No, you are not part Cherokee. And neither is Elizabeth Warren. - 0 views
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Why tribal family lore is so common among white people from Oklahoma to Georgia
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If you meet somebody who you wouldn’t necessarily think they’re Native, but they say they’re Native, chances are they’ll tell you they’re Cherokee
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This is what my brothers and I were told by my mom and my dad, my mammaw and my pappaw.” Many people’s mammaws and pappaws have told them the same thing. There is a distinction, of course, between actual, provable citizenship of the Cherokee Nation, and purported heritage
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Cherokee people did intermarry with white settlers at an uncommonly high rate compared to other Native American tribes. Still
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the number of people claiming Cherokee heritage far outstrips the number of possible descendants from these intermarriages.
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pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity.
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Their descendants believed them, and then they had children of their own who also believed these stories, and so on
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Which brings us to the other reason white Southerners liked to claim Cherokee heritage, and continued to do so throughout the hyper-racist Jim Crow-era, when having a drop of non-white blood was otherwise a genuine liability: in the decades after the Civil War, the Cherokee story had become a metaphor for the Confederacy.
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white Southerners (many of whom, remember, already thought they had Cherokee ancestry) had reimagined the Cherokee as brave anti-federal fighters who courageously resisted government tyranny. The Cherokee had been defeated, but retained their pride and dreamed of a return to former glory — a Lost Cause.
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increasingly conflated the Cherokee struggle with the struggle of the South, especially as the Civil Rights movement threatened to finally loosen Southern whites’ firm grip on the region.
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The deep Southeast is the Cherokee heritage claim’s point of origin, but not its exclusive province. Such claims are common, too, on the outskirts of the region — like Oklahoma, to which the Cherokee were relocated, and the Smoky Mountains of North Carolina and Tennessee, to which many of those who escaped the Trail of Tears fled. So, the lineage claims in Elizabeth Warren’s family are not surprising.
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If your ancestor’s name can’t be located in those documents, the chance that you’re actually Cherokee is slim to none. Think of it this way, says Cornsilk, “If there were enough Cherokees to produce all the wannabes now claiming to be us, we would have never lost the war!” And he doesn’t mean the Civil War.