pretended to have Native American heritage. Does anybody else remember this?
posted by ALeaflikeStructure at 4:35 PM on September 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Andrea Smith, a prominent example. But she was long established.

Perhaps you're thinking of Jessica Krug, who falsely claimed to be black.
posted by praemunire at 4:51 PM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Or perhaps Ward Churchill.

A difficult problem to solve.

*Edit to change to a better link.
posted by SunSnork at 4:52 PM on September 7, 2022 [3 favorites]

Without judgement: is it the university's duty to dig as deeply as was done by private individuals in this case, or should the university do as they did and accept the identity of a person who declares themselves to be indigenous, even though they don't have Canadian status under the act? As, say, a person born in the US would not? I don't know what to think in these cases, and I don't envy the administrators who have to make these calls.

I don't see the the rights to privacy discussed either, which are at least partially relevant here too. If a public servant had made this kind of inquiry on an intuition, I don't know that that would hold up in court, especially as there's no direct evidence either way here. Again, that seems like a problem to me, but I'm no expert in this either.
posted by bonehead at 5:11 PM on September 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

As noted in the article, indigenous status can be legal, cultural, or both. I don't think it's necessarily invasive to request *some* evidence supporting one's claim, but I have no idea what the standards of proof should be, given the sensitivities involved.
posted by suelac at 5:13 PM on September 7, 2022 [4 favorites]

An indigenous colleague of mine puts it this way:

“They’re coming to take your kids to residential school. Are you still indigenous?”
posted by davey_darling at 5:19 PM on September 7, 2022 [49 favorites]

Ultimately ad hoc inquiries leave the university in the position of being arbiter of First Nations identity, which is of course contrary to the concept of their sovereignty. Other "objective" systems were set up or maintained by settler governments. It's so challenging. But clearly just permitting someone to check a box is not adequate.
posted by praemunire at 5:23 PM on September 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

This is why when your people are being hunted and your culture being destroyed it is absolutely vital to get a receipt.

I’m only half joking. It’s amazing how often this sort of issue arises.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 6:01 PM on September 7, 2022 [7 favorites]

It's important to be careful when using terms like Status. Status is a particular legal concept in Canada that only applies to a subset of the constitutionally recognized indigenous peoples of Canada which include the Meti, Inuit and non-status Indians. There are lots of no debate indigenous people who aren't Status Indians.

Now Cyca doesn't seem to be recognized by as a member of the organizations she is claiming membership in and that is definitely a problem.
posted by Mitheral at 6:21 PM on September 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

If creating a non-state credentialing system is too much of a reach for either logistical or ideological reasons, I wonder if it would not be possible for major nations to at least get together to formulate some general consensus principles to apply in cases like this. There will always be disputes about their application, I'm sure, and I'm also sure the process itself would be challenging and contentious, but at least then universities (and others) can look to some guidance that's not just being formulated by primarily settler institutions. It's a lot easier to sell places like universities on "you need to follow the Iqaluit Principles, formulated by representatives from x and y and z..."
posted by praemunire at 6:28 PM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

“Indigenous identities aren’t about racial or biological characteristics that can be reduced to a 23andMe result.”

While the writer goes on to discuss the nuances, I don't think that's entirely correct. Biological heritage is, for better or worse, paramount in this context and that certainly is knowable via these cheap and widely available tools. If one of your grandparents was indigenous, you're almost certainly going to have many distant relatives who are obviously and verifiably indigenous. It's not ambiguous.

If Adams wasn't lying and she had those experiences with her grandfather, then an easy DNA test could have provided confirming or discomfirming info. You'd think that would be the first thing she'd do, and then (if there was evidence supporting his stories) she'd have a lot more possibilities for further verifying the claim.

These DNA tests only do so much and I can imagine that biology might in some cases be better subordinated to cultural connections as qualifying (presence) or disqualifying (absence). Nevertheless, for most purposes biological heritage is supremely important and, these days, it's no longer ambiguous.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:30 PM on September 7, 2022 [1 favorite]

Now Cyca doesn't seem to be recognized by as a member of the organizations she is claiming membership in and that is definitely a problem.

I think you're confusing the writer and the subject of the article. Michelle Cyca is the writer of this article - as far as I know there's no doubt about her Indigenous heritage. Gina Adams is the faculty member at Emily Carr University who doesn't seem to be recognized by as a member of the organizations she is claiming membership in.
posted by dttocs at 6:40 PM on September 7, 2022 [16 favorites]

When I think about these cases, though, none of them have really been about ambiguous status - they've been about lies and wishful thinking. None of the people in question had, for instance, a demonstrable strong cultural connection to a tribe in their family but were not enrolled, none of them were, eg, adopted by a Native family, none of them could point to many relatives who were Native or First Nations while having grown up with no connections to Native communities themselves. I think that if someone were positioning themselves as a Native artist and the real truth was complicated, Native people would probably be reacting differently. All these cases seem to be about people who just...make things up and maybe, at best, con themselves into believing it.

Even if someone were provably mislead by a member of their own family, like their grandfather always said he was Native and everyone remembers that people did in fact believe ol' Grandpa Joe and so the kids thought they were Native - that wouldn't entitle someone to a faculty position, but it would be sad story about racism and lies rather than a story about a person who told some racist lies.

This just seems like one of those things where you're in a damnable situation because of colonialism and capitalism - it seems terrible to have to force people to prove their heritage but it is also intolerable to let fantasists take what seems to be a meaningful percentage of scarce faculty, nonprofit and artistic positions that are intended for Native people, and because everything actually is dished out in this culture of intense scarcity and precarity it is in fact important in an immediate-justice sense to try to allocate the positions intended for Native people to Native people.

Andrea Smith was really a big deal in radical circles. I cannot even imagine the situation that the INCITE folks are in. It just seems like a miserable situation all around and frankly a waste - it's not like Andrea Smith is a stupid person with nothing to contribute. It's got to be miserable when someone you like personally who has done actual good on-the-ground work turns out to be plausibly accused of just making up their racial identity.
posted by Frowner at 6:49 PM on September 7, 2022 [31 favorites]

Biological heritage is, for better or worse, paramount in this context

That has certainly always been the position of the U.S. (and Canadian?) government. I'm not sure it would necessarily be the position of all indigenous people in North America. Blood quantum is a U.S. policy concept, but it certainly isn't the basis for U.S. (or Canadian) citizenship, so its use in this context is far from straightforward. Note that, among other things, in the U.S. the emphasis on biological heritage meant the exclusion of descendants of slaves held by the Cherokee from membership in the tribe for decades.

(Note: I've read enough to know that this is a fraught topic but don't profess to be an expert and would gladly defer to one.)
posted by praemunire at 6:50 PM on September 7, 2022 [8 favorites]

"Biological heritage is, for better or worse, paramount in this context and that certainly is knowable via these cheap and widely available tools. "

I don't know how these things work for indigenous people in North America. But where I live, yes and no. It is about GENEALOGY. Traceable genealogy. If you have traceable Māori descent you will be accepted as Māori, because it is conceptualised as a family relationship. Yes, descent has a biologicial element, but the mental model is family relationship. Merely having a DNA result can't get you anywhere because you do not know which individual people you are descended from. Indeed that is one of the tragedies of colonisation, that a person can be estranged from their relations and culture, and the people can be deprived of a member and a relation, because family history has been lost. But anyway, biology is not paramount. Descent is, and that's not the same thing.
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:54 PM on September 7, 2022 [31 favorites]

(for clarification, I'm talking about cultures' membership definitions, not colonisers' legal definitions here. Although in New Zealand in many legal contexts self-identification is more or less sufficient).
posted by i_am_joe's_spleen at 6:56 PM on September 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

This open letter posted on Twitter by Devery Jacobs in December 2020, in response to a similar incident involving a filmmaker who (falsely) claimed Indigenous identity in Canada, lays out in detail the way that Indigenous identity (which is not the same as Indigenous ancestry) is understood by Indigenous people in Canada.
posted by heatherlogan at 7:04 PM on September 7, 2022 [5 favorites]

So as not to abuse the edit window, TL;DR:

Blood quantum is not an accurate way to measure someone's Indigeneity; but rather, learning which community they claim and ensuring their community claims them back.

posted by heatherlogan at 7:09 PM on September 7, 2022 [17 favorites]

The place where I work contracts assignments out to freelancers. One of the things we'd like to do is to add not just new freelancers to our roster, but Indigenous freelancers. The catch is that we really have no good way of doing that.

