This paper
was written in 2007 with the help of a Professor/mentor
The Sovereignty of Racial Identity
Genealogy,
Racial Identity and Sovereignty
Throughout the history of The United
States the dominant society, through its laws and social practices, has sought
to define racial identity precisely, and in “either-or” terms. This has serious
implications for individuals of mixed ancestry, who did not, and do not fit
into conventional racial classifications. Multiracial individuals such as
those with mixed Native American, African American, and European heritage often
struggled against the dominant society’s classification system in a number of different
ways. These actions, or forms of resistance can be understood as
demonstrations of personal agency, or the ability to direct one’s own future,
not to mention that of future generations. Drawing upon genealogical records,
as well as the current, and contentious, literature on persons of mixed African
American and Native American heritage, this paper will explore my own African
American and Cherokee ancestral line in order to shed light on the complexities
of racial identity in the southeast United States. Consequently, this
paper raises a number of controversial questions about identity
formation. For example, who determines racial identity? What
are the implications of self- identification, the practice currently employed
by the United States Census? Conversely, what are the implications when
agencies, governments, and courts determine individual identity? To make
matters more complicated, Native American nations claim sovereign rights over
citizenship. What does this mean? Who has the right to determine
tribal membership? Since historical experiences, forces, and
personalities, influence questions of racial identity, this paper also will
look to the past for clues that determined a Native American’s identity, and
when and where were these decisions made? Finally, and perhaps most
intriguingly given contemporary events, do individuals have the right to
challenge official racial designations?
Most
Important findings, how genealogy meets the history of race
The longing to learn of one’s own
history lies buried in most everyone’s heart. Like many others, my family has
stories that have been passed down from generation to generation. There
are many components in telling a story; experiences, experiences of others,
characters, clues, misconceptions, the full gamut of emotions, intuition,
historical records and academic research, to name a few. Personal
experiences, oral family history and hidden history, contact with family
members, genealogical records will set the stage to examine issues of racial formation
and racial designations explored in academic literature. The necessity of
focusing on a family line to examine larger issues is expressed here, “The
family can thus be read as a barometer for the society, tracing and reflecting
the atmospherics of social life and social change.”[i] I will use oral history of my family,
genealogical records and academic literature in attempts to trace my African
American and Cherokee ancestral line to show the complex nature of racial
formation and how that has affected families’ identities for generations.
I will assert that racial designations are challengeable, taking into
consideration the tumultuous history in the southeast United States in regards
to racial formation specifically of those who are mixed with African American
and Cherokee. Hopefully the information shared in this paper will aid in
healthy discussions, on race, and exclusionary behavior in our current affairs.
My
starting Point
My
family’s oral history stretches as far back five generations, but the few paper
records that I have found do not reflect the fullness of my family’s story,
particularly their racial identity. What I know of my ancestors has
changed as I contacted living relatives, and learned of a racial identity
different from what I had originally known. These differences are reflected in
paper records, and through oral history. This information, contradictory
as it is, has helped me gather up clues and begin to piece them together.
The first source that a person should start with when beginning genealogical
research is gathering oral history from living family members, because you may
be the first person to write it down for future generations.
Genealogists recommend beginning
with oral histories, gathered from living family members, if for no other
reason than capturing memories before they are lost. Genealogists also
suggest starting with one’s self and slowly working back one generation at a
time, particularly when gathering vital information like birth, death, marriage
certificates. Fortunately, I already knew of my Cherokee Great-Great
Grandmother, her Daughter and her two sisters. The first Daughter mentioned had
a Daughter, who is my Grandmother, and her first Husband was my
Grandfather. My Grandmother and Grandfather had five children; my father
is their second oldest child. - Conversations with family members also
revealed different opinions and beliefs regarding racial dynamics that are
common among many families from the American Southeast. To make matters
more complicated, scholarly literature suggests that words like ancestors,
miscegenation, conflict, heartbreak, family bonds, survival, kin, sovereignty,
land ownership, belonging, and redemption, racial formation, and identity are
loaded with meaning, and controversy.
I have been particularly interested
in my Native American heritage, even as I have been frustrated by the absence
of concrete information. My Father spoke of his part-Cherokee
blood, but one of my brother’s recalled that my Dad also claimed descent from
other tribes. I settled on Cherokee partly because my father was from
Tennessee, which lay at the heart of that Cherokee Tribe’s pre-Removal
homeland. My high school textbook contained a paragraph about the “Trail
of Tears” that did not satisfy my thirst for knowing about my past. As a
high school student, I also noticed a picture of a Cherokee woman who resembled
my father. This was my most vivid memory of reading about the Native part
on my past. As a small child this desire to know more of my ancestors
left me feeling bewildered because of the fact that there really was not much
available for me to learn.
I did not have any relatives living near my immediate
family. My mother’s family, from which I
derive my English ancestry) was spread out, and we visited a couple of times during my childhood. I knew of my Father’s family but had never seen nor met them. I remember only one picture of my
Father and his Sister when they were small children. Still, I understood that my Father’s side of the family was Cherokee, Italian and Irish; at least, this is what my Brothers and I were told. I knew the names of my Great-Great grandmother, Great Grandmother and her Sisters, Grandmother and Grandfather, and my Father Brother’s and Sister’s and some of their children, but never met them.
There were no talks of visits either. I had many questions for my Father about my Cherokee Great-Great Grandmother. My father attended to My Great-Great Grandmother’s garden over the period of a few summers in his early life, he observed some of the ways in which she lived. My Father said that if someone approached her land unannounced in the night, she with her “left hand, would shoot first, and then ask, “Who’s there?” Literature has shown that Cherokee people had gardens.[ii] My Great-Great Grandmother built her own home and had a garden that my Father helped tend. Even though this could be true of many other ethnicities at the time, it does imply that her ways were that of a Native American women, and that extended family recalled here as such as well. She also had control over the dominion of the household. She allegedly kicked her husband out of the house for drinking and spending up all his money. It was not until I was older that I had a chance to make strong inquires about my father’s people. One
night, during that time when I lived in a friend’s basement, I had a strong sensation to look at a book that my brother gave me about Native American myths and legends. As I reread, I suddenly experienced a strong impression to call my Dad’s sister. Since I already had her phone number due to her calling my Father a year or so before, I called Aunt in Nashville, and spoke to her for the first time inquiring of my ancestry.[iii] Aunt affirmed my desire to know of those before me, and invited us down for Thanksgiving. I proceeded to write her a letter explaining my desire to learn more about our Native history, but also whether we had African American heritage as well. I inquired about Black ancestry largely because of a few life experiences. While studying in Florida, African American students from the South sometimes grabbed my hair and asked whether I was “mixed.” I soon learned that this question, repeated many times, had something to do with the fact that questioners hailed from a region where people had a longer view of historic events, specifically the
history of “miscegenation.” The way in which they asked this question lead me to believe that they had a deeper understanding of something that was unknown to me. History indicates that
miscegenation took place, but under forced conditions of rape between slave owners and slaves. “Sometimes a White master or overseer would rape a woman in the fields or cabins.”[iv] Women were often more vulnerable to objectification by men. This left women, particularly women of color alone, or with someone other that the biological father raising the children on their own, with no involvement/support from the men that had impregnated them. Numerous academic writings indicate this.
When Thanksgiving came around my brother and I drove down to Nashville.
