The Bridge & Politics Published

Announcing simultaneous publication of two books, The Bridge and Politics. In late 2021, it became necessary to place all work on hold throughout 2022. I have now returned to those projects, which means more will appear in a shorter time than usual, beginning with these two collections, but I will not inundate you with emails. I hope you find the completed projects interesting and relatable.

The Bridge and Politics collect new and previously published poems that present the stories of life's common and extraordinary experiences we share in myriad ways. The books are available through most bookstores in digital and paperback formats, including Amazon, iTunes, Kobo, Barnes & Noble, and many others. You can also request your local library to purchase them through distributors such as OverDrive.

In tribute to my best friend and spouse Bonnie, I am currently posting previously published poems to FaceBook (http://facebook.com/c.s.fuqua.author), poems that will be included in an upcoming collection tentatively entitled Bonnie Lynne ~ Real Love Poems, featuring new and collected poems written for and/or inspired by Bonnie over our 5-plus decades together. Other upcoming projects include a tribute album of songs and instrumentals written for Bonnie over the years. I hope you’ll find each project a celebration of and testament to one of the most extraordinary persons ever to grace this planet.

Praise for C.S. Fuqua’s poetry:

• C.S. Fuqua’s poetry paints an entire story with a Tom Waits brush. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, google it. ~ Ken S., editor, Spank the Carp literary magazine
• With an eye for the particular and ear for the music of life, C.S. Fuqua shares with readers his brave, lyrical view of the human experience. ~ Dr. Wendy Galgan, former editor, Assisi Literary Magazine
• … gritty, insightful, humorous, tragic, and celebratory … ~ Jonathan K. Rice, editor, Iodine Poetry Journal
• C.S. Fuqua handles the themes of love and death with beautiful simplicity: what else is there to life? ~ Kalyna Review
• …thought-provoking and interesting … ~ Suanne Schafer, author, A Different Kind of Fire
• …a lasting impression on the reader. ~ Sensawunda
• The power of C.S. Fuqua’s poetry lies in the relentless chronicling of real people with real sorrow, triumph, regret, and above all the sad beauty of the human experience. Superb poetry. ~ Tony Nesca, Author of About A Girl
• Few have as deft a touch as C.S. Fuqua, weaving a complete story in just a few lines—what poetry is supposed to be. ~ Dick Claassen, Author of Sacred Native American Flute

I am grateful for your support of and interest in my work. If you have questions or concerns, please visit my websites (csfuqua.com and csfuqua.bandcamp.com) or write to me directly at fuqua.cs@gmail.com. 

I wish you and your loved ones the very best always.

Fatherhood Explores Parenting from Dad’s Perspective

Any way you look at it, parenting is rife with challenges and joys. Fatherhood ~ Poems of Parenthood, the latest book by author/musician C.S. Fuqua, published by UK-based Stairwell Books, explores the facets of parenting from a father’s perspective in 90 poems written over a 30-year period.

In 1991, Fuqua became an “at-home dad” charged with the day-to-day care of a newborn daughter. He and his spouse Bonnie were what the media then called a new breed of parents, those who chose not to settle into traditional roles of woman-as-homemaker, man-as-breadwinner. While his wife pursued a career in public service, Fuqua established himself as a freelance writer. 

In the lean, early years of marriage, the couple had dismissed the idea of becoming parents, Fuqua said, “because we weren’t ready for parenthood—not monetarily, not intellectually, not emotionally.” By age thirty-five and their thirteenth wedding anniversary, “We’d become financially stable and decided it was time.” 

Beginning with two miscarriages, the couple found themselves on an emotional rollercoaster like they’d never experienced before, one that only intensified with the birth of their daughter. “But something magical happened,” Fuqua said. “With most of my time now devoted to her, our daughter became my primary creative muse, and I began to devote much of my writing to the exploration of parenthood—the daily experiences, insecurities, failures, successes.” 

Fuqua spent most days caring for the couple’s daughter, playing with her, taking her on exploratory walks, conversing with and reading to her as though she understood every word, involving her in social development situations, and sharing all duties with his spouse in the evenings, on weekends, and her days off—all about which he wrote in poetry, in fiction, and in journal-style letters to their daughter that he continues to write today.