My boss is against advertising, in part because we have no way of evaluating the validity of a person's claims of being Indigenous. We're a tiny organization (with tiny resources). Even if we had the resources to investigate people (not to mention the desire to do so, which we really don't), none of us are really qualified to say "we accept you as Indigenous." That is not our place, or our right, especially given none of us are Indigenous.

To avoid that issue, I've reached out to every Indigenous person we've come across over the course of doing our regular business and said, "we hire freelancers in these professions. We want to hire Indigenous freelancers. Please pass the word along to your network." I've chased people down at trade shows (including speakers and presenters on Indigenous-related panels), handed them my card and given them the same message. I've also reached out to associations that represent or are affiliated with Indigenous freelancers, and never gotten a response back from them.

I know that part of the problem is that the Indigenous people we typically encounter aren't employed in the same sectors as those freelancers we want to hire, so they might not know people employed in those professions. Another part of the problem is that we are a small (i.e. not famous or well-known) organization (at least, outside of our own very niche field), so we aren't alluring. There are other reasons why Indigenous freelancers may not want to work with us (that I won't get into here), but I still truly believe that the biggest problems is that we're not reaching them.

I've considered posting an Ask about this, looking for advice on how to go about hiring Canadian-based Indigenous freelancers, but I've always decided against it, in part because this site is so American that these kinds of discussions tend to get derailed with American perspectives (that is even happening, to an extent in this thread), and in part because I really don't want to go into the other, complicating factors as to why we might not be an attractive employment option. (It's not anything we've actually done, it's more for cultural and historical reasons.)
posted by sardonyx at 7:56 PM on September 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

That is an exceptionally balanced, thoughtful, and well-written article. Thanks for posting it.
posted by Dr. Wu at 8:00 PM on September 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Biological heritage is, for better or worse, paramount in this context

That has certainly always been the position of the U.S. (and Canadian?) government

That's not entirely true. (I am here going to put in a plug for the podcast This Land, which is about legal challenges to tribal sovereignty in the US.)

To put it bluntly: the official position of the United States is that tribal status is political rather than biological, because otherwise it's an unconstitutional racial classification that would risk destroying tribal sovereignty.

Yes, in the past the US government used blood quantum to determine tribal members; now, the decision as to who is a tribal member is primarily left to individual tribes. This can go badly, as with the Cherokees who were adopted after escaping from slavery.

There are also tribal groups and communities who are not formally recognized by the US government, for various historical reasons (like genocide or tribal termination or forced relocation). Members of those communities are culturally indigenous but would not qualify as members of a recognized tribe -- but could instead be considered members of a minority population that doesn't have separate political status.

I won't speak to Canadian law, I don't know anything about it. But tribal membership in the US is formally, legally, considered to be political rather than biological or racial.
posted by suelac at 8:28 PM on September 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

LE,NONET sounds like a terrific program.
posted by doctornemo at 8:34 PM on September 7, 2022 [6 favorites]

My partner has indigenous ancestry. No connection to his particular people as they exist now, but there are definite echoes of our national version of colonisation - not just the family-wide fear of government interference, but claiming other ethnic identities because they got better rights and white people couldn't tell them apart anyway. He has no real plans to examine or reconnect with his tribe, but the DNA bit is important medically at least. He doesn't apply for those identified jobs, and as an individual rarely gets racially profiled.

His lived experience is White, even with DNA and some traits otherwise, and those things WITHOUT a cohesive reconnection with your tribe and family makes you taking an Indigenous identified position an issue. Similar issues for an old late friend of mine from NZ - his father was Maori but had no connection to his whanau and passed nothing on to his child except the genetic predisposition and consequences of colonisation. Including in his case, far more racism due to his appearance. My partner passes, mostly, but my friend didn't. Most of my non-white friends don't and the experience is different, and without that or a connection to your ancestors and whanau/mob/tribe/nation/clan, what exactly do you offer in these positions? It's not a greater understanding, not awareness, not experience, not connections.
posted by geek anachronism at 3:43 AM on September 8, 2022 [6 favorites]