When Aunt opened the door, I saw my Father in female form: shorter, smaller and more feminine. This Southern Black woman invited us into a house very similar to the ranch style home I grew up in. Later, I discovered that my Father’s other Siblings also chose similar houses.[v] Whether by mere availability or affinity. New family members and new, really just old culture, entered into my life. Aunt’s house had a lot of African American Art and photos of family I had never met, even though some names were familiar. We met my first male Cousin that night, and most of his Sisters during the remainder of the trip.
Since that time, I have met more relatives on my Father’s side of the family and am blessed to know strong, African American women, who identify as such, that are my Kin. I have been amazed over our rich history, and struck by the realization that this history is more common than many American’s may or may not appreciate, or do not yet know that their children may appreciate.
In my letter to my Aunt, I expressed a desire to know anything about our ancestry. Sitting at her kitchen table, during that first visit, she offered what she knew, hand written on a torn yellow sheet of paper. She said that my great-great grand mother was Cherokee, Black and White. This information differed from my father’s version, which was that she was a full-blooded Native American. According to our oral history, a Jewish man impregnated my Great Grandmother, who was the first daughter of my Great Great-grandmother that I had previously mentioned, while she was living and working for his family in Canada. On the way to Nashville, she delivered the baby along the railroad in Marion, Illinois, who turned out to be my Dad’s Mother. My Great-Great grandmother, raised the baby with the help of my Great Aunt.
The baby born along the railroad tracks in Southern Illinois was my Grandmother. She married a man whose mother was impregnated by an Irishman. My Great-Grandmother on my father’s father’s side, was also a Black Indian woman, who married a man from whom my Sir name originates. This came as some surprise to me, and could have generated animosity toward my parents for withholding family information. But I had long since forgiven my parents, and myself, for mistakes in the past. I also understood that my father grew up a “colored man” in the South before the civil rights movement. I cannot begin to fathom what that must have been like. This meant that genealogical research has actually strengthened my identity, and motivated this quest. I have been blessed to meet people who have encouraged me to seek the truth, and even by those who have not been so encouraging, through whom I have come to value. I have been encouraged to show kindness toward elders[vi], and an appreciation for America’s complex history with race. Academic literature provides context for political, historical and social issues that shaped my experiences. I have found clues to the reason behind the motivation of my parent’s decision making withholding our African American and Jewish ancestry.
In Confounding the Color Line, Welburn argues that “most of us living on the Indian-Negro color line grew up with mixed signals and coded information. Our elders had learned to protect us from the ridicule and abuse they had experienced as Indians or from which their parents had sheltered them. They instilled in us the sense that we are “different” form our peers; but that we were Indian or of Native descent, when it was raised, was a covert issue. Why we should live such a covert identity was seldom explained. At best, in some families, we were to view ourselves as “Americans” or as “Colored people,” which actually provided an inclusive ring for non-Indians and a social safety valve.”[vii] This literature reference is speaking largely about a mixed blood author with in the boundary lines of a “colored community”. Persons who were mixed and lived in a “white” community and people who were mixed within an “Indian” community felt this tension.
In past decades, light-skinned persons of mixed ancestry sometimes “passed’ into dominant white society.[viii] Passing was said to be commonplace (although difficult to measure precisely), at least until the 1960s when “black pride” movements denounced the practice as an exercise of self-denial that divided the African American community along different hues of skin color.[ix] This act of unification may have intentionally or unintentionally left out Native American Ancestry from African American identity. Paradoxically, movements promoting racial pride contained no space for multiracial persons to embrace their full ethnicity within different communities.
Passing might move in multiple directions. Literature scholar Sharon Holland a former University of Illinois at Chicago Professor, described a part of her own family history in a recently published text where Holland is recalling a conversation a tribal records administrator from the Narragansett Nation. According to Holland “She then asked me about my family, and I told her about my grandmother’s secret and her revelation to me: that my grandfather’s mother was an “Indian from Alabama” and that he left Georgia one day and passed for black for the remainder of his life.”[x] The author explains her family story while during research in New England. As she spoke with this understanding women from the Narragansett Tribe she continued her experience, “Across decades and generations, we silently acknowledged our losses.” [xi] On the one hand, if a multiracial person was of “Negro blood,” he or she had to hide this fact for fear of enslavement and/or discrimination. On the other hand, if a multiracial person was of Native descent, he or she had to hide this fact to escape Indian removal and/or discrimination, and sometimes enslavement. Often, hiding multiracial identity was a method of avoiding discriminatory practices and ultimately a means of survival.
Another reason why racial designations are challengeable would be the history of African American and Native American relations since contact with Europeans and the slave trade for hundreds of years there were relationships among these two groups.[xii] Because of the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans and the common foes of colonialism, these two groups joined forces in an act of resistance.[xiii] Some of the first contacts may have been in bondage and later making contact as slaves running away and living within a native community beyond the boundaries of new colonies and states, as and as kin. In the 1800’s is where things really got messy. Slave trade became profitable for the elite group of Cherokee because of colonial influences internally and externally. Leaders in the Cherokee Nations were of mixed ancestry, particular mixed European. Chief John Ross was and eighth Cherokee and was a slave owner. Literature is somewhat conflicting on Ross because in some text he did not take sides with the minority who were for slave trade and ownership, and took sides with those of his tribe who were not for slave owner ship nor were they for relocating, yet Ross was a slave owner himself. “Well to do” Cherokees similar to Ross in their mixed ancestry, took positions of Leadership and changed the dynamics of Cherokee laws and customs.[xiv] Cherokees were forbidden to marry Blacks, or people of slave ancestry. Even though at this point in time, there in the Cherokee nation existed individuals who had parentage of both. This is controversial to some because of the lack of documentation.
Also, many Cherokees did not pay mind to laws such as these that separated family and ancient customs of kinship. Often, poor Afro Cherokees were marginalized and were not in the center of Cherokee life but occupied the space on the boarders of towns and villages. The lives of these individuals would be harder to track. Even harder today because many individuals avoided removal during the 1830’s and did not register upon any roll. Because of this history it is imperative that racial designations should are challengeable. “The places where blacks and Cherokees had raised families together were now behind the state live s of Georgian and Tennessee. In a new landscaped devoid of embedded mutual memories, the people were separated by a cavernous divide of race and caste”.[1] The author expresses that a division amongst Cherokees and blacks began to widen. This widening of the relationship is due largely to the influences of colonialism that penetrated Cherokee society that should be refutable. No one has the right to cut another person off from their ancestry. Particularly Cherokees with thousands of years of Kinship bonds and African Americans who were stripped from the content of origin, transplanted, and forced to procreate, and live upon land that was at first foreign to them.
derive my English ancestry) was spread out, and we visited a couple of times during my childhood. I knew of my Father’s family but had never seen nor met them. I remember only one picture of my
Father and his Sister when they were small children. Still, I understood that my Father’s side of the family was Cherokee, Italian and Irish; at least, this is what my Brothers and I were told. I knew the names of my Great-Great grandmother, Great Grandmother and her Sisters, Grandmother and Grandfather, and my Father Brother’s and Sister’s and some of their children, but never met them.