In 2007, Uncial Press published a collection of 38 of Fuqua’s parenting-related poems entitled The Swing ~ Poems of Parenthood, which won the Best Poetry Collection EPIC Award for 2008 and remained in print for the next fourteen years. In 2021, Fuqua decided to expand the collection with poems he’d written since its publication, more than doubling the number of The Swing’s original poems, all of which are included in Fatherhood. 

Fatherhood chronicles 30 years of parenting experiences, from pregnancy to the child’s adulthood—the joy, sorrow, insecurity, confidence, anxiety, calm, irrationality, fear, pride, confusion, clarity, mourning, celebration, hope, and so much more—“all due,” Fuqua said, “to one extraordinary young woman who’s astounded her mom and me from day one with her intellect, humanity, and grace.”

Fatherhood ~ Poems on Parenthood is available through most bookstores and directly from Stairwell Books at https://www.stairwellbooks.co.uk/product/fatherhood/.

Fuqua has been writing professionally since 1979. His published books include White Trash & Southern ~ Collected Poems, Walking after Midnight ~ Collected Stories, Big Daddy’s Fast-Past Gadget (SF novel), Hush, Puppy! A Southern Fried Tale (children’s book), and Native American Flute ~ A Comprehensive Guide, among others. His short fiction and poetry have appeared in hundreds of national and international publications as diverse as Rattle, The Pearl, Cemetery Dance, The Christian Science Monitor, Main Street Rag, and Year’s Best Horror Stories. Learn more about his writing and music at http://csfuqua.com.

Tradition and Modern Structure Meld on Native Flute Album

Musician and author C.S. Fuqua has taken a slightly different approach with his latest Native American style flute album Homeward ~ WindPoem VII ~ Native American Flute Meditations, combining traditional sound and harmonies with modern structure and percussion.

With popularity centered around its unique and novel sound, the Native American flute has come a long way over the last three decades and is now featured in a variety of music genres and styles, from folk and jazz to orchestral and world. And yet solo instrumental renditions remain the instrument’s most powerful — and perhaps most popular — means of reaching listeners. 

Four years have passed since Simplicity, Fuqua’s last WindPoem native flute album. During that time, he produced two albums of multi-instrumental world music incorporating native flute. With Homeward, Fuqua returns to the soulful power of solo native flute that made his first six WindPoem albums favorites among those seeking relaxing, meditative music.

Although a return to the traditional sound of solo flute, Homeward selections are more structured than earlier WindPoem instrumentals.

“I produced this album specifically to create the same type of calm and relaxation as earlier WindPoem recordings but with a more modern, melodic sound,” Fuqua said. “Although the native flute is becoming a familiar instrument in popular music, its traditional solo sound will always be the most soulful and satisfying.”

Erroneously portrayed as a male-dominated instrument used solely for courting, the Native American flute historically has been an instrument played by children, women, and men in a variety of capacities, including spiritual and fertility rites, courting, mourning rituals, basic entertainment, and as an instrument of greeting between individuals and villages. In every role, it has been and remains an instrument whose melody is both haunting and soothing.

Since the first WindPoem album, Fuqua’s native flute instrumentals have been used for casual listening and in settings for counseling, meditation, hospice and general care, and educational environment enhancement.

Homeward builds on the WindPoem tradition of music that is both soothing and entertaining, blending traditional sound deftly with modern form while remaining true to native music traditions.

Fuqua wrote and performed all instrumentals for the album, playing flutes that he custom-crafted. Fuqua is the author of the book Native American Flute ~ A Comprehensive Guide ~ Craft & History. For more information regarding Fuqua’s music and books, please visit http://csfuqua.com. To preview Homeward and other WindPoem albums, please visit http://csfuqua.bandcamp.com or most streaming platforms such as Spotify and Pandora. Fuqua is available for performance and educational presentations. For more information, contact him at fuqua.cs@gmail.com.

