My Grandpa's Mysterious Family

Throughout this course I have found myself not really understanding a lot of the typical Native American stereotypes that most Americans seem to have.  I spoke in my last post about my brothers and I always wanting to be the Indian while playing cowboys and Indians, and looking back there is probably more of a reason for that than just our geographical location.  The two main reasons being our upbringing by our mom, and part of our supposed ancestry.  My mom always taught us from a young age to be accepting of different people and different cultures unless that specific person did something that didn’t deserve respect.  So because of this I can say with full honesty that I grew up with no racial or cultural racist thoughts, everyone in my mind was equal and that was that.  So, maybe this is why I never heard many of the stereotypical Native American hatred or ideals, but that still doesn’t explain why my brothers and I thought Indians were so cool.  Thinking through it however, I think I know the reason why we did and it all has to do with our grandpa.  Our mom’s dad, who passed away about a year ago now, was a huge part of us kids life, he was basically our hero.  Our grandpa was like our dad, taught us so many things from survival and camping, to tools and building things, to how to be a real man in life.  He meant the world to us and still does, but why does this have anything to do with thinking Indians are so cool?  Anyone who ever met our grandpa, us included, can tell just by his features that he has to have Native American blood in him, I can’t totally explain why but everyone used to say that.  We’ve always been told that there is some evidence that my grandpa and grandma had uncovered over the years pointing to our grandpa’s dad as having a decent amount of Native blood in him.  The problem is, my grandpa moved all around the country while he was young because his dad worked for the steel company.  Because of this constant moving, much of his dad’s family history, the little that was known, was lost in all the moving.  To this day us kids, my mom, and even my grandma, don’t know much about my grandpa’s dad’s side of the family.  The little they do know and what they have heard from other relatives,  points to either some Sioux or Blackfoot ancestry.  I think to us this always made our grandpa even more mythical, mysterious, and to be blunt amazingly cool.  I think we justified his vast knowledge of everything in life for some reason to his possible Native American ancestry.  It’s so hard to explain why we thought this was such a cool aspect of our grandpa, other than it was a seemingly rare aspect of our family, and mostly probably because he meant the world to us and everything he did was cool to us.  His dad’s background is something that is still a mystery to us even today, and I know my brother and grandma are constantly trying to find out anything they can, maybe one day we will know more, but I know for sure that’s why us kids always thought Indians were so cool, and never thought of a bad side to them.