There were no talks of visits either. I had many questions for my Father about my Cherokee Great-Great Grandmother. My father attended to My Great-Great Grandmother’s garden over the period of a few summers in his early life, he observed some of the ways in which she lived. My Father said that if someone approached her land unannounced in the night, she with her “left hand, would shoot first, and then ask, “Who’s there?” Literature has shown that Cherokee people had gardens.[ii] My Great-Great Grandmother built her own home and had a garden that my Father helped tend. Even though this could be true of many other ethnicities at the time, it does imply that her ways were that of a Native American women, and that extended family recalled here as such as well. She also had control over the dominion of the household. She allegedly kicked her husband out of the house for drinking and spending up all his money. It was not until I was older that I had a chance to make strong inquires about my father’s people. One
night, during that time when I lived in a friend’s basement, I had a strong sensation to look at a book that my brother gave me about Native American myths and legends. As I reread, I suddenly experienced a strong impression to call my Dad’s sister. Since I already had her phone number due to her calling my Father a year or so before, I called Aunt in Nashville, and spoke to her for the first time inquiring of my ancestry.[iii] Aunt affirmed my desire to know of those before me, and invited us down for Thanksgiving. I proceeded to write her a letter explaining my desire to learn more about our Native history, but also whether we had African American heritage as well. I inquired about Black ancestry largely because of a few life experiences. While studying in Florida, African American students from the South sometimes grabbed my hair and asked whether I was “mixed.” I soon learned that this question, repeated many times, had something to do with the fact that questioners hailed from a region where people had a longer view of historic events, specifically the
history of “miscegenation.” The way in which they asked this question lead me to believe that they had a deeper understanding of something that was unknown to me. History indicates that
miscegenation took place, but under forced conditions of rape between slave owners and slaves. “Sometimes a White master or overseer would rape a woman in the fields or cabins.”[iv] Women were often more vulnerable to objectification by men. This left women, particularly women of color alone, or with someone other that the biological father raising the children on their own, with no involvement/support from the men that had impregnated them. Numerous academic writings indicate this.
When Thanksgiving came around my brother and I drove down to Nashville.
When Aunt opened the door, I saw my Father in female form: shorter, smaller and more feminine. This Southern Black woman invited us into a house very similar to the ranch style home I grew up in. Later, I discovered that my Father’s other Siblings also chose similar houses.[v] Whether by mere availability or affinity. New family members and new, really just old culture, entered into my life. Aunt’s house had a lot of African American Art and photos of family I had never met, even though some names were familiar. We met my first male Cousin that night, and most of his Sisters during the remainder of the trip.
Since that time, I have met more relatives on my Father’s side of the family and am blessed to know strong, African American women, who identify as such, that are my Kin. I have been amazed over our rich history, and struck by the realization that this history is more common than many American’s may or may not appreciate, or do not yet know that their children may appreciate.
In my letter to my Aunt, I expressed a desire to know anything about our ancestry. Sitting at her kitchen table, during that first visit, she offered what she knew, hand written on a torn yellow sheet of paper. She said that my great-great grand mother was Cherokee, Black and White. This information differed from my father’s version, which was that she was a full-blooded Native American. According to our oral history, a Jewish man impregnated my Great Grandmother, who was the first daughter of my Great Great-grandmother that I had previously mentioned, while she was living and working for his family in Canada. On the way to Nashville, she delivered the baby along the railroad in Marion, Illinois, who turned out to be my Dad’s Mother. My Great-Great grandmother, raised the baby with the help of my Great Aunt.
The baby born along the railroad tracks in Southern Illinois was my Grandmother. She married a man whose mother was impregnated by an Irishman. My Great-Grandmother on my father’s father’s side, was also a Black Indian woman, who married a man from whom my Sir name originates. This came as some surprise to me, and could have generated animosity toward my parents for withholding family information. But I had long since forgiven my parents, and myself, for mistakes in the past. I also understood that my father grew up a “colored man” in the South before the civil rights movement. I cannot begin to fathom what that must have been like. This meant that genealogical research has actually strengthened my identity, and motivated this quest. I have been blessed to meet people who have encouraged me to seek the truth, and even by those who have not been so encouraging, through whom I have come to value. I have been encouraged to show kindness toward elders[vi], and an appreciation for America’s complex history with race. Academic literature provides context for political, historical and social issues that shaped my experiences. I have found clues to the reason behind the motivation of my parent’s decision making withholding our African American and Jewish ancestry.
In Confounding the Color Line, Welburn argues that “most of us living on the Indian-Negro color line grew up with mixed signals and coded information. Our elders had learned to protect us from the ridicule and abuse they had experienced as Indians or from which their parents had sheltered them. They instilled in us the sense that we are “different” form our peers; but that we were Indian or of Native descent, when it was raised, was a covert issue. Why we should live such a covert identity was seldom explained. At best, in some families, we were to view ourselves as “Americans” or as “Colored people,” which actually provided an inclusive ring for non-Indians and a social safety valve.”[vii] This literature reference is speaking largely about a mixed blood author with in the boundary lines of a “colored community”. Persons who were mixed and lived in a “white” community and people who were mixed within an “Indian” community felt this tension.
In past decades, light-skinned persons of mixed ancestry sometimes “passed’ into dominant white society.[viii] Passing was said to be commonplace (although difficult to measure precisely), at least until the 1960s when “black pride” movements denounced the practice as an exercise of self-denial that divided the African American community along different hues of skin color.[ix] This act of unification may have intentionally or unintentionally left out Native American Ancestry from African American identity. Paradoxically, movements promoting racial pride contained no space for multiracial persons to embrace their full ethnicity within different communities.
Passing might move in multiple directions. Literature scholar Sharon Holland a former University of Illinois at Chicago Professor, described a part of her own family history in a recently published text where Holland is recalling a conversation a tribal records administrator from the Narragansett Nation. According to Holland “She then asked me about my family, and I told her about my grandmother’s secret and her revelation to me: that my grandfather’s mother was an “Indian from Alabama” and that he left Georgia one day and passed for black for the remainder of his life.”[x] The author explains her family story while during research in New England. As she spoke with this understanding women from the Narragansett Tribe she continued her experience, “Across decades and generations, we silently acknowledged our losses.” [xi] On the one hand, if a multiracial person was of “Negro blood,” he or she had to hide this fact for fear of enslavement and/or discrimination. On the other hand, if a multiracial person was of Native descent, he or she had to hide this fact to escape Indian removal and/or discrimination, and sometimes enslavement. Often, hiding multiracial identity was a method of avoiding discriminatory practices and ultimately a means of survival.
Another reason why racial designations are challengeable would be the history of African American and Native American relations since contact with Europeans and the slave trade for hundreds of years there were relationships among these two groups.[xii] Because of the enslavement of Native Americans and Africans and the common foes of colonialism, these two groups joined forces in an act of resistance.[xiii] Some of the first contacts may have been in bondage and later making contact as slaves running away and living within a native community beyond the boundaries of new colonies and states, as and as kin. In the 1800’s is where things really got messy. Slave trade became profitable for the elite group of Cherokee because of colonial influences internally and externally. Leaders in the Cherokee Nations were of mixed ancestry, particular mixed European. Chief John Ross was and eighth Cherokee and was a slave owner. Literature is somewhat conflicting on Ross because in some text he did not take sides with the minority who were for slave trade and ownership, and took sides with those of his tribe who were not for slave owner ship nor were they for relocating, yet Ross was a slave owner himself. “Well to do” Cherokees similar to Ross in their mixed ancestry, took positions of Leadership and changed the dynamics of Cherokee laws and customs.[xiv] Cherokees were forbidden to marry Blacks, or people of slave ancestry. Even though at this point in time, there in the Cherokee nation existed individuals who had parentage of both. This is controversial to some because of the lack of documentation.