Different Direction world jazz featuring Native American flute

Mention the Native American flute, and the first thing that comes to mind is a beautifully carved piece of artwork that produces soulful sounds. No screaming guitars. No banjos. No brass section. Just that single instrument and its haunting melody that serves as soundtrack to countless Youtube meditation videos. 

But the native flute is far more than that.

Las Cruces-based musician C.S. Fuqua’s first six WindPoem ~ Native American Flute Meditations albums fully celebrate the traditional sounds of the native flute, but Fuqua’s native flute music has taken a new turn in his seventh album, Different Direction, blending the flute’s soulful, meditative traditions into diverse compositions of world music influenced by bluegrass, rock, and jazz that combine into a refreshing sound that is at once both familiar and yet new. 

Fuqua is not the first to broaden the native flute’s range and use in music. The Rippingtons jazz group featured Robert Tree Cody on two cuts on their 1999 album Topaz. Twenty-one years later, that album remains one of the group’s most popular.

Classically-trained musician R. Carlos Nakai is best known for his traditional native flute work, but he has also broadened the flute’s use in other music genres, collaborating with guitarist William Eaton on new age productions, composers James DeMars and Phillip Glass on classical compositions, the Japanese group the Wind Travelin’ Band, and Tibetan flautist and vocalist Nawang Khechog. Yet, despite these beautiful excursions into other genres, the music that sustains Nakai’s popularity, and that of most native flute musicians, remains rooted in the traditional Native American sound.

Not only is the native flute’s use so grounded in traditional sound, it’s also still fighting the invented belief that it’s a male-only instrument, a false narrative created by European invaders whose sole purpose was to romanticize aspects of native life, even though the flute was played and enjoyed by both genders and all ages. Times are changing, though, thanks to award-winning flautists like Mary Youngblood who have blazed a path of acceptance and expansion that others now follow.

Fuqua’s Different Direction contains twelve world jazz cuts, with native flute featured as primary instrument in more than half of the instrumentals. As more artists produce albums featuring the native flute in modern music, the instrument will continue to expand its range, securing its deserved place in bands of all genres, holding its own with the loudest guitars and most strident brass sections to create a multi-cultural celebration for the ears.

Fuqua’s Different Direction is available for streaming and/or purchase on most major music platforms, including Pandora, Deezer, Amazon, iTunes, and Fuqua’s Bandcamp music website.

Fuqua has researched and published extensively on the history, mythology, and crafting of the Native American flute, including A Comprehensive Guide ~ The Native American Flute ~ History & Craft. His first WindPoem album was released in 2014.

Native American Flute ~ A Comprehensive Guide ~ History & Craft

When Native American flute popularity exploded in the 1980s and ’90s, the public latched onto the “love flute” myth as a history-based tale, that Native Americans had used the flute strictly as a courting tool. Other myths associated with the flute — that it was a gift from the Great Spirit to set trapped souls free, that it was a gift from Woodpecker to help a lost boy find his way home — were ignored, forgotten, and the instrument was promoted distinctly as a man’s instrument.

It isn’t. It’s much more.

The flute’s documented, celebrated history is detailed in the new book Native American Flute: A Comprehensive Guide ~ History & Craft, the result of nearly three decades of researching, playing, and crafting the native flute. Native American Fluteupdates and combines into one volume my previous two books on the Native American flute, The Native American Flute: Myth, History, Craft and Native American Flute Craft, to present a comprehensive history of and crafting guide to the native flute. Native American Flute explores the documented history and mythology of the Native American flute, debunking the popular belief that the flute is only a man’s instrument.

As a freelance journalist, author, and musician, I learned to play and craft the native flute in the early 1990s, discovering its history to be extremely rich and diverse. With gender equality a way of life in native cultures before Europeans arrived in the Americas, the popular belief the flute was strictly a man’s instrument just didn’t ring true.

Early accounts of Europeans who came to North America attested the flute played a diverse, intricate role in native life, from entertainment to fertility rituals to travel, even to courting. It had never been an instrument limited to men. instead played by all for varied purposes, but the courting aspect caught the romantic fancy of European readers.

