One Drop of Blood The American Misadventure of Race

INTRODUCTION
One Drop of Blood
The American Misadventure of Race
By SCOTT L. MALCOMSON
Farrar Straus Giroux

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THIS BUSINESS OF ANGELS



All the names, all those to-
gether burned
names. So much
ash to bless.
—Paul Celan, "Chemical"


The North Canadian River slips through Oklahoma City, which marches away from it, to the north and south, in an almost unbroken grid. Like many towns in the southern Great Plains, Oklahoma City grew up at a time when irregular curving rivers had given way to the more rigid lines of railroads (themselves soon replaced, on this level terrain, by straight highways). People came to Oklahoma because land was cheap; and evidently land remains cheap enough, for Oklahoma City is not built up. Even close to the center, people live in houses on evenly spaced lots. In a hot and moody climate the lawns and gardens stay green. During the dust-bowl years, Oklahoma land went from cheap to worthless, and tens of thousands of Okies, the poorest of the white Depression poor, left for yet another trek west; but when the bad weather had gone the state dammed the rivers, creating the lakes that provide the water that makes the lawns of Oklahoma City possible. On a rectangle of land you can make for yourself a garden, a lawn, a home. Oklahoma City is among the most man-made of American towns; it is what we, leaving nature aside, create for ourselves. The proud city turns its back on the river, especially at night, when everyone has returned safely home and the river drifts quietly by like a winding secret.

In this orderly city a bomb brought down a government building one workday, killing 168 people, either immediately or after dehydration, suffocation, or dripping away enough blood to die. Every age and race of American was among the murdered; it was a democratic torturing death. More than a year later, the site of the building remained empty, surrounded by rickety Cyclone fencing. Twisted or stuffed into the fence were T-shirts with scrawled messages, business cards, flowers, toy animals, a child's pair of red sneakers. I visited the place on a sunny day in late autumn. A small but steady trickle of pilgrims passed slowly by this homemade shrine, reading certain messages out loud. Parents tried to explain matters to children. In a lot next to the fence stood an old tree, surprisingly unharmed, and an office chair; above them were two walls of buildings made useless by the explosion. On one, someone had painted a lengthy cry telling us that God demanded justice. On the other was the simple remark, "We Should Have Looted." From the bombing site itself rivulets of reddish-brown water flowed beneath the fence and into the gutter, where visitors stood deciphering the T-shirt messages. One read, "God Bless America and Help US ALL." We tiptoed and hopped about to avoid staining our shoes.

Many people had wedged sticks into the fence to form primitive crosses. There were dozens of them, and a few Christmas trees tightly bound to the wires. Were all of the victims Christian? There were many images and invocations of angels, and references to young victims who had become angels, and even some photographs of children now dead. I saw no pictures of adults, which was a surprise, because most of the bombing victims were not children. This business of angels came from the belief that children, upon death, unquestionably enter heaven. Adults, having no doubt sinned, cannot expect immediately to become angels. We are not assumed to be innocent. But it is worth recalling that children did not post these angel notices. In many cases their parents did. One family put together a holiday card with pictures of their two lost boys on one side and, on the reverse, a handwritten letter signed by those children from beyond the grave. The boys' letter said they were happy in the other world and asked all who read it to pray, Not for them, but for their family—for the very adults who, in this world, had actually written the letter. When these adults speak of innocents they are talking to themselves, saying, We are innocent. This is one way to make sense of things.

Another strange detail of the popular shrine to the dead at Oklahoma City was that the pictures of victims, at the time of my visit, all portrayed white people, although many of the dead were not white. Perhaps nonwhite families had felt this was not a place for them to mourn, or that they were not members of this larger, stricken family. Certainly the national face of the tragedy had been a white face, that of a white child, immediately after the bombing, a spontaneous assumption of many Americans was that the bomber must have been nonwhite and non-Christian—in the event, an Arab Muslim man. This was another way to make sense of things. Within forty-eight hours several attacks took place against people who were thought, however vaguely, to be Arab Muslims. Once a young white Christian, Timothy McVeigh, was arrested, those many Americans who looked as if they might be Arab Muslims could harness their particular fear, and presumably those Americans who had suspected them swallowed shame.

