I like John Cena too. But for my tribe at least, the process to receive a spirit animal is a hard, personal journey, not unlike receiving a military honor or a Catholic patron sainthood. Don't you think it cheapens a very important cultural achievement for a very marginalized group of people just a little bit when everybody calls everything their "spirit animal?
If you really need to say that you like or relate to John Cena or Chester Cheetah or any other fictional or non-fictional character, maybe just call them your Patronus instead? A Patronus is from the "Harry Potter" series, and the only person you might offend by using that term is Voldemort. As I mentioned previously, Native people come in all shapes, sizes, and skin colors, and we're from so many different tribes and cultures that it's impossible for one person to speak for all of us, myself included.
I recently worked in a writers' room with a bunch of super funny Native American comedians, and even within our small room of a half dozen people, our opinions differed on a lot of things.
I'm just going to answer that for you. Your friend with the DNA test or your other friend with a mysterious, potentially made-up Cherokee Chief great-great-grandfather who they don't know anything about can't speak for all Natives, either.
Outside of racist sports mascots and plays about Thanksgiving, Native people are very rarely shown in the media, and almost never in a contemporary light. Our representation in the media is so lacking in the modern day that we're often called an " invisible" minority. Because of that, a question I often receive from grown adults is, "aren't you guys extinct? First off, ouch. Second, no! We're still here. There are around 6 million Native American people currently listed on the US Census, which is similar in size to the Jewish-American population and the Chinese-American population.
So we're not exactly "rare" either. Also, we're doing some amazing stuff! Aaron Yazzie is a genius Navajo mechanical engineer. John Herrington is an inspiring Chickasaw Nation astronaut and the first-ever Native American in space. These are just a few of the many, many very awesome contemporary examples of Natives not just existing, but flourishing in the 21st century.
Not only do we still exist, we're killing it. World globe An icon of the world globe, indicating different international options. Get the Insider App. Click here to learn more. A leading-edge research firm focused on digital transformation. Joey Clift. As one of the few Native American people in the entertainment industry, I'm used to being asked bizarre questions about my culture.
Many people seem to think that all Natives live in teepees and look like caricatures from the s. Here are some of the weirdest and wildest misconceptions people have about being Native American today. I doubt it. For the idle curious, genetic testing can be a fun adventure, but for some of us, the stakes are far greater and the dangers are more real.
It is not surprising that DNA tests have real risks. It asks the question of who we are head on. This question is far from being settled, but it is one of the essential ones we ask.
Much of the history of thought is born out of it. Heraclitus incited everything from philosophy to physics with the idea that no one steps into the same river twice. Everything, he claims, from the river to the person doing the stepping, are subject to change.
The ancient thought experiment, the ship of Theseus , asks how we are to understand permanence in objects. Is a ship the same ship if, to fight rot and the other ravages of time, we change one plank, and then another, and then another, until there is nothing of the original ship left? These metaphysical problems about permanence and change hide a methodological problem about how we define what is changing and what is staying the same.
DNA tells us lots of interesting things, but it is not definitive: it can only dig so far back before it starts depending on things other than DNA to make sense of the data. In other words, if DNA goes back far enough, Englishness, for instance, gets lost in the melting pot of its own past, from its colonial empire to its early Brittonic settlers. How do we decide which different groups matter to English identity? Surely not DNA tests, because some notion of identity already has to be in place in order to decide what to look for in genetic markers.
Even at its best, DNA only answers a certain type of question about who we are. Some thinkers argue that this metaphysical question about the sameness of substance is on the wrong path for understanding human identity.
One such thinker, Paul Ricoeur , thought that such sameness misses a specific ethical and imaginative aspect of our identity called selfhood. This narrative identity is supposed to be formed by the stories that we tell and that others tell about us.
It is the unity of these stories that allow us to create a unity in our life. There is something compelling about this. However, there are limits to this notion.
My own story puts me face to face with a specific kind of rupture. The stories I have told about myself my whole life are based on certain material aspects that my narrative self depended on. Now, I am working from a fractured narrative because of a material change. But this cannot be reduced to the ancient problem of change either. I am not changing one plank at a time, rather I have found that there was never any ship.
But I still try to stay afloat. This is hard, because even with stories, even with data, we navigate our lives unaware of the reefs that lie in wait, whole ecosystems of secrets ready to sink us should we run aground in them. This article is more than 2 years old. Sequoya Yiaueki.
Finding out my father lied about his heritage has forced me to radically question who I am. There is no statistically significant difference between the percentage who worked in service occupations and the percentage who worked in office occupations. The median household income of single-race Native American and Alaska Native households in The percentage of single-race Native American and Alaska Natives who were in poverty in , the highest rate of any race group.
For the nation as a whole, the poverty rate was The percentage of single-race Native American and Alaska Natives who lacked health insurance coverage in For the nation as a whole, the corresponding percentage was 9. Updated October 4, Infoplease Staff. More from Native American Heritage Month. See also:. American Veterans By the Numbers. Trending Here are the facts and trivia that people are buzzing about. Is Vatican City a Country? The Languages of Africa.
The Mongol Empire.
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