Thanks to people like explorer Carcilaso de la Vega in 1592, Europeans focused on the flute’s courting aspect. According to de la Vega, “…[T]hey did not know how to harmonize measured verse, and were mostly concerned with the passions of love … One might say that he talked with his flute. Late one night, a Spaniard came upon an Indian girl he knew in Cuzco and asked her to return to his lodging, but she said: ‘Let me go my ways, sir. The flute you hear from that hill calls me with such tender passion that I must go toward it. Leave me, for heaven’s sake, for I cannot but go where love draws me, and I shall be his wife and he my husband.’”

As flute popularity has grown, women musicians have had to overcome discrimination and prejudice regarding their playing. Even award-winning flautists like Mary Youngblood have encountered male flautists who refuse to play on the same stage, shamans who refuse to bless a flute before an event, and venues that cancel performances by women when male performers complain. 

Native American Flute sets the record straight, updating and combining the information from Fuqua’s first two books on the flute—The Native American Flute: Myth, History, Craft and Native American Flute Craft—into one volume to present a comprehensive, documented exploration of the native flute’s history and a fully illustrated, step-by-step crafting guide for making both the ancient and modern versions of the Native American flute, an instrument truly for all people.

Native American Flute is a available through most bookstores.

Literary Themes Rooted in Childhood

 Insecurity and salvation.

These two themes recur often yet unplanned in the fiction and poetry I write. They usually emerge from a character’s self-doubt, countered by an unrealistic belief that situations, no matter how awful or threatening, will eventually turn out okay, that adversity will ultimately surrender to peace. But why do these particular themes keep showing up?

A few years ago, a political disagreement with my father ignited in him a firestorm of condemnation of other cultures and races—never mind the mixed racial heritage of my spouse and our daughter. Communication ended abruptly in mutual expletives. After more than five decades, he and I were finally done. I figured I’d never hear from him again, that the next time I visited him would be at his graveside.

The relationship with my father has always been tenuous at best. I felt safe with him only once—in 1958 as he carried me through the hospital parking lot on my way to a tonsillectomy. I was two. Fear soon obliterated that initial sense of safety, thanks to repeated episodes of rage, from verbal abuse and an eagerness to fight, to animal cruelty and domestic violence, a few incidents recounted in my published fiction.

My parents separated when I was twelve. I’d spent that summer of 1968 working in my father’s Phillips 66 service station in Crestview, Florida—sometimes alone and always under order to wear a “Wallace for President” Dixieland hat and campaign necktie. Dad’s small, two-pump station had three restrooms in back, designated as “Men,” “Women,” and “Restroom,” the third to which he directed people of color.

In the station’s front window, he’d hung a hand-drawn recreation of an auto tag that read “Put your (heart symbol) in Dixie, or get your (donkey symbol) out.” One hot day, a traveller from a northern state noticed the sign after I’d gassed his car. “If I’d seen that damn thing,” he snarled, “I wouldn’t have stopped.” I was glad my father was away at the time. Otherwise, a fight would have certainly ensued.

Bizarrely hot-tempered, my father was quick to violence. I witnessed such fury that crippled and killed animals and bruised and broke people both emotionally and physically. I felt a flood of relief and freedom when my parents split and I ended up in Pensacola, Florida, fifty miles from Crestview and my father. Marrying his second wife shortly after the divorce finalized the following year, he moved some forty-five miles north to his hometown, Andalusia, Alabama. With his wife’s deft support, he established a used car dealership that provided a good income, even though he faced legal problems at one point for buying and selling stolen cars. Due more to his wife’s business savvy than his public charm or honesty, he skirted prosecution and became wealthier than he’d ever imagined he would, though it had no effect on his refusal to pay child support, doling out only small portions when I visited him.

During my visits that never exceeded two days, he appeared to have mellowed since the divorce—specifically, his propensity to violence had apparently evaporated. I became jealous of his wife’s two sons whom he’d adopted. They, I believed, enjoyed the father I craved, a reasonable man who respected them enough to do what a parent should do. The emotional distance between us increased while the frequency of my visits decreased. Only after his death did I become aware of the psychological and physical violence he waged against his new family.