Many of us cast the Oklahoma City bombing as a story in which innocent, childlike white American Christians were victims, a story of Terror in the Heartland. The heartland was by definition Christian, white, and blameless. The shrine at Oklahoma City was a spontaneous expression of this idea—not a media spin or a planned commemoration, just America talking to itself. Even those who were not present there—blacks, for example—participated in that conversation by not talking. We heard much about unity, about coming together, after the bombing. Timothy McVeigh—if he is as he has been portrayed, a government-hating white Christian separatist "sending a message"— made the event a perfect paradox: he killed a representative sample of Americans to send his separatist message, and we, in our confusion and pain, reacted by separating ourselves, each to his or her heartland. Thereby we did what he, a madman, wanted.

McVeigh's madness lies in the belief that any of the American races can pursue a separate destiny and in that pursuit achieve a new life and freedom. Americans have believed this, in many different ways, for centuries. Our New World was indeed new, and full of possibilities for new forms of freedom—as well as limitless possibilities for chaos. The racial roles of Indian, black, and white were one leading aspect of American novelty. They formed channels through which social power might flow with some smoothness and social position might be understood. Since early-colonial times, none of these groups has ever been missing from the national equation. They came into being as part of the American experience, and their elaboration over the centuries is much of what makes America unique. Each is crucial to our collective imagination; without any one of them, we could not have a collective imagination. We could not have a nation.

Yet our American drive for newness has also led us into new forms of unfreedom. From the beginning, the people living out these racial roles of Indian, black, and white often felt them to be constricting. They wanted not to be reduced to instances of a race. So they sought to escape race by escaping—or controlling, separating off, eliminating, sometimes absorbing—that which alone made them racial, namely the existence of other races. One sought to go beyond race by escaping the reminders of one's own racialness, to "separate" in order to become fully oneself and free, to solve this problem of race by starting afresh. Such efforts never entirely succeeded. It was already too late. The history of the New World's three-part racial division stuck to Americans like a burr, pricking at their skin, even as they went west, always west, hoping to start over.

Oklahoma was the last place to start over, the last truly Western place: Indian Territory did not join Oklahoma Territory to form the present state until 1907. Oklahoma is an extreme example, one I will often return to in the pages that follow. The state has been a laboratory of separatism. Its first extensive settlement was by Indian tribes relocated there in part, or so many believed, as a way of preserving their racial identity. Both blacks and whites arrived at the same time, the blacks as slaves to Indians. Blacks and whites began moving in large numbers to western Oklahoma (Oklahoma Territory) and eastern Oklahoma (Indian Territory) in the last great westward migration following the Civil War. In the early years of the twentieth century blacks and whites outnumbered Indians in Indian Territory. And it is a very revealing feature of those years that the members of each of these three groups, within living memory of the Civil War, had precisely the same goal: a separate state dominated by their own race. An impossible desire animated their hearts. Each wanted to be free and unencumbered by the others; indeed, the idea of freedom, as they understood it, required racial separatism. Even apart from economic considerations, these Americans seem to have felt they needed their own racial place in order to escape the past, to remake themselves, to become new people—to become, at last, innocent, each to itself, after nearly three hundred years together.

Not quite a century after these unsuccessful efforts at separation Timothy McVeigh arrived in Oklahoma City, to send his message. I couldn't help seeing his act, however hideous, and the commemorations that followed it as part of an American pattern. At the site of that vast killing, adults faced with the immensity of political terror and death were trying to recast themselves as children, who were not to blame, and in the process once again separating into people with races—which was the same separation that had led, in a way, to the terror and death. This suggested to me that the past was forming them, in spite of themselves. That past is the past of race in America—not the past of racism, but of race in itself, and of race in our selves. The racial roles we play as Americans have tended to be repeated over the course of American history; I should say, we have tended to repeat them. And we regret this, and tell ourselves that we will start fresh, the past will stop now, and will not hold us any more than it holds an innocent child. Then we repeat our race roles again.

I have done this, too. I think most Americans do. It cannot be undone, but perhaps it could be done differently. When I was growing up, in Oakland, California, I knew many different kinds of people. The city had a great mixture of peoples. I can remember, faintly, what it was like when, as children, we did not attach much significance to the colors of our skins. I can also remember, more clearly, what it was like when we fit into those skins and began to separate, friend from friend, into races—to think with our skins, so to speak, and to act in them—a painful and violent process. These were roles prepared by the American generations that had gone before; the past was forming us, and so we would carry that past into the future. I have never ceased regretting that process, because it diminished each of us.

