My parents helped me with this assignment and I learned a lot about my family by asking questions. I interviewed my mom with these three questions:

1.) Where did my family immigrate from? Most of your family immigrated from nowhere, we are Native Americans and have always been here. Part of your family is French Canadian, so I assume they came from France. Other than that, we don’t know anything about that side of your family.

2.) When did they come to America?

3.) How did my family come to America?

I learned from my mom that I could not really answer these questions for her side of the family, and half of my dad’s. We are Native American and therefore my family did not immigrate from anywhere. I am 1/4 French Canadian, but we don’t know anything about that part of my family. My mom said this was an important question because not all people in America came from somewhere else. I am Mescalero Apache, Chiricahua Apache, Yaqui, and Huichol from Mexico. I learned that almost all Native American people have creation stories and these stories tell where we came from. In all of our stories, we came from the Earth on our tribal lands. We did not immigrate from another land. My mom says that scientists think that some Native Americans groups crossed a land bridge from Asia, but those are not our beliefs. So I changed my questions to:

1.) What is our creation story?

2.) Which lands are considered our original territory?

3.) Why did my family move from those places?

I learned that our Creation story places my family in the region of the southwestern United States and Mexico. This used to be one large territory, but then a border was put up and divided it. We came from the area that is Sonora, Tucson, Phoenix, to name a few. Native Americans were migratory people who moved from one area to another for food, our region that we migrated is mentioned in our creation story. We were created by a female creator named Yomummuli. She created the earth, stars, universe, insects, plants, waters, and humans. I learned that in part of the creation story, our creator foretold the people about the coming of the Spanish from Spain. Many of our people did not want to stay, and so they were given the opportunity to become dolphins, ants, or the Surem, which are little people who live in the mountains.

In conclusion, doing this project I learned that my family never really immigrated to America because we are Native American. I also learned that we don’t know much about my dads side of the family because our family does not know much about it. I wonder why some families don’t know much, maybe it was not important to know this a long time ago.  I wish they knew more than they do, it would be nice to be able to see all of family on a tree.  I learned that my mother’s side of the family was very large and could go very far back on the family tree. I think it is interesting how some families know a lot, and others, not that much. I would be interested in learning more about my family in the future and asking different people who may have more information.