My father’s wife died in April 2015, succumbing to cancer. During her decline, her children visited her at home, but not without consequence. When his wife’s daughter said she would not move into my father’s home to take care of him after her mother’s death, he became so livid he threatened to kill her if she ever returned for any reason. She didn’t. When his oldest adopted son visited his mother a few days before she died, my father accused the son of plotting to steal his money and slugged him. The son responded instinctively, knocking my father to the floor.

“Get out!” my father raged. “Get out before I kill you! I’ll put you in the ground you ever come here again!”

Increased paranoia followed his wife’s death and led to rabid accusations that relatives were constantly plotting to steal his land and money. He threatened to kill many and alienated all but one, a cousin whose tolerance ensured the care he needed.

Already receiving thrice-weekly kidney dialysis before his wife’s death, my father had developed a notorious reputation among Andalusia’s medical workers for verbally abusing doctors and dialysis personnel. In early August 2016, he suffered a mild heart attack that placed him in a hospital where doctors determined he’d require rehabilitation center placement upon release. Facilities in his hometown, thanks to his reputation, refused to take him, necessitating placement in a Crestview facility where he existed under sedation most of the time. Shortly after placement, my cousin informed me that his condition had begun to deteriorate rapidly, that he suffered from advanced diabetes, kidney disease, and increasing dementia.

Living in New Mexico, I decided not to visit him. Any possibility of reconciliation, no matter how remote, had surely vanished within his sedation and dementia. Then my wife’s brother in Pensacola died unexpectedly, and we made the 1,350-mile drive to attend his memorial, placing us within forty minutes of the Crestview rehab facility.

On a rainy Wednesday morning in a town that’s grown unrecognizably large since my childhood, the nurse in the rehab facility’s locked wing pointed out my father at the end of a line of wheelchair-bound patients parked along one wall. The greasy pompadour he’d worn most of his adult life had been replaced by shorter hair, brushed into a faux mohawk, the result of a nurse’s playfulness. He stared blankly toward the opposite wall, murmuring. I knelt before his chair and took his hand.

“Dad?”

He slowly turned his gaze.

“You know me?”

After a moment, he nodded almost imperceptibly.

“Who am I?”

He smiled slightly. “Ray,” he whispered.

“No, not Ray.” I had no idea who Ray was. “Try again.”

Something clicked. His face tightened, his lips parted slightly, and he began to cry. “Chris…”

Just as quickly, his expression muddled, and the stare returned. He nodded. And nodded again.

I engaged him in talk as best as possible and took a few photographs.

He held my hand off and on, muttering things like, “I used to have lots of money. No more. It’s okay, it’s okay. Madelyn [his deceased wife] is coming soon.”

Aides began wheeling patients to the dining room for lunch.

“You seen Mama?” he asked. His mother had died some forty years earlier. “She ain’t been by.”

“No, but you’ll see her soon,” I said. “She’s waiting.”

A shadow of a smile played on his lips. He nodded once. “I love everybody.” He nodded again. “Everybody loves me.”

“I’m sure they do.”

He leaned slightly forward. “I’m proud…”

My breath caught as I thought for just a moment that, at last, he was about to express something he’d never before expressed.

“I’m proud,” he whispered again, “real proud of my life.”

I let the breath go. “Yeah, you should be.”

He sat back.

An African-American nurse arrived to take him to the dining room. My father, whose racist rants were legendary, reached for her hand and grinned.

“She’s nice,” he said. “People…people’s the same everywhere.”

The nurse positioned herself behind the chair.

“We need to go,” I said. “Time for you to get some lunch.”

He raised a hand toward my wife—that at one time unsuitable, racially-diverse person who’d married me thirty-eight years before.

“I love you,” he whispered.

She hugged him lightly.

He then held his hand out to me. His face twisted momentarily as though he might cry again.

“I love you,” he said. And he nodded.

“Yeah, I love you, too, Dad.”

His eyes glazed.

I lowered his hand to his lap.

The nurse said, “Y’all can wait or come back after lunch if you’d like.”