We cannot successfully choose not to have a past. But we might find a common past that, if we can claim it in all its tragicomic fullness, with all its passionate murders and lasting intimacies, will enable us to do something more than repeat our racial roles, the divisions that steal among us to mock our humanity. Perhaps we can identify the past that haunts us—not to exorcise it but to live with it, and slow the pace of our repetitions, ease the sharpness of our separations, overcome the thoughtlessness of our racial roles.

The name Oklahoma was cobbled from two Choctaw words, for red and people. By coincidence, the dirt of western Oklahoma has a red cast, which is why the rivulets flowing from the bombing site appeared to come from a wound, In that flowing water I did see the color of blood, which is the same for all of us. In the popular commemorations I saw the color of skin, which is not the same for all of us; and I wanted to know why that separation had taken place, unbidden, probably unwanted, here at the site of this tremendous murder committed by my mad countryman.



Chapter One



AN INDIAN COUNTRY



The Cherokee nationalist David Cornsilk, dressed in shorts and a casual shirt, of medium height and build, was unremarkable in appearance save for his green eyes. He would often look away into some middle distance, whether when listening or speaking; he had that nervous and distracted quality common to political activists, an engaged loneliness born of a constant solitary effort to grasp allies and anticipate the enemy. At the moment, he was again fighting his tribe's government. The Cherokees' chief had got caught up in a battle with the tribal police force, which was investigating the chief for financial improprieties. Anxious for his power, the chief decided to fire the police force. The police responded in an unusual fashion: they chose not to recognize his authority. They appealed to the tribal court, which temporarily granted them a new home, right there in the courthouse. The officers took their patrol cars, computers, radios, and uniforms and simply moved.

So on a warm spring morning David Cornsilk and I met in the lobby of the courthouse in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, capital of the Cherokee Nation. From time to time a self-described policeman would wander by. The officers were behaving as if they had power, and, at least so far, some Cherokees were willing to agree, even though these "policemen" had, for example, no jail, and even though the tribe's chief had decided to hire a new force. It was a curious situation. These uniformed men made pots of coffee, logged in and out, smoked cigarettes on the back porch, and investigated crimes as if they were police officers, and as long as enough people agreed that they were policemen, weren't they? Various Cherokees had contributed thousands of dollars to pay their salaries. Cornsilk had come that morning to present them with the check, along with an eagle feather, sanctified by a medicine man, to give them strength. The policemen's predicament—their insistence, despite being technically unemployed, on their policeness—must have struck a number of chords with Cornsilk. He is perhaps the leading Cherokee nationalist today, a self-appointed spokesman for the tribe, respected and sometimes hated; a keen genealogist, he is also more than half white. He is spending his life trying to answer a nearly impossible question: What is an Indian?

"There was a lot of prejudice against us in my dad's family because we were half white. My grandmother, my dad's mother, always called us, you know, her half-breed grandkids." Cornsilk did not find being a half-breed grandkid easy. "Coming out of childhood into adulthood," he said in his thoughtful, deliberate way, "it was real hard to straighten out a lot of that. It was really very confusing for me." His father's mother made self-definition either simpler or more difficult, depending on how you look at it, because, while not herself genetically a full-blood Cherokee, she nevertheless believed herself to be a full-blood. "She would sit for hours combing her granddaughter's hair, which was straight and black. She just loved it, it was so beautiful. The whole while sitting there with her wavy hair. My grandmother had real wavy hair. But she considered herself a full-blood. She spoke the language and lived as a full-blood."

This was what David Cornsilk saw as a little boy, and it made an impression on him. He grew up in the countryside surrounded by full-blood Cherokees and feeling their particular prejudice against white people (and against blacks and half-breeds). His white mother, who was more or less rescued by his father from an abusive relationship with a white man, had decided to live as a Cherokee. "Her family are backwoods folks from Arkansas. We were not accepted into her family because we were half-breed Indians. So we were treated differently by them. I'm sure if we had been half-breed blacks they would have never even accepted that we existed. So my prejudices come from that side. It took me a long time to even—I'd never been around black people other than just the few who live up there and one or two other kids who'd come to my school." "Up there" refers to a hill overlooking Tahlequah. a place local whites and Cherokees call Nigger Hill. The black people who live up there today are still collectively known as "the freedmen" and are descendants of slaves brought west by their Cherokee owners from the tribal homelands in North Carolina, Georgia, northern Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of other states. Most of these ancestors came during the forced removal in the 1830s along what was called the Trail of Tears.

