I am more than fog

melted by

mid-morning sun–

more than smoke

scattered by wind

dwindled by time–

more than a footprint

left on a beach

washed away by tides–

I am a song played

on eternal strings,

sounding endlessly

through halls

of forever.

 

Note: “If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.” Obi Wan Kenobi (Star Wars)

“The secrets of the master are not found in his ashes, but rather in the flame he ignites in others.” Master Rick Pickens (He may have gotten it from somewhere else but I heard it from him.)

 

A friend calls me Country Bumpkin. I don’t mind. I find the most simple things in this world are also the most complex and far-reaching. I have a need to be surrounded by those complex simplicities. I do my best thinking when I’m alone, surrounded by nature. That’s when I have my epiphanies, my eureka-sparks, my moments of brilliance (okay, well, they’re brilliant to me.)

I need to touch the earth, to feel the sun on my face and the wind on my lips. I need the smell of soil and the sounds of birds. I need dragonflies and butterflies and tiny garden snakes. I need crickets and snails and random centipedes. I need to see the stars at night and wonder at the moon. I need the magic of trees. I need the sound of rain falling on the leaves and scent of a wet woodland floor, spring peepers and fire-flies.

When I am surrounded by the natural world, it doesn’t matter what I look like or sound like. It doesn’t matter what accomplishments I’ve made or failures I’ve experienced. All that matters is that I make like a flower, grow, bloom and produce some sort of seed for future flowers to grow, so that there will always be flowers on the earth. A seed can be an idea, an invention, an investment into the lives of others. A seed can be a song, a poem, a book. A seed can be a simple act of kindness. Flowers don’t compare themselves to other flowers. They just grow and bloom, according to whatever kind of plants they are.

 

When I was a little girl

Daddy played guitar

sang off-key

to me, he was a star.

He’d sing

Mary Don’t you Weep

There’s an Unclouded Day

Be Careful of the Stones You Throw

and Jesus is the Way.

But my favorite song of the hour

was when he’d sing

The  Wildwood Flower.

Then he’d stop and say,

“You’re my wildwood flower

bloom where God plans

I’ll be watching over you

but our lives-

are in His hands.”

Years came and went

my  little girl days were spent

roaming woods

skipping rocks

climbing trees.

There never was a time

I wasn’t free.

I suppose we don’t know

what we’ve got until it’s gone.

We forget life is as fragile as a weed

I held my daddy’s hand

as I squatted on my knees

The man who sang to me

was a flower all along.

For as long as I live

I’ll be listening to his songs,

Mary Don’t you Weep and

There’s an Unclouded Day

Be Careful of the Stones you Throw

And Jesus is the Way.

But my favorite song of the hour

Was when he’d sing

The  Wildwood Flower

Then he’d stop and say,

“You’re my wildwood flower

blooming where God plans

I’m always watching you

but our lives-

are in God’s hands

 

I went out, hoe in hand

to tend my garden

beside the clothesline.

 

Blade to soil,

I uncovered a deer

buried in pieces

hacked apart

never to be found.

 

 Yet—

there he was

mutilated,

scattered,

obscured

but his blood

still ran–Red.

 

 I looked at the clothes

hanging on that line,

the ones I had not yet worn,

even though they were mine

his blood spotted them.

 

I felt his pain

from being ripped asunder

from being lost in time

covered by layers of dirt

like pottery shards.

Devastated. Grieved.

I wept.

 

Wars had severed him

Disease had killed him

Politics had buried him

 

His demise had been

deliberate

His enforced mutism

premeditated

 

Same blood that spotted my clothes

pierced my heart.

Separated by years and lies

we were one.

 

A voice called

from a distant place.

His mother.

Deer body,

Earth Spirit.

Her love was strong

her medicine great.

He came together.

He stood.

 

Another voice called,

from the sky, a beam of light

came down, Great Spirit,

his Father, and this voice

brought life

transformation.

The deer became a boy.

He breathed. He lived.

He walked toward

his mother

his father

and my soul

walked with him.

