I’ve known a few people who have (or claimed to have) Native American heritage. Of those whose heritage is small (i.e., the “I’m 1/16 Cherokee” folks), they are almost universally “descended from an Indian Princess.” None of them seem to claim descent from “an Indian washerwoman” or “an Indian cook.” So, my questions are:
Were there really that many Indian princesses?
Were white men universally told “she’s a princess” whenever he expressed interest in a native American woman, even if the woman in question was the daughter of the village idiot and the town slut?
Did “princess” mean something different to native Americans than it means to us? I.e., where we might think “heriditary daughter of the tribal chief,” they might mean “the Chief’s favorite maid” or something.
(Yes, I know that I’m lumping together dozens of different and discinct native cultures. But what I really want to know is whether all these folks who think they have Indian Princesses in their ancestry actually do.)
Speaking very, very broadly, in most hunter-gatherer or simple agriculturalist societies, leadership rarely rises above a headman whose only power is the respect he commands. The society is much more egalitarian than our own, so that the daughter of the headman would more or less just be the daughter of the headman. What we would consider “nobility” isn’t commonly found among Native American societies outside those of the Meso-Americas where one would find privileged chiefs or kings, noble councilmen, and priests, who possessed absolute power over thousands of people.
The Cherokee were particularly adept at adopting the ways of white culture, adopting plow agriculture, animal husbandry, cotton and wool industries, and slavery. A Cherokee “Indian princess” of the 1800’s could translate to the daughter of a wealthy landowner…or could just be family tradition.
First, my credentials: I am of Cherokee descent. Except for a g’g’grandfather (may be at least one more great in there), my mother was full-blood. My grandmother was the last medicine woman of her line (my mother repudiated NDN medicine). And Cherokee (Tsalagi, if you want to be completely correct) are matrilineal, IOW, descent is traced through the mother, rather than the father; so is (was) inheritance of property.
There ain’t no such thing as an Indian princess. Unless there are hidden descendants of Moctezuma somewhere in Mexico, anyway. And members of other NDN nations tease us a lot about all the “Cherokee Princesses”. :rolleyes:
The only nation which lived within the boundaries of the US, and had a royal family, were the Natchez. And they had a very … unusual … pattern for determining who their emperor married. Y’see, there were three classes in society: Royal family, free citizens, and slaves. Each emperor had to marry a slave woman. Those children of theirs who did not ascend the throne didn’t stay royal; they automatically went down one notch. It’s been a very long time since I read that stuff, so I can’t recall whether anybody got demoted from citizen class to slavery or not.
Anyhow, the Natchez (and some related groups) were mound builders. You don’t get public works (in the absence of industrial technology) unless you have people who are eligible in some fashion to have to work as long and hard as you say. So all of the mound builders were empires, but most of them got killed off by the bacteria and viruses introduced by Ponce de Leon and his soldiers, and their herd of swine (yup, they carried pigs along on their journey into the interior of (what is now) the southeastern US). So, before the English and French ever got a chance to explore into the interior, the Spanish (and I’ve got a conquistador in my father’s ancestry :o - not from de Leon’s expedition, I hasten to add) killed whole tribes -some of 'em large - off. And that’s the real reason why Kentucky was mainly a no-man’s-land when the English speakers penetrated that far. The fact that de Leon died on the trek is poetic justice, however inadequate it is for the many thousands for whose deaths he and his men were responsible.
When all is said and done, the people who claim the NDN princess ancestor are kinda like the story about the little lizard who told everybody that he was T. rex on his mother’s side of the family.
I’m a direct decendent of William P. Ross, a 19th century Cherokee chief.
(And yes, unlike many who make this sort of claim, I can prove it. We have family records dating back to the late 18th century.)
As pravnik points out, in pre-Columbian tribal societies there wouldn’t have been any social role analogous to the European conception of “princess”. And those 18th and 19th century Indian families who did adopt white culture emulated the ways of prosperous American planters, not European royalty.
The Ross name still has a bit of clout in certain parts of Oklahoma. I can remember my grandmother in the nursing home in Tahlequah using the fact that she was William P.'s granddaughter to wheedle a little extra out of the staff. But an Indian princess? Not hardly.
(For the record, I’m 1/128 Cherokee. Don’t be too hard on us small fractions … after all, Chief John Ross himself, who led the Cherokee west on the Trail of Tears, was only 1/8 blood.)
I would suspect that it’s more likely that a white man who brought a Native American bride home to mom & dad would tell them “She’s a princess!” even if he knew full well she was the daughter of the village idiot and the town slut.
If one defines the term “princess” broadly enough to include the daughters and sisters of even small-time chiefs, and perhaps the daughters and sisters of other men of note like shamans or wealthy landowners, there could be a heck of a lot of “princesses” out there. A distant cousin of mine (a white woman) was the wife of one chief and the mother of another; we don’t refer to her as “an Indian princess” in my immediate family, but I guess we could with about as much accuracy as many people who do claim such things.
There’s a story in my family that my great grandmother was a Chippewa Indian who was found as a baby in a basket near a railroad track.
I have no proof of that, other than having found another descendant of my great grandmother via the internet who heard a similar story as a child.
Anyway, it does seem, especially in some parts of this country, that most white or black families claim some trace of Indian ancestry. I wonder how prevalent this intermarriage really was. Have there been any genetic studies on this subject?
Or someone up in the Cuzco mountains in Perú who can still trace lineage straight to Huayna Cápac The Spaniards did recognize part of the former Aztec and Inca nobility as being of “aristocratic” station.
It was once fairly common for light-skinned African-Americans who were “passing” as white to claim Spanish or Native American ancestors to explain why they had darker coloring than the average WASP. (Intermarriage between Native Americans and African-Americans seems to have been relatively common historically, so these claims weren’t necessarily outright lies.) It was considered interesting and exotic to have an “Indian princess” for a grandmother, but not all that long ago having a black granny was enough to send you to the back of the bus. So there must be at least a few white families today that mistakenly believe they are part Blackfoot instead of part black.
So glad to see some actual NAs posting to the thread. Maybe it’s like the Irish–we’re all descended from Celtic kings, ya know.
I do have a question that’s bugged me for a while–were marriages arranged in Native societies, were they love matches, or was it a combination that differed from tribe to tribe? The movies seem to show women who fall in love with the visiting white guy/warrior from another tribe with no repurcussions or questions from their families, which sounds pretty implausible for a lot of reasons. Then again, there’s that whole incest/inbreeding thing you’d want to avoid…then again, I do remember being struck at the Albuquerque Indian Museum about the lack of love poetry (between two humans, not girl and god) and sculptures of beautiful women like you see in Far Eastern and Western art…then again maybe I just don’t recognize it when I see it. Thanks!
And members of other NDN nations tease us a lot about all the “Cherokee Princesses”. :rolleyes:
The Spaniards did recognize part of the former Aztec and Inca nobility as being of “aristocratic” station.