It is possible though. There were 80 years between the abandonment of San Miguel and Wahunsunacock had influence that far south, plus if you know anything about his sex life he’d probably have wanted to add other races to his harem. (He used to get women pregnant then give them away to other chiefs.) Alonso, the servant who was spared from the Ajacan mission in Virginia, is also referred to as negrito (probably meaning of mixed South American-African heritage) in some sources, and Wahunsunacock absolutely in no uncertain terms knew people who had been involved with that raid and may even have been among them, so African bloodlines had been introduced.
The Cherokee were also pretty lenient about giving people marrying Cherokee full status in the tribe, as well as considering their children full members. The result was that by the time the US became an independent nation there was a fairly significant infusion of European genes into the tribe. This might have given them some resistance to European illnesses other tribes didn’t have which enabled them to keep up their numbers, but it also meant that quite a few Cherokee even a couple centuries ago looked remarkably European, and there were also significant numbers of the tribe with African ancestry as well.
(They have recently tightened up their membership rules, though)
Cherokee, like the Creeks and Powhatan and most other southeastern tribes, are rigidly matrilineal. They didn’t invent the term “baby daddy” but that’s essentially how they view the father of a woman’s children in terms of kinship; your father may or may not be important in your life- ideally he provides for your mother and your siblings- but your clan affiliation is 100% determined by who your mother is or was and it will never change in the eyes of the tribe. This is why there were Indian chiefs who were obviously of mixed heritage (both white and black) who were accepted 100% as Creek or Cherokee or whatever- their paternity made no difference and neither did their mother’s, they were 100% Wind clan or Snake clan or whatever just as much as their 100% pure native cousins.
Now what DID cause a problem was the children of tribe members by white women. An example is John Ridge, a Cherokee who converted to Christianity and married a white woman. While there weren’t many of these there were more than a few. Their wives had to be adopted into a clan if their children were to have any tribal clan affiliation, and that took some doings and of course the wife’s consent, and since the wives would not consent since they were Christian and clan adoption included accepting their rites and mysteries their children were technically not Indians in the eyes of the tribe, BUT in the eyes of the government that’s exactly what they were.
Another problem was when the white fathers did try to invoke paternal rights. Alexander McGillivray was the greatest chief in the history of Alabama (the farm I grew up on was part of his vast plantation at one time and had the remains of some structures from the 18th century [nothing standing but clear areas and parts of granite house supports]). His father was a very wealthy Scot trader who only married his mother, Sehoy of the Wind {how’s that for a screen name?}, a half French/half Creek woman who was a member of the Wind clan and something of a noble by virtue of her close blood relationship with most of the greatest chiefs of her age. (Her brother and uncles were very powerful micos, or chieftains; female chiefs were rare among the Creeks but they did occur, but more common was women like Sehoy whose say could be very important and who served as powerful diplomats to the white world.) By Creek tradition all rearing of male children was done by the mother’s male relatives- her brothers usually or otherwise any male member of her clan- but when Alex was 14 his father, who had no other acknowledged sons (he never married Sehoy in more than the Creek fashion if that but he did acknowledge their children) wanted to send him to school and since children were 100% the provenance of their mother- and she didn’t want him to go- it was an issue. It was only hammered out by some bargaining between the two- basically he would go to school but then return and his education completed by her relatives.
Alexander was one of many chiefs- his cousin William McIntosh was another- who returned after being educated and ever after kept a legging in both worlds. They were chieftains who did all chiefly duties but they also lived in the frontier equivalent of Euro mansions and owned private property (unheard of in traditional tribal life- private property was stuff you could carry like your clothing and your weapons, but the Scots chiefs extended it to land, slaves, horses [which never really caught on in the southeast], carriages, etc.]). Many (including the Mc-cousins) were polygamists but their biracial wives dressed like white women, and they had alcohol problems. Even their dress reflected biracial heritage: feathers (but ostrich feathers), deerskin breeches, cotton shirts, jewelry and military uniforms and moccasins and tribal decorations were worn together.
Self serving addendum: the pics of McIntosh and Micanopy were done by famous eastern portrait artist Charles Bird King. Here’s my self portrait in his style.