Episode 2 of the excellent season 2 of Rutherford Falls (which featured, according to Wikipedia, "one of the largest Indigenous writing staffs on American television") nails this situation in the US context. Reagan recruits and hires a new curator for her small cultural heritage museum for the (fictional) Minishonka nation. Over drinks, there's a moment when three of the characters realise that the new curator is probably not what he seems: when he describes himself as 'a descendent' of a particular tribe - just as Adams did in her Dartmouth address. All three characters wince. "Ooh, descendent! Coooooool. I ascended from my Mom, who's Minishonka". A few moments later, when the new curator has gone to the bar for a round: "He definitely used the d-word, didn't he?" The show explores the ethical dilemmas raised by trying to verify someone's identity in the context of genocidal destruction of communities before actor Michael Greyeyes gets a brilliant exposition scene where he explains the technique and the impact of this kind of pretense: "Now you're here, until you scurry back to a more prominent museum where no one in those white spaces has the depth to sniff out your fakery. Do you fathom the harm you cause us? Can you? As you pick and choose all the positives of who we are, without ever once experiencing any of the hardships?"
posted by happyfrog at 4:57 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

The damage done by these people is likely far reaching. It isn't just damaging to the programs or institutions who get fooled, or the candidates who lose out. Every high profile story of this nature probably leads some institutions or organizations to decide that it isn't even worth the trouble to try to bring in more Indigenous staff or offer more Indigenous programming.
posted by jacquilynne at 7:22 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

I didn't see Kim TallBear's book mentioned yet Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (also podcast interview).
posted by spamandkimchi at 8:30 AM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

His lived experience is White, even with DNA and some traits otherwise, and those things WITHOUT a cohesive reconnection with your tribe and family makes you taking an Indigenous identified position an issue.

On an opposite note, I'm reminded of when I used to watch "Switched At Birth." Features one redheaded girl and one brunette girl and this doesn't come out to everyone until the girls are teens. Brunette girl (Bay) is biologically of Puerto Rican/Italian heritage, but raised by a well-off brunette dad and redheaded mom, so nobody really noticed anything there. Redhead (Daphne) is ...obviously different looking than the Puerto Rican mom that raised her (and the dad walked out, suspecting she'd cheated on him). I used to love the show until they turned Daphne from a lovely girl into a selfish asshole and crapped all over poor Bay. But anyway, before I quit the show in frustrated disgust, I remember Daphne trying to get a Latina scholarship because she was RAISED Puerto Rican even if she turned out not to be biologically one. She did not get it.
posted by jenfullmoon at 9:32 AM on September 8, 2022

I’ve never thought of genetic testing as guaranteeing that you are part of a group, but it may be a reasonable indication that you’re not. Which is to say that if you have zero of the marker pairs that are common in the Unanganin, your heritage claim deserves a closer inspection.
posted by Tell Me No Lies at 9:35 AM on September 8, 2022

I have a Mi'kmaq neighbour who told me the genetic tests for his two kids came back with no indigenous markers, even though his had plenty and his familial connections leave no doubt about who he's related to.

On the other hand, my mother's test put her at about 50% indigenous, which is sort of helpful because there's been a lot of uncertainty about her father's... uhhh... level of bloodedness--and this helps uphold the evidence that says one of his parents was European. It's the same on my mother's mother's side, except that we know her father was Scottish.

Though I think the genetic tests are interesting, and provide a few pieces of the puzzle, it really is, at least in my experience, just like the article says, all about who claims you.

On the pretendian front, there's just so much in these people's stories that just doesn't make sense to me. Like, I'm pretty disconnected from my grandmother's culture but there's still a large number of undeniable connections. So, though I don't doubt it could happen, I'm highly dubious about the way so many (actually, it seems like all) of these "my grandparent was..." people are completely severed from the heritage they claim.

Finally, I'll just mention that I sometimes joke that my mother's an Anti-Boyden. Because she was offered her status and, though she felt it an honour, turned it down because she felt she hadn't really lived the life to justify it. The relatives accepted that, but told her the papers are ready for her if she changes her mind.
posted by house-goblin at 11:05 AM on September 8, 2022 [2 favorites]

Genetic testing can give seemingly incredibly precise answers. It is often presented and is sold with an illusion of certainty and even scientism (the false appeal to authority of "It's Science!"). It's always easy reading a number off a machine or a chromatogram to produce meaninglessly precise numbers.

