This entanglement of Creek and Cherokee blood with the legal stipulations of racial identity has caused Davis to give up on fighting the powers that be. The process is long, and the affirmation may never come. She doesn’t want to have to prove herself to anyone, and this has been a fight stretching back decades into her childhood.
Darnella Davis was born in Oklahoma but as a child moved with her family to Detroit during the rise of the Black Power movement. Her family migrated after a relative told her father that there were factory jobs in the North that would offer better pay than the railroad jobs in Vinita, Oklahoma. To Darnella, Detroit was a cultural shock. “People ask me, ‘How did you call yourself before Civil Rights?’ I tell them that we were the Davis family on my dad’s side and the Adams family on my mom’s side. We were a clan onto ourselves.” To her, home in Oklahoma was a “mixed-person kingdom.”
Before Detroit, Davis grew up in a town called Beggs, ten miles outside of Okmulgee, a city in Creek Nation. In Okmulgee, blacks were said to live under the bridge and whites lived on the hill. Beggs was different: “Everybody lived together. I have my great-grandmother saying blacks, whites, and Indians all ate in the hotel together. I have my mother remembering a sheriff saying, as to Jim Crow, ‘This is Beggs. We don’t do that here. We’re not having separate things.’” Everyone was family, and there was no place that was unsafe. Growing up in Detroit when Martin Luther King Jr. came down Woodward Avenue was a triumphant moment for all black locals, like Davis and her family, but there was no room in the conversation for both black and native identity. Similar to Terry Ligon’s life, the civil rights movement inspired those of African descent to lean more into black identity than into any other part of their background.
She didn’t know of any other freedmen in Detroit, and there wasn’t much discussion about that status label. Alongside the civil rights movement, these discussions on black identity have their origins from the revolution of the American academy. In the 1960s, African American history courses and departments proliferated along with the rise of the civil rights and Black Power movements. Dr. James Leiker, chair of the History and Political Science departments at Johnson Community College, said that this rise inadvertently shed light on the intersections of black identity: “There was a focus to correct earlier narratives, but that focus gets set up through one lens at a time. You have one thread that is African American studies and another thread which is Native American studies, but you’re still taking a bigger narrative and breaking it up into categories. In the last ten to twenty years, there are more scholars trying to connect all of these things.”
For Darnella Davis, the connection is self-identification. “I am a person of color. I’ve membership in the Muscogee Creek Nation and a Cherokee freedmen heritage. That’s who I am.” Part of the pride Davis takes in self-recognition arises from the fact that, once her family moved from Oklahoma to Detroit, her father didn’t talk about home or the land that they had owned. She didn’t understand. Her father’s family was composed of large landowners. They were prosperous, owning a convenience store in their small town for over a hundred years. Davis wanted to know why her relatives fled after World War II. The land allotment rules kept changing, depending on how much Indian blood you had. Originally there were 40 acres for the homestead and 120 for ranching and farming. Her family left because their acreage was shrinking. The land restrictions meant that family members would get taxed more for having less Indian blood than others. These restrictions made it easier for outsiders to come in and buy these land allotments. The encroachment made them realize that their way of life was ending. This proud family was carrying a lot of hurt, hence their migration.
When I asked Davis about DNA tests, she admits that she did take three of them—one of which was the same one I took—but requests that I don’t divulge the names so as to not single out any company. I withheld all names so no process of elimination can be done.
Davis took these tests when seeking enrollment in the Cherokee Nation. They showed negligible Native American ancestry. She was found to be 50 percent African, 36 percent European, 8 percent Asian/Pacific Islander, and 5 percent Native American.3 How can that be if Davis’s father was Cherokee? Since we last spoke, Davis reached out to tell me that her profile in two companies had been updated: there was no percentage of Pacific Islander and her Native blood percentage had increased. That still made her less than a quarter native. She tells me these meager amounts are common among her friend group: “For those who find nothing, as has been the case with mixed-race friends who can trace their indigenous connection through family links, it might be premature to question their paternity again and again.” Without a sufficiently large database for comparison, one cannot reliably trace indigenous bloodlines. In addition, tribal status is not entirely based off blood, but rather membership and kinship. In other words, for example, no DNA test can accurately determine “Cherokee blood.”
