Hezekiah Garrett has been posting comments here for some time, and now he has a blog. Hezekiah is a Chickamauga Indian, a Cherokee who grew up in southern Appalachia, a descendent of Cherokees who hid in the mountains to avoid the mass deportation to Oklahoma that became the Trail of Tears. One of his first posts is part one of a primer on Cherokee religion.
This interests me for a number of reasons. First, I have been interested in American Indians since boyhood and have read a good bit about the myriad native tribes and their cultures.
And it interests me because my bride is part Cherokee. Her Cherokee blood comes by way of her paternal grandmother, who bore the Scots name of Erskine. Michelle was born in West Virginia, and while just about everyone I know from West Virginia claims Cherokee blood, in her case it is credible: there is her coal black hair and dark eyes, and the fact that many men in the Erskine line are dark haired and many cannot grow a beard.
The post on Hezekian’s blog is an inside look, from the oral tradition of his People, at the history of Cherokee faith. I found it fascinating, and you can read it here: http://hezekiahgarrett.wordpress.com/2012/10/14/a-primer-on-cherokee-religion/
I am afraid you might be disappointed to see me then, Daniel, with such beauty on display. Though I am regarded as fair, even handsome by whites, I describe myself as ugly because I see ugly in the mirror, with my blue eyes and brownish hair. Though it is straight as an arrow and thick as the bramble.
Sometimes I do get mistaken for Mexican though, and that always makes me happy.
I hope I do not give offense in pointing this out, but if everyone who claimed descent from my people were accurate in their account, I have heard the numbers estimated between 25-50 million people.
Descended from a people numbering less than 10,000 in 1835 and that is combining all of us, Arkansas Cherokee, Oklahoma Cherokee,Texas and Mexican Cherokee and the holdouts and hiders in Our Mountains.
What has happened is that people know they had a fullblood, and Cherokee was nearly synonymous with Indian in American imagination. So those Erskines very likely are Indian, but they could be Saponi, Tuscarora, Catawba or any other number of peoples.
Or, in some cases, they are mullatos who passed themselves off ad Indian to avoid other.persecutions.
Got hung up in my little screen…
I don’t take any offense, in fact I count it a great honor that everyone wants a little Cherokee in their heritage. And I thank you for not using the expression “part Indian” or “part Cherokee”. You either are, which is cultural not genetic, or you aren’t. You can’t have a Cherokee leg and foot and the rest of you be white.
Thanks for the plug too. I’m gonna try to get a mailing adress from you this Christmas, if a handmade weapon wouldn’t offend your sensibilities.
Klickitat and some Cherokee tribe that ended up in Oklahoma for me (same branch of the family in Okie picked up a bit of African American as well, thus our hair ain’t straight by any stretch of the imagination) on my mother’s side. On my Father’s side, it’s harder to trace, French Canadian and Jewish, both coming to this country in the early 1900s.
Our wealthier members took up chattel slavery from the Americans when we became ‘civilised’. So now a good many OK Cherokee have some black blood. And there was the Freedmen controversy of a few years ago.
Mind if I ask what family names your OK Cherokee went by? The worst effect of the Trail for them was they forgot who their grandmothers were, which clan they were, and became Patrilineal.
I am Red Paint, descended from Nanny Ollie thru the Red Paint Woman.
Ouch, I see you did. Well, ignorance is easily forgiven. Your bride has Cherokee ancestry. My father’s amputated extra pinkie fingers were part(s of a) Cherokee.
Pax!
That seems an odd point of language to take offense at. The expressions “part German” or “part English” seem quite natural to me when speaking of my own family, and no confusion with dismemberment ever seems to happen.
peace,
Zach
P.S.: I appreciated your writing of the Cherokee Religion. Very interesting!
Your people constructed ‘race’, and so it is natural for you to consider your genetic heritage, and how it is split between multiple nations, in the case of ‘mongrels’. (Please take no offense, by your standards I too am a mongrel, being roughly 1/2 Scots and/or Ulster Scots, 1/4 German and 1/4 Indian [mostly Cherokee, but also Saponi and Catawba and Shawnee, which will make some sense by the time I finish this comment.])
