During a live YouTube chat, Colorado safety Shilo Sanders brought up race in a casual, off-the-cuff way. Things took a sharp turn when he asked a group of Palestinian women if they had an “N-word pass.” One of the women checked him right away, saying that was a crazy thing to ask and not something they could answer.

“That’s a crazy question; we don’t have the right to answer that,” one woman replied. Shilo Sanders wasn’t done. “Well, we get our passes sometimes,” he said on his YouTube channel before revealing the big surprise. “My mom actually told me I’m Indian.”

The women looked confused as they exclaimed, “What?” in unison. Shilo caught himself and tried to clear up the confusion, saying he did not mean from India, but that his mom told him he was Native American. He admitted he didn’t know anything about it until his mother brought it up recently.

“Not Indian,” he corrected. “My mom told me I was a native of. I just learned it like last week.” When they asked him which specific tribe he belonged to, Shilo drew a complete blank. “I don’t know that yet, but she knows,” he said.

The interesting part of the whole exchange is that Shilo Sanders wasn’t claiming he had suddenly uncovered a specific Native American identity, something that he was unaware of. He was saying his mother had told him there was Native American ancestry in the family, and the news was brand new to him. His mother, Pilar Sanders, has a mixed family background herself. She has African American, Filipino, and Puerto Rican roots, giving him a family history that already crosses several cultures.

Pilar Sanders was born in Elmira, New York, and became known as a model and actress. Her marriage to Deion Sanders later put the family in the spotlight. Shilo is the oldest of three children, followed by Shedeur Sanders and Shelomi Sanders. But the Native American connection appears to be a different part of the family story. And Shilo’s comments suggest he hasn’t received the full version yet.

That is where things get interesting. Knowing that there may be Native American ancestry is one thing. Knowing which tribe, where that connection comes from, and how far back it goes is another. For now, Shilo Sanders apparently has only one piece of the puzzle. His mother knows.

This isn’t the first time Pilar has encouraged her son to look beyond simple racial labels when talking about identity. In an earlier conversation, she challenged the way Americans sometimes separate race from nationality and ancestry.

“Do you know everybody outside of America knows who Black people really are in America, except Black people in America?” she told him in one of his podcasts. “They’re Americans. You’re the natural person of the land, which they entitled Indians at one point, but you’re from the land. So I’m Not Black. Not Black as in the color Black. There’s no nationality like that.” 

That conversation makes Shilo Sanders’ latest revelation even more curious. He has spent much of his life publicly identified through his father’s famous name and his own football career. Now, he’s learning there may be another chapter in the family history he never knew about. And until Pilar fills in that blank, he appears to be just as curious as everyone else.