Then why do many African Americans claim Cherokee even if they’re not enrolled or a DNA test tells them otherwise? According to Davis, there are three reasons: overlapping migration routes, tribal size, and trauma among the descendants of enslaved black people. In her words, “Consider the geographic location and the politics of earlier eras . . . the overlap of indigenous peoples and blacks would have been greatest in the South. Consider size: the Cherokee were the largest tribe and were often seen as the most organized and powerful, both by whites and other tribes. Also consider the nostalgia factor. It’s an understatement to say that many blacks lost their history during slavery, in the displacement following the Civil War, or through the silence of shame.” She tells me that for those African Americans who heard that they were part Indian, they may have assumed Cherokee or Blackfeet because these two tribes were most prominent in popular culture, especially during the time of the Great Migration. Cindy Walker’s “Cherokee Maiden” was a hit in 1941 as recorded by Bob Wills and the Texas Playboys, and Blackfeet Indians were depicted in Western classics like Broken Arrow (1950) and The Big Sky (1952). The Blackfeet and Cherokee tribes were a part of the American imagination, and arguably, seeing them on-screen inspired black Americans to attempt to re-create the past that they would never know.
If Cherokees occupied North Carolina, Tennessee, and parts of South Carolina and Georgia before and during chattel slavery, how could they not have had relations with black people? No matter if these relations were master and slave, man and wife, or parent and children, the bonds are there. It was when these two groups moved out of the South, into Oklahoma and other territories, that their identities came under scrutiny and their kinship ties were contested for generations to come. DNA cannot be the sole arbiter of our truth. But even historians today, though well-intentioned, propagate this belief. Dr. Henry Louis Gates Jr. said in an article for the Root, “Those high cheekbones and that straight black hair derive from our high proportion of white ancestors and not, for most of us, at least, from our mythical Cherokee great-great-grandmother. Sorry, folks, but DNA don’t lie.”4
In an interview with me, Dr. Arica L. Coleman, an independent scholar and Time magazine contributor, criticized both Gates’s conclusion and his show, Finding Your Roots, “Everybody is looking for a scientific answer, like there needs to be a scientific method of who you are, that it carries more validity than the stories that have been passed down. This is a sticky issue, because everything is not written down. Who can claim Indian is determined by the policies set forth by the federal and state governments.” If who can claim Indian is defined by law and DNA cannot yet prove native ancestry, then that means this conflict between African Americans and Native Americans is internecine warfare. We have never been able to have the privilege of defining ourselves for ourselves, and therefore our narratives, despite their endurance, exist outside of the accepted framework.
As Coleman went on to say, “There is this power struggle over memory, what we remember and how we remember it. When I told a man once that I was part Native American
, he asked me if it’s been authenticated. My blackness has never been authenticated. People assume that because of my hair texture and skin, I’m African American.” Dr. Coleman is a brown-skinned woman with locs. People look at her and automatically assume she’s black, but they never give her room to comfortably share her other ethnic identity, Rappahannock, an Algonquian-speaking tribe from Virginia. People’s assumptions are not only often wrong, but dangerous too. When people assume, they inadvertently erase others’ identities. It’s the same conundrum I faced in Louisiana: Where is the space to be black and not black?
I was trying to figure out my purpose in trying to prove my Cherokee lineage. I am not an enrolled member, and my DNA tells me I have no indigenous blood. People never look at me and assume I have any native ancestry. Shouldn’t I chalk up this part of my journey as a failure? I started to lose hope. I wondered how it would feel if African American families were more whole, if there weren’t so many gaps in my family’s memories. But isn’t that indicative of how much we survived in spite of it all? Weren’t those gaps the purpose of my trip?
