Thanks to a Thanksgiving Day spent with family, I learned a piece of my genealogy that had been a mystery to me for a long time. As a child, I was proud of one quirky fact in my family’s history: a smidgen of native American ancestry. I used to mouth off, “I’m one-sixteenth Indian,” as if it offered an explanation for the differences I felt between me and my same age peers. There is something about my response to life that does not quite mesh with the ethnic majority. A piece of coal in a gravel driveway, a splat of odd-colored paint in the homogenous whole.
I grew up in an enclave of mostly German Lutherans, the 4th generation to descend from the original pioneers who’d come from northern Germany to transform the fertile prairies and sloughs of northeast Iowa into farms. My great grandparents’ names appeared on the plat maps in the 1870s, and I studied the German language off and on since about 3rd grade, extended my college career by taking it for five semesters in college. My family says “ja” instead of “yes,” and all the old tombstones say “geboren” and “gestorben” instead of born and died.
Educated agricultural people, there’s nothing to be ashamed of in my hard working German ancestry. My pacifist great uncle(s) escaped from Kaiser Wilhelm’s military by smuggling himself onto a ship for America. My grandma wore her hand-sewn dress and apron into a chicken-house full of squawking hens, reaching under feathers and their thorny toes for the eggs that waited in wire baskets in her basement to be candled for roosters.
That heritage is a part of me, yet there is more. Beyond the shaping caused by personal experiences, I feel a difference in hereditary temperament, and I see a little of that difference in my brothers and sisters. One that is rooted in the genetic dust motes that cannot be extinguished, the way fatal diseases can’t ever be entirely wiped off the globe, or rumors arise of animals once thought to be extinct.
For me, the difference involves a a type of quietness inside that’s not exactly spiritualism, but an ethereal link with the natural world, with the trees and earth and birds, an affiliation stronger than I sense other people feel, one that makes it painful when I walk by a tree trunk, once a living rooted creature, cut down by thoughtless ignorant coldness to shared life.
The difference is also about interior language, a river that runs at flood stage internally, so much larger than the puny creek that is expressed to people around me. I perceive that same exterior verbal silence in my siblings, a listening pose, a receptivity that reflects the slower pace of assembling response to input.
As an adult, I took the family myth of Indian heritage seriously and it impelled me to research regional tribes. I read books by James Welch, Susan Power, Black Hawk, Buffalo Bird Woman, learned about the Sac and Fox, the 1862 Sioux uprising in Minnesota, read the history of the Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, Winnebago, Mdewakanton Sioux, went to pow wows, sewed an attempt at regalia, put rabbit fur and feathers on my walls.
Each time I explored the history of a particular tribe I tried to feel back with my intuition to see if any of it resonated, if any of the faces looked familiar, the way that old photos of great grandparents resemble the faces of young generations. I ruled out the closest tribe in proximity, the Meskwaki, and tried to figure out who else might have traveled to Iowa, in all the crisscrossing coerced chaos of Indian movement in the 19th century.
The generations of my family that are now passed on were so secretive about the connection, I wondered if my Indian relation was one of those who slipped into the folds of Iowa river valleys, hanging back from the government’s push west, preferring to cling to fertile homeland by merging identity with the white Iowans. “Forgetting” would be safest, blending in would mean survival. Or were they willing the tribal identity to be lost due to surrounding prejudice?
I floundered, the connection remained murky, the impulse to research faded. When I found and moved to Dubuque, the remnants of history that are kept alive here, the deep coulees and crunchy oak leaves leading to tree-veiled vistas from a high hills that might have been bucketed in dirt by long ago mound builders, I knew this place spoke to me as home. There exists here the twin energies of German-ness and native sensibilities that also exist within myself.
Now, at last, since yesterday, I know the specific tribe of my ancestry. And it is one I never would have guessed, because it’s not regional at all: Cherokee. Yes, the same tribe whose people were decimated by the infamous heartrending Trail of Tears. Not whooping, painted buffalo hunters who camped on the plains, but settled people who knew reading and writing early on and then were forced from their hilly southern farms after a series of cold-hearted legal blows during the presidential regime of the genocidal Andrew Jackson.
The geography makes sense. Dad always said that his dad came from Missouri, an implausible fact which I interpreted as being confused with possibly a tribe along the Missouri river, like the Mandan. Missouri is a state with not much Indian influence since the ancient civilization of Cahokia imploded due to the tenuousness of urban life before modern sanitation. The map of the enforced Trail of Tears migration not only crosses the state, but an un-sourced Wikipedia citation says that a segment of Cherokee moved to the state of Missouri before that. And if Wikipedia says so, it must be true…? It’s a heritage definitely worth exploring further.