I’ve grown up, like many Southerners and Appalachians, being told I was Native American. There was no myth of a “Cherokee princess” in my family, on either side. That was NEVER our story. Our story was one of a people who had gone underground to hide their true identities and it came through my grandma, Sally Rogers Franklin (Pabilo).  My other Granny always told me that she had “Indian” ancestry but she didn’t believe it was Cherokee.  The term Blackfoot got tossed around a lot, but I couldn’t figure that one because I learned in school that Blackfoot lived far away from here, like up in Montana. Later, I discovered that her family origins were intertwined with Melungeons, who are intertwined with the Eastern Siouan tribes.

 The tall man in the hat is my maternal grandfather. He had strong British lines. The lady in pink is my maternal grandmother. She was descended from Wallens, Collins [of Hawkins County, TN), Leaches, Sizemores, Gibsons and others who go back to Russell, Clinton and Wayne Counties and even future back to Tennesee and North Carolina. Granny’s family had several Melungeon lines that seemed to culminate when her parents married.  The man in white is my dad and my mom is partially out of the photo. 

As some of you know, this past summer I had an autosomal DNA test done, but unlike some people, I couldn’t just take it at face value and simply say I was such and such a percentage of this and that and then let it go. I knew genetics had to be more complicated than that, so I did what I always do, dug deeper. I was introduced to GEDmatch.com, which is a  cool site that lets you break down DNA results. It’s a bit technical but to me, it’s worth the challenge to uncover more than just the “estimation” that you get with your DNA results. It could be a genealogist’s dear friend.

Now, like most folks whose family has lived in the Southeastern U.S. since before George Washington first soiled his diapers, I had a big old chunk of British Isles. 45% at first glance, but the percentages from AncestryDNA and 23andMe are only estimations and there is a wide range that allows the percentage to possibly be a lot more or a lot less. But for now, let’s just leave roughly half my DNA with the British Isles and talk about the rest of me, that other 55%, give or take a few numbers, depending on which company you ask and what calculator you use.

I did not get a report back from a genetic testing company saying, “You are ____% (specific kind) of Native American.” Wouldn’t that be nice? But that’s not the way your results come back from AncestryDNA or 23andMe. But what you do get that’s cool is your raw data which you can take to a third party calculator. Please remember that so far the DNA companies are HEAVILY weighted toward European results and it doesn’t break it down by ethnic group, only by regions. My 23andMe did show a small percentage of Native American DNA, but not as much as it should have been according to my paper documentation. Also, remember that the absence of evidence is NOT the evidence of absence. For example, if your documented family history shows that your great-great-grandmother was Samoan but your DNA test doesn’t show Somoan, that doesn’t mean you’re not of Samoan descent or that you don’t have a Samoan heritage. It just means that your DNA doesn’t show it. It also means you might have inherited a different 50% of the Somoan descended parent’s DNA. Do you still have the right to claim Samoan heritage and be a part of the culture that your parent was a part of? Sure you do.

So, I sat down and asked myself, “What do I KNOW about my heritage?” Well, I know that maternal grandfather’s family was mostly the British Isles and her neighbor, Normandy. So, I should expect at least 45% percent British Isles because they’re scattered throughout every family line and on every side of any family who has been in Appalachia as long as mine has. I know that my father’s maternal ancestors were English on one side and on the other side were documented French/German-Moravians who lived among the Cherokee and traveled here along with soldiers who had been sent to guard Moravian Town and that the soldiers belonged to the Rogers family and that some of them are documented as having Cherokee wives.

My very handsome father. My gorgeous and camera-shy mother.

I know that my dad’s paternal grandmother is listed in the 1900 censuses as being mulatto and that she changed her name four times. I know that my paternal great-great-grandfather came from Gila River. I know that he called himself a Spanish Indian. I know that my mother’s mother’s family dates back to known Melungeon families on at least three sides. So, what should I expect to see in my DNA beyond the obvious British Isles? Well, I should expect to see some Iberian, maybe some Mediterranean, maybe some Scandinavian (Normandy was populated by Scandanavians) and possibly some African and I should expect to see some Native American, right? Well, I did see all of these things in varying percentages, but when I dug deeper, I saw much more and that’s when things got fascinating.

