As a person of color, I’ve always wondered about my heritage. It’s a natural thing to ponder your ancestors: their journeys, their experiences, their hopes and dreams. Several people in my family are genealogy buffs, and they’ve confirmed to me that, like many thousands of other Americans, I am a direct descendant of the real Pocahontas.

If it sounds like I’m joking, I’m not. Over the last year or so, I’ve come to learn that I’m about 10% Native American, my relatives tell me. I’m publishing a photo of my great great grandmother below, where you can see the Native American characteristics quite clearly. Because I’ve had numerous death threats over the years, I’m obviously not going to post my family tree online and subject my relatives to similar threats. So you’ll have to take my word that what I’m relating here is genuine and very personal.

This realization also explains a lot about who I am and where my passions for natural medicine and environmental protection have come from. Those who have seen me in person know that I have red skin, and although my heritage includes many ancestors of European descent, my grandmother — the granddaughter of the woman you see in the picture below — taught me many skills of gardening, wildcrafting and living off the land… all in ways that I now realize were inspired by Native American traditions.

Check out the photo below. My great great grandmother is the woman on the right:

Here’s a close-up of my great great grandmother (can you see the resemblance?)

When my grandparents were growing up, many Native Americans hid their ancestry to avoid discrimination

The strange thing about all this is that no one in my family ever communicated any overt identity with Native American culture. Yes, we enjoyed hunting for arrowhead artifacts on my grandmother’s farm — and we found many — but I don’t recall anyone ever telling me in my childhood, “We are of Native American descent.”

It all makes sense, of course, when you consider the cultural context of the era in which my grandparents were raised. In a society dominated by white people, many Native Americans did not advertise their culture or heritage. Some were even ashamed of it. It’s only relatively recently that society has found greater respect and honor for our Native American ancestors who lived and thrived in North America long before the colonists arrived from Europe.

I can easily imagine my grandmother being told by her mother, “Shhhh! Don’t tell anyone your mother is half Indian!”

Remember, in the 1930s and 40s, Native Americans were still thought of as “savages” by many ignorant European-Americans. Many tried to hide their heritage rather than celebrate it, so the knowledge of the identity of our ancestors was hidden from us rather than passed freely from generation to generation. It is shocking to come to the realization that for most of my life, I have been denied the knowledge of my true ancestry because of a deep-rooted fear among Native Americans to feel safe in expressing their true identities.

Now, I am ready to serve as a “science warrior” to help protect my Native American brothers and sisters across this nation…

How I’m going to help protect Native American waters from pollution and contamination

I’m going public with this because I’m ready to pursue a science mission to help protect Native American waters from pollution and contamination. We’ve all seen the pipeline protests in North Dakota, and it’s obvious that Native American waters are under extreme assault from corporate interests as well as the EPA itself (remember the Gold King Mine spill?).

Today, I own and run a world-class science lab that’s internationally accredited by ISO (ISO-17025 standard). My lab instruments are capable of detecting heavy metals, pesticides and other pollutants in water and other environmental samples. I now plan to use that lab (CWClabs.com) to test water samples from Native American lands all across North America (including Canada).

Here’s how I’m going to fund that effort:

Today, I’m launching CHIEF Organics Whey Protein. It’s the first of an expanding line of CHIEF Organics products we’ll soon be announcing. A full 1% of net sales revenues from CHIEF Organics products goes to fund the laboratory analysis of Native American water samples — a service which I will now offer at no charge to all Native American communities across North America.

Conducting the science costs real money — the ICP-MS instrument along costs over $300,000, and the MS-TOF instrument is similarly expensive. I’m probably $2 million into my current laboratory, and running each sample costs additional money. But now we have a mechanism to pay for it so that we can run Native American water samples at no charge to Native American communities.

Through this mechanism of raising funds for science by offering organic, lab-validated whey protein and other products, we can offer free lab testing to all Native Americans, including those in Canada and Mexico. That’s one small way I can help honor my own ancestors while using the best tools of modern science to make a lasting difference in the world.

(Soon, my lab will even be able to test for fracking chemicals in water supplies. This will help identify aquifers where fracking may be causing chemical contamination.)

Why is this needed? Many Native America communities in America simply do not have extra funds to pay for laboratory testing, so they often aren’t aware of the contamination issues they’re facing. The U.S. government, meanwhile, actually causes contamination through a destructive EPA that, bluntly stated, causes more harm to the environment than it prevents. Only through a private, self-funded laboratory can Native Americans finally get reliable, scientifically accurate testing of their water sources. That’s what I’m announcing today, and that’s what we are funding with our launch of CHIEF Organics.

You can help support this initiative by choosing CHIEF Organics products, which are available right now at the Health Ranger Store.

How to request lab testing for your Native American water sources

If you are connected with a Native American community and you’d like to take advantage of this offer for free scientific testing of your water samples, simply contact us through the Natural News contact page.

Put “Native American water” in the subject of your email. We’ll get you instructions on how to send us a water sample for testing.

To help financially support this effort, just purchase our ultra-clean CHIEF Organics Whey Protein products, which are laboratory verified, certified organic, and tested for rBGH, pesticides, GMOs, heavy metals and other contaminants.

Nobody on the planet does more laboratory testing of whey protein than CHIEF Organics. This is the cleanest, most pristine, most transparently honest whey protein you’ll ever find, and it’s sourced from New Zealand.

Thank you for your support in helping me apply modern science to the contamination challenges my own ancestors never had to deal with. The Earth is more polluted than ever, but we also have the scientific tools to detect that pollution, alert those affected by it, and maybe even halt the destructive environmental policies of greed-driven corporations and runaway Big Government.

Thank God we don’t depend on government grant money, or we’d never get funded for a project like this. The funding for science to protect Native Americans can only come from non-governmental sources. We the People have to step up and get this done, because our corrupt government will never do anything meaningful to protect the very people it has marginalized for centuries.