Cherokee
193 (99.999%-ile)
11.75"
Ambidextrous
SEAL
I had an ambidextrous Cherokee seal once. You never knew which flipper he was going to catch the maize with. We called him Sealquoyah.
I thought you’d be taller. Do you play the piano?
That’s the statistic I am looking for years.
I wonder why the American foundational myth always associate Blacks with Indians, and hides the intermarriage that happened between Indians and Europeans. I also wonder why the intermarriage always happened in the tribe, and you never know about mixed peoples in the European towns. I know from local stories, that many Amerindians didn’t like blacks, particularly in South America, where blacks were usually the executioners, so when some fall at theirs hands they were killed by torture.
According to several myths, Indians were Black already when they met the first Europeans. Certainly makes sense given this another myth that says Spaniards weren’t Europeans, and came first :rolleyes:
I am sure this sort of fantastic history is something of recent invention, created to satisfied the ego of powerful communities like the black, and also to ensure the myth of purity of the dominant white community.
But what about the historical facts?
African-Americans have considerably mixed ancestries. Is it really inconceivable that a large proportion of African-Americans have Native American ancestors? And if that’s true, is it not also possible that some large proportion of that group might specifically have Cherokee ancestry? Given the history of the Cherokees, it doesn’t seem all that farfetched.
So, do we know for a fact that all these black people claiming Cherokee ancestry are wrong?
It’s not inconceivable, but DNA testing is pretty good these days, and based on research using it, most African Americans have not been found to have much NA ancestry. They have been found to have a ton of white ancestry.
I’m really not sure what you’re responding to, but I don’t think anybody has denied intermarriage between whites and Indians. To the contrary in fact, the… ahem… foundational myth… of Pocahontas (not a myth actually but pretty very well verified) has an extraordinarily important marital union of Indian and European (Matoaka and John Rolfe). It’s rarer that the intermarriage of Indians and blacks is mentioned than the intermarriage of Indians and whites.
The union of the Rolfes even has one of those rare things in history, which is when you look at the primary sources you find out it wasn’t totally self serving. Rolfe actually legitimately loved her- he said so in his letters seeking permission to marry her. Ironically, today many hobby genealogists would gladly give a kidney to prove descent from their son, Thomas Rolfe, but in his own lifetime his half Powhatan ancestry was such a stigma he had to have special legal dispensation to marry a white woman and even his great-grandchildren (whose surname was Bolling) still felt some embarrassment over being “Red Bollings” as opposed to “White Bollings”.
Interesting more-than-trivia I learned from researching my ancestors who had Saponi heritage: people of mixed Indian and white blood were often listed as “Mulatto” in the legal documents of the time. It was not just a term for people of mixed black-white heritage. Another term you’ll often see in 18th century documents for people who had Indian heritage is “Tithable”. (Very long explanation, but short version- white heads of households and non-whites of any gender were required to pay a special head tax, or tithe, but white women and children were exempt, so seeing women and children listed as ‘tithable’ usually means they were free but had non-white heritage.)
DNA testing isn’t really that good, actually. Oh, sure, for purposes of, say, paternity testing or establishing if two individuals are related, yeah, but it is NOT reliable to definitively use to pigeonhole people as being a certain ethnicity, race, tribe, nation, whatever. There’s just too much overlap between such groups to make such testing definitive except in rare cases. So, if they say “This person is 30% West African” what they mean is that about 1/3 of their genes resemble the typical assortment of that area, but there are always a certain number of people elsewhere who have similar assortments, and there will be natives within the designated area who have a somewhat different assortment.
This is probably because throughout history people have moved around, intermarried with each other, and so forth. There are no purebreds, we’re all mutts. It’s just that in some cases the recent ancestry is better known that others.
Thanks. Very interesting comment.
By the way, I wonder why in English the word “Mulato” passed from designing AfroEuropean mixtures, to mean IndigenousEuropean mixtures. In the Iberian countries those mixtures were considered different.
When I was in 2nd grade, we each had to dress up a paper doll in traditional clothing of our heritage. I had lederhosen on mine, after deciding I couldn’t justify the kilt*. Turns out, in my lily-white Portland suburb, over half the class had lederhosen on their paper doll; it got tedious during show and tell.