My Iberian/Native American great-great-grandfather.My Paternal Grandparents. Sorry, it’s hard to see. My grandfather is the one holding the child and my grandmother, Sally Rogers, is the one in white socks. They didn’t have a lot of photos made. The two dressed funny are my uncles. I think it was Halloween or something and they dressed up silly for the photo. T

Let’s get back to the GEDmatch.com site.  Now, it’s true that different calculators will give you different results because they’re geared toward finding different things and they will  each give you different percentages, but I’m not looking for iron-clad percentages, I’m looking for a continuity of population references that consistently turn up and lend clues to an overall bigger picture; some of those that keep turning up for me, which made me start asking questions are: Samoyedic, Melanesian, Austronesian, Arctic_Amerindian (specifically Inuit and Beringian), Altaic (Indo-Tibetan), Amerindian, Meso-American Indian (sometimes shows up), and South-American Indian. Now, granted, each one of these is in small doses, individually, but when added together do they indicate something else? My first response was Samo-what? So, I began to research and found out about these awesome folks who have made the Russian Tundra their home.

(Isn’t this family beautiful?)

Then I wanted to know how an Appalachian Foothills gal, like me, with absolutely no recorded origins in Siberia could possibly have Samoyedic DNA?

And what about the Melanesian and Austronesian? How could I have THAT?! And let’s not forget the traces of Meso-American and South American, specifically a group of people called Botocudo (Oceanic people)?  To answer my questions, I’ve been researching.

Melanesian Child (I just think this little guy is adorable) www. quora.com

Austronesian Girl (wn.com)

Botocuda, Native Brazilian.

Let’s tie it all together with a link to some interesting articles.

https://dna-explained.com/2015/07/22/some-native-americans-had-oceanic-ancestors/

http://www.latimes.com/science/sciencenow/la-sci-sn-native-american-origins-dna-20150721-story.html

http://www.geocurrents.info/place/russia-ukraine-and-caucasus/siberia/siberian-genetics-native-americans-and-the-altai-connection

So, it appears that all these references to Melanesian, Austronesian, Siberian, Altaic (Ind0-Tibetan) and Oceanic are just further indicators that my family’s stories about Native American heritage are true and that my documented familial lines are on the right track. One thing that was surprising to me was that I had a slice of India show up in my chromosome paintings on Gedmatch and in some of the calculators. Now, knowing which calculator to use is a whole other post! In addition to the slice of India/Pakistan showing up, there were strong indications of significant heritage from Eastern Europe (again, when does it become Western Asia?) I don’t think the India/Eastern Europe (mine seems to center around present-day Checkosovalkia, Hungary, Western Russia and Romania) thing is related to being Native American or Melungeon, but I do know that the British Isles and other European countries sent their Gypsies to the New World to get rid of them so that is a possibility.

Then again, it could be that my father’s Moravian ancestors actually were from Moravia first before ending up in France and that many Moravian and Bohemian people have traces of Romani in their DNA. I also had a lot of Basque showing up in the Iberian portions, but I do know that many of the men who traveled with the Conquistadors were of Basque origin, but it was researching the DNA results that led me to discover that fact. It makes sense that I would have Basque because my great-great-grandfather was a mestizo. Romani? Basque?Who knows for sure? Another interesting thing is that my maternal haplogroup is highest among the Basque and Tuareg peoples of Northern Africa. Now, that’s strange because my mom has NO documented Iberian descent. She does have Melungeon. I think I should consider doing a mitochondrial test in the near future because this intrigues me.