The trick is to ask what level of uncertainty the data has, and what statistics are being used to understand that uncertainty. This is especially true where the measurement is indirect, as it is in the ancestral testing. There certain markers and even ratios of markers are used to establish "fingerprints" of commonality between and among ethic groups. Those correlations themselves have yet more uncertainty and both false positives and negatives associated with them.

It's frequently the case that the numbers are in fact so hazy as to be only weak guides to any truth, and can indeed misdirect interpretations of the results by falsely reporting the correlations of certain markers or not report the presence of others.

It may have some value, but it shouldn't be used to prove anything, in my opinion, particularly with regard to socially identities. It's not precise enough for that. I've been a professional forensic scientist for a couple of decades, if that matters too, though not one that does genetics, but chemometrics, using similar statistical techniques. I'd put the 23orme testing to be idle cocktail party discussion levels of value, particularly with regards to ancestry.

Importantly genetics says nothing about culture anyway, and so can't even address many of the questions here.
posted by bonehead at 11:42 AM on September 8, 2022 [5 favorites]

I am all for getting in touch with one's roots and all, but "my grandpa told me that he's really indigenous but passing off as white for decades" sounds like a bedtime tale taken a bit too seriously.
posted by kschang at 12:34 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I have a Mi'kmaq neighbour who told me the genetic tests for his two kids came back with no indigenous markers, even though his had plenty and his familial connections leave no doubt about who he's related to.

Umm...
posted by kickingtheground at 3:50 PM on September 8, 2022 [3 favorites]

“I’ve never thought of genetic testing as guaranteeing that you are part of a group, but it may be a reasonable indication that you’re not.”

Yeah, this was the point I was trying to make. It's not qualifying, but it's almost certainly disqualifying.

Furthermore, there's a bit of misunderstanding or lack of information here. You're all talking about supposed genetic ethnicity, which — yes — is not trustworthy at all, rather than talking about actual genetic relatives, which isn't ambiguous, especially when taken collectively. This is how they're catching killers in cold cases using DNA and genealogy. It doesn't take much genetic relatedness with several people who themselves have known genealogies to figure out important parts of one's own genealogy.

I know this because I found a half-sister last year because her son and I both did the consumer DNA test. His relatedness to me compared to his relatedness to my first cousins (two of whom also had done this) and given his mother's age (she was adopted) was enough to rule out all other possibilities than that his mother was my father's daughter. Her own DNA, as well as my sister's and our mother's, made it redundantly certain. And, the thing is, if I'd not done this, then my cousins' results would have led him to my paternal grandparents and, had my cousins also not done this, numerous second cousins would have led my half-nephew to my dad's family.

Anyone who claims to have a biological connection to an indigenous group within two or three generations is certainly going to have genetic relatives revealed by these apps who are themselves indigenous and/or can establish how someone fits within a family line. Someone who makes this kind of claim (such as having a late indigenous grandparent) can use these apps to establish familial relationships if those exist. And if they have no indigenous relatives, then that's pretty definitive that their claim is false.

None of this establishes whether the relationship is significant enough to satisfy various authorities. I think cases like those discussed in the article would, for those involved, require some significant historical-familial and cultural relationships beyond biology. Indigenous authorities themselves should and will decide for themselves what their criteria are — that's nobody's else's business. And colonial governments — well, they'll have their own ideas.

At the end of the day, what's been happening for a long time is that pretendians have been claiming both blood and personal ties to indigenous communities and, well, these days genetic tools and public genealogies, as well as modern record-keeping, make the blood ties side of things both easy to prove and, more importantly, easy to disprove.

Tl;dr: it's not the "DNA ancestry" that's revealing and reliable, it's the actual genetic relatives.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 5:11 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

Genetic testing isn't precise because we don't just inherit half half with strict delineations on exact amounts. I am obviously enough my mother's child that strangers identify me on the street in their home towns. But I'm also the palest of the family, to the point the only one with my skin tone in group photos is the newborns without Asian parents. I have wildly curly hair, as does my father and my mother's father. I have the darkest eyes, compared to the almost yellow gold brown of my siblings. We share parentage but get different genes and expressions - my brother and I got the thick dense body hair, my sister didn't, but mine is held in check somewhat by being cis female and so my brother looks part bear. My mother and sister have barely any body hair. My kid inherited light brown eyes, light brown dead straight and gorgeously thick hair - and also somehow my skeletal shape but height from their father. None of this is fifty percent me and fifty percent dad who is also fifty percent his parents and so on.

