Who am I?

I keep my racial identity in the top drawer of a bedroom dresser. It’s in the form of a white paper card, laminated in plastic.

My wife, who is Chickasaw, says she could tell I was part Indian the first time we met. But most often, a mention of my Indian heritage is met with a skeptical look and occasionally outright laughter. Yeah sure, I can hear them thinking, everyone has a Cherokee princess somewhere in the family tree.

But the card in my dresser, my Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood (CDIB), signed by the Secretary of the Interior, states that: “This is to certify that John Gregory Perry is 1/64 degree Indian blood of the Cherokee tribe.”

Turn the card over and it explains that the blood quantum on the card face is “computed from the final rolls of the Five Civilized tribes closed March 4, 1907.” This final roll is known as the Dawes Roll, named after the chairman of the commission that created it.

Membership in the modern Cherokee Nation requires proof of descent from a Dawes enrollee. My connection is Mary Jones. She was my second great-grandmother, Mary Anne Ross Jones, the granddaughter of Andrew Ross.

Below Mary Jones on the Dawes Roll census card are listed six children including my great-grandfather, John E. Jones.

The census card lists Mary Jones’ Cherokee blood quantum as one-fourth and John Jones’ Cherokee blood quantum as one-eighth. That makes my grandfather, Sam Jones, 1/16th, my mother 1/32nd and me 1/64th. My sons, some of them also citizens of the Cherokee Nation, are 1/128th.

Blood quantum is a strange relic of 19th century racial pseudoscience that has been preserved in the laws and regulations concerning Native tribal membership rights.

Before European-Americans started making treaties with native people that required a legal definition of Indianness, Cherokees determined tribal membership with a simple question: Who’s your mother?

If your mother is Cherokee, you are Cherokee. The idea of a half or one-quarter or 1/64th Cherokee was nonsensical. Cherokee was a binary concept. And to some extent, that’s still true.

“It’s really not about race,” said Circe Sturm, a University of Texas anthropology professor who has spent much of her career studying Indian and Cherokee identity. “Indianness is about a political standing. It’s a political categorization. So it’s about citizenship in a tribal nation.”

While most tribal nations today have blood quantum requirements, The Cherokee Nation does not.

“Not only do we have no blood quantum, we have an equal protection clause in our constitution. We see every citizen as equal based on their legal status as citizens of the Cherokee Nation,” said Chuck Hoskins, Secretary of State for the Cherokee Nation.

In her book “What Blood Won’t Tell: A History of Race on Trial in America,” author Ariela Gross observes that while trials to determine race included much testimony about appearance, questions of race are often decided based on behavior and performance.

The racial ideology that justified slavery argued that Africans were incapable of performing the social and citizenship obligations of whites. So evidence that a man had performed his citizenship duties of voting, sitting on a jury or serving in the military, or that a woman was virtuous and performed her duties in social settings became evidence of whiteness.

This is part of a concept Gross calls “racial commonsense,” the idea, still with us, that we can look at a person and, from both appearance and performance, know their race.

So legally, politically, I am completely Indian. Racial common sense, however, would categorize me as white.

4
Sixth cousin once removed

In Charleston, Tenn., we turn our bikes down a residential street, take a left under a brick railroad bridge, then another left onto a concrete roadway, the worn, crumbling expansion joints just wide enough to grab a bicycle tire, if someone isn’t paying attention.

Many of the neighborhood lots are empty. Some have tiny, recently built homes. Some have mobile homes. A few have older, larger homes.

We pull over just past one of the older homes at the end of the first block. It is a two-story, worse-for-wear Queen Anne cottage with two overgrown shrubs squatting on either side of a weathered concrete walk that leads to the entrance.

We dismount and gather around historian Jack Baker, who tells us this is the site of a home once owned by Lewis Ross. The current structure incorporates part of that original home.

Lewis Ross was a successful trader and the brother of Andrew Ross and Principal Chief John Ross. After John Ross convinced the U.S. government to let the tribe take over its own removal operation from the Army, Ross appointed his brother, Lewis, to provision the journey.

Baker reads from the diary of a missionary who traveled with the Cherokees. The entry from Dec. 13, 1838, tells of a Cherokee woman who had died during the night and was found in the morning with her arms wrapped around her days-old infant. The property owner where the Cherokees camped refused to allow her burial, so her corpse was carried in a wagon through the day.

“At night a coffin was made, and the next morning she was buried near the graves of some other Cherokees who had died in a detachment that had preceded us,” Baker reads from the journal.