I didn’t know how to feel after my conversations with Ms. Davis and Dr. Coleman. On the one hand, I felt affirmed. Dr. Davis knows of her Cherokee lineage, and yet a test indicated that she wasn’t even one-sixteenth Indian. If her results were inaccurate, were mine? This trip felt Sisyphean. Each day I felt like I was back at square one. I learned about blood and then found that blood isn’t the be-all and end-all. I learned about Dawes Rolls and then found that they’re imprecise. I returned home with hundreds of pages of transcriptions, hours upon hours of recordings, yet considered this part of my trip a dead end. I couldn’t use my story to show its broader implications about migration and African American families. I was stuck in a rut for a year until, miraculously, my mother sent me some letters written by one of the oldest people on her side of the family, which breathed new life into this work.
4
AT EIGHTY-THREE, GWEN Davis Wiggins is one of the oldest living relatives I have from either side of my family. My paternal grandfather’s great-grandad and Gwen’s great-grandad were brothers. I don’t know what prompted my mom to send me letters that Gwen had written by hand about our family history. In fact, the last conversation we had before I received these letters was about my medical insurance coverage. Why in the hell were we talking about the ancestors when I was trying to figure out my deductible? But my mom sent the letters without any disclaimer or hint of what they contained. Gwen begins with the earliest ancestor that she can trace, Randall Wiggins Sr., who was born somewhere around 1808 or 1809:
It all started (as far back as we can go) with Randall Sr., who was half European, and his wife Winnie, who was of Indian blood. They had thirteen children, though Randall Sr. had to leave them behind to work on another plantation. While he was away, five of his boys were sold to other plantations. One of the daughters looked white and was kept by the slave master and his wife, and that was the end of our family’s connection to her. Meanwhile, Randall Sr. fathered two daughters with another woman. When he returned to his wife and children, he lost contact with those other two daughters, and we haven’t been able to find them. Therefore, we the family never had any connections. With money Winnie had saved, Randall Sr. was able to find and buy his five boys back.
After a few phone calls to my mother and then to one of my cousins, who is the unofficial historian of the Jerkins family, I was able to find Gwen’s number. The letter was dated May 15, 2019, so the chances of her still being of sound mind were very high. Luckily, I was right. Not only was she lively, but she texted—rather quickly, actually—and was so excited to talk to me.
During a phone conversation, Gwen, who lives in Warner Robins, Georgia, told me that she grew up in Andersonville, Georgia, a sister city to Americus in Sumter County. When she was younger, she noted, Andersonville used to be a part of Schley County. During her youth, people assumed that she and her relatives were Indian because of their brown skin and high cheekbones. People still make this assumption. In fact, she told me that just two years ago, at a family reunion in Charleston, a black and native woman asked her about her heritage and then gave her the number of some organization in order to get recognized, or at least search more into her ancestry.
“Was it the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Gwen?”
“I’m not sure what it was. I forget the name. I called the phone number and tried to reach out, but nothing came of it, so I forgot about it.” Did she reach out to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and no one picked up, or did someone pick up and give her the cold shoulder? I couldn’t be certain, but I was certain that her story aligned with those of Marilyn Vann and other black and native people in Oklahoma, who told me story upon story of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, among other agencies, which rebuffed their requests even with the proper documents in hand.
“Do you remember which tribe Winnie was from, Gwen? Any name would help.” I waited with bated breath.
“I don’t think I was ever told a name. But I do know that Randall fetched her from the river and she was from the hills of Tennessee.”
The earliest ancestor that my family can trace on the Wiggins side (my maternal grandfather’s mother’s side), Randall Wiggins. He was said to be half black and half white. Gwen Wiggins
“Was Randall’s wife enslaved too?”
“No, I’m not sure. I was never told that she was enslaved. I was told that she was a black Indian, though.”
