From the Damned Lies and Statistics Dept.:

Any mathematicians out there care to take on the odds of going your entire life without meeting a member of a group that constitutes 0.5% of the population? It's got to be vanishingly small -- never mind how much worse it gets if the correct number is 1.5% as the earlier poster indicates. Yes, they're a minority, but going your entire life without meeting one? What a stupid statement by the author.

I'm relatively young, but remember a family from church, a foster sister (not named Margaret), and an MBA classmate who were close to full-blooded. I'm sure I could find others I've met if I cared to think about it.

I know! I grew up on a former Maidu reservation, so all my neighbors, except for one, were full or part Maidu. Heck, about a quarter of my town was Maidu. FYI, Maidus live in the Sierra Foothills east of Sacramento, in California.

Never meeting a Native in my life! Laughable! My best friends growing up and my first boyfriend were all native!

I don't consider myself native, since I'm only 1/8 Cherokee, but I do consider myself to have native ancestry. My dad is 1/4 Cherokee, but you would never know by looking at him, since he looks Caucasion. My Grandpa, on the other hand, yes definitely, you could tell that he had Native blood in him.

More than anything, I think that is what has happened. From what I have learned and observed, Natives intermarried a lot in the last 200 or so years. So they have become mixed and really blended in. They are still here, though, in the blood of many millions of Americans.