My family had a similar experience in that we were always told, by our mother, that her grandmother, who lived in Kansas, was a full blood member of the Chickasaw tribe. We believed this until one brother did some research and found no such connection.

Not my analysis. Found it on Quora.

Shout out to @StarvingArtist, who nails it. Your analysis is superficial and simplistic.

I am an enrolled member of the Muskogee (Creek) nation, another victim of the death march. My grandfather's people were Creek (and European, he wasn't full-blood) while my grandmother's people were both Cherokee and Creek. The Dawes Act required that you could only identify with one Nation, not two, so my grandmother chose Creek.

It is possibly not so far fetched, but the real litmus test would likely be DNA testing.

[slate.com]

That makes you 1/8 cherokee.

the Baker roll didn't extend to all states..West Virginia did not participate..my grandfather and grandmother(eastern tribe) settled near a little place called creston along the little kanawha river in the late 1800s and raised a family of five..my mother, the youngest moved away and married an irishman!....granny used to say that there were about 1200 in the eastern tribe..no way of knowing I would assume....a lot of gaps in history but I keep finding things out as time goes on..

As my daughter and I were told when our search into our rather mixed Ancestry was going on,.
We found direct linage links to both the Cherokee peoples and the Navajo peoples via an ancestor from Wales in the U.K. who was 'stranded' on the coast of what is now Nth. Carolina after his Trading Ship was attacked and sunk by French Privateers.
He and 3 other survivors wandered for weeks until they met up some of the native peoples, Cherokees, who took them in and welcomed them into their nation.
His name was Royston Stanley and shared the same surname as I do.
He was a widower back in Wales and ended up wedding a Cherokee woman by the name of "Singing Bird" with whom he had 3 more sons and 2 daughters beside the 2 grown sons back in Wales.
To cut a very long story short, my daughter and I were invited to, and welcomed as well, come and meet our distant relatives on the Cherokee land now in Oklahoma were we informed that by Cherokee Lore " Anyone with even a drop of Cherokee blood in their veins IS NOT part-Cherokee BUT ALL Cherokee."

I am less then half, but more then a quarter, indigenous. I look exactly like my mom who was 3/4 indigenous. I have very distinctive native features, and am registered with a first nation in northern Ontario.....with that being said my full blooded sister is my opposite. She has hazel eyes and blond hair. She can pass for Caucasian.

I once dated a girl who'd grown up in foster care, but had always thought she was 100% Navajo. In her late 20s, she discovered that she actually had a Pima grandmother (for history buffs or folk music fans, Ira Hayes was Pima).

A lot of the problem is that we did as much as possible to destroy the culture and heritage of our natives. Children were stolen from their families and sent to "Indian Schools" often while they were too young to remember their own origins.

I have English and Dutch ancestry but nothing I can nail down. I'm sure there is some native American there but it is just family folk lore that I was hearing. I'm sort of a mutt. I don't have a pedigree of the pure blood that Nazi's and others claimed in error that they had.

I've always been amused by all the White Americans who claim Native American ancestory, always in fractional parts, and nearly always Cherokee.. (ever notice none claim to be "three quarters Tonkawa", or " three sixteenths Arapahoe"?).
Since most White Americans are descended from European immigrants who arrived in the United States sometime between 1890 and 1910, it could be that their children pretended to have Native American ancestors, to make themselves feel less "foreign", to avoid bullying at school; and that this is the origin of the phenomenon?