Ancestry is Not Identity: Reckoning with the Myths of Belonging

My 6th great-grandfather, John Findley, was born in Belfast in 1737, before the partitioning (colonizing) of Ireland. His wife, Mary Boyd, was also born in Belfast before the two of them emigrated to the United States. Several of my 3rd great-grandparents – Patrick Kelly and Mary Curley of County Galway, William Sullivan and Margaret O’Hern of County Kerry, Thomas King and Jane Carleton – all left Ireland for the United States in the 1800s.

This does not make me Irish.

I am a white American who has benefited in significant ways from the systems put in place by my ancestors. These are the systems that facilitated and sustained the colonization of this country. My ancestry includes distant relatives like William Findley, who emigrated from Ireland, eventually served in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, and later represented Pennsylvania in the U.S. Congress from the second through fifth sessions. Uncle William even played a role in mediating the Whiskey Rebellion alongside George Washington. Again, my connection to this man from Belfast does not make me Irish. While some in the United States embrace an Irish-American cultural identity, my point here is about the dangers of using ancestry as a blanket claim to identity, especially when it obscures the roles our ancestors played in settler colonialism.

My ancestry also includes a long line of well-documented French Canadian colonizers who displaced the Indigenous First Nations of what we now call Vermont before following the lumber trade westward down the St. Lawrence Seaway and into the Great Lakes region of what we now call Michigan and Wisconsin.

Indeed, my French Canadian ancestors played a significant role in the spread of Catholicism throughout New France, quite literally designing and constructing various cathedrals for the church. It is not lost on me how that same colonial government (and ultimately our own) used religious residential schools as deliberate institutions to isolate, indoctrinate, and abuse the children of Indigenous families. These institutions were not simply educational spaces. They were tools of cultural erasure and violence, leaving deep generational scars that Indigenous communities are still healing from today.

And yet, I see this history weaponized in a different way.

It is common for some white Americans of French Canadian descent to cite ancestry (particularly distant, often unverifiable Indigenous ancestry) in order to lay claim to Indigenous identity. This is a persistent and harmful myth. My own ancestor, Nicolas Marsolet, served as the primary translator for Samuel De Champlain and is reported to have fathered many children with an Indigenous woman. While some French Canadian settlers did have relationships with Indigenous communities, including intermarriage, ancestry alone does not confer Indigenous identity. Identity is not just a matter of genetics. Rather, it is cultural, political, and communal, shaped by lived experience and recognized through participation in community governance. Having an ancestor from an Indigenous lineage does not make a person Indigenous, just as my connection to Irish emigrants does not make me Irish.

Moreover, many of the self-identified Indigenous Vermonters today, who claim descent from French Canadian colonists, have no documented history of participation in Indigenous governance, culture, or community. The actual Indigenous nations of the region, such as the Abenaki Odanak and Wôlinak First Nations, have been clear in rejecting these claims, asserting their own sovereignty and pushing back against the ways false identity claims dilute their political and cultural integrity.

This is why I am careful in how I engage with ancestry. My role in advocating alongside the Odanak and Wôlinak is not to speak for Indigenous communities but to support their calls for recognition and self-determination. I do so with an awareness that I am the descendant of settlers, not Indigenous people, and that any advocacy must be rooted in truth – not in narratives of convenience.

We do not get to choose our ancestry, but we do get to choose how we engage with it. We can either wield it as a tool for entitlement or approach it with honesty, accountability, and respect.