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I bet you are wondering whether this is going to be about the senior senator from Massachusetts who is currently running for president and attracting the name “Pocahontas” as a racial epithet by the incumbent or about the historical girl of that name whose collision with English settlers defined her entire life? It’s about both, an attempt to show how two cultural tropes — both with tenuous connections to reality — collided.
Let’s start with as much reality as we can discern in the 21st century about somebody who born in the 16th century. We know Pocahontas was an Indian girl from an Algonquian-speaking tribe and she was a real, historical person. All else is contested.
Pocahontas is said to have been a daughter of Powhatan, a Very Important Person among (probably) the people known today as Pamunkey, living in what we now call Virginia. Understanding of Indian political offices suffered in translation, a problem aggravated by a strong undercurrent of nonsense that to this day claims American Indians were innocent of sophisticated governmental forms until shown the way by white people. This would be the same white people who at the time were representatives of a feudal society just beginning to experiment with the privately held but Royally chartered corporation.
Put more plainly, Indians had representative government at a time when Europeans still had kings who claimed God anointed them. Some people today understand Powhatan to have been important enough that he was principal chief of a confederation of Algonquian peoples, of which the Pamunkey were one. Whatever Powhatan’s exact office or how he acquired it, he was a person with whom the colonists had to interact, and it was a political advantage to those in charge of the colony if interaction with Powhatan was perceived to be difficult and dangerous.
The Complete Works of Captain John Smith tell a swashbuckling tale of how dangerous the Natives were, as reported by an alleged master of the swash and the buckle with the unpretentious name of John Smith. History spares us why he did not call himself James Bond, but we know his contemporaries tried several times to exile and even execute the man they called “an ambityous unworthy and vayneglorious fellowe.”
Published at a time when both Pocahontas and Powhatan had walked on, a tale has come down to us claiming that the barbarous and fearsome Powhatan was about to have Captain Swashbuckle’s brains splattered by Pamunky war clubs. A 13 year old Pocahontas, under the influence of love or blinded by the sheer magnetism of the man about to be brained, shielded him with her body and talked her father down from his agreement with a substantial number of the colonists that Smith needed killing.
Modern historians are virtually unanimous that tale was a figment of Smith’s talent for self-promotion.
Pocahontas, however, was a real person, who really came to live in the Virginia Colony as a love-struck teenager or a hostage, depending on who is telling the story. She professed conversion to Christianity and took the name “Rebecca.”
By the time Powhatan agreed to the terms of her ransom, Rebecca had married a tobacco planter ten years her senior, John Rolfe, on April 5, 1614. Histories told from both sides of the colonial-Indian divide agree that the marriage of Pocahontas to Rolfe sealed a peace that lasted as long as she did.
Rolfe took his bride to England in 1616, where she was a celebrity, presented at the Court of King James I as a “civilized savage.” It was during Mr. Rolfe’s victory lap, according to some tales, that she learned her True Love, John Smith, was still alive. She had been told that he was dead.
The cause of her death is contested as is the date. Some say smallpox and some say a broken heart. Or a sub-category of broken heart, homesickness. Whichever, Pocahontas never saw her homeland again. She died as Rebecca Rolfe, most sources say in March and was buried in Gravesend, England, in 1617, although the location of her grave is as uncertain as the date of her death.
John Rolfe returned to the “New World” and was killed by Indians in 1622. Since white people died, the incident was called a “massacre.” Thomas Rolfe, the son of John and Rebecca/Pocahontas, remained in England to be educated and then came across the ocean and made himself prosperous.
John Smith went on to weave the tales that would make him famous or notorious, depending on your point of view.
A man of the 20th century, Walt Disney, would found a movie studio and make a film based on John Smith’s self-promoting fantasy. The sexual undercurrent of the fantasy would inspire faux Indian garb for teens we call “Pocahottie,” with lust or bitter irony, depending on who is reporting. On the strength of a film named after her but hardly even touching her real life, Pocahontas would become famous and Walt Disney would become even more prosperous.