Also, many Cherokees did not pay mind to laws such as these that separated family and ancient customs of kinship. Often, poor Afro Cherokees were marginalized and were not in the center of Cherokee life but occupied the space on the boarders of towns and villages. The lives of these individuals would be harder to track. Even harder today because many individuals avoided removal during the 1830’s and did not register upon any roll. Because of this history it is imperative that racial designations should are challengeable. “The places where blacks and Cherokees had raised families together were now behind the state live s of Georgian and Tennessee. In a new landscaped devoid of embedded mutual memories, the people were separated by a cavernous divide of race and caste”.[1] The author expresses that a division amongst Cherokees and blacks began to widen. This widening of the relationship is due largely to the influences of colonialism that penetrated Cherokee society that should be refutable. No one has the right to cut another person off from their ancestry. Particularly Cherokees with thousands of years of Kinship bonds and African Americans who were stripped from the content of origin, transplanted, and forced to procreate, and live upon land that was at first foreign to them.
In the Article, “Analysis of Blood Politics, Racial
Classification, and Cherokee National Identity: The Trial and Tribulations of
the Cherokee Freedmen,” Circe Sturm explores how racial ideologies have
filtered from the national to the local level, where they have been
internalized, manipulated, and resisted in different ways by Cherokee citizens
and Cherokee freedmen. She also argues that as a result of this continuing
dialectic between the national and the local, many Cherokees express
“contradictory consciousness.” This means that while they resent discrimination
on the basis of race they still use racially hegemonic concepts to legitimize
their social identities and police their political boundaries. Today, this
contradictory consciousness is illustrated by discrimination, amongst some
Cherokees, toward African ancestry, particularly when it comes to eligibility
for tribal benefits.
Strum tries to answer why the Cherokee Freedman experience is not widely known or documented. The author states that the Cherokee people have a long history of excluding multiracial individuals of Cherokee and African ancestry, who are treated in different ways from multiracial individuals with Cherokee and European ancestry. This is reflected in policy, wherein the Dawes Rolls, the critical baseline for Cherokee citizenship, formalized distinctions between “Cherokee by blood.” According to the Dawes Rolls, even though many Cherokee Freedmen were blood descendants of Cherokee people, they were categorized as Cherokee Freedman on the basis of appearance. Many others chose not to register at all. The author alludes to the fact that the Dawes Act, which was designed to undermine tribalism and in turn eroded some of the sovereignty of Indian Nations.
The Dawes rolls, which later influenced construction of Cherokee citizenship specifically west of the Mississippi, labeled Cherokees as Intermarried, Freedman, or Cherokee by blood. The Cherokee Nation later the Dawes rolls as a basis of citizenship. Cherokee Freedman; even though this labeling did not accurately reflect individuals on rolls was used by the Cherokee Nations as a separator between who is in and who is out of citizenship. The crux of the article is a great example of Native American sovereignty. Another historical fact that thickens the controversy is that a Government Building in Texas that housed data on persons of mixed ancestry conveniently burned down at a time where proving lineage would have proven land ownership rights and tribal registry, and it would have been questionable if those records would have been accurate, due to historical “pencil genocide”
The right to define citizenship is a sovereign right of Native Nations. In The Nations Within: The Past and future of American Indian Sovereignty, Vine Deloria Jr. a benchmark Native Scholar, states that “The United States, after successfully revolting against the King of England, claimed to inherit Great Britain’s right to buy the lands of the Indians, and this doctrine, modified to fit the internal, domestic law of the United States, has been the primary conceptual focus for all subsequent federal Indian law. Every legal doctrine that today separates and distinguishes American Indians from other Americans traces its conceptual roots back to the Doctrine of Discovery and the subsequent moral and legal rights and responsibilities of the United States with respect to Indians.”[xv] Deloria is explaining the origins of sovereignty of Native Nations within the United States. He goes on to state that, with the help of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 “which gives all Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States full citizenship but adds that such status does not infringe upon the rights to tribal and other property that Indians enjoy as members of their tribes. A dual citizenship exists here, which is not to be hindered in either respect: Indians are not to lose civil rights because of their status as members of a tribe, and members of a tribe are not to be denied their tribal rights because of their American citizenship.”[xvi] Deloria continues to state the historical events of federal law in regards to Native Nations. Considering a duel citizenship that protects civil rights but honors ancient laws of Native Nations would therefore be inclusive to Afro-Cherokee people. Trouble stirs with this line of reasoning though. Historically, it would have not been advantageous for tribes applying for federal recognition to admit individuals who descended from slaves. This would have been a disqualifier for individuals. So in a sense, Native Tribes like the different Cherokee Bands, in denying kinship with African Americans sought survival particularly survival of tribal sovereignty.
Polices, social attitudes and the aftermath of slavery have excluded African Americans since the birth of the U.S. In contrary, Indian policies have tied to absorb indigenous people into the population. Expressing a Jeffersonian thought, “ The Indian need not be destroyed; in fact, most involved in government Indian affairs, and all those privately interested in the native’s welfare, agreed that the white man had a moral obligation to himself and to his posterity to see that the tribesman survived. If the Indian were transformed if he adopted civilization and lived like a white man, his savage ways would disappear, and he would endure to become a useful member of the white man’s world.”[xvii] To the contrary, African Americas have historically been excluded from citizenship, largely because a nineteenth century notion that they were not fully human and were used as property. “One should not take at face value the legendary indifference of aristocratic planters to profits. More often that not the successful planter was bent on maximizing profits. While the profitability of slavery has been a long-standing subject of controversy, in recent years economic historians have concluded that slaves on the average supplied about a 10 percent annual return on their cost. At the time that was an enticing profit margin, just as it is now. By a strictly economic calculation, slave and land on which cotton could be grown were the most profitable investments available in the antebellum South.”[xviii]
An inalienable right of any person should be to identify themselves as in kinship with their ancestors. Shouldn’t Afro-Cherokees have rights to any agreement of treaties with the federal government as much as Euro-Cherokees whether or not their brothers and sisters, distant cousins or other people within the Cherokee Nation or the United States government believe they belong or not, but issues of sovereignty and reparation, historical colonialism and racism complicate matters, especially for those who fall in between strict racial identities. It is a very saddening affair that there is such discrimination and racial injustice between and towards Native Americans and African Americans peoples, especially when one considers the tumultuous history of racial discrimination in the Southeast United States. The struggle of Cherokee Freedman goes on in Oklahoma today. Unfortunately dissention amongst Native Americans does not stop there. There are Natives from the reservation, those from the city, those who are more traditional, and those who take on more modern values that don’t necessarily get along with one another. There has always been tension with those who are from mixed racial descent compared with those who are full blooded, or fully documented as “authentic” within a certain time period. In the 1970’s for example, the second Wounded Knee, in part was due to tensions between mixed bloods and full bloods.
Welburn offers another vantage point of racial tensions. According to. “ I encountered people like my self who had been confused by the Native and Black color live and had misread its signals, experiencing its ridicule and its embarrassing ignorance, and who had been advised by their families to “forget about it.” Their families ‘ refusal to engage Indian identity except through coded language, and their silence, translated to a “colored” identity, which in the argot of race relations meant African ancestry.”[xix] Confusion and ill feelings were a human response to the racism felt by persons of mixed heritage.
I received methodology on genealogical research through a workshop that I attended at the Newberry Library in the Spring of 2007. It is recommended to gather as much information as possible with each generation starting with ones self, then work back wards. Genealogists recommend gathering vital records like, birth and death, and marriage certificates. I gathered my information, and then my parents and I ordered records on my Grandparents. Death certificates on my Grandparents came in but some of the birth and marriage certificates on microfilm are on back order through the Mormon Church.[xx][xxi] On my Grandmother death certificate he father that is listed as a man, which is actually her Grandfather. Oral family history would explain this because my Grandmother was raise by her Grandmother, who is my Great-Great Grandmother. Information that could be gathered on records such as these would be race categories and parentage information. The death records indicate that my grandparents are Negro and Black, these documents would not tell the whole story if one compared them to my families’ oral history, and the academic literature.
I had to ask my Father for help in obtaining a death certificate for his Father. I was very hesitant to do this because at the start of my research in 2003, I asked him if I could record our conversation about my Great-Great Grandmother. He declined my request. I felt as though I started to pry into a past that was not ready to be revealed. I had read warned of this sort of reaction. Genealogy experts suggest that elders often resist inquiries regarding painful episodes. Much to my surprise my father agreed to help and we ordered my Grandfather’s Death certificate and faxed down my father’s drivers license to Nashville. I await the arrival of these documents as well.
Another source for material is the Social Security Death Index. This is available through the Administration for anyone who passed after 1962. I was able to order this information through rootsweb.com.[xxii] I ordered information and my Grandparents and my Great Grandmother and her Sister.[xxiii] This information is further confirmed parentage for my great grandmother. My Great-Great Grandparents were the parents of my Great Grandmother. The Social Security Death Index shows the original application for a social security number in the applicant’s handwriting. The application on my Grandmother confirms that her mother is my Great Grandmother, which we knew by our oral history. On my Great Grandmother, application it showed that she worked for the Works Progress Administration. This also revealed my Great Grandmother‘s maiden name on my Father’s Father’s side. This is a lead for information in the future.
Also, another great source of information is census records that can be accessed through Ancestry.com.[xxiv] Through Ancestry.com, and Federal census books at the Newberry, I was able to locate my predecessors on the census of 1870 and 1880 as well as 1900 and 1930, The 1930 census shows that my newly weds grandparents were living with my Great-Great Grandmother. Going backward, the 1900 census shows my Great-Great Grandmother and my Great-Great Grandfather, with their four children one of which is my Great Grandmother. The 1870 census shows My Great-Great Grandfather, with his siblings and their Mother. who may be my Great-Great-Great Grandmother. This document shows that she was born in Virginia, and that the father of her children, who is not present, was born in Tennessee. This is generation that we don’t have any oral family history on. The race category is listing my family in 1870 as black with would concur with the literature that I found on multi racial persons. The 1880 and 1870 census on parents my Great-Great Grandmother is conflicting. On the 1870 census she, is listed at age 3 with parents particular parents, but in 1880 she is listed at age 13 with another set of parents. This is also another generation that we don’t have any oral family history on, in which my family is listed as Black according to census information.
A limitation to genealogical research would be revealed at this point in my work. Because I have nothing yet to confirm parent information my Great-Great Grandparents, I shouldn’t go back any further. There is an enormous amount of information to look through, so narrowing the search is the harder part. I was hoping that my Great-Great Grandparents marriage certificate would have revealed their parentage but it did not. I will have to go back to reference materials on methodology and search for more confirming information.
Another limitation in genealogical research for persons of mixed ancestry would be the fact that genealogical methodology as largely been developed form a Northern European background, with guidelines that are strict concerning factual evidence. So therefore, a person with mixed ancestry will most likely but up against “pencil genocide”, where accurate records are not kept of mixed individuals, or racial ideology determines what is written down on paper. At one point in history, records of mixed persons were sent to a Government building in Texas, which happened to burn down This could have possibly proven more thoroughly Native American, African American and Caucasian ancestry of mixed persons, but with known methods racism at the time, this may have inaccurate if the records were even preserved.
A great example of pencil genocide is found in Tiya Miles book, Ties that Bind. In it, she reveals that one of the daughters of the two main characters, Shoeboots, a full blooded Cherokee, and his wife, Doll a former African American Slave, is in one record sold into slavery. After her father’s death and in order to justify this action, Georgia’s records indicate her as mulatto. Later, after she had been freed with the help of kinship ties to the Cherokee community, during Indian removals she is considering Cherokee when the State of Georgia is taking her land away.[xxv]
There is a collection of works that lists the government rolls of registered Cherokees throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work includes the famous Dawes rolls, which are used today by the Cherokee Nation (Western Band), to determine if a person is of Cherokee descent. Many people on all of the rolls that were created during this time period did not officially become apart of the rolls.[xxvi] The government-imposed rolls discriminated between people who were Cherokee by blood, Cherokee Freedman, and Cherokee by marriage. A Cherokee Freedman was considered a former slave who was set free within the Cherokee Nation. Due to the racial discrimination of the time, if a person appeared to have traits of African descent or admitted to have a “drop” of African-American blood her or she was labeled as Cherokee Freedman and sometimes rejected from tribal enrollment altogether.
An example of where a racial ideology effects record keeping can be found in the application for the Miller Guion rolls. The census rolls that I gathered at the Tennessee National archives in 2003, lists a question a census interviewer asks evokes an answer by one Amanda F. Fuqua who was rejected from a roll and of no known relation to my family, answered a question in # 9 in a application number 39898, wrote out referring to her ancestors “No they were not slaves” showing that for whatever be the reason, the question of African American Blood had to be distinguished when classifying rolls for Eastern band Cherokee decedents.[xxvii]
So far my relatives are listed as Black under race, according to the federal census information posted by Ancestry.com. Another interesting web site that I have come across has been www.usetinc.org[xxviii], which is the United South and Eastern Tribes association. On that web site under genealogy it states that during the late 1800’s native living with Whites were listed as white and Natives living with Blacks were listed as Black. This is the first time that I have read this statement, but not the first time I have heard this orally. I found this the Government Archives web site with the help of a staffer at the Newberry, John Aubry an expert on Native American records at the Newberry. Also on another great resource that I have found on the Internet has been Nativeweb.org, which has linked me to a site addressing African American and Native American Ancestry. Angila Y Walton Raji put this site together an African American and Native American women out of Indian Territory in Oklahoma.[xxix]
Networking and exploring the Newberry Library in Chicago have both been very helpful in doing genealogical research. Making new friends who understand your desire to find your ancestors is invaluable. Having a building like the Newberry gives you awesome access to information that you didn’t even know was there. After a seminar one evening a few of us talked about people that you meet along life’s journey, How people and places open up to you when you are on your way. This has been the experience in my life when I have changed and moved into a more healthy direction. In literature, encounters like this are not isolated. “Our dinner that night was magical: good weather, good food, good talk. William (Bill) Yellow Robe and I smoked and talked at length about African and Indian connections, about our families and the persistence of racism at home and abroad.” Sharon Holland writes this in her experience of searching for information on a Nargansett and African American women.[xxx]
Racial Identity has been under the influence of many different factions through out American history. New persons were created in the Americas as Native American, African American and European Americans intermingled (under a number of different circumstances) and created off spring. Particularly, relations with Native, and African Americans began when contact with European Americans began. English rule, though benefiting from the labor and land of others did want the union of persons of color because of a fear, these two groups, would retaliate from their subjugated status. In records, Indians and Africans or mixes of any persons with darker complexions, particularly people of African and Indian decent where not white. Therefore, terms like Negro, colored, mulatto maybe encompassing of individuals of mixed ancestry, Euro-Native, Afro-Native, Afro-Euro-Native, etc. These terms referred to people who labored side-by-side, as indentured servants, slaves, and free people, runaways, survivors, and as family. Although some would object to this statement, I have found in my oral history and academic research that this statement reflects a more accurate history other than a biracial category.
