Native American Chief visits Samaria: 'A great honor'

The Native American Chief Joseph RiverWind and his wife, Laralyn arrived Sunday for a tour of Samaria. Chief RiverWind is the Peace Chief of the Arawak Taino Nation.

The two, who came from the United States, visited factories in the Barkan industrial zone, took in the view from Har Bracha (Mount of Blessing) of Joseph's Tomb in Shechem (Nablus), and tasted local Samaria wines at the award-winning Har Bracha winery.

In a meeting with the head of the Samaria Regional Council, Yossi Dagan, RiverWind revealed the warm feelings of the Native American community towards the State of Israel in general and Judea and Samaria in particular....

RiverWind said: "It is an honor for us to be here and to meet such wonderful people, the people of this land. Your story, the people of Israel, gives us a lot of hope. Your return to your language, your land, your return to your spirituality. For Native Americans this is an exciting success story."

"We share a similar story. They took from us our language, our identity, our land, and here there is the story of returning to Israel. It is an honor for us to be in Samaria and to encourage people in America and overseas to support Israel, including Samaria, to speak against the BDS movement and to support any way to help Israel, we are doing what we can to stop the propaganda and the Israel.

He added: "The Arab occupation must be stopped and Samaria should be returned to the Jewish people as they have restored Jerusalem and the rest of the country to its owners." The two played and sang a traditional Native American song, which they wrote and composed especially for the celebrations marking the 70th anniversary of Israel's independence.

Good enough but it doesn’t really say what you claimed

“The team compared her genome sequence to existing datasets of modern-day indigenous populations and found the ancient DNA had origins most like Arawakan-speaking groups in northern South America. In present-day populations, Taíno genes were most common in Puerto Rico, they found.”

That’s not eighty percent

The Romans are long gone. No one even know the how the Romans actually pronounced their Latin words; no one speaks it today except in certain churches. Not a good comparison.

The point is that the Tribal chief is angling for something ... usually a ploy for money so he and the other ruling families can continue to live in the lifestyle they have become accustom. He is a phony.

“New DNA evidence indicates that 80% of Puerto Ricans have at least some Taino DNA.”

It was a DNA test done on a self-selected group of people with high cheekbones from mountain towns in western Puerto Rico (one of the last holdouts for the Puerto Rico Tainos, the last of which died in the early-to-mid 17th century, although certainly there was some intermarriage between Spanish men and Taino women and between Tainos and escaped African slaves). And while like 80% of the sample had some Amerindian DNA, such results were not necessarily due to Taino ancestry, but due to having an ancestor who immigrated from South America or Mexico (it should be noted that Spanish censuses in Puerto Rico eliminated the Mestizo category in the late 17th century and had to bring it back in the 19th century due to immigration to Puerto Rico from other Spanish colonies in the New World). Moreover, even had it been a representative sample (which it isn’t), and even if all of the Amerindian DNA actually was Taino DNA (which is unlikely), almost all of the people tested had insignificantly low percentages of Amerindian ancestry. Is someone who only has 1% Native American DNA considered a Native American? Even the Mashantucket Pequots of Connecticut require more substantial ancestry than that.

Those two Fake Indians are seeking recognition as the Taino tribe so as to receive federal benefits, such as the right to build casinos that are exempt from state taxation. Maybe they have a smidgen of Taino ancestry, but so what?

That being said, I’m glad that someone out there recognizes the Jews’ claim to the Land of Israel, even if the recognition is for selfish motives.

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