So i finally got my ancestry results back and I always been told my mom dad was native and my dads great grandma was Native but no native popped up for my results . Supposedly my moms dad and my fathers great grandmother both had “good hair” and lighter skin .My mom also took the test and no native was in her also and her dad was just mixed with a white father and black mother . Do African Americans especially down south have a history of being told they have native in them? I know a lot of other Black people who say they have native but it never shows up in results . Every time I asked about my grandpa and great great grandmother my family always talked about how good and long their hair was and I think that’s a problem because it’s basically saying good hair = not black . Is it any significant to why a lot of African Americans are told they have native ancestry?
I'm coming at this from a genetics perspective, instead of a historical one. Basically, I'm never quite so sure how much I would trust the percentages of X 'race' you're given via ancestry genetic testing. I'll try and summarise this for a non-scientific understanding, and reference articles written for lay people as scientific articles especially in the field of genetics are heavy with jargon. Basically your results depend on how the genetic testing company 1) examines your DNA and 2) how good their reference data library is.
How the company examines your DNA. Your DNA is about 3 billion base pairs long. Obviously, it's uneconomical to fully sequence each person's full genetic background. What these ancestry genetic companies do instead is they take many short sections of your DNA, and look for mutations that are commonly associated with ethnic groups. These mutations are called SNPs, or single nucleotide polymorphisms. 23andme looks at about 900,000 SNPs. That's a lot of SNPs, but a good proportion of them don't give any meaningful data yet. 23andme is simply collecting the data from those SNPs to examine them for new trait associations in the future. For example, genetic traits associated with being a morning person: https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms10448
Their reference data library. There are a lot of fallacies that come with trying to genetically define races and ethnicities, which I'm frankly not qualified enough to get into. What I will say is that the accuracy of the results are only as accurate as the reference library your genetic testing company uses. The question becomes how many indigenous north americans did they use to create a reference population? How many tribes did those people come from, or were they from the same tribe? Did those people have known intermixing with people from outside their ethnic group - highly likely given all the wonders of colonialism? If it was common for indigenous north americans and african americans to intermix, perhaps some of the markers which reported black heritage are actually indigenous american markers which have just been associated with black heritage.
To combine both of these points, over time, as the company's reference library increases, as more people use ancestry genealogical testing, your results may very well change. The algorithms that determine which percentage of which ethnic group you are descended from will be tweaked over time.
In some of the articles I've listed, there does seem to be some references to african americans believing that they have native ancestry only to have none linked by their genetic genealogy testing. So it would anecdotally appear to be somewhat common.
Some great articles which point out the fallacies on relying on genetic testing genealogy to estimate heritage and ancestry:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/19/magazine/dna-test-black-family.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-accurate-are-online-dna-tests/
This is a good scientific paper which discusses the fallacies of genetic genealogy testing. It's a little old for the field (2010) but a good summary: