Whenever Caucasians claim some amount of Native American heritage, it always seems as if that part of their heritage is Cherokee. I seldom hear people bragging about being 1/16th Seneca or 1/8th Apache, but there’s no shortage to the amont of palefaces that claim to be “an eighth Cherokee” or “a sixteenth Cherokee.” Why are claims of Cherokee blood so much more prevalent than ancestry from other North American tribes?
If I remember correctly, the Cherokee Nation is the second largest tribe in the United States (which is the first?). That alone probably has a lot to do with it.
Another possibility: there was quite a dispersive effect during the various “Trails of Tears” (there were many forced marches of many different tribes to Oklahoma, and they’re all collectively referred to as the Trail of Tears). What often happened is that women and children simply left for other states on the way… on my father’s side, two sisters fled for Arkansas, for instance, which is where I also get 1/16 Cherokee blood. The women almost always married (or at least slept with) white men, which results in a lot of part-Cherokee people living all over the United States, especially in states that border or are at east of Oklahoma (not to mention the part-Cherokees in Georgia, the original homeland of the tribe).
Those two factors probably count for a lot of what you’re seeing…
The Navajo nation is the largest Native American tribe. Unlike some tribes that allow members on the tribal roll to have very little Indian blood (probably for political and economic reasons), you have to have at least 1/4 Navajo blood to belong to this tribe. Rules for tribal membership vary widely. Here is more info. about this:
http://www.lapahie.com/Dine_Census_Right.cfm
- Jill
[Edited by JillGat on 08-11-2001 at 11:54 PM]
As mentioned in other threads about Native American genealogy, the Cherokees were the subject of two extensive censuses by the Federal government. The results can be found in sources called “The Dawes Rolls” and “The Guion Miller Rolls.”
So tracing your ancestry back to include Cherokees is significantly easier than with other nations.
The Cherokee have been very mixed for many years. Chief John Ross (1790-1866), the Cherokee leader during much of the 19th century upheavals, was one 1/8 Cherokee. He was mostly Scotch and English, and in photographs he looks far more like a Scotsman than a Native American.
http://www.mindspring.com/~caruso/johnross.htm
http://ngeorgia.com/people/ross.html
Sequoya (1776-1843) was the famous Cherokee who developed the Cherokee writing system. He was, by most acounts, the son of an English father and a half Cherokee mother - a quarter Cherokee and 3/4 white.
So even in the 18th century a great deal of mixing had taken place. And an individual who lived in the 18th century may be the ancestor of thousands of people living today. So a few thousand mixed Euro-Cherokee from the Georgia and Carolina uplands in th 1700’s may now have several million of 1/8, 1/16, 1/32 and so on descendants in the South and Midwest.
And there are many people out there who claim to be part Indian and not part Cherokee. But the Cherokee are the biggest group in the East.
Western groups, such as the Navajo, Apache, Dakota, and Shoshone, usually didn’t intermarry as readily as the Indians to the East. For one thing, white American culture had a greater fear of intermarriage in the later 1800’s than earlier - Darwinism and eugenics had a role in that.
Also many of the western peoples had already encountered the Spaniards and had bad experiences with them, so the Apaches and Navajos did not embrace the Anglo-American newcomers as the Cherokee or Mohawk initially did. So in general native peoples east of the Mississippi are often very mixed, while those of the West and Southwest are not as mixed. That may account for differences in blood quantums, or why few “white” people can claim to be part Apache.