Most claims of Native American ancestry rest on the mother's ethnicity. This can be verified by a DNA test determining what type of mitochondrial DNA she passed to you. A hundred participants in DNA Consultants multi-phase Cherokee DNA Study did just that. What they had in common is they were previously rejected--by commercial firms, genealogy groups, government agencies and tribes. Their mitochondrial DNA was not classified as Native American. These are the "anomalous" Cherokee. Share the journeys of discovery and self-awareness of these passionate volunteers who defied the experts and are helping write a new chapter in the Peopling of the Americas. "The Yateses' DNA findings are revolutionary." --Stephen C. Jett, Atlantic Ocean Crossings. "Monumental."--Richard L. Thornton, Apalache Foundation.

Phase III of DNA Consultants' Cherokee DNA Studies adds more than fifty new participants to what has become a classic project. They'd all been told there was no way they could be Indian given their DNA haplotype or mother's direct line. This book underlines the unavoidable conclusion that most "Indian" lineages in Eastern North America originally came across the Atlantic Ocean, not over any land-bridge from Asia. Update your priors with this sweeping attack on "big box" companies and know-it-all experts. Includes historical Cherokee photographs, genealogies, graphs, charts, references, index and raw data.

Most histories of the Cherokee nation focus on its encounters with Europeans, its conflicts with the U. S. government, and its expulsion from its lands during the Trail of Tears. This work, however, traces the origins of the Cherokee people to the third century B.C.E. and follows their migrations through the Americas to their homeland in the lower Appalachian Mountains. Using a combination of DNA analysis, historical research, and classical philology, it uncovers the Jewish and Eastern Mediterranean ancestry of the Cherokee and reveals that they originally spoke Greek before adopting the Iroquoian language of their Haudenosaunee allies while the two nations dwelt together in the Ohio Valley.

Who is a Native American? And who gets to decide? From genealogists searching online for their ancestors to fortune hunters hoping for a slice of casino profits from wealthy tribes, the answers to these seemingly straightforward questions have profound ramifications. The rise of DNA testing has further complicated the issues and raised the stakes. In Native American DNA, Kim TallBear shows how DNA testing is a powerful—and problematic—scientific process that is useful in determining close biological relatives. But tribal membership is a legal category that has developed in dependence on certain social understandings and historical contexts, a set of concepts that entangles genetic information in a web of family relations, reservation histories, tribal rules, and government regulations. At a larger level, TallBear asserts, the “markers” that are identified and applied to specific groups such as Native American tribes bear the imprints of the cultural, racial, ethnic, national, and even tribal misinterpretations of the humans who study them. TallBear notes that ideas about racial science, which informed white definitions of tribes in the nineteenth century, are unfortunately being revived in twenty-first-century laboratories. Because today’s science seems so compelling, increasing numbers of Native Americans have begun to believe their own metaphors: “in our blood” is giving way to “in our DNA.” This rhetorical drift, she argues, has significant consequences, and ultimately she shows how Native American claims to land, resources, and sovereignty that have taken generations to ratify may be seriously—and permanently—undermined.

What if the history of America's largest Indian nation is actually a polite modern fiction, one invented by "anthropologists and other friends"? In this sweeping revisionist study of the Cherokee Indians, a scholar trained in classical philology and the new science of genetics discloses the inside story of his tribe. Combining evidence from historical records, esoteric sources like the Keetoowah and Shalokee Warrior Society, archeology, linguistics, religion, myth, sports and music, and DNA, this first new take on the subject in a hundred years guides the reader, ever so surely, into the secret annals of the Eshelokee, whose true name and origins have remained hidden until now. The narrative starts in the third century BCE and concludes with the Cherokees' removal to Indian Territory in the nineteenth century, when all standard histories just begin. The ancient Egyptians, Greeks, Jews, Romans and Phoenicians have long departed from the world stage. The Cherokee remain after more than two thousand years and are their heirs.

... Racial shifter ... are people who have changed their racial self-identification from non-Indian to Indian on the U.S. census. Many racial shifters are people who, while looking for their roots, have recently discovered their Native American ancestry ...

This unique book introduces the reader to the seven Cherokee clans, found in no other American Indian tribe. They are Wolf (Ani-Wahiya), Bird (Ani-Tsiskwa), Deer (Ani-Kawi), Twister (Ani-Gilohi), Wild Potato (Ani-Gotegewi), Panther (Ani-Sahoni) and Paint (Ani-Wodi). In each section of notes appear the etymology of the Cherokee name, synonyms and related clans, the clan's in-born strengths and character, mitochondrial DNA types, symbols and iconography, famous people, ceremonies, art and monuments. Illustrated and solidly documented, this down-to-earth guide is the first and last word on an ancient matriarchal kinship system that began in the dawn of human history and lives on in contemporary times.