I am so white

When I was child, I was told I had Native Canadian ancestry, that some great-great-grandfather on my father's side had married a "lady of the land."

When my daughter got married and decided to have children, I took a DNA test to find out if I had any bad recessive traits that my daughter should watch out for.

My genes look pretty good, surprisingly, but the biggest surprise was that I have zero First Nations gene markers. I mentioned this to my sister, who said that she had also noticed this in my Dad's genealogy test; she's big on family trees and whatnot.

I have since learned that it is very common for white people in North America to believe, without evidence, that they have some small amount of Native ancestry. When I was a teen, my Dad used to take me to what was back then called the Indian Friendship Centre in Calgary, to get in touch with that part of my heritage. People claimed that the Native ancestry really shows in me and especially in one of my brothers.

I have tried to look deep into my heart to try and understand why I was disappointed to hear that my ancestry was 100% Northern European.  Why do we white folks want to believe that we have "native blood"?  All the possible answers are ugly.  Maybe being part native made me exotic and special, with some kind of Earth witchiness. Maybe it made me not just a child of invaders, but a mix of  the colonizers and the colonized, a "true" Canadian.

Of course, I am who I am, whoever that is, and there is no such thing a true Canadian by blood.  I have no witchy powers of any kind and I am just a citizen because I was born here, not by any virtue of my own.  Whoever my ancestors were and whatever they have left me, I am the same me no matter what race or creed they were.