Cherokee people, Cherokee tribe So proud to live, so proud to die.
That’s not what the OP is referring to. The OP is referring to the people who have no tangible proof or connection to their professed heritage at all, other than rumour or wishful thinking.
My family has been in the U.S. for almost 200 years. If you look at our family tree, about 150 years ago, someone got married in Greece to someone who had a Greek name. For me to say “the reason I love feta cheese is because of my Greek heritage” would be silly.
And if you’d read the thread where I already made direct, clear comments about the OP, noting that I agree with her that people claiming Indian ancestry are trying to co-opt a mystique, you probably wouldn’t have posted the above in response to me, huh? What I wrote was not in response to that, but in response to the posters complaining that people call themselves Irish when really just their grandparents were Irish so therefore their lives must be entirely unaffected by it.
In fact, while I read your previous post, I did not see the username that came with it.
And there was nothing snarky intended with my last post.
Yes. Yes, that is my beef. Maybe it wouldn’t bother me if I believed that even one NA person had ever in their lives bragged, " I have lots of black in my family! My great grandmother is a full blooded black!"
But I must admit, I don’t know any NAs. Maybe they go around saying that all the time.
I wish I could believe that the people I know that brag about NA ancestry were doing so out of just natural pride in their heritage. But I think it has much more to do with the fact that they just don’t have pride in their own blackness. And that breaks my heart, because my grandma and grandpa were not only cool cats, but were also full of all kinds of rich culture and great pride, and all that good stuff. And I am sure their parents had much of the same. So why can’t we look to our own black grandparents for pride in our ancestry, and stop making stuff up!
They also played bagpipes!
The also invented the bagpipes!
Did they make a butter sculpture out of her?
(Its a Minnesota State Fair thing - its actually Princess Kay of the Milky Way - and she is the Dairy Industry Queen (as opposed to the Dairy Queen)…)
No, sadly, no butter sculpture.
But she married my great-grandfather, THE MONARCH OF RADIO!
hmmm… link-thing is different, oh well, here:
Hmmm…the part Cherokee thing…
If asked, I’ll say yes because the family history says my great-grandfather came to Texas through Oklahoma during Reconstruction, thereby acquiring my great-grandmother from reservation. However, great-grandmother was only thirteen and the acquisition was said to to involuntary. Not all of the NA ancestry stories are good ones, you know. We are also trying to figure out how he acquired an entire section of land in 1887 in East Texas…and managed to keep it. He seemed to be not particularly nice.
I asked my mate Two dogs Fucking that very same question.
I think it’s more about being perceived as special than self-hate. I’ve heard black people play up their NA ancestry more than their white ancestry–even when they have clear photographic evidence of the latter and no proof of the former (my own mother is an example of such a person). They’ll point to “Indian” blood as the cause of their less-than-curly hair, aqualine noses, or lighter complexions, all the while carrying Massa’s last name. It’s funny.
For whatever reason, there’s a certain cache to being part-Indian than being part-white. Everyone wants to be Indian without being Indian. But there are places in this country where Indians are stigmitized as badly as black people are, if not worse. I bet there aren’t a lot of self-identified Cherokee princesses in these places.
I actually have to admit, I hadn’t looked at it this way. If it is self-hate that makes black folks claim NA ancestry, then I guess they would brag more on all the white folks that are in the family history; but I notice, they never do.
Speaking of Black Seminoles, they are considered by some historians to be the only successful slave revolt in North American history. (It was a qualified victory, but it was not a total defeat like most slave revolts.) Good web site here by a writer researching John Horse (a black chief of the Seminoles).
My paternal grandmother’s family always said they got some of their features from a supposed Creek or Cherokee ancestor. From my research it was far far more likely it was a mulatto who crossed the color line in moving from Virginia to SC to GA in the late 18th century. (I saw a picture of my grandmother’s father as a young man recently in a yearbook of an Alabama medical school from the 1880s- it was a small and not terribly clear image, but also very similar to this pic of Alexandre Dumas).
Genealogy is very much like gynecology: look up all of your great-grandmas enough and you’re going to find a really shocking thing or two. We really are a genetic fondue.
Well, I’m of mixed ancestry (although I’ll happily put “black” on any form that doesn’t accept “mixed” *), and I know for a fact I’m 1/2 black **. But what culture should I be celebrating? New York soul-food watered-down ex-slaves-from-Alabama-who-went-North-looking-for-a-better-life, sure. But African? Which part? No-one was taking notes on which of the bodies loaded onto the ship came from which inland village. No-one was filling out birth certificates for the kids born in the slave’s huts. I could blow a few hundred dollars on a genetic test to tell me that there’s a 85% chance that 12% of my genes came from northeastern Sudan, but I’m not gonna.
