Which U.S. State Has the Most Native American DNA? 10 States Ranked

Which U.S. state has the most Native American DNA? There are two answers and they are not the same. Ask who identifies as American Indian or Alaska Native and the census gives one list, topped by Alaska at just over twenty percent. Ask where Native ancestry turns up in the genomes of Americans who call themselves white, and you get a different list — topped by a state that is not in the census ten at all. THE CENSUS TOP TEN. Alaska, Oklahoma, New Mexico, South Dakota, Montana, North Dakota, Arizona, Wyoming, Oregon and Washington, by share of state population identifying as American Indian or Alaska Native. Alaska is first at just over twenty percent, for a reason that sets it apart: Alaska Native peoples were never removed anywhere. Oklahoma is second at nearly fourteen percent, and high for the opposite reason. Most of those nations are not from Oklahoma. They were moved there. WHAT THE GENOMES SAY. The largest study of American ancestry ever attempted, led by Katarzyna Bryc and published in 2014, measured Native ancestry in people who describe themselves as white. The average is 0.18% — effectively nothing, because most have none any test can detect. About one in forty carries a measurable amount, roughly five million people. They are not spread evenly. In the western states a little over three percent carry at least one percent. In Louisiana it reaches eight. WHY LOUISIANA. Louisiana was not an English colony. French Louisiana survived by trading and marrying rather than clearing, and priests entered those marriages in parish registers, which is why we can read them three centuries later. In the 1860 census most of one such community in Terrebonne Parish was recorded as Indian. In 1916 a school board went to court to argue that a man named Billiot's children were not Indian but colored, and won. They got a separate school in the 1940s that stopped at eighth grade, and were not admitted to white schools until the mid-1960s. Their descendants are the United Houma Nation — over 19,000 people, recognized by Louisiana, not federally. OKLAHOMA'S BURIED STORY. Among Americans who describe themselves as Black, Oklahoma tops the same map: over fourteen percent carry at least two percent Native ancestry, against about five percent nationally. The Five Tribes held enslaved Black people — the Cherokee alone around four thousand by 1861 — and those people walked the Trail of Tears too. The 1866 treaties granted them citizenship. Then the Dawes Commission enrolled everyone in separate categories: Cherokee by blood, intermarried white, and Freedmen. People on the Freedmen roll generally had no degree of ancestry recorded at all. Not reduced. Blank. Including people who had it. HONEST FRAMING Native ancestry in a test result is not Native identity and it is not tribal citizenship. Kim TallBear's line is the one to hold onto: Native Americans do not use genetic ancestry tests to define citizenship. A nation is a political body and it decides who belongs to it. The Bryc study included no self-identified Native cohort, so it says nothing about the ancestry of Native people, and its state figures come off a shaded map — treat the order below the top as a shape, not a decimal. On the family stories: Gregory Smithers traces the Cherokee version to the 1840s and 1850s, after removal, and Henry Louis Gates has written on why, for some families, a Cherokee great-grandmother was a more bearable explanation than the real one. CHAPTERS 0:00 — Two maps of America that disagree 1:35 — A test result is not tribal citizenship 2:16 — The countdown begins 4:40 — Number one, and why nobody made them leave 5:50 — What the genomes found 7:06 — Where the Cherokee grandmother story began 9:00 — The map that disagrees 9:34 — Why Louisiana 10:47 — The Houma and a school board in 1916 14:18 — The Dawes Rolls and the blank column 16:40 — What the research cannot tell you 17:28 — A map of paperwork TELL ME WHAT YOU FIND Find your family in the census returns and read the column for race, decade by decade. Did it ever change? Did a line get written down one way and another way ten years later, with nothing to explain it? Tell me the state and the decade in the comments. The Dawes Rolls and the federal census are digitized, free and searchable by surname. #NativeAmerican #Genealogy #AmericanHistory #Ancestry #AmericanBloodlines most Native American state, Native American ancestry by state, Cherokee grandmother myth, Dawes Rolls Freedmen, United Houma Nation, Louisiana Native ancestry, Bryc 2014 ancestry study, Kim TallBear