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>being accepted as Indigenous requires no minimum amount of ancestry That's not my take on the requirement that one have ancestral DNA

• skissane 3y ago
  When I said "no minimum amount of ancestry", I meant "minimum" as excluding "zero". So, a person with literally zero Indigenous ancestry, cannot be Indigenous by the official definition. However, if a person has non-zero Indigenous ancestry, the official definition doesn't care how slight that ancestry is. Furthermore, the official definition is not phrased in terms of DNA, only descent. Many Indigenous communities object to the use of DNA testing in determining Indigenous status, and as a result it is mostly not considered in deciding these questions. The official definition is ambiguous in using the word "descent" – while most commonly that is interpreted as "biological descent", it isn't clear that merely legal descent (as in legal adoption) is actually excluded. If an Indigenous person legally adopts a biologically non-Indigenous child (or has such a child through IVF, surrogacy, sperm/egg/embryo donation, etc), and the child is raised to identify as Indigenous, and their Indigenous community accepts that child as Indigenous – there is an argument they officially are Indigenous, and given the unresolved ambiguity in the official definition, I don't know how one can say that argument is incorrect. In practice, if the elders of their Indigenous community write a letter declaring them to be Indigenous, the government will very likely accept them (and their descendants) as such.