I don’t know if the fuss I’m hearing over Elizabeth Warren’s Cherokee claim is entirely local here in Mass, or if it’s a national thing. Regardless, it hits a little close to home, so I want to talk about the whole “White Indian” thing some today.
In the early days of the Republic, many hoped for assimilation – that as the American culture spread across the country, the native nations would be subsumed – that we’d live alongside each other, eventually becoming one people.
For a very brief time, that dream was almost realized in Cherokee. They largely adopted Euro-American ways, and we lived alongside each other for a good couple generations. That’s why of so many “white Indians” you speak to, many if not most will point to Cherokee ancestry.
Sadly, it wasn’t enough for a fallen humanity.
And so it is that my family – like most Appalachian families that have been there any length of time – has some Cherokee in the woodpile. Our “family lore” is pretty specific though – a couple sisters on the Dawes Roll from the tail end of the 19th century.
By the early part of the twentieth, Grampa was growing up in an Indian School out in Oklahoma. There’s a class picture from that school up on the wall in my aunt’s house, along with a brick from its foundation. All that’s not quite as romantic as that might sound – his folks ran the school, and from what I understand his nickname among the other kids translates loosely as “white boy.”
That said, after WWII Grampa wanted to undo the Trail of Tears at least for his own family, or so goes the story. I grew up in the Southern Appalachians specifically because Grampa wanted to get his Cherokee-minded self back to the home mountains. And that’s where his daughter met my father – a boy from deep deep Dan’l Boone and Davy Crockett country.
Now, Dad’s original family farm is under one of Roosevelt’s artificial lakes, but best I can tell from the family talk they’ve been not too far from Chota since..well, since it was Chota. I can’t prove it yet, but I’d be awful surprised if Dad’s relatives weren’t trading rifle balls with Mom’s a couple hundred years ago.
Fast forward to the end of the twentieth century. My brother and I are looking at college paperwork. Mom pulls out the family records, and I have a distinct memory of being told that we were both at the minimum required blood quanta to check “native” on that box.
I’ll tell you now… I honestly don’t remember what I did. When I was young and foolish – well – I was young and foolish. I know I wouldn’t have only checked native, but I’m not going to swear I didn’t check all that applied. Probably would have thought I was supposed to.
Anyhow, I know my brother enrolled in the Eastern Band. I didn’t. Even then, that felt a step too far.
Sure, it was interesting reading the (English version) of the Phoenix. But I didn’t grow up on the Qualla Boundary – only set foot on it a couple times on family trips. I know maybe a word or two of Cherokee, and the smell of tobacco makes me ill. The love of those Southern mountains may be inextricably in my blood – but it would have been trespassing too far to claim any more than that.
That’s from my end.
I have wondered from time to time though, how I’d feel if I were born on that other branch of the family tree. If I were watching the drama from the Tsalagi seats.
On the one hand – there is strength in numbers. I think to myself that if I lived say two hundred years from now, and America had been ground to a shadow of what it is today – if a Chinese kid came up to me waving Old Glory and asking what it meant to be an American…. frankly, I’d think that was awesome. I’d love that someone treasured what we were enough to carry it into the future, no matter how tenuous the bloodline. Heck, that’s the whole meaning of American.
On the other hand – I know there’s more than a few in the contemporary native culture that are well and sick of spoiled SWPLs play-acting Indian. I can’t really blame ‘em either. Being reduced to a caricature isn’t any less demeaning when it comes dressed in soft paternalism instead of jingoistic fervor.
My gut says the distinction lies in the extent to which one is willing to lay aside the Dances With Wolves fantasy of what native culture is, and actually live in the real thing in the modern day. But that’s from the outside looking in.
I wish I could say I came to some fascinating conclusion – I haven’t. The best answer I have is that I can show the most respect for that legacy – precious as it is – by not trying to claim something that’s not mine.
I’ll smile at the stories – still look forward to another trip down to Cherokee again with my mom someday. Every now and again I’ll do handwork in a native style like I once learned, usually as a gift for a special friend or two more attached to the tradition than I am. Even that touches the edge of decency though I admit.
All that said – some whisper of the early idealists’ dream did survive. The American mutt is so different I think from his or her European counterpart precisely because of that native influence in our early days. Like a child in her formative years, the American character is indelibly shaped by days alongside families from the Narragansett to the Seminole.
I wouldn’t check that “Cherokee” box today. That whisper from the past, precious as it is, is too far gone in my branch of the family tree to be more than a fond memory. But what is left – and what I do hold dearer than most anything in the mortal world – is being able to call myself… American.
