NEWS FLASH – Shawnee DNA Project Launched

A first-ever Shawnee DNA Project has been organized under the private initiative of DNA Consultants, which is sponsoring a limited number of qualified participants.  Goal of the project is to test some 30 representative tribal members and compare their 15-locus STR (short tandem repeat) profiles (“DNA fingerprints”). The resulting reference population allele frequencies will be in line with forensic data for other tribes published in the classic 2016 Globalfiler study by J. Ng et al. 

To participate, you must be a member of one of the three federally-recognized tribes, all headquartered in Oklahoma:  The Absentee-Shawnee Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma, Eastern Shawnee Tribe of Oklahoma, and Shawnee Tribe.  Stipends to cover your test cost are available from several sources. For a copy of the consent form, contact:  Dorene Soiret, Shawnee DNA Project Administrator, at  Dorene@thecaseforblueskyandparkeradkins.com.

If accepted into the project, each participant will receive, gratis, a personal confidential Basic American Indian DNA Ancestry Report in exchange for contributing their alleles anonymously to the project. No other compensation is offered beyond the satisfaction of promoting the scientific goal of the project. All results will be published as disaggregated data. 

As of newsletter press time, Soiret reports that she has five Shawnees who’ve signed on the dotted line and is expecting three more “headed back to me in the mail, so we’re on our way!”