"So when I got into college and I started seeing more black people in school and stuff and—they're so different from us. I had this one friend and—I just cringe when I think of me doing this—I asked him if I could touch his hair. I would never do that to a white person. You know, that's awful. And he laughed, he thought it was really funny that someone'd want to touch his hair. Just because I'd never even been around someone like that. It took me a long time of associating with them and realizing that they're human beings and that's how you have to see them to even want to shake their hand. 'Cause I had all those prejudices that my mom's family had. You know, 'You guys are lucky that at least you're Indian and white, you sure wouldn't wanna be one of them.' I had a hard time even going to a restaurant and seeing a black person cooking, and thinking, 'Ecchh, I don't want to eat after that person has handled that food.' I think back on that person that I was and it just makes me sick." Cornsilk laughed a little in quiet amazement and shook his head.

Not that he got a much more positive view of blacks from his Cherokee family. But the picture there had some subtleties. There was, for example, the matter of lips. Cornsilk's are a big-lipped people. "So many of my family have really big lips, and that's a characteristic, I think, to a certain degree, of many American Indians. Many American Indians have full lips. But some of my family have big lips. Really big lips. I had one cousin, we used to call him 'Lips.' They were just turned up, I mean they were so big. But I tried to discern what that small amount of blood that runs through our family that is not Cherokee, on that side, really is. I found Irish, Scottish, English in that small strain. But no evidence that there's any African ancestry in there. Which wouldn't bother me at all."

The boy David Cornsilk, with his full lips, wavy hair, and restless green eyes, wandered about his rural Indian home in the late 1960s and considered his options. His neighbors treated him as something of a stranger; they did not welcome him into their tribe, especially when it came to group ceremonies. He knew that the essence of tribal identity—it is most important in religious matters—was membership in a clan, inherited through the mother's side. This matrilineal kinship system, based on seven clans, is older than recorded Cherokee history. Well into the colonial era, clan membership was the ground upon which Cherokee social relations were built, laws about property, marriage, and criminal justice. Cherokeeness, or a national identity, was a very baggy concept compared with clan identity. Having a white mother meant Cornsilk did not have a clan, and could never have a clan.

"I think I was probably about ten years old, and I was walking from my house to my grandmother's house, and I started thinking about how I had been treated at the ceremonial grounds. Because I don't have a clan. I'm not ashamed of being without a clan. My dad made the choice to marry a white woman and that's how I ended up being here. I've never really thought about being more than what I am. But when I'd made the decision that I was gonna get married— I think I made a lot of decisions when I was ten years old, I decided that I was gonna go to college, although no one in my family ever had—I decided that I was gonna marry me a woman with a clan." Cornsilk laughed when he said this because he'd adopted a hillbilly accent, the speech of his white family. Ah wuz gonna marry me a woman with a clan. Cornsilk wanted to "make sure that my kids had a clan. And that kind of evolved into—the way to find a woman with a clan was to marry a full-blood. That's what you looked for, because you knew that a full-blood, whether that person knew their clan or not, had a clan. There was a clan there somewhere. Fortunately, I married a woman who was both full- blood and knew her clan, so it worked out pretty well."

Many, perhaps most, Cherokees have no idea what their clan is. Cultural nationalists, such as David Cornsilk, want more people to "return" to their clans. "Over the last probably ten years there has been a kind of cultural awakening among Cherokees. So you have a lot of people searching for their clan. By the same token, you have these people that are clanless, like myself." The Ojibwas, he said, have solved this problem by creating a new clan. "They call it the Chicken clan. And anyone who's born without a clan is automatically the Chicken clan. Although I'm not sure that I'd wanna be from the Chicken clan. I'd wanna have a more interesting animal totem." He laughed, and I laughed. I could see it might be a little humiliating to be profoundly associated with a flightless barnyard bird. Cornsilk had thought about identity questions, attended to them in more detail, than most Americans ever would or could, but he also seemed to find them richly comic, which is probably not a bad idea. When we had finished laughing about the Chicken clan I suggested that perhaps the existing Cherokee clans had begun in a similar fashion: through force of circumstance, in an act of imagination.

