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That motivation is certainly there for WNs. Nonetheless, the stories are often ludicrous on their face. These people often claim a grandparent, great-grandparent, or 2x great-grandparent to have been Indian. My brother-in-law is one such person. But you look at his parents, and there's no way they have that much Amerindian. If they did, they wouldn't think they were white in the first place. Then there's the person from Iowa that claims to be a quarter Cherokee, although the Cherokees never came close to Iowa. It's these obvious and gross errors that make me dismiss these tales out of hand. And that's not to mention the antagonistic relations with the natives throughout history, the racial attitudes of the times, the scarcity of Indians in North America, and the English colonists' practice of bringing their families over with them, unlike the French and the Spanish.
I've no doubt there are Americans with distant Amerindian blood. They're likely to be located primarily in the South and in Oklahoma. But I think the evidence points to their being a minority.
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