When I got off the phone with Gwen and did some research, I found out that Schley County, which was carved from portions of Marion and Sumter Counties, was named after William Schley. When William Schley was governor of Georgia beginning in 1835, and he was apprehensive about Cherokees living among whites, so much so that he had informants sent out to spy on the tribe. The informants told Schley that the Cherokees were peaceful and wanted no trouble, but Schley had already made up his mind that they were a threat. State officials and regular civilians alike armed themselves out of fear of an uprising. In 1837, Schley informed President Martin Van Buren that he had two regiments ready to expel “that savage and deluded people.” The militia and citizens assisted federal troops in removing Cherokees from their homes. Troops were said to have “. . . cleared woodland, muddied streams, rutted roads, and filled the air with sound and smoke.” Sarah Hill writes in Southern Spaces, “Georgia led the United States in the expulsion of the Cherokee Nation from its homeland. In the spring of 1838 more than two thousand soldiers arrested some nine thousand Georgia Cherokees, confined them briefly, then marched them to holding camps in east Tennessee to await their miserable trek to Indian Territory eight hundred miles away.”1
If Winnie came from the hills of Tennessee, I guessed that she was near the border of Tennessee and Georgia. That was also Cherokee territory. OK, I thought. All signs point to Winnie being the Cherokee in the family. The Oklahoma Historical Society has a website where you can search for a name in the Dawes Final Rolls from 1898–1914. I took a deep breath, typed in the last name Wiggins, and there she was: Peggie Wiggins, thirty-nine years old, roll number 438, search card number 150. Tribe: Cherokee Freedmen. My mother also provided a list of every one of Randall and Winnie’s children along with their spouses, which she had received at a family reunion that I was unable to attend. If Peggie was thirty-nine and the Dawes Commission collected names from 1898 to 1914, then she was born between 1859 and 1875. If Randall was born around 1802, then he was, at the earliest, her grandfather.
Thirty-eight-year-old Peggie Wiggins is certified for tribal enrollment as a Cherokee freedman with an application dated for April 5, 1901. Her owner was George Crapo, her roll number was 459, and her card number was 150. Oklahoma Historical Society Research Center
One of Gwen’s nieces reached out to me with a list of all of Randall Sr.’s grandchildren, but there is no Peggie on it. The twelve children are listed, but two of them, Jacob and Mattie, are listed as having no children. Were they never parents, or were they separate
d from their children? If the latter, could it be that their names were never recorded? And what if some of the men, like Randall Sr., had children with other women but because of time and separation, my family lost contact with them, too? What if one of Randall Sr.’s siblings had children with another black Cherokee woman and they were Peggie’s parents or grandparents?
A list of Randall and Winnie Wiggins’s children and their spouses. My great-great-great-grandfather is Moses and he was married to Anna Wyche. Gwen Wiggins
I decided to contact the Oklahoma Historical Society and paid them to send whatever information they could find on this Peggie Wiggins. From the Midwest to the East Coast, I gathered stories from relatives about a tribal link, and they always pointed back to the Cherokee. This Peggie Wiggins was listed as a Cherokee freedman, meaning that she was what we may consider today a black Indian. Could this woman be related to my family, perhaps through marriage? The mystery deepened as I kept asking more questions about Peggie Wiggins’s family.
In an interview with the Department of Interior Commission to the Five Civilized Tribes, dated April 5, 1901, representatives recorded that she was thirty-eight years old and that her husband’s name was Mitchell Wiggins, who was not a Cherokee citizen. Peggie Wiggins herself was a slave to George Crapo and was born in Cherokee Nation around 1863. It is not specified where her mother or Mitchell Wiggins was born. He may or may not have been Randall’s grandson, but what if Randall had siblings and Mitchell was a direct descendant of that brother or sister? I was told that Randall Sr.’s father had many children. There is no Mitchell Wiggins listed on any Dawes Roll. Was he a black man? If so, what was this African American doing in Indian territory?
Wandering in Strange Lands Page 19