"That's a possibility. The origin of those clans is so far back it's difficult to say. There's only a couple of them that really have origin stories. The Holly clan, sometimes called the Bear clan, they claim an origin with a child that was found underneath the holly tree, a girl child, and she fostered this clan of Cherokee people. That's the only one I can really think of that has an origin story. In order for us to move ahead, I think, as a people we're going to have to figure out some way for everybody to have an identifier, you know, something they can cling on to. And maybe clan is the answer. Because you get people in the tribe whose degrees of blood drop to one over four thousand and ninety-six. That's the lowest degree we've enrolled so far, and this person I think will find it difficult to figure out, How do I connect? How do I belong? Where do I belong? And if we have some automatic pocket for that person to fall into, it'll be easier for us not to lose that person. That's what I think is the key. You know, there's safety in numbers."

The concept of safety in numbers has specific resonance among Cherokees. It echoes an ancient idea of collectivity. Cherokees certainly had property, both movable goods and land; but these descended through the female line and were inextricably tied to the matrilineal clans. Land was understood to be collectively "owned." In daily life land belonged to whoever used it, and ceased to be theirs when they were through with it. Private accumulation of wealth beyond a basic level, whether in land or goods, was not an activity that made sense. The Cherokees accompanied this economic structure with concepts of group generosity and responsibility (including responsibility for crime and punishment).

Such were the core ideas, however attenuated, that reformers sought to eliminate in the nineteenth century. The Cherokee tribe today recognizes as citizens about 182,000 "Cherokees by Blood." The phrase is that used by the Dawes Commission, a turn-of-the-century federal outfit charged with deciding who was a real Indian. The United States, after about a hundred years of sometimes serious effort, had succeeded in forcing the Cherokees and other tribes to accept land "in severalty," that is, to divide the land allowed to them by treaty into parcels that would be owned privately by individuals. The purpose of this was most clearly stated by Henry Dawes himself, a senator from Massachusetts, speaking, he believed, as a friend of the Indians to other well-meaning white friends of the Indians at a conference in 1885. He is reporting back after a trip to Indian Territory: "The head chief told us that there was not a family in the whole nation that had not a home of its own. There is not a pauper in that nation, and the nation does not owe a dollar. It built its own capitol, in which we had this examination, and built its schools and hospitals. Yet the defect of the system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they hold their land in common. It is [the socialist writer] Henry George's system, and under that there is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbors. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Till these people will consent to give up their lands, and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much progress." The latter nineteenth century was a time of brutal frankness—or of brutal confidence—among social theorists, and Dawes was no exception.

Before the Dawes Commission could accomplish its goal of instilling selfishness in the hearts of Cherokees, it had to determine Cherokeeness, and this was done in the language of blood. (There were many impostors, mainly white, claiming Cherokee roots in order to get land allotments.) It required a shocking amount of paperwork. The commissioners interviewed thousands of Cherokees, many of whom, after forced relocations, intermarriages, absconded parents, informal adoptions, and civil wars, had only the fuzziest ideas about where they were from. A significant number of Cherokees—usually members of or sympathizers with the traditionalist Keetoowah society, known as Nighthawks— refused to go along with the Dawes Commission's racial categorizing. These people were put on the Dawes lists thanks to genealogical assertions made by informants. Because the Nighthawks were known to follow traditional ways, and perhaps also because they were thought to dislike white people, they commonly were registered as full-bloods. (This was the case with Cornsilk's paternal grandmother, she of the wavy hair, who was informed on by her neighbor Leonard and enrolled as a full-blood, although she wasn't one. When she found out, she went down the road and slapped Leonard in the face.) The Dawes Commission published neat lists, easily available today in public libraries and federal archives, with a column for blood quanta: 1/4, 1/8, 1/2. F means "full." These lists are still the basis for determining Cherokeeness. The tribe today will not recognize anyone as Cherokee who does not have an ancestor on the Dawes rolls, though all it takes is one drop of blood.