Whatever the case, when I look in the mirror, sometimes, I see a little bit of Spain peeking back at me and sometimes, I see a taste of Bohemia and Romania, and I see a Celtic gal, a Pict, with ties to Lands End and ancient France, and now…yeah, I can see Samoyedic and Austronesian traces, but I always see one who loves the Earth and her Creator, who sees the beauty in all of Earth’s people, who longs to be Spirit-led and see with spirit eyes. I belong to my ancestors and to my descendants, to the Creator and to the Earth. I don’t need anyone to tell me who I am, but it is fun to discover all the pathways my ancestors traveled. I do not believe in accidents. I was meant to be and so were you.

 

 And this is ME!

 

 

I’m attempting to pick up where I left off with my Catawba story. Now, keep in mind that I am mostly going to focus on those who intermarried with Melungeon families and wound up in Kentucky, but in order to do that, I need to touch on other things as well. In my last post, I established that there was contact between Spanish explorers and their slaves, many who were from Basque Country, North Africa and Italy, as well as Spain and Portugal. Hence, there is a logical possibility that European DNA was introduced into the Catawba and Saponi in the early part of the 1500s. By the 1800s, wars and Small Pox epidemics wiped out the majority of the Catawba people. Struggling to survive, they set out in groups.

After the Revolutionary War, some of them went back to the land they had fled from. In 1826, they leased about half their reservation to Whites and the money they got from this leasing allowed those few survivors of what I call the Catawba Holocaust to survive. But the survival was meager.

 In 1840, the Catawba signed a treaty with the government of South Carolina and sold all but one square mile of their original homeland of thousands of acres. But the treaty was invalidated by the federal government on the grounds that the state of South Carolina didn’t have the right to make it in the first place. Surrounded by Whites on all sides, some of the remaining Catawba went to join the Eastern Cherokee in North Carolina, but the cultural differences were just as pronounced among the Cherokee as they were among the Whites and life among the Cherokee was unpleasant for most of the Catawba. The Cherokee, although willing to extend a hand of mercy, never truly saw the Catawba as their people. All but a few who had intermarried with the Cherokee and one elderly woman who died in 1889, returned to their tiny parcel of land in South Carolina.

Some of these remaining Catawba later moved to Indian Territory in Oklahoma as a result of the Indian Allotment Act. Indians were supposed to receive free land and the excess land was to be sold to settlers and the revenue given to the tribes. Some Catawba went as part of the Cherokee Nation to receive free Indian Land but they were denied the land because the Cherokee knew their own and they knew the Catawba and Melungeons. The White Top Laurel group was considered a mixed people and though they definitely had “Indian” blood, neither the Cherokee nor the federal government would recognize them as Cherokee, so they were denied. It didn’t mean they weren’t “Indian.” It just meant that weren’t the right” Indians. These Catawba remnants who had mingled and become associated with the Melungeons in order to survive were literally being robbed of their identity at every turn. Small Pox, war, forced removal, broken treaties—it was forced assimilation, genocide. By the mid-1800s, the federal government had what it wanted concerning the Catawba people, they basically were “Indian no more.” They had been stripped of everything except their desire to live and provide for their families.

Some of those who went to Oklahoma were received by the Choctaw Nation and literally gave up their cultural ways and identities. They became Choctaw and their descendants live among them to this day. Others met with Mormon missionaries in Oklahoma and became members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints. They continued westward with the Mormons. Still, others returned to the southeastern areas from whence they had come, to Tennessee and Kentucky and Virginia and the Carolinas. I think that it was during this time that my own great grandfather, William Wallen (descended from an unknown gal named Jane Collins) and his wife, Mary Caroline went to receive land but instead of land, they received tuberculosis and William died in Oklahoma. He is buried there. Mary Caroline died back home in Wayne County, Kentucky, and their children were left orphans.

At this point, I need to travel back in time and revisit some things in order to get myself back on track; it does seem that the Christianized Catawba had “English-sounding” names and I won’t even attempt to say where they got them. I suppose that living among English speakers and having taken sides with the colonists in the Revolutionary War may have had some influence on their changing their names. These Christianized Catawba were known to have learned the English language and therefore, it makes sense that they would have also learned the ways of the settlers. The names they carried were names like Collins, Goins, Blevins, Coles, Clonchs, Nuckolls, Moore, Perkins and others. These Christian Catawba were known as “friendly Indians,” and were often found in the company of European settlers. When asked who they were by English settlers, some of them answered that they were “Portugy.” Was there a legend among these people dating back to the days of the Conquistadors? Did they carry the DNA of those long gone explorers?

