Well, well, well

Having gone from knowing nothing to knowing some things to assuming others, I now find I really knew nothing.  I refer to my genes. 

As an adoptee, I lived in blissful ignorance of my genetic heritage until I was about 29, when a pregnancy awoke wonderings about my birth family.  What would I give birth to?  What genetic forces were at play?  I had no clue.  Pre-internet, I had to do arduous library research to find my birth mother and when I did, learned she had died of lung cancer at 49.  But she was a smoker, so I have avoided that fate. 

A few years before he died, my great uncle informed me that my great-grandmother had been a Mohawk from the Tyendinaga Reserve in Napanee who had married off-reserve and moved to Kingston, where my mother and her siblings were raised.  He had great stories about this woman and her skills, about how..."she had no teeth, smoked a pipe and was the only one who could chop wood in the frozen winters.  We learned so much from her," he had said when he told me about this great-grandmother. When her husband died, he added, she immediately moved back to the reserve..."to be with her people".   

Wow!  I have Indian heritage, I thought.  All wrong!  For some unknown reason, this woman lived on the reserve, but she was not native.  All this I have now discovered thanks to a reality check from "23 and Me".  And what is my genetic profile?

One hundred percent European, with 94.2% British and Irish!  As to Native?  0.0%.

OMG!  The birth-family folklore has now been trashed.  Did my great-uncle know?  Obviously not, or he would not have told me all about her.  Yes, she lived on the reserve, but she was as pure white as the driven snow.  Why would she have lived on an Indian Reserve?  And what about my birth father?  He was said to have been of German and Austrian descent, but with only 1.5% of my genes in that pool, this is now another fanciful fabrication.

So, the myths have been exploded and I find I am a pure-bred Anglo.  The other thing I have discovered is that I possess none of the genes for Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or breast cancer -- all good news.  But make no mistake, as a tax-paying Canadian, I will continue to take issue with the natives who insist on doing everything in their power to oppose every wealth-generating initiative in this wonderful country.   

But for today, it's Happy St. Patrick's Day to all my genetic kin!