We thanked her and stepped aside, and she wheeled him away.

Six days later, the day after our return to New Mexico, he died. My cousin said that he had been en route from dialysis to the rehabilitation center when he went to sleep for the last time.

I didn’t travel to Andalusia for the funeral, but my cousin filled me in. The preacher of the church my father attended—designated as a primary recipient of Dad’s estate after he disinherited his adopted children and me—delivered a glowing tribute that had some attendees wondering who the hell the preacher was talking about.

That’s fine.

Southern preachers consider eulogies sacred opportunities to exploit insecurity to harvest souls by lobbing sizable chunks of fire and brimstone while praising the exceptional life of the dearly departed, now cozied up in heaven with Jesus.

What does it hurt?

Most of us—kind or cruel—reach for higher standards at some point. And we all fail in different degrees. It’s okay to remember people as better than they were. It’s okay to grant a little salvation.

At some point, I’ll stand at my father’s graveside, keenly aware of how he influenced me to strive to be his opposite, of how he will always affect the characters and themes in my fiction and poetry.

Perhaps I’ll thank him.

Perhaps not.

The Pretendian Tribe

“Brother’s got high cheekbones!”

“Sister’s hair’s jet black and straight!”

“Granddaddy looks like Geronimo!”

I’ve heard such nonsense all my life as relatives, without proof, claimed Native American ancestry. Officially, we’re white, “but we got Indian blood in us from way back.” In 2015, a Pew Research Center study revealed that at least half of all U.S. adults who identify as multiracial are whites claiming Native American ancestry—that’s 8.5 million people. In a 2016 Fusion.net article, Native Peoples magazine editor Taté Walker pointed out the obvious. For that many whites to have Native American ancestry, American Indians would have to be “getting it on with everybody.”

Some claims of native ancestry are legitimate. Most others, not so much—and there’s a name for the people making such erroneous claims: Pretendians.

Claiming native ancestry isn’t new, but white claims of being a quarter or less Native American have skyrocketed in recent years. Asked for proof, those claiming ancestry resort to family lore and physical attributes like high cheekbones. Moreover, these wannabe Indians readily feign extensive knowledge of whatever tribe they claim. They buy, display, and wear stereotypical garb and trinkets as though every Indian in America purchased their clothes and jewelry at some Arizona interstate tourist trap, but these Pretendians have no experience in native culture. Instead, they profess nativeness, especially on social media, by coining outlandish “Indian” names like Howling Wolf Tree, Badger Womyn, and Eagle Feather Heart. (Get your own ridiculous “Indian” handle with the online name generator at http://www.lingerandlook.com/Names/FictionNames2.htm.) If their claims are questioned, Pretendians shore up their authenticity with inaccurate knowledge of Indian culture and history based on popular myth and stereotypes, demonstrating little or no fact-based understanding of past or present native issues. They will even attack true native descendants as imposters to make themselves appear genuine.

A few years ago, a distant relative who’s researched our mutual genealogy put authority to our family’s claim to native heritage, purportedly discovering two Muscogee women in my paternal grandfather’s ancestry. “I’m still working on documenting it, but, after all,” he told me, “we have a great-great-great grandfather who traded with Indians up and down the river.” How trading anything other than a certain bodily fluid gets native genetics into a person’s DNA is beyond my understanding, but the claim, he insisted, was genuine and only needed official confirmation. We could now check with clear conscience those white and Native American ethnicity boxes on job and other applications.

White folks claim native ancestry for a variety of reasons, including a romanticized view of native culture and people. Take the Native American flute as example. It’s an instrument that’s mystical, haunting, spiritual. It touches our ancient soul. According to one of several creation myths, it was given to native men for use in courting women, a fairytale now accepted by most as fact. Besides misogynistic, the myth-as-history is preposterous. In reality, the flute’s place in native culture was and remains broad, from entertainment to courting to fertility rites to greeting visitors—like any other instrument ever made in any other culture. The story, however, fits well into the Pretendian narrative that embraces myths promoted by European invaders, myths designed to undermine native women’s cultural status. Europeans ensured general acceptance of chosen myths-as-history through systematic destruction and replacement of native culture and values with European nonsense now accepted by many Pretendians as fact.

