Cherokee, Seminole, Taino..Black?
By Marie McKinney
There are 80,000 Native Americans in the NYC area. Many may know that their mother or great grandfather was Native American and many may question their right to that heritage, based on images in movies and TV.
Donna Ahmadi Cherokee and Modern Dancer with Third Rail teaching Shawl dance at Lotus Sundays April 19-26
The bottom line? There is no such thing as “part” anyone, no more than you can split your grand parent in half.
It has taken me over 10 years to come to this, even though my Mother is original Key West “Conch”/Lucayan-Taino (one of very few left) and Scots/Irish and Dad is Cherokee and Seminole and Cameroonian (Africa).
My grandfather built many of the big, columned landmark houses in Key West and the island was much like a big compound, full of cousins 15-20 years ago and now most of the land was sold to city folk and strangers. My “Grandmommy” was Lucayan-Taino from Eleuthera, Bahamas and her people originally came from South America, 10,000 years ago according to history(NMAI, 2009)
It has taken me years to clarify my heritage. It’s made up of Cherokee, Seminole, Lucayan Taino, Cameroonian (Africa), East Indian and Scots-Irish. many of us have heritage combinations. As a member of the Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and Heyna Second Sons Drum group, pow wow dancer and relative of world travelers, continued…
Keep the Cherokee Language alive via on-line language classes starting April 13 th . You can sign up for classes by logging into Cherokee.org and selecting ‘register for class’ from the ‘on-line Language’ menu. We look forward to seeing you there! For class schedule and details visit: Also see Archives for videos of previously taped classes.
www.cherokee.org/classinfo.aspx
Wado!
cherokee.org web site staff
Continued……
I can appreciate the importance of knowing my heritage and thus my connection with tribes in South America, who are reclaiming their lands, preserving their language and culture.
(Lonnie Harrington Seminole Writer of Book : Both Sides of the Water Storyteller Dancer)
They suffer from deforestation and therefore fewer animals and less food. Cities are expanding into forest lands. Farmers and gold miners taking lands, rich with food; with little thought for the balance of life. Often choosing crops that kill off naturally growing foods and pollute waters used for drinking and fishing.
At the 2009 National Museum of the American Indian Film Festival, it became clear that we doubt our right to the Americas because of color and economic lines and media stereotypes. Native Americans lived in the US/Turtle Island since 25,000 BC. Mmany migrated from South and Central America. There were no borderlines drawn then, no countries, no such thing as “my” land. You were identified in terms of the rivers you lived between. There was no need to hold on to ownership of land. Land seemed endless. It was always the land “where we live”. We have been hosting visitors for a very long time, with the same hospitality my “Grandmommy” had when she welcomed strangers to her laced dining room table to have cake in Key West (our island “rez”).
That hospitality led me to reconnect with Alan “Star” Brown, who was welcomed to her table, and later welcomed me into The Thunderbird American Indian Dancers and Heyna Second Sons Drum group. There were no locked doors in Key West, then, and Grandmommy’s porch was open to all. Now the house is renovated with marble and being sold for millions.
The history of displacement is so widespread. At Acoma, Pueblo (NM) and Paraquay, Acteal, the Amazon and Key West, Florida; the story is the same. Land lost, cultural history and resources compromised; stories of priests forcing women and children to cart huge stones and clay for miles to…
(Marie McKinney Author of necartz.com, Lucayan/Taino-Key West Conch, Cherokee, Cameroon/Ghana (African), Scotts/Irish)
…build churches. Killing or maming their helpers and taking their land. Substituting abundant ground provisions for an economy based on time and consumption of crafts and trinkets bought for so much less than art and production are worth. Art sold in big cities for astronomical prices that might have otherwise, fed the artisans.
Gold, mining, murder and communities under paid for their land caused damage in Mexico and Central America. What if families in the US found and united with their culture cousins overseas? Many American Natives don’t know where their ancestors are from. Where does that leave us? Disjointed. Estranged. Abandoned.
It took me years to clarify (and embrace!) my Native, African and Scots/Irish roots. There are many who could claim these inquiries to be divisive. They say: “Give it up! You black!”, but the face of the Guarani speaker at NMAI was undeniably familiar, more familiar, now that I see my own picture. A twist of the mind and lies I was told as truth; a life and death reason for unity among indigenous people.
I see the need to learn a language that helps me communicate with my extended family: Portuguese (or Spanish) for South America and French, Bambarra, Wolof , Twi or Fulfulde or Bantu or Arabic. If you can speak Spanish and French you can communicate with many people. And the language of the eyes and the heart, as well as, and the language of “you look so much like my aunt and my niece”. I get such a comfort from the familiar sounds of the land and our music and dance, they live for me like cousins at a family reunion. They ring inside us when heard.