What are the implications of self-identification? At different time periods, the implications would have been very different. The identity of “mixed blood”, “Black Indians”, “multiracial”, Afro Cherokee, people was sometimes hidden in the Southeastern part of the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. On one hand, if a multiracial person was of Native descent, he or she had to hide this fact to escape Indian removal and/or discrimination, and sometimes enslavement. On the other hand, if a multiracial person was of “Negro blood,” he or she had to hide this fact for fear of enslavement and/or discrimination. In all cases, the hiding of multiracial identity was a method of avoiding discriminatory practices and ultimately a means of survival.
Strum tries to answer why the Cherokee Freedman experience is not widely known or documented. The author states that the Cherokee people have a long history of excluding multiracial individuals of Cherokee and African ancestry, who are treated in different ways from multiracial individuals with Cherokee and European ancestry. This is reflected in policy, wherein the Dawes Rolls, the critical baseline for Cherokee citizenship, formalized distinctions between “Cherokee by blood.” According to the Dawes Rolls, even though many Cherokee Freedmen were blood descendants of Cherokee people, they were categorized as Cherokee Freedman on the basis of appearance. Many others chose not to register at all. The author alludes to the fact that the Dawes Act, which was designed to undermine tribalism and in turn eroded some of the sovereignty of Indian Nations.
The Dawes rolls, which later influenced construction of Cherokee citizenship specifically west of the Mississippi, labeled Cherokees as Intermarried, Freedman, or Cherokee by blood. The Cherokee Nation later the Dawes rolls as a basis of citizenship. Cherokee Freedman; even though this labeling did not accurately reflect individuals on rolls was used by the Cherokee Nations as a separator between who is in and who is out of citizenship. The crux of the article is a great example of Native American sovereignty. Another historical fact that thickens the controversy is that a Government Building in Texas that housed data on persons of mixed ancestry conveniently burned down at a time where proving lineage would have proven land ownership rights and tribal registry, and it would have been questionable if those records would have been accurate, due to historical “pencil genocide”
The right to define citizenship is a sovereign right of Native Nations. In The Nations Within: The Past and future of American Indian Sovereignty, Vine Deloria Jr. a benchmark Native Scholar, states that “The United States, after successfully revolting against the King of England, claimed to inherit Great Britain’s right to buy the lands of the Indians, and this doctrine, modified to fit the internal, domestic law of the United States, has been the primary conceptual focus for all subsequent federal Indian law. Every legal doctrine that today separates and distinguishes American Indians from other Americans traces its conceptual roots back to the Doctrine of Discovery and the subsequent moral and legal rights and responsibilities of the United States with respect to Indians.”[xv] Deloria is explaining the origins of sovereignty of Native Nations within the United States. He goes on to state that, with the help of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 “which gives all Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States full citizenship but adds that such status does not infringe upon the rights to tribal and other property that Indians enjoy as members of their tribes. A dual citizenship exists here, which is not to be hindered in either respect: Indians are not to lose civil rights because of their status as members of a tribe, and members of a tribe are not to be denied their tribal rights because of their American citizenship.”[xvi] Deloria continues to state the historical events of federal law in regards to Native Nations. Considering a duel citizenship that protects civil rights but honors ancient laws of Native Nations would therefore be inclusive to Afro-Cherokee people. Trouble stirs with this line of reasoning though. Historically, it would have not been advantageous for tribes applying for federal recognition to admit individuals who descended from slaves. This would have been a disqualifier for individuals. So in a sense, Native Tribes like the different Cherokee Bands, in denying kinship with African Americans sought survival particularly survival of tribal sovereignty.
Polices, social attitudes and the aftermath of slavery have excluded African Americans since the birth of the U.S. In contrary, Indian policies have tied to absorb indigenous people into the population. Expressing a Jeffersonian thought, “ The Indian need not be destroyed; in fact, most involved in government Indian affairs, and all those privately interested in the native’s welfare, agreed that the white man had a moral obligation to himself and to his posterity to see that the tribesman survived. If the Indian were transformed if he adopted civilization and lived like a white man, his savage ways would disappear, and he would endure to become a useful member of the white man’s world.”[xvii] To the contrary, African Americas have historically been excluded from citizenship, largely because a nineteenth century notion that they were not fully human and were used as property. “One should not take at face value the legendary indifference of aristocratic planters to profits. More often that not the successful planter was bent on maximizing profits. While the profitability of slavery has been a long-standing subject of controversy, in recent years economic historians have concluded that slaves on the average supplied about a 10 percent annual return on their cost. At the time that was an enticing profit margin, just as it is now. By a strictly economic calculation, slave and land on which cotton could be grown were the most profitable investments available in the antebellum South.”[xviii]
An inalienable right of any person should be to identify themselves as in kinship with their ancestors. Shouldn’t Afro-Cherokees have rights to any agreement of treaties with the federal government as much as Euro-Cherokees whether or not their brothers and sisters, distant cousins or other people within the Cherokee Nation or the United States government believe they belong or not, but issues of sovereignty and reparation, historical colonialism and racism complicate matters, especially for those who fall in between strict racial identities. It is a very saddening affair that there is such discrimination and racial injustice between and towards Native Americans and African Americans peoples, especially when one considers the tumultuous history of racial discrimination in the Southeast United States. The struggle of Cherokee Freedman goes on in Oklahoma today. Unfortunately dissention amongst Native Americans does not stop there. There are Natives from the reservation, those from the city, those who are more traditional, and those who take on more modern values that don’t necessarily get along with one another. There has always been tension with those who are from mixed racial descent compared with those who are full blooded, or fully documented as “authentic” within a certain time period. In the 1970’s for example, the second Wounded Knee, in part was due to tensions between mixed bloods and full bloods.
Welburn offers another vantage point of racial tensions. According to. “ I encountered people like my self who had been confused by the Native and Black color live and had misread its signals, experiencing its ridicule and its embarrassing ignorance, and who had been advised by their families to “forget about it.” Their families ‘ refusal to engage Indian identity except through coded language, and their silence, translated to a “colored” identity, which in the argot of race relations meant African ancestry.”[xix] Confusion and ill feelings were a human response to the racism felt by persons of mixed heritage.
