Why does my DNA say I am 9 percent Native American?

We all really need to know this, particularly since our education system starts off by showing us or infering a pyramid of half measures.  The empirical evide3ence we experience was saying otherwise, but that hard model made us ignore all that.

empirically we tend to take after a grandparent and that is because we notice that.  I know I took after my Grandfather and my daughter takes after my mother.  This is what we can clearly notice.  other traits run strong as well.  All my children landed my father's blue eyes as i did.  The point is that identifieable features do jump over generations and can reach back much farhter than expected.

This is also strong reminder that Native DNA is a strong component of all established North American populations.  not least because assimulation was far stronger than ever acknowledged.  Just who admited that grandfather was the offspring of an indian slave girl.

Why does my DNA say I am 9 percent Native American? I am black and I only know one grandparent, but my mother’s people are from Louisiana and my father’s from Mississippi.

Originally Answered: Why does my DNA say that I am 9 percent Native American, I am Black and I only know one grandparent, but my mother’s people are from Louisiana and my father’s from Mississippi?

Here’s a dirty little secret that the DNA analysis people don’t want you to know: DNA is a lousy way to determine your ancestry.

How can that be, you cry? Don’t I get half my DNA from my mother and half from my father? Absolutely you do.

The problem comes when you look at where that DNA comes from. Women’s bodies make egg cells with half the normal complement of DNA, and men’s bodies similarly make sperm cells. Where does the DNA for those cells come from? Your mother has 50% DNA from her mother and 50% from her father, and similarly for your father, but when they make egg and sperm cells, the DNA is basically grabbed randomly. So you can have anywhere from 0% to 50% of the DNA from any of your four grandparents. The most likely outcome is that you’ll have close to 25% from all four grandparents, but it’s not at all guaranteed or even hugely likely.

And since that process repeats in every generation, the odds that you’d have a tiny amount or even no DNA from, say, one of your great-grandparents is actually fairly good.

So take that “9%” with a large grain of salt. If the DNA is there, it means that at some point one of your ancestors had a child with a Native American, but it really doesn’t say anything at all about how many generations back it was.