Comment on Adkins by Doug Couch

I didn’t want to read the entire thread (did read quite a bit), however, I do have a theory about why so many families uprooted and moved to Oklahoma. IT WAS INDIAN TERRITORY. Their relatives had previously been forced to move and live there. Consider this: That many families moving??? Sounds to me like a decision of tribal councils (not that I would know of such things…just makes sense to me). In other words, all of the families were intermarried with Indians, and many of them were Indians (whites on paper, Indians by blood, or perhaps better simply referred to as “The People”).
And yet, when you search for their genealogy, you will find lineages of Europeans. Why? Because it beats being killed.
This did not happen to my great grandmother, born in later generations (b.1882). Her ancestry shows entirely white European heritage. But our family lore always said very certainly that she was Indian, specifically “full blood Cherokee” (be there any such thing by the late 1800s). The families she married into were European, with apparently native ties here and there…but not mentioned as Indian in the genealogical record. She allegedly married five times, but only four of her husbands and some descendants have been found in the record, and you guessed it…all white.
Persecution of Indians has not ceased. There are apparently still families who know they are Indian but swear even to their children they are not. It has been said that records of lineages may exist with various tribes, but it is doubtful that where any such records exist (or are passed down in older ways), that it is desired to have some genealogy-addicted folks get that information and publish it on the web.
I would like to know more, for sure…but frankly, it is unimportant that I possess such information. I am white as they come, and yet I have heard the cries in my heart in the night, and have had a dream of a former life and time as an Indian running through thickets with others. True? Doesn’t really matter. I know who “I” am, and that knowledge is much more precious than who my biological parents’ lineages derived from. The whole world is awaiting our return to this shared knowledge of self, not for the world to discover its biological roots.
In some reading I did several years back (and saved the digitized PDFs of these old books, but with computer crashes, etc., I can no longer find them)…and this reading stated that in the early years of Europeans migrating to this continent, MANY married Indians. Why? To survive, and to have a better quality of life for their families.
When the papal bull came down declaring Indians to be heathens, and making it okay to do with them as the Europeans pleased (ending in wholesale slaughter from coast to coast, men, women and children…entire villages), persecution began in earnest. While it had formerly been very acceptable to be married to Indians and thought well of to be married to Indian equivalents to “royalty” with visits to Europe, when this occurred, it was often a death sentence. Indians with darker skins faded into black communities, and those with lighter skins faded into white communities…and many just faded into the wilderness, hiding out in hideaway communities…so as to NOT be killed or forced to leave their remaining families and tribes, and go to Oklahoma.
Much pain and suffering? Much longing to bring the families back together? These are a given. Who knows but what councils hiding out and still in the east masquerading as non-Indians, decided to join their kin? As whites moving to Oklahoma and being given land as whites, perhaps they would be able to help their “known to be Indian” relatives who had no standing like the whites had.
So perhaps the question to be asking yourself is not “who in our family were Indians?”…but “who were not Indians?”