Searching Through Smoke What an Ancestry Test Could Not Teach Me About My History

In my family, the past had always been a sore subject. I hoped an ancestry test would change that.

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Los Angeles, United States

At the end of last year, I came across a sepia-stained picture on Twitter posted by writer, Genette Cordova, of her great-grandmother. Genette explained in the Tweet that she was killed by an ex-husband in the prime of her life. The story was made more haunting by the image Genette shared of her great-grandmother, who looked so much like me and my mother that I was inclined to reach out and send Genette a message. When I began drafting the message, I was unsure of what to ask. All my questions sounded archaic and overly sentimental:

‘Who are your people?
Where are you from?’

I found out she was from Texas by way of Oklahoma and that the father of the woman in the photo was a ‘full-blooded’ Choctaw man called Hosea Hill. In the US, this was and is a common mythology: Americans of all races who report their possession of some ‘Native blood’, usually attributed to a nondescript ancestor who was ‘part Cherokee’. Often, White settlers invented and perpetuated oral histories alleging Native ancestry to justify their claims to indigenous land, or, like me, to put distance between themselves and the more undesirable inheritances of a family lineage. For this reason, Native Americans based tribal enrolment on many factors—‘blood quantum’ or DNA and ancestry estimates, not being one of them. But for African Americans, such a lineage was not unusual. There was a storied history of relations between Native Americans and Black freedmen, specifically before Andrew Jackson’s Trail of Tears. Though I had no family in Texas or Oklahoma, three of four of my grandparents hailed from North Carolina, Georgia, and Florida, where much of the ‘Five Civilized Tribes’ lived before relocation, aligning mine and Genette’s histories. My curiosity piqued, after much indecision I decided to take a genetic ancestry test through the website, 23andMe. I collected a saliva sample and sent it away to their lab, which informed me that in 4-to-8 weeks I would receive the results.

Perhaps it was no coincidence that, afraid my grandmother was dying, I sought out these results. Just the week or so before, my grandmother had been admitted to the hospital for shortness of breath. Faced with the imminence of her mortality, I grasped to the few memories I had of her now that her mind was years-withered by dementia. Months later, in her eulogy, I wrote that she was a fixture in my life such that sometimes, when I looked in the mirror or walked around my apartment barefoot, I still heard the tenor of her voice, especially in the summer, complimenting my freshly tanned skin.