As a Cherokee nationalist, David Cornsilk has spent much of his time exposing Indian artists he believes to be fraudulent. The market for original Indian art began to expand more than a decade ago; increased demand brought increased supply; and certain people not necessarily known before to be Indians started to make Indian art. As Cornsilk put it, anytime Indians have something worth money—land in 1890, oil paintings and casinos today—white folks will try to take it. So he and his friends hunted a few of these artists down, traced their genealogies by means of the Dawes rolls and other records, and exposed them as fair-weather pseudo Indians. They humiliated them. It is, by now, impossible to recognize many Cherokees as Indians because they have no physical or speech characteristics that swiftly distinguish them from whites, blacks, Hispanics, or Asians. That is why Cornsilk had to do so much research, because many millions of people in the world could pass for Indian.

"You know, I got punched in the mouth in front of Wal-Mart by one of these people." The Cherokee capital has a Wal-Mart, as well as all the other chain stores and restaurants for which Wal-Mart has come to serve as the symbol. Tahlequah is, aesthetically, indistinguishable from numberless small American towns, except for the street signs in Cherokee. "He's a pretty vocal fella. He's a good artist. He does beautiful flowers and birds and things. He was taking our history and our mythology and our culture and twisting it to his own view of the world. And he may have painted a Cherokee man floating in a canoe through the Tennessee River... but that's how he saw it, that's not how I might have seen it, and that's not how the Cherokee people might have perceived that. And what right does he have to tell us how that event was? He doesn't have that right. That would be like me going to Egypt and—you know, I have ancestors on one side who are Italian, and they came from Egypt to Italy. So I'm probably of Egyptian heritage. And I can go to Egypt and say, `Hey, guys, I wanna come over here and do some sculptures and you guys accept it.'"

Evidently, Cornsilk had a distant ancestor named Alberti who went from Egypt to Italy in the early eighteenth century. "He was an architect for the Medici family in Tuscany. Then he killed somebody and fled to Poland. Then from Poland he was deported to Germany, then from Germany he came to America."

I asked, "Is that where the Alberty Cherokee name comes from?"

"That's where it comes from. We're all descended from this man."

"There's a number of Albertys."

"Yeah, there's a lot of them. My great-grandmother was an Alberty." The primordial American Alberty had three wives in succession and eight sons by his wives. "All eight of his sons married Cherokee women. This is like in the 1780s and '90s. So some of these Alberty families have married back in so much that they don't even know they have white ancestry." Those people would be full-bloods. "You'll ask them, `Where does your name come from?' And they'll say, `I don't know.' They don't have any clue. And then you have others that married back out of the tribe and they'll be as white as white." Those people would be what we call whites. "It's a fascinating family. We all trace back to Frederico Alberti, who came to America in the early 1700s."

Cornsilk and I rose from our chairs in the courthouse lobby and went back into the provisional police station to say goodbye and wish luck to the stubborn lawmen. Two of Cornsilk's friends, both fellow nationalists, joined us; we drove to a place on the highway called Goldie's and had cheeseburgers and iced tea. The two Cherokee men, one young and one middle-aged, were, like Cornsilk, educated and thoughtful, though more playful than their militant friend. They appeared just as white as he, and I supposed that, in their day-to-day life, they must enjoy the benefits that white men effortlessly get in most parts of American society: a basic unthinking respect, for example, and credibility; the precious privilege of not being seen as a special interest or an exception to the rule. I recalled that Cornsilk had told me he'd married a full-blood in part because he wanted to see in his own family "those little brown faces." He had also said that the tribe is steadily lightening in color, and that soon enough the Cherokees by blood will all "be white." Part of his work is to find a way that a white tribe can yet be Cherokee. Blood, as he sees it historically, is merely necessary, not sufficient.

How could someone having lunch at Goldie's that spring afternoon in Tahlequah have known that three of the men at our table were Cherokee Indians? Only by listening to the conversation. There was some talk about the arrogance of full-bloods, who apparently lord their language skills over mixed bloods. Cornsilk said that full-bloods often refuse to teach Cherokee even to their own children, much less to mixed bloods. He spoke of occasions when full-bloods had made fun of his efforts to master Cherokee; he called this "hurtful" several times, "hateful" once. He spoke as if the full-bloods were planning to take their knowledge—the knowledge he craved—with them to the grave in a suicidal, purist act of self-preservation, by keeping what they know pure in death.