Based on assumed nativeness, Pretendians have even developed a sense of political correctness regarding aspects of their claimed heritage. When I began crafting native flutes some thirty years ago, the instrument was known simply as a Native American flute. In recent years, a movement among mostly Pretendians contends that Native American flutes can be crafted only by Native Americans. If you’re non-native and claim no native ancestry, the flute you make must be termed a Native American styleflute. If we accept such skewed logic, then non-Europeans can craft only a recorder style flute, and non-Spaniards can make only Spanish style guitars.

By far, Cherokee is the most claimed of all Native American ancestry. The 2000 U.S. federal census reported that 729,522 Americans claimed Cherokee heritage. By 2010, the number had increased to 819,105, some 70 percent of them—white folks—declaring mixed race. I grew up in southern Alabama and northwest Florida, so this statistic is no surprise. Bring up native culture in conversation, and someone will claim native heritage. Nine out of ten times, that heritage will be Cherokee, usually “traced” to an Indian princess—never mind that no such tribal status ever existed.

Throughout the country’s history since the European invasion, Americans have used mixed-race status for personal advantage. For example, a person with African American and white heritage who looked white would usually pass as white to avoid discrimination as she or he rose in society as only whites could do. Even today, most people who have less than twenty-eight percent African-American ancestry, according to a 2014 23andMe genetics study, claim white-only heritage. Conversely, whites are increasingly quick to claim native ancestry in an effort to gain perceived minority advantages in employment or scholarships. Making the claim is easy. Since 2000, the Census Bureau has allowed people to check multiple boxes for race and ethnicity without proof.

This kind of ethnic multi-checking has created an alternate reality for native heritage. Until recently, tribes determined membership on whether a person spoke the language and followed cultural practices which defined cultural affinity with the tribe. As white claims rose, blood quantum became the standard determinant. If one grandparent, for example, belonged to a tribe but the other three grandparents did not, a person was considered to have one-quarter blood quantum. Before 1963, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians allowed anyone with at least one-thirty-second blood quantum (one great-great-great native grandparent) to join the tribe, but the claim had to be documented. You couldn’t just check a box. After 1963, the standard increased to one-sixteenth.

Before the mid-1800s, the Cherokee were the southeastern U.S.’s most populace tribe, numbering around 16,000. But they had something whites wanted—land for farming and gold mining. And let’s not forget racial prejudice. These were local Indians after all, substandard humans in the European mindset. To appease white desire, the U.S. government in 1838 and 1839 forcibly removed the southern Cherokee to the Indian Territory in what later became Oklahoma. After removal and as tensions rose between north and south in the run-up to the Civil War, whites realized an advantage in claiming Cherokee ancestry, insisting these claimed ancestors had escaped forced removal to hide, remain, and marry in the south. Official records, however, indicate that few, if any, Cherokee escaped removal, although 4,000 died on the Trail of Tearsen route to the Indian Territory. Claiming Cherokee ancestry enabled southerners to step out of their role as oppressor by legitimizing themselves as native born rather than of European origin. The claim thereby relieved them of guilt for what they’d done to the actual Cherokee and established a delusional native right to defend their despotic system of slavery from an “aggressive” federal government.

This delusional mindset has had a long shelf life. It’s evident today in southern Pretendians’ defense of the rebel battle flag as heritage not hate and their unyielding support of political candidates who promote xenophobic and racist ideology. Claiming ownership of an imagined native past allows these whites to forgive themselves for their European ancestors’ aggression against native peoples and their own present-day assaults against different cultures, races, and ethnicities.

Claimed ancestry became a political issue in 1924 when Virginia politicians were forced to address matters of mixed-race rights. The state’s Racial Integrity Act at the time banned marriage between whites and members of any other race, defining people as white only if their “blood is entirely white, having no known, demonstrable, or ascertainable admixture of blood of another race.” That put a kink into claims of ancestral links to Pocahontas by prominent white Virginia families. Generationally, if the claims were true, it meant family members were at most one-sixteenth native. The Virginia legislature therefore amended the Racial Integrity Act with the “Pocahontas Exception,” allowing white families to claim native ancestry to Pocahontas but still be classified as white. Conversely, those with one-sixteenth African American ancestry could not claim white status and remained designated as black.