Pocahontas, in death, remains a symbol of contested historical narratives. She either adopted the virtues of “civilization” and brought peace to the frontier or was kidnapped by English barbarians for their own purposes. She was a frightened child or an exotic sexual fantasy. She was madly in love or forced into marriage with a much older man.
We only know for certain that Pocahontas insured the fame and the prosperity of others and that her historical legacy remains contested. Important by all accounts, Pocahontas remains all these years later a major player in the stories other people tell for their own reasons.
One reason for prevarication arose in Pocahontas’ birthplace of Virginia with the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, the brainchild of Dr. Walter Ashby Plecker, a leading light of the eugenics movement. Plecker contrived to be in charge of his own law when he became Registrar for the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics. His law recognized only two “races” in the Commonwealth of Virginia, “white” and “colored,” effectively legislating American Indians out of existence. From his post as Registrar, Plecker enforced the “one drop rule” against African-Americans and Indians alike, and no “colored” person like my father could lawfully marry a white person like my mother until the U.S. Supreme Court struck down the law in 1967.
Racial “integrity” did not stop with marriage. Having the wrong notation on one’s birth certificate engaged the full panoply of prohibitions that traveled under the name “Jim Crow.” Under the transparent legal fiction of “separate but equal,” those denoted “colored” faced inferior schools and public accommodations. Most famously, Plecker used the Racial Integrity Act to dig up “colored” persons buried in “white” cemeteries.
The cream of Virginia society, organized as First Families of Virginia, quickly had the Racial Integrity Act amended to relieve Indians from the one drop rule and set the standard for whiteness at less than 1/16 Indian blood. The FFV greatly prized descent from Thomas Rolfe, the only child of John and Rebecca Rolfe AKA Pocahontas. Plecker’s campaign against the Pocahontas Exception was unsuccessful, and social snobbery trumped the “science” of eugenics in Virginia law.
When Oklahoma became a state in 1907, race relations were complicated in a manner much more broadly based than the FFV. The Five Tribes of today were then called the Five Civilized Tribes, and they were removed from their ancestral homelands under color of “treaties.”
The Choctaws signed the Treaty of Dancing Rabbit Creek in 1830, and Article IV of that treaty provided that Choctaw lands in Indian Territory would never be part of a state without tribal permission.
The Creeks entered the Treaty of Cusseta Creek in 1832 at gunpoint. Still, Article 14 of Cusseta provided that the Creek lands acquired by involuntary exchange for the homelands would never be part of a state without tribal consent.
The Seminoles agreed in the Treaty of Payne’s Landing to join the Creeks in Indian Territory — at least the part of the Seminoles amenable to being removed. The entire tribe famously never surrendered and as a result there is still a Seminole reservation in Florida.
The Chickasaws signed the Treaty of Pontotoc Creek without a promise they could remain outside the U.S. in 1832, but they came back in 1834 with an appendix to Pontotoc Creek in which Article 2 promises the Chickasaw Reservation will never be involuntarily part of a state.
The U.S. government entered a purported treaty with the Cherokee Nation in 1835. None of the Cherokee signers held any office in the tribal government that gave them the power to agree, but the Treaty of New Echota was ratified in 1836 over the objections of the real Cherokee government by one vote.
At the turn of the 20th century, it appeared that statehood was in the air, treaties be damned. The leaders of the Five Tribes met in a constitutional convention and proposed the State of Sequoyah to the U.S. Congress, where it was a non-starter. In 1907, Indian Territory was folded together with Oklahoma Territory and the “no man’s land” of what is now the panhandle to form the state of Oklahoma.
Reservation lands not allotted to individual Indians were opened for white settlement. The Cherokee Outlet, a strip of land reserved by treaty for access to buffalo hunting on the Great Plains went first, in a spectacular land rush. Those who disdained following the rules and sneaked into the lands about to be opened to stake claims in advance became known as “sooners.”