Family history has it that somewhere on my Dad’s side there’s some Cherokee blood. I have no proof of this. Do I go around bragging about it? No. Do I write in “black/white/native american” on the “Other: Please Describe” line of the “Race” question? Damn straight. I like being a mutt ***, and maybe somewhere down the line some part-something kid will look at the stats of the 1998 graduating class of MIT and say “I can do that” because of it.
JRB
- I know that there are a lot of black people out there that consider thinking of ones-self as “mixed” a form of treason. But my Mom was a blue-eyed blond WASP and my dad was an Afro-wearing bitter-chocolate-colored ghetto-kid-made-good, and I don’t look like either of them. As a kid, looking into the mirror, I always filed myself under “none of the above”, and I’m not going to change that now.
** Modulo any contaminating white ancestors in Dad’s pedigree.
*** If and when I have kids, I’m holding out for 1/2 East Indian, 1/2 Middle Eastern, 1/2 Aleutian Islander (or something equally cool) for the sperm donor. I want offspring that can claim ancestry from all 6 inhabited continents.
Up until about the 1960s it was apparently fairly common for light-skinned African-Americans who were “passing” as white to claim to be part Native American. I don’t have a cite or statistics for this, but I’ve read several accounts of people who were passing and explained their not-quite-Aryan looks by saying their grandmothers were Cherokee princesses or similar.
This leads me to believe that some white people who claim to have Native American ancestry may well be basing their claim on old family stories but are in fact descended from light-skinned African-Americans who were only pretending to have Native American ancestry.
And of course some people are just wrong. Since I was a kid I’d heard about how my mother’s family was supposedly related to Quanah Parker, last chief of the Comanche (not Cherokee, for once). Whether we were actual descendants of Quanah Parker or related to him only through his white mother was unclear, but we were definitely said to be related.
When I was researching our family tree I found that this story had been in the family for at least four generations…but was incorrect. I have ancestors with the last name Parker who lived in the same right part of Texas at the right time, but were unrelated to Quanah Parker’s family and had come to Texas from different parts of the country. If there’s any connection at all, it could only have been back before either Parker clan immigrated to the US.
Quanah Parker himself did have 25 children, and several of his daughters married white men. Plenty of white Texans are descended from him, but there’s no evidence that this group includes anyone in my own family.
My half-sister supposedly is 1/8 Cherokee. Of course there’s no paperwork and her father’s long ran off.
But I find it amusing that although all my director ancestors come from Europe I have Native American, Korean, Pakistani, and Indian relatives by either adoption, marriage, or tradition (there’s an Indian family that are basically my relatives: they go to as many family events as my other relatives and it would be unthinkable to not invite them to family events at the same level as my other relatives, but I never asked why they are considered so close.)
Lamia I thought you were half serpent?
I hear this a lot, and I don’t get it. The slave owner’s philosophy was, “If we take their name, culture and language, the will have no history and feel less human…”
I think a good response to that was a new culture… One that blacks from many different lands in Africa could share. A people decsended from one tribe probably now braids their children’s hair in a technique derived from a different tribe. In other words, if you aren’t interested in dropping the coin to research your DNA, then just pick a west African people and be done with it.
For the record, if my mom or dad was white, I would call myself black. Not that I have a special attachment to that word, in particular. If we all decided tomorrow to call black people blue instead, I would go along with that fine, as long as the bluest, poorest, most descriminated amongst us is called blue, also.
Well, there’s African-American culture in general, which is a mishmash of assorted African cultures with assorted European cultures with assorted Caribbean / Creole /what-have-you second-generation cultures mixed back in and all kinds of regionalisms that were smeared around and blurred by population movement during and after slavery, and that’s all fine and dandy and you can celebrate that as much as you want.
But then there’s the question of where your great-to-the-nth grandparents came from, where all that movement and mixing started from, and for me at least it’s a little unsatisfying to say “Africa somewhere”. I’m already a product of pick-your-own-culture, due to hippy-dippy 70’s upbringing, and at some level it would be really nice to say “these are my roots”. So far all of the roots I can positively identify are in Europe, and that’s not representative of who I feel myself to be.
I do consider myself black, like I said, but “mixed” first. I feel a great kinship to people who are (for example) half-Chinese and half-Korean and felt that they were never quite accepted into either group.
JRB