I received methodology on genealogical research through a workshop that I attended at the Newberry Library in the Spring of 2007. It is recommended to gather as much information as possible with each generation starting with ones self, then work back wards. Genealogists recommend gathering vital records like, birth and death, and marriage certificates. I gathered my information, and then my parents and I ordered records on my Grandparents. Death certificates on my Grandparents came in but some of the birth and marriage certificates on microfilm are on back order through the Mormon Church.[xx][xxi] On my Grandmother death certificate he father that is listed as a man, which is actually her Grandfather. Oral family history would explain this because my Grandmother was raise by her Grandmother, who is my Great-Great Grandmother. Information that could be gathered on records such as these would be race categories and parentage information. The death records indicate that my grandparents are Negro and Black, these documents would not tell the whole story if one compared them to my families’ oral history, and the academic literature.
I had to ask my Father for help in obtaining a death certificate for his Father. I was very hesitant to do this because at the start of my research in 2003, I asked him if I could record our conversation about my Great-Great Grandmother. He declined my request. I felt as though I started to pry into a past that was not ready to be revealed. I had read warned of this sort of reaction. Genealogy experts suggest that elders often resist inquiries regarding painful episodes. Much to my surprise my father agreed to help and we ordered my Grandfather’s Death certificate and faxed down my father’s drivers license to Nashville. I await the arrival of these documents as well.
Another source for material is the Social Security Death Index. This is available through the Administration for anyone who passed after 1962. I was able to order this information through rootsweb.com.[xxii] I ordered information and my Grandparents and my Great Grandmother and her Sister.[xxiii] This information is further confirmed parentage for my great grandmother. My Great-Great Grandparents were the parents of my Great Grandmother. The Social Security Death Index shows the original application for a social security number in the applicant’s handwriting. The application on my Grandmother confirms that her mother is my Great Grandmother, which we knew by our oral history. On my Great Grandmother, application it showed that she worked for the Works Progress Administration. This also revealed my Great Grandmother‘s maiden name on my Father’s Father’s side. This is a lead for information in the future.
Also, another great source of information is census records that can be accessed through Ancestry.com.[xxiv] Through Ancestry.com, and Federal census books at the Newberry, I was able to locate my predecessors on the census of 1870 and 1880 as well as 1900 and 1930, The 1930 census shows that my newly weds grandparents were living with my Great-Great Grandmother. Going backward, the 1900 census shows my Great-Great Grandmother and my Great-Great Grandfather, with their four children one of which is my Great Grandmother. The 1870 census shows My Great-Great Grandfather, with his siblings and their Mother. who may be my Great-Great-Great Grandmother. This document shows that she was born in Virginia, and that the father of her children, who is not present, was born in Tennessee. This is generation that we don’t have any oral family history on. The race category is listing my family in 1870 as black with would concur with the literature that I found on multi racial persons. The 1880 and 1870 census on parents my Great-Great Grandmother is conflicting. On the 1870 census she, is listed at age 3 with parents particular parents, but in 1880 she is listed at age 13 with another set of parents. This is also another generation that we don’t have any oral family history on, in which my family is listed as Black according to census information.
A limitation to genealogical research would be revealed at this point in my work. Because I have nothing yet to confirm parent information my Great-Great Grandparents, I shouldn’t go back any further. There is an enormous amount of information to look through, so narrowing the search is the harder part. I was hoping that my Great-Great Grandparents marriage certificate would have revealed their parentage but it did not. I will have to go back to reference materials on methodology and search for more confirming information.
Another limitation in genealogical research for persons of mixed ancestry would be the fact that genealogical methodology as largely been developed form a Northern European background, with guidelines that are strict concerning factual evidence. So therefore, a person with mixed ancestry will most likely but up against “pencil genocide”, where accurate records are not kept of mixed individuals, or racial ideology determines what is written down on paper. At one point in history, records of mixed persons were sent to a Government building in Texas, which happened to burn down This could have possibly proven more thoroughly Native American, African American and Caucasian ancestry of mixed persons, but with known methods racism at the time, this may have inaccurate if the records were even preserved.
A great example of pencil genocide is found in Tiya Miles book, Ties that Bind. In it, she reveals that one of the daughters of the two main characters, Shoeboots, a full blooded Cherokee, and his wife, Doll a former African American Slave, is in one record sold into slavery. After her father’s death and in order to justify this action, Georgia’s records indicate her as mulatto. Later, after she had been freed with the help of kinship ties to the Cherokee community, during Indian removals she is considering Cherokee when the State of Georgia is taking her land away.[xxv]
There is a collection of works that lists the government rolls of registered Cherokees throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The work includes the famous Dawes rolls, which are used today by the Cherokee Nation (Western Band), to determine if a person is of Cherokee descent. Many people on all of the rolls that were created during this time period did not officially become apart of the rolls.[xxvi] The government-imposed rolls discriminated between people who were Cherokee by blood, Cherokee Freedman, and Cherokee by marriage. A Cherokee Freedman was considered a former slave who was set free within the Cherokee Nation. Due to the racial discrimination of the time, if a person appeared to have traits of African descent or admitted to have a “drop” of African-American blood her or she was labeled as Cherokee Freedman and sometimes rejected from tribal enrollment altogether.
An example of where a racial ideology effects record keeping can be found in the application for the Miller Guion rolls. The census rolls that I gathered at the Tennessee National archives in 2003, lists a question a census interviewer asks evokes an answer by one Amanda F. Fuqua who was rejected from a roll and of no known relation to my family, answered a question in # 9 in a application number 39898, wrote out referring to her ancestors “No they were not slaves” showing that for whatever be the reason, the question of African American Blood had to be distinguished when classifying rolls for Eastern band Cherokee decedents.[xxvii]
So far my relatives are listed as Black under race, according to the federal census information posted by Ancestry.com. Another interesting web site that I have come across has been www.usetinc.org[xxviii], which is the United South and Eastern Tribes association. On that web site under genealogy it states that during the late 1800’s native living with Whites were listed as white and Natives living with Blacks were listed as Black. This is the first time that I have read this statement, but not the first time I have heard this orally. I found this the Government Archives web site with the help of a staffer at the Newberry, John Aubry an expert on Native American records at the Newberry. Also on another great resource that I have found on the Internet has been Nativeweb.org, which has linked me to a site addressing African American and Native American Ancestry. Angila Y Walton Raji put this site together an African American and Native American women out of Indian Territory in Oklahoma.[xxix]
Networking and exploring the Newberry Library in Chicago have both been very helpful in doing genealogical research. Making new friends who understand your desire to find your ancestors is invaluable. Having a building like the Newberry gives you awesome access to information that you didn’t even know was there. After a seminar one evening a few of us talked about people that you meet along life’s journey, How people and places open up to you when you are on your way. This has been the experience in my life when I have changed and moved into a more healthy direction. In literature, encounters like this are not isolated. “Our dinner that night was magical: good weather, good food, good talk. William (Bill) Yellow Robe and I smoked and talked at length about African and Indian connections, about our families and the persistence of racism at home and abroad.” Sharon Holland writes this in her experience of searching for information on a Nargansett and African American women.[xxx]
Racial Identity has been under the influence of many different factions through out American history. New persons were created in the Americas as Native American, African American and European Americans intermingled (under a number of different circumstances) and created off spring. Particularly, relations with Native, and African Americans began when contact with European Americans began. English rule, though benefiting from the labor and land of others did want the union of persons of color because of a fear, these two groups, would retaliate from their subjugated status. In records, Indians and Africans or mixes of any persons with darker complexions, particularly people of African and Indian decent where not white. Therefore, terms like Negro, colored, mulatto maybe encompassing of individuals of mixed ancestry, Euro-Native, Afro-Native, Afro-Euro-Native, etc. These terms referred to people who labored side-by-side, as indentured servants, slaves, and free people, runaways, survivors, and as family. Although some would object to this statement, I have found in my oral history and academic research that this statement reflects a more accurate history other than a biracial category.