Admittedly the ancestry "oh hey maybe Jewish" explained a lot about one particular great-great grandmother (and how a family as white as mine has so many frizzy curls, between that and the more Gaelic sides). But it also changes, frequently, and is notoriously terrible at a lot of marginalised groupings. And tells me nothing about how my family and ancestors lived. My grandfather grew up on a nation and was embedded enough to use specific kinds of language, and for us to be sister/cousin when we are around there. But when I walk into university I'm pushing against class, not race (and gender/sexuality). Sure I'm assumed some kind of weird European-not-british, depending on which city I'm in as to which kind, but not enough to be racist about since I don't have any cultural markers for it (language, accent, celebrations, religion).

The lack of cultural belonging is not just a factor of genetics. Australia had a whole policy about that, with the stated goal of erasing not just genetic belonging but cultural too, by stealing the children and starting with the whitest looking. That's the heritage missing when you just claim a genetic link - the cultural effects of soft genocide via child welfare policy. Because unless you take that link and trace it through, and find your mob, and live through the history via that, you haven't got enough experience with it in order to be able to represent your people. Which is what these identified positions require - that understanding and experience and cultural knowledge.

I don't want to have an identified social worker who not only didn't experience the Stolen Generation beyond spitting in a tube and a percentage from a corporation, but has not done the work to trace and listen to the stories and how it affects generations. That person cannot offer children what they need. Academia is similar, where the identified position is one that doesn't just theories about these ideas (sans that important learning) but also works with Indigenous students. That is a position of responsibility that genetics will not give you a foundation for.
posted by geek anachronism at 5:25 PM on September 8, 2022 [1 favorite]

I'm confused because it seems like you're responding to me and therefore disagreeing with me? Because I strongly agree with your final two paragraphs, and I think I made that clear in my comment.

However, your biology isn't making a lot of sense. You're playing fast and loose with genotype and phenotype and how these may or may not reflect relatedness. As a quantitative measure of relatedness, genetic relatedness as measured even with these consumer DNA tests is now very accurate and quite precise. You did inherit very close to 50% of your DNA from your parents and these tests will show this. Which specific genes from which parent, and which genes may have been differently activated developmentally because of environment or chance . . . well, that's going to lead to various phenotypic differences. If your hair is more curly than the rest of your immediate family, that doesn't necessarily indicate that somehow you're "less" genetically related to them, either generally or specifically with regard to hair. That's not how genetics works.

And, again, the ethnicity estimates in these apps are the least reliable aspect of them. They rely upon samples of representative populations, which vary hugely, as well as other statistical modeling with regard to ethnic relatedness that's also iffy. So I wouldn't place much stock in the test validating some suspicion you have about your grandmother's hair. If you're looking for that kind of information, use your own genealogical records in combination with your actual distant genetic relatives revealed by the app who were previously unknown. You'll find, say, Jewish heritage more reliably that way than by the these apps' estimation of ethnicity.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 6:16 PM on September 8, 2022

I have a Mi'kmaq neighbour who told me the genetic tests for his two kids came back with no indigenous markers, even though his had plenty and his familial connections leave no doubt about who he's related to.

Umm...

Ah. Ha. Yeah, you've made me see what I did there.

To clarify, among other things, the neighbour has parents and uncles who were in residential schools, and (if I remember correctly) his father's birth certificate says his grandfather's race was "Savage". He also gets money from the feds to support indigenous stuff for his home-schooled kids.

Beyond that, I appreciate the comments about genetic/ethnicity testing as tools that can support, or lead to, other, more reliable, methods of establishing who one is related to.
posted by house-goblin at 11:08 AM on September 9, 2022 [1 favorite]

Mod note: One deleted. Let's stick to the topic rather than getting into personal anecdotes of looking Native American or whatever. Thanks.
posted by taz (staff) at 12:06 AM on September 11, 2022 [1 favorite]