Oklahoma is known, with little objection, as “the sooner state,” after these thieves without honor, and that is also the sobriquet for the University of Oklahoma football team. “Sooner” relates to the land rushes, but there were other white people the tribal governments called “intruders.” Some married into Indian Territory but most just wandered across the border seeking their fortunes, often at the expense of Indians. Some Indian treaties contained promises by the United States to remove intruders, but those promises proved as valuable as other promises in the same treaties.
By the time the tribal governments came together to attempt forming the State of Sequoyah, white intruders outnumbered Indians in the lands about to be designated the state of Oklahoma in violation of the removal treaties. When failure to remove the white intruders also violated some of the treaties, it was a much lesser violation beside forcing the Five Tribes into the United States without tribal consent.
So it came to be that Oklahoma was born in fraud by the U.S. government and theft by the individuals attracted by the promise of “free land.” The only advantage for Indians I can see in this peculiar history is that they were never hit full force by the Jim Crow laws, as they were in much of the south. There was a great deal of overlap between delegates to the Sequoyah constitutional convention and to the Oklahoma constitutional convention. Tribal citizens had been running things in Indian Territory and they continued to run things in the new state of Oklahoma.
All of the Five Tribes, it pains me to report, were to some degree involved with the peculiar institution of chattel slavery. Some owned slaves and some were for hire as slave catchers. So Jim Crow came to Oklahoma. He just inserted Indians above blacks and below whites in the fantasy hierarchy of race. Most of the Confederate States of America were like Virginia — you were white or colored — but no other state applied the one drop rule even briefly to Indians.
What I am about to suggest is the solution to a question that has vexed me from the time I came to understand the social lay of the land in the state where I was born and raised. If you think I am assigning too great a role to guilt, then please offer another explanation for the attitude that being “part Indian” is cool but being an FBI (full-blooded Indian) is not.
The number of Cherokee grandmother stories is easily explained by the Cherokee being the largest of the Five Tribes and the cultural trappings ascribed to persons “part Indian” being Lakota or perhaps generic Plains Indian is easily explained by television and the movies.
None of that explains how a bit of Indian blood is a positive but exclusively Indian blood is a negative. Here’s my theory.
The tribes that inhabited Indian Territory were placed there involuntarily by acts ranging from fraud to military force. Having created Indian Territory for the U.S. government’s convenience and populated it by sketchy practices, that same government completely trashed the treaties that the Indians considered bogus in the first place. That is, they stole our land and then stole the land given in exchange. Adding insult to injury, the settlers did not even follow their own rules for the distribution of the stolen land and then bragged about it by calling themselves “sooners.”
My theory starts on the assumption that nobody would want to be associated with that much evil. I came to it by noticing that the Cherokee grandmother stories come out when Indians are claiming injury from racist remarks, unfair business dealings, or being mascotted. The Cherokee grandmother enables avoidance of guilt by claiming, “Hey, I’m Indian, too.”
Within Oklahoma, there are truly mountains of historical guilt to be avoided, particularly within settler families that came to Oklahoma just after statehood, when the land was freshly stolen. How could granddad have stolen from Indians when granma was one?
I presume the nameless Indian ancestor is always female because the males might have resisted the theft violently and so be vilified as bloodthirsty savages. Once more, I invite those who don’t like my explanation to proffer their own. The use of the nameless ancestor was to escape blame for at a minimum accepting the proceeds of theft and at worst becoming an accessory after the fact. The Cherokee grandmother had to be far enough back to be hard to document and to make the amount of Indian blood small enough to avoid attacks from practicing racists.
One way to put it is that when Elizabeth Warren claims to have a Cherokee grandmother based on a family story, she is putting forward a tale common to lots of white settlers in Oklahoma. The distance back to the time when the Cherokee ancestor lived is a common part of the meme, and it could be understood as Okies creating their own Pocahontas Exception.
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This post was previously published on www.medium.com and is republished here with permission from the author.
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