According to Native American journalist Mary Annette Pember, claims to Cherokee ancestry went nationwide during the twentieth century, thanks to Tinsel Town. Hollywood movies made the Cherokee acceptable to people outside the South by civilizing the tribe. In 1971, a popular Keep America Beautiful ad campaign established Iron Eyes Cody, The Crying Indian, as the quintessential image of Native America, a tear rolling down his cheek as he mourned environmental destruction. Cody famously traced his heritage to the Trail of Tears and a Cherokee grandfather who purportedly worked with the Confederate outlaw band, Quantrill’s Raiders. Cody made no personal claim to glory, however, calling himself just another Injun who left the reservation to find success in Hollywood. After he’d portrayed Indians in more than 200 films, the public discovered that Iron Eyes Cody’s heritage did not trace to the Trail of Tears after all, that he’d never lived on a reservation, that he was actually Espera Oscar de Corti, a Louisiana-born actor with 100 percent Sicilian ancestry—not a drop of Indian blood.

The three federally recognized Cherokee tribes—Untied Keetoowa Band, Cherokee Nation, and the Eastern Band of Cherokees—have a combined population of 344,700 members, most living in close-knit communities in eastern Oklahoma and North Carolina’s Great Smoky Mountains. Although becoming a Pretendian may seem harmless, it has consequences beyond a wink and snicker. In the workplace, whites can be hired based in part on claimed heritage, taking a position that should be filled by someone of true native heritage. Iron Eyes Cody is a good example. His success in playing an Indian prevented true Native Americans from landing roles that should’ve been theirs.

To address increasing claims of ancestry, the Cherokee Nation has created a task force to deal with false assertions by individuals seeking official recognition, leading one investigator to theorize that many Pretendians are simply seeking a sense of place and connection. The problem is, the only way some know how to achieve such connection is to buy it and own it. Heritage is not such a commodity.

Pretendians may be fully sincere in their romanticized native view of nature and spirituality. Their appeal vanishes, however, when they use their nativeness to justify or forgive disturbing personal traits. Sociologist Herbert Gans in 1979 coined the phrase symbolic ethnicity to describe the act of white Americans claiming native identity without changing behavior or suffering social consequences. The practice is pervasive, exemplified by Native American heritage clubs that have no members of documented ancestry and by Pretendians claiming heritage for reasons of employment or scholarship benefits. For them, ethnicity is voluntary, a piece of clothing that can be put on or taken off at will, unlike skin.

As America becomes more racially and ethnically diverse, whites unwilling to accept their changing status search for a collective identity of ancestral place and culture to link to the world they live in and to justify personal racism toward other groups. The 2016 presidential election provided a champion for many whites who claim Native American ancestry, encouraging and inflaming racism and xenophobia without regard to decency, empathy, or societal norms. Many Pretendians on social media professed steadfast support for Native Americans protesting the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) while vehemently condemning similar groups such as Black Lives Matter and opposing anti-discrimination legislation designed to protect women, people of color, and LGBTQ individuals.

For all the claims of indigenous blood, ancestry no longer needs to be a mystery. We can easily determine by DNA analysis whether we have native ancestry—which is exactly what I did a few years ago. Forget those two native women in my paternal grandfather’s ancestry, and don’t give the Indian trader a second thought. Thanks to DNA testing, I know the truth. I’m as white as a person gets. 

When I informed the relative who’d “discovered” the perceived native ancestry, he replied, “Another genealogist in the family feels strongly there’s Indian blood. So we just have to continue to wonder.” 

No, we don’t. 

Science is a marvelous thing. It doesn’t depend on faith, myth, or family lore. Science relies solely on empirical evidence—like climate change or gravity. Or DNA analysis.

Never mind high cheekbones. 

Ignore hair color or texture. 

And Granddaddy? He looks like Granddaddy.