 Eventually, these families and many others would become the signposts names of Melungeon families. Members from one of these “friendly Indians” groups, the Sizemore (from which I am descended through my maternal grandmother’s father, who was the great grandson of Nancy Sizemore), are suspected by some researchers to have been affiliated with the Catawba but later when they applied for tribal recognition as Cherokee, in hopes of receiving free land, they were denied. The reason they identified as Cherokee is because, at one time after they had been decimated by war and disease, the Catawba were under the jurisdiction of the Cherokee.  Thus was born a trend, numerous families that would populate the southeastern United States and claim Cherokee heritage, only to be turned down again and again by the U.S. government and by the Cherokee nation. The Cherokee didn’t recognize them as Cherokee so the government didn’t recognize them as Indian. For a long time, the world forgot who the Catawba were. Their language was almost completely gone, their culture became a legend and even they forgot who they were, many only remembering that somewhere back in time, Granny or Paw-paw had been “Indian” and they believed it was “Cherokee.” Some settled in the Greasy Rock area and some in Pilot and some in the White Top Mountains, but it appears that others continued to move out from these places. The Sizemore (White Top Laurel Clan who identified as Cherokee but some records indicate they were originally Catawba). These Sizemore seemed to move with the Blevins, Perkins, and Baldwins. Some migrated on into Ohio and are now known as Carmel Indians.  Some migrated to “Indian Territory” in Arkansas and Oklahoma.

I’m skipping a lot of details, mainly because this is an overview, not an all-inclusive, exhaustive and comprehensive breakdown of how Catawba-Melungeon families got to Kentucky.

Many of these families, the names of some which have become lost in the layers of Appalachian soil, migrated to Hancock and Hawkins Counties in Tennessee, and later into the southeastern Kentucky. The last known migrations of these “Melungeons” with Catawba and White Top Laurel ties (census records of the family names, etc.) shows them along the Cumberland River of Kentucky in what is now Rockcastle, Pulaski, Wayne, Clinton, Cumberland, Adair, Russell and Casey Counties. They have married extensively into “old” Kentucky families and in many towns, they WERE the first families to settle the area. Their names and the families they married into either right before coming to the area or right after include Harmon, Easley, Smith, Green, Parnell, Rogers, Adams, Riddle, Ramsey, Sizemore, Leach, Wallen, Neal, Guffey, Denney, Wells, Downey, Starnes/Stearns and others that I can’t think of right now.

 As for those whose descendants aren’t the Christian Catawba they were denied the right to vote until the 1940s, even though they had to pay land taxes and were subject to the same laws as their White neighbors. In 1959, the government completely stripped them of the right to even call themselves Indian and terminated them as a tribe, denying them any and all federal benefits that other tribes received. In 1973, the Catawba applied to be federally recognized. They were small in number and had endured enormous hardships as a people in order to survive. Many of them had long ago lost their identities but a few still clung to the knowledge of who they were and in 1975 they adopted a constitution that had been modeled on their 1944 version prior to the government disbanding them altogether. It wasn’t until 1994 that the United States government recognized the Catawba people as a nation. 

The Christian Catawba who ended up in Kentucky were the victims of genocide and forced assimilation. They were never able to reclaim their status as part of the Catawba Nation.

An interesting side note: the Kentucky River was once called the Catawba River.

Sources:
http://sciway3.net/clark/freemoors/LewisJarvis.html

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~varussel/other/forts.html

http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~varussel/landgrants/washcorsurvbk.html

http://vancehawkins.blogspot.com

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catwaba_people

http://historical-melungeons.blogspot.com/p/lewis-jarvis-article.html