Baker then singles out one of the riders, Gaya Pickup, as a direct descendent of Lewis Ross. The group encourages her to have a photo taken in front of the house. Uncomfortable with the attention, she poses between the two towering shrubs for a few quick photos, then returns to the group.

Lewis Ross was her fifth great-grandfather, and my fourth great-uncle. That makes Pickup my sixth cousin once removed.

Back on the bikes, it’s raining as we ride a half-mile west toward the Hiwassee Highway and turn into the parking lot of the Hiwassee River Heritage Center, home to a museum dedicated to the town’s role in the Trail of Tears and the Civil War. It is on the site of Fort Cass, one of three emigration depots built for the removal.

Local Trail of Tears Association members greet the riders with gift bags and lunch on a covered patio on the east side of the building. There are welcome speeches, and students from a nearby elementary school file past to shake hands with the Cherokees.

From spring to fall in 1838, several internment stockades at Fort Cass held almost 5,000 Cherokees waiting for the end of a drought in the West. People died daily in the stockades from dysentery, whooping cough and other ailments associated with unsanitary conditions.

By that time, Andrew Ross had comfortably relocated to Indian Territory with other members of the Treaty Party, a small group that feared Georgia’s aggressive harassment campaign would economically destroy the tribe. Without any authority, they traded away all Cherokee land in Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama and North Carolina for $5 million and 13 million acres west of the Mississippi River.

Andrew Ross played a small, but ignominious role in these events. He opened the negotiations that eventually led to the removal. He was the second to sign the Treaty of New Echota on March 1, 1836. The last Cherokees left Georgia in September 1838.

In June 1839, a group of Cherokees met in Indian Territory to again take matters into their own hands. Citing an 1829 law making it a capital offense to cede Cherokee land without consent of the tribal government, they sentenced Treaty Party leaders to death. A series of assassinations sparked a violent struggle that lasted into the mid-1840s and took the lives of more than 200 people.

I never knew my ancestor, Andrew Ross, was among the victims. But the gravestone I found last June clearly said: “KILLED THIS DAY NOV. 29, 1840, SIGNER OF THE 1835 NEW ECHOTA TREATY”

I learned about the grave through David Hampton, the genealogist who prepared the riders’ family trees. I then found the landowner, who said he would leave the gate unlocked for me.

Following my visit to the site, I asked the landowner if he knew anything about the new gravestone and the fresh flowers. He didn’t.

After a bit of sleuthing, I found Ron Burnett, a relative of the cemetery’s former caretaker who said he remembered a man and his daughter visiting the grave last year. The man said he’d ordered the gravestone three years earlier. Burnett didn’t remember a name. He thought the man might be from Chicago.

Modern-day Indian

When I was an assistant city editor at The Oklahoman newspaper in Oklahoma City, they hired a new top editor from Mississippi. One afternoon at a meeting, he looked around at the assembled editors and said, “I thought there were supposed to be Indians in Oklahoma. I haven’t seen any Indians.”

No one said anything, but several of us exchanged looks with, I’m certain, the same thought, “We’re sitting right in front of you.”

Many Oklahomans have Indian ancestors. More than 520,000 Oklahomans identified themselves as American Indian, at least in part. Many are enrolled citizens of one of 39 federally recognized tribes in Oklahoma. Many don’t resemble anyone’s stereotype of an Indian.

Cherokees have long defied European stereotypes. They have been interacting – and intermarrying — with Europeans since the 17th century. They were eager to adopt European technologies that raised their standard of living.

By the early 19th century, they had adopted European-style commercial agriculture and dairy farming practices. They were building gristmills and lumber mills. They grew cotton and sold cloth. They invited Christian missionaries to educate their children. Some adopted the Southern plantation system and, unfortunately, slavery.

Brothers Andrew, John and Lewis Ross were educated, spoke and wrote English fluently and Cherokee only poorly. John Ross reportedly never spoke Cherokee in public.

For a long time, federal policy was based on the notion that Indians would be absorbed into the general U.S. population and would indeed vanish as a distinct people.

Today there are more than 350,000 citizens of the Cherokee Nation, making it the largest federally recognized tribe. The tribe processes 1,200 citizenship applications each month.

So Indians have certainly not vanished. But I struggle with the meaning of Indian identity in the 21st century. What makes a modern Indian? Does learning to make a blowgun or flute from river cane make me more Cherokee? Maybe. Learning to speak the language? Certainly.

But my mind resists the idea that being truly Indian means conforming to some romanticized notion of a once-stone-age people, and that Indians were authentic then, but less so now.

And, at some point, I realized that my own reluctance to embrace my heritage had been based on stereotypes, projected by others and accepted by me. It was my own racial common sense telling me, you’re no Indian.