What are the implications of self-identification? At different time periods, the implications would have been very different. The identity of “mixed blood”, “Black Indians”, “multiracial”, Afro Cherokee, people was sometimes hidden in the Southeastern part of the United States between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. On one hand, if a multiracial person was of Native descent, he or she had to hide this fact to escape Indian removal and/or discrimination, and sometimes enslavement. On the other hand, if a multiracial person was of “Negro blood,” he or she had to hide this fact for fear of enslavement and/or discrimination. In all cases, the hiding of multiracial identity was a method of avoiding discriminatory practices and ultimately a means of survival.
What are the implications when agencies, governments, and
courts determine individual identity? The historical events enamored with
racism with in the Cherokee Nation are astounding. African Americans and
Cherokees had hundreds of years of interaction. But due to the effects of
colonialism in the 1800s things really got ugly, People in the tribe, leaders
mixed white ancestry, where educated Colonial institutions. They came back to
the Cherokee Nation and changed political structures. They wrote into law
blatantly racial rulings that excluded people of African decent from serving in
the Cherokee Nation in official positions, and outlawing intermarriage, and
citizenship.[xxxi] At the same time wrote into law opportunities for mixed
bloods of white ancestry to be apart of the nation. These changes disrupted
matriarchal systems and those of kinship and family.
Like wise, Census takers or those who made the
rules for census takers, categorized individuals into boxes based on what the
household appeared to be. So if a native person, or mixed blood was living with
a family that looked mostly black that is what would be recorded. Like wise, if
the family appeared white the same thing happened. My assertion at the
beginning of the paper as a result of my research this questions is yes, we
should challenge racial designations, for our people it is intertwined with
identity. In the style of psychology paper, I would be strongly interested in the psychological effect of historical genocide in the Native American and African American communities, and everywhere else in between. Also, I believe a study like this one could help to examine immigration laws and the effects that laws have on mixed status families, such as children born in the U.S. with parents undocumented.
[i] Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: A story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (California: University of California Press, 2005), 3.
[ii][ii] Handbook on Native Americans, ed. Raymond D. Fogelson, vol. 14th,Cherokee in the East, (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 2006),341-342
[iii] The first conversation with my Father’s sister; “Hello Aunt .., this is Heather, your Brother….. daughter.”
“Hello Baby” a hoarse and gentle southern voice replied back.
“Aunt … I was wondering about my family history and wanted to know more.”
“How old are you baby?”
“21”
“I suppose that that is old enough. Let me just say that you come from good people”
“I have no doubt of that Aunt ….”
“Why don’t you come down for this Thanksgiving and invite all of your family too.”
“Well, I’ll ask them. I think that my brother …. might be interested in coming down with me.”
“Well we will plan to have you down then.”
“Thanks Aunt …..”
[iv] George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi, America: A Narrative History 7th ed. (United States of America: W.W. Norton & Company Inc, 2007),549
[v] Handbook on Native Americans, ed. Raymond D. Fogelson, vol. 14th,Cherokee in the East, (Washington: Smithsonian Institute, 2006),341-342[ there may be historical reasons for the structure of the house that my
Great-Great Grandmother built and the garden that she attended to. She also built her own home, which was found in literature as well. “In many respects, the shapes and spatial arrangement of household clusters mirrored the large ceremonial center, which in turned served as a microcosm of the culturally constituted Cherokee universe.” . I intend to examine the property more closely to see if there is any historical resemblance to structures described in this text]341
Great-Great Grandmother built and the garden that she attended to. She also built her own home, which was found in literature as well. “In many respects, the shapes and spatial arrangement of household clusters mirrored the large ceremonial center, which in turned served as a microcosm of the culturally constituted Cherokee universe.” . I intend to examine the property more closely to see if there is any historical resemblance to structures described in this text]341
[vi] Tony Mack McClure, Cherokee Proud: A Guide for Tracing and Honoring Your Cherokee Ancestors. (Somerville, TN: Chunannee Books, 1999)
5. Ron Welburn, Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (United States of America: University of Nebraska, 2002),292-293.
[viii] Paul R. Spickard. Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in the Twentieth-Century America. (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press 1989)329-339.
[ix] Paul R. Spickard. Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in the Twentieth-Century America. (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press 1989)329-339.
[x] Sharon Holland,. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds The African Diaspra in Indian Country, ed.Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland (United States of America: Duke University Press, 2006),xi.
[xi] Sharon Holland,. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds The African Diaspra in Indian Country, ed.Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland (United States of America: Duke University Press, 2006),xiCheck the page number.
s
[xii] “Black Indians: An American Story Narrated by James Earl Jones”, Circle of Life Series, produced by Steven R. Heape, Directed by Cip /Richie, Screenwriter is Daniel Blake Smith, Rich-Heap Films, Inc, a Native American Owned Corporation, 60 minutes,2000,DVD.
[xiii] Katz, William Loren. A Hidden Heritage: Black Indians. (New York, NY: Simon Pluse1986).
[xiv] Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: A story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (California: University of California Press, 2005),
[xv] Vin Deloria, Jr. and Clifford M. Lytle, The Nations Within; The Past and Future of American Indian Sovereignty. (Untied States of America: University of Texas Press, 1998) ,2
[xvi] Deloria and Lytle, 3-4
[xvii] Bernard W. Sheehan, Seeds of Extiction (Chapel Hill North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 1973), 4
.
[xviii] [xviii] George Brown Tindall and David Emory Shi, 538.
[xix] Ron Welburn, Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black experience in North America, ed. James F. Brooks (United States of America: University of Nebraska, 2002),292-293.
[xx] State of California Certification of Vital Record County of Los Angeles Registrar-recorder/county clerk. (0190-028805)
[xxi] State of Tennessee Office of Vital Records Tennessee Department of Health Certificate of Death, (92 046473)
[xxii] www.Rootsweb.com scroll down to Social Security Death Index
[xxiii] Treasury Department Internal Revenue Service Form SS-5 U.S. Social Security Act Application for Account Number (4 different applications for 4 relatives)
[xxiv] Ancestry.com Federal Census information
[xxv] Miles, Ties That Bind, 134-143
[xxvi] Bob Blankenship. Cherokee Roots: Eastern Cherokee Rolls. Volume I. (Cherokee NC: Bob Blankenship 1992).
[xxvii] Eastern Cherokees application of Amanda Fuqua and 3 children Residence of Croawford Tenn. Action Reject no. 39898-9
[xxviii] www.usetinc.org United South and Eastern Tribes association
[xxix] Nativeweb.org, Angila Y Walton Raji
[xxx] Sharon Holland, Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds The African Diaspra in Indian Country, ed. Tiya Miles and Sharon Holland (United States of America: Duke University Press, 2006)
[xxxi] Tiya Miles, Ties That Bind: A story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (California: University of California Press, 2005),