The moral of the story was that the non-ordinary ones got extra attention, from the kilts to the one chick who did go for the Indian dress. People like to be special.
When it came time for my multiculturalism in the arts class in college, I had come to embrace my assorted-white-person lineage, for it is all I have, and I won’t apologize for it.
*: My father’s side is nearly all German, my mother’s side is mostly French and English, with a side note of Scottish. And yes, there is an uncorroborated half-Indian woman mixed in during the westward migration. Whooppee.
:D:D:D
No.
I advise getting as many names of ancestors from your grands while you still can and going back through the census records. You will be surprised by how far you can get on some lines and how true some of those stories the old folks tell are. It’s interesting to know your place in history. It doesn’t have to be about putting on airs. The documents left behind could tell you of revolutionary soldiers or knights or Chickasaw or Scots archers or Cherokee or your relation to Elvis. It’s not that it elevates you but it places YOU in history. And in the end we are ALL Africans, from the cradle of mankind.
I remember when I was discussing this with an old black gent and we found we had some of the same ancestry. He said maybe we were kin and I said maybe so and we laughed. There was a lot in that moment, it spoke of how far we have come and glad to be done with that nonsense. Maybe you had to be there. Anyway, check out your ancestry. It may surprise you.
It may be true that “everyone knows the Seminole are a mixed bunch”, but i suspect that’s not the case. There was no “pristine” Seminole tribe – the very name is a corruptiomn of Spanish “Cimarron” = “runaways”, and the group always has been a mix of various tribes and escaped black slaves and free blacks. There were also colonies of mostly-black groups called “Black Seminoles”, but there were Blacks among the “regular” Seminoles as well.
This is why I don’t go around telling about our Cherokee great-grandmother. We have a picture of her, and know that Savillion, my ancestor, ‘took’ her off the Trail of Tears as it wound through the Midwest. Adding up dates, she would have been 13/14ish, and surely the soldiers wouldn’t have just let someone walk off with a girl, would they? I imagine there were bribes, or some underhand dealings going on. Whatever the real story was, it was Discreetly Hushed Up in my family, as has every unseemly happening since the Flood.
I read in, I believe, a National Geo article that a surprising number of white southerners tested positive for African ancestry. It wasn’t a majority but it was over 10%.
I would love to have such a test done but I’m not even sure what they’re called. The genetic genealogy tests advertised on ancestry.com and other sites are the ones that are <$100 but only test two lines: mitochondrial (i.e. your mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s mother’s ad infinitum) which changes very little over the millennia hence is mainly useful for your ancient ancestry, and the Y-chromosome (i.e. your father’s father’s father’s father’s etc.) which changes more frequently but will still let you know (providing you’re male- has to be conducted on a male sample obviously) where you’re patrilineal line has been over the centuries. This is the line that with African Americans is most likely to be the “white line” of course since far more people of Euro-African ancestry had white fathers than had white mothers.
The problem with these tests is that they only trace those two lines. Imagine a polyracial guy whose four grandparents, whether he knows it or not, had the following heritages:
-Paternal Grandpa: son of an Irish father and a Cherokee mother
-Paternal Grandma: daughter of a Chinese father and a Hawaiian mother
-Maternal Grandpa: son of an African father and a Pakistani mother
-Maternal Grandma: daughter of a Filipino father and an Australian aborigone mother
He takes both tests. This is only going to tell him about the Irish line and the Australian line- it will not show that he has any Cherokee or Chinese or Hawaiian or African or Pakistani or Filipino bloodlines. It’s useful but rarely is a genealogical brickwall going to be answered by those (it’s usually going to be your father’s mother’s mother’s father or your mother’s father’s mother that you need clues about). While obviously none are going to say “Your great-great grandmother was Catherine T. Keaton of West Pepperjack, Maine who ran the concession stand at the Battle of Bull Run and had 18 children, all named Paul” it’s still useful to know that you have a certain type of ancestry.
Things I would like to know are if I have Eastern European ancestry (my grandmother’s maiden name is Irish but according to several sources many of that name changed it from a Polish surname and I’m curious if she’s among them) and African ancestry. I’m curious what the tests that Barkley took is called and how much it costs. Anybody know?