My people call ourselves “ani-yuwyna” or “Real People”. That is, we have always regarded our culture as being the most human one, and all others somewhat inferior. I am unaware of any nation of Indians who did not consider themselves and their culture in this way. For us, who you are is how you act and look at the world, not the circumstances in which you were born. In fact, Chickamauga are the very first Indians in history to set this aside and preach a brotherhood of all Red Men. This was the unique genius of my ancestor, Tsiyu Gansini, known to your people as Dragging Canoe or my personal favorite “The Cherokee Dragon!”. (It really helps understand why I like this nickname to hear it in a Tennessee hillbilly accent.) This idea was carried forward by a young Shawnee who lived among us in Broom’s Valley as a child. You know him as Tecumseh. tecumseh and I share a childhood, in that we lived in the same place, with pretty much the same women.
While my Indian ancestry is from many tribes, culturally we are Cherokee, the Real People. Or “A Person’s Person”, if you will. Tsiyu Gansini was, genetically, half Nipissing and half Natchee. His father, Adg’Kala, was born Nipissing, but is revered as our greatest Peace Chief. His wife, Nanny Ollie, was born Nachee. They were both raised as Real People though. To our way of thinking you are emphatically not part German and part English, you are American. (And to your credit, Mr. Frey, you personally are a very poor example of an American, in my estimation. As are Daniel and Ted.)
The idea that a person can be chopped up into parts, reduced to who screwed whom over the centuries, is offensive to us. A person is the result of his culture.
This is why Indians are offended at the notion of being part Indian. Either you are an Indian, or you are not an Indian.
Taking offense at it, in the sense you mean offense though, would be silly. I will not strike a man for speaking thusly. I will gently correct him, and move on.
My ancestors in that realm that I am closest to considered themselves “The Wealthy People”. Not wealth as the Europeans imagined it- nudity was normal in the short summer, mutli-generational longhouses common in the winter (teepees? oh, you mean those EASTERNERS!). But food was plentiful, as were other goods, and the land was managed under a kind of proto-agriculture (Tarweed, lillies, wapato were major crops, as were berries and sunflowers. Tribes would also maintain herds of deer, elk, and bear for hunting).
And Celilo Falls for the great fall powwow and trading of fish was the commercial sector of 8 American States. Right up until White Man built Dalles Dam and flooded them in the 1950s.
You sound mor Indian than you know, Ted. Always knew my natural affinity for you had some basis more than a cyclothymic’s admiration for an autist.
And please, protect my true identity for I have an employer who does not allow us to do much of anything on the internet, lest it somehow affect his bottom line. But you and I once knew each other here in cyberspace when I tried very hard to pass as ‘white’. I used to contribute homesteading articles to a blog you used to read, long ago. In the time since, I have come to realise I like who I am, and I don’t want to try any longer to be like your people. And that that is ok. God loves Indians too.
So don’t tell anybody, ok?
I think I maybe knew you by a different name. Did you used to be tempted by libertarian economics?
Yep yep, that was me thru and thru. I was away from home and trying desperately to fit in the only way I knew, by trying to be Scots-American, and devouring the Enlightenment.
I was miserable, and my catechist started the seed by sitting up until dawn arguing his Aquinas against my Locke and Voltaire. It didnt yield immediate fruit, but it planted a seed.
After offering a path to salvation, I thank God for offering me a way to just be myself and honor my ancestors.
I can’t tell anybody, as I have no idea who you “really” are…
I meant no offense by saying my bride was “part” Cherokee; I think of myself only secondarily as American, as “America”, as we are constantly told by the Americanists, is an idea, and one I don’t share. So I like to call myself “Anglo-Celtic”. Mostly English, but with some Scots and Ulster Irish, and that paternal. So I don’t take offense at being called “part Irish” or whatever.
But it is true that “race” is a construct; in truth we are all descended from one couple.
And it is true that every tribal culture that I know of called themselves “The People” or “The Real People”. This is a common human temptation, and it is true that to one degree or another a few humans in history have transcended this tendency.
And it is true that ethnicity is a matter of culture, not blood. My bride may look more the part, but her Indian identity is limited to family legend (and my own geneological research has led me to deep trust of the oral tradition); she was raised as a suburban white person….
Regardless of the research, unless you come from a family of proven liars, always give preference to the oral history.
I think it is more important to accept an authority who loves you than to get every licttle fact correct. Correct and True don’t neccessarily mean the same thing. The Gospels don’t gibe with one another, factually. But if you live in Antioch, follow John. North Africa, follow Mark. Accept the rest, but follow what you have been given.