Politics was a happier subject. The three friends gabbed cheerfully about other tribes, on whose affairs they were well informed. This was real politics, only it concerned Apaches and Navajos rather than Serbs and Mexicans. The younger man, a Web-site designer for a Memphis paper, talked about tribal Internet projects. I wondered whether his Memphis colleagues knew he was a Cherokee or if they thought of him as one. The three discussed the strengths and weaknesses of various medicine men and the relative vitalities of local ceremonial gathering places, or "stomp grounds."

Cornsilk spoke about Redbird Smith and the vagaries of traditionalist religion, which now goes loosely under the term Keetoowah. Redbird Smith, more than anyone else, was responsible for codifying and preserving modern Cherokee religion. Redbird's father, Pig Smith, had been a conservative in the Cherokee sense, in other words, a full-blood. (The name Smith came from his trade as a blacksmith; a pig is a unit of iron.) Redbird, born in 1850, grew up in an activist traditional Cherokee milieu. Cherokee society was at that time already well divided against itself, and its traditional forms of knowledge greatly lost. The Smith family's milieu was a mixture of Creeks, Cherokees, and, most importantly, Natchez. The French had destroyed the Natchez in the early eighteenth century, and a remnant was adopted into the Cherokee tribe. Some scholars assert that the Natchez were closest to the ancient Temple Mound cultures; the Natchez among the Cherokees in 1850 certainly had a store of traditional knowledge, a body of thought that overlapped extensively with that retained by their fellow southeastern Indians the Creeks and Cherokees. Within this world the Smiths and other families worked up a cultural blend, the essential elements of which continue today as the Keetoowah religion. By such adaptive methods the sacred Fire, in Cherokee terms, was kept burning.

It did not always burn brightly, and it was often divided. The Keetoowahs split several times, commonly because one group decided the main body had become impure. After Redbird's death his son Stoke Smith moved his father's Fire from its old place in the hills to Stoke's front yard. According to Cornsilk, Stoke went on to extinguish the Fires at other stomp grounds and take the medicine bottles beneath them to his own Fire. Not everyone went along, but the momentum was with Stoke, and many Fires gradually cooled. One stomp ground allowed drinking; its observances finally ended when dancing drunken men fell into their Fire.

Cornsilk said that Redbird's niece Katie, whose group still prospers, claimed that she had received a message from Redbird on his deathbed. He made two signs to her, one of which looked like the V for victory, and supposedly said the words "I was wrong." Educated in Christian schools, Katie took this to mean that Redbird had accepted Christianity. She created her own version of Cherokee spiritual tradition that incorporated Christian elements. Cornsilk said her stomp ground was south of Tahlequah, in the hills above Highway 82.

When we had exhausted the subject of medicine we paid the check and said our goodbyes in the parking lot. Cornsilk had mentioned that one of the Fires which Stoke Smith had extinguished still had its medicine bottles buried beneath. The table had gone somewhat quiet at the mention of this abandoned remnant. I thought of what might be in those bottles; of Cornsilk's efforts to purify Indian art, which he sees as representing Indian culture; and of another Medicine Bottle from another tribe. I have two pictures of him, by Joel Emmons Whitney (1822-1886), above my desk. The first, a stereograph, is captioned "Medicine Bottle, a Mdewakanton Dakota participant in the `massacre' of 1862, as a prisoner at Fort Snelling, June 17, 1864, awaiting the gallows." His features are cut deep and are beautiful, he is a perfectly handsome man, with long dark hair. He has loosely wrapped about himself a blanket; his chin rests on his hands; his eyes are half open and look away. This was Indian art in the nineteenth century, for white viewers, an art of dying. In both visual arts and literature of the period the Indian commonly appears as someone not quite gone, a person expert in the endings of life. The other picture is captioned "Little Six and Medicine Bottle on the gallows, 1865." Through two ranks of soldiers you see in the middle distance a gallows and two men with sacks over their heads, hanging by their necks from ropes. The space between you as the viewer and the lifeless bodies must have been cleared for the photographer to get his shot. In front of the gallows are two open coffins. Before these in the clearing, looking away from the gibbet, stands a thin white dog, awkwardly turned, one paw extended forward, caught nervously pacing.

(C) 2000 Scott L. Malcomson All rights reserved. ISBN: 0-374-24079-5





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