This is for Donald Trump. Since the time of the message below, 2012, I
have learned a good deal about DNA (for instance, how can you can not show
Indian heritage though your brother does) and a good deal about the history of
the control of the Indian rolls in the 1800s, particularly the Choctaw rolls
(in the news today over a 1/64th Choctaw child custody case). Scott
Brown, defeated once again in a different state, was never so blatantly racist
as Donald Trump. My great aunts, I realize now, probably did not know about the
Glenn-Tucker lawsuits, though they were living around Glenn cousins.
Senator Scott Brown’s Racist And
Anti-Indian Campaign Rallies
Hershel
Parker 4:21pm September 27, 2012 at 4:21 pm
So
Elizabeth Warren has not documented her Cherokee and Delaware ancestry! And so
the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation (pictured on TV) has been declared
by Scott Brown not to look red. Look at him, Scott Brown said, he's not a
person of color! And here Scott Brown has extended the "Person of
Color" category to include us injuns. Well, that's better than Obama in
his inaugural address which mentioned other colors but not red, to my pained
dismay. (I rejoiced that day and wept because only one person at the ceremonies
mentioned Indians.)
Now,
let's talk turkey. I always assumed Grandma Parker was half Indian because she
was so very dark and Indian looking. One of her daughters was always called
Blanket because she came out so dark that the family thought about wrapping her
in a blanket and dropping her off at the reservation. Okie humor. I knew that
some of my great aunts as recently as 1990 were lamenting their failure to be
in the Indian rolls, and they had different explanations which usually came
down to people in Muskogee having to ride a horse or drive a wagon to Waggoner
or Bowlegs–something on the order of what the Republicans are doing in
Pennsylvania this year, where elderly people are being frozen out of the
electorate by arbitrary obstacles which non-mobile people cannot surmount. I also
thought Grandpa Parker was part Indian. He may have been, but it's not
documented at all. Why did his father call his mother squaw? [I did not learn
my highly refined political correctness from blood relatives.]
Now
I know that Grandma Parker had a white Scots father. One of his daughters told
me he was a full blooded Irishman–presumably a misunderstanding of how so many
Scots were in Ireland before coming to the colonies. I was able (through
misspelling creatively and through an incisive clue in the 1900 census–the name
of a brother) to trace him back to Arkansas and then his parents to Tennessee.
NOT an Irishman who got off the boat in Indian Territory somehow in the 1880s.
NOT. Just another illiterate Scots-Irish guy with red hair.
Yet
this Scot bowed his head before meals and said the Lord's Prayer in Choctaw,
and one of my aunts irritably said of her clay-pipe-smoking child-pinching
grandmother, "She was a Chockie"–a Choctaw. Well, part Choctaw.
But
she was also part Cherokee, who knows how much? There's on record a story about
Uncle Joe Coker being chased in northern Arkansas by a party of Cherokees
because he had taken one too many Cherokee wives, and some of his brothers must
have married Cherokees. And my Glenns and Tuckers were party to the Jarndyce vs
Jarndyce trial of Indian Territory and Oklahoma Territory–a joke to those who
got on the rolls early and often, a joke even in a history published the year
after statehood. The good part, for documentation, was that cousins of mine
testified in the 1880s and afterward before the Dawes Commission on what they
remembered about Indian ancestors in the 1830s and earlier—family history
documented in government archives.
I
no longer say I am at least an eighth Indian, but I know that being part Indian
was a defining condition of my life. Because of Grandma Parker and what I
understood about her I identified with her Choctaw and Cherokee ancestry.
I'm
with Liz.
Scott
Brown, I have blue eyes and look as white as you, but oh my soul, and oh my
body, they are part Choctaw and part Cherokee. Out of the Senate, Scott Brown!
Make way for my Cousin Liz.
Now, Donald Trump, please lay off
Elizabeth Warren’s Indian heritage. Remember what my posts did in 2012 to Scott
Brown.
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