Learn the names of companies exploiting my relatives in other places and refuse to buy…
What will it take to empower ourselves?
Congrats to films:
Owners of the Water: Conflicts and Collaboration Over Waters by Laura Graham and David Hernandez Palmar
Across the Amazon by Lucas Bessine
Mokoi tekoa petei jeguata/Two Villages,
One Path by Ariel Ortega(Guarani), Jorge Motinico(Guarani) and Befites(Guarani)
DAWES ROLLS: CHEROKEE, CHICKASAW, SEMINOLE, CHOCHTAW, CREEK, ROANOKE…ANCESTORY RESEARCH SITE
BAHAMAS GENEALOGY: LUCAYAN TAINO, KEY WEST GENEALOGY GROUP
OLIVIA ST KEY WEST
ENDANGERED LANGUAGE FUND: GRANTS FOR SAVING LANGUAGES
Are you watching We Shall Remain? It’s wonderful to see the recreations of rhe environment. I now understand that I (we) are Andrew Jackson’s nightmare, the perfect unity of Native Indigenous+African= A new IndigenousAmerican with great strength, immunities(on the Coast we’d been exposed to Euro diseases and had developed immunities to diseases like mumps and chicken pox that devastated so many on this side, plus by surviving the crossing we’d become suriviors. When we made contact with our ‘selves’ on this side of the water we learned and adapted to this environment and exchanged strengths for strengths. Interesting. what do you think?
What an interesting article, finding information about another indigenous tribe. I have ‘found’ my grandmother who was of Nottoway( VA) descent, I have always identified as indigenous, my dad told me about his Seminole great-grandmother who had lived with his family when he was a boy of about 7. My mothers Aunt who raised her said emphatically she was ‘blackfeet’. I later discovered that meant people of athe Carolinas, perhaps Saponi. Anyway, i’m still looking for links. I think my grandmother may have gone to Hampton Indian School as achild as her mother died and she disappears from all records until shes about 19-20.
Very interesting!!! I often thought I might be Haliwa-Saponi. My grandmother’s family is from Oxford, NC and they had a farm there. They were not slaves and they didn’t get taken away on the trail of tears. My great grand dad won a legal case against the railroad and had to change his name from Cannady to Lloyd to flee those who wanted to take his life, leaving Grand mother Martha (Cannady) Lloyd McKinney an orphan at 13. SHe had a very strong personality and married my Grand Dad who became Dean of Johnson C Smith in Charlotte, NC (Charlotte, NC in Mecklenburg county is named after Charlotte Sophia of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, wife of George III: find more info about her in my article Anansi to Brer Rabbit: Art and Identity in this site and also at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture on 135th St in Harlem, NY 2 or 3 train to 135th St http://www.nypl.org/research/sc/sc.html. Like Beetoven, some of her pictures look black and others have a white haze over them.
I think it is wonderful that you are making some headway with finding your native ancestry. I would like to do the same but am not sure where to start. On one side I have a great great grand father’s name and the Mic Mac tribe from Nova Scotia, on the other side it is my great great grandma, and of course there were no birth records for people of color (she had left the tribe) and she took her husbands name, so all I have is a first name and possibly cherokee paw from South Carolina. Any ideas of where to search and what types of records were kept would be so helpful and appreciated!!!
The National Museum of the American Indian has a research section for history of different tribes. The National Archive has genealogy records. Some online sites can lead you to more information if you know the names of your earliest relatives. Sometimes your relatives may have more information. Some southern natives hide their Nativeness, because it was dangerous to be native at one point and not looked upon with honor. See the Dawes Rolls and Guillion-Miller census Rolls to locate you family member’s name. Many Cherokees come from North and South Carolina, Virginia, Georgia and, as Cherokee refers to a large group of people, when you look closer, they may have had other names like Lumbee, Haliwa-Saponi or Algonquin. See Books: Confounding the Color Line by Brooks and Both Sides of the River By Lonnie Harrington, and The Tainos: Rise and Decline of the People Who Greeted Columbus by Irving Rouse, The Seminoles of Florida by James W Covington, Sacred Revolt: The Muskogees Struggle for a New World by Joel W Martin. The best source is going to pow wows. Much of our unwritten history can be found in conversations with others or just watching for family tendencies among people and accepting the unexpected.
This blog’s great!! Thanks
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Thanks Matt!
What do you like most about it?
What do you wish I have more info about or more of?
Marie, author