Tag: American Indians

Colorado’s Mesa Verde

Colorado’s Mesa Verde

by Justin Durand

From Kevin Simpson at The Colorado Sun:

When Swedish researcher Gustaf Nordenskiöld arrived at Mesa Verde in 1890 and surveyed the ancient cliff dwellings, he seemed to have the best of intentions. 

But his subsequent efforts to meticulously — and urgently — unearth and catalog the human remains and artifacts of the tribes who once inhabited the area unfolded in a period of rampant excavation, a busy black market for antiquities and scarcely any regard for the cultural significance of the objects rediscovered in southwest Colorado.

Read more: More than a century ago, a European visitor took more than 600 Native American remains and artifacts from Colorado’s Mesa Verde

Fremont Village

Fremont Village

by Justin Durand

They found this ancient Fremont village long after I left Salt Lake, but it’s not too far from one of the places I lived. The Fremont people were related to the Cliff Dwellers (Anasazi, Ancestral Pueblo, whatever we’re calling them now), further south. And like the Cliff Dwellers, the Fremont culture seems to have collapsed about 1300 C.E.

I’ve been fascinated since I was a kid. I’ve known about the Cliff Dwellers as long as I can remember. Probably because I started grade school in Brigham City, Utah and had friends whose families were at the Intermountain Indian School there. Very sad now, but back then we kids loved the mix of Anglo and Indian cultures.

I think the first I heard about the Fremont culture was my 8th grade Colorado history teacher, Mr. Meador. I think anyone who ever had him as a teacher probably ranks him among the best and most memorable. When I had him he was a student teacher for Mr. Legrani.

I wanted to do my “term paper” on the Fremont. If I remember correctly it had to be 3 pages, or maybe it was 5 pages. Handwritten, on notebook paper. This was 8th grade, remember. Anyway, there wasn’t enough source material. I don’t think anyone knew as much about the Fremont people as we do now, and besides, it seems like there has always been much more interest in the Utes, who were there when the Anglos arrived. I settled for doing my paper on the Meeker Massacre. This was 1969. Like every other boy in my class I was drawn to Nathan Meeker because the Utes drove a metal stake through his mouth. He was a preacher. They thought he talked too much. Best story ever.

There is a Fremont site at Glade Park, but I didn’t figure out where it is until many years later. Glade Park is a little community at the Colorado National Monument behind the Redlands, where we lived. And it was only recently that I discovered from Navajo historian Wally Brown that the ancestors of the Navajo lived as far north as the Book Cliffs, an area that would include what is now Glade Park. It seems likely to me there wasn’t as much difference between the Fremont and Ancestral Pueblo cultures, as it seems when looking just at their material culture.

Many years later, when I lived in Salt Lake City, I looked some more for information on the Fremont culture, and also came up empty. Same problems. Not much is known and what little there is gets lost among the volumes of stuff written about the Utes.

Then in 1999 they discovered a Fremont burial in Salt Lake City, at South Temple and 300 West:

“Archaeological sites are not uncommon in Utah, but unearthing this human burial in downtown Salt Lake was a significant discovery. Further excavation by a research team from Brigham Young University uncovered several ancient pit houses, storage pits, fire hearths, and thousands of artifacts dating to 1000 years ago. Pottery, bone needles, arrow points and corn grinding tools provide clues about the Fremont people who lived at this spot. Animal bones found at the site, such as deer, rabbit, bison, and fish, provide information about the foods they ate and the surrounding environment. For example, the fish bones belonged to a minnow that probably came from what is now called City Creek, which flowed adjacent to this prehistoric village.” Archaeology Underfoot (2012).

I lived at 214 West North Temple until about March or April 1978. So close. I wish I had still been there in 1999, or at least still in Salt Lake. I would have enjoyed the feeling of connecting with history by living so close to a known site. (All of us live close to some historic site or another, whether we know it or not.)

Edited Sept. 23, 2019 to clarify the information from Wally Brown.

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Not Exactly Cherokee

Not Exactly Cherokee

by Justin Durand

White Americans love to say they’re part Cherokee. Experts say identifying as Cherokee gives people a feeling of being native to America, but that doesn’t explain how they get the idea. There are a lot of theories here, as you might expect.

RF Tree Genealogy suggests many of these people have Melungeon ancestry. The Melungeons were mixed race communities in the area around Cumberland Gap and East Tennessee. Their ancestry, going back to Colonial Virginia, was a mix of White, Black, and Indian.

Their swarthy complexions led them to develop defensive explanations. To explain their skin color, they said they were Black Dutch, Portuguese, Turks, Moors, or Indians–anything that would give them cover for being part African.

Melungeon descendants in East Tennessee intermarried with backwoods Scots Irish in the years before the American Revolution. Among the Scots Irish, a darker complexion was often explained by having a “Cherokee grandmother.”

The Melungeons were in the wrong area to have had Cherokee ancestry. The geography and migration patterns don’t work. But the Cherokees were one of the Five Civilized Tribes so Cherokee ancestry was accepted as being more respectable than other tribes.

We end up with a modern world where many people who claim to be part Cherokee aren’t really, although they probably do have distant Indian and African ancestry in Colonial Tidewater Virginia. Ironically, they have even more ancestry among the Scots Irish, the frontiersmen and Indian fighters who as a group were the most aggressive about taking Indian land.

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Pay to Play Indian

Pay to Play Indian

by Justin Durand

Did you know there was a time when you could pay to be Indian? I’m not sure about the reliability of this information but it has become a common meme about pretend Indians (“pretendians”). 

“It may be fashionable to play Indian now, but it was also trendy 125 years ago when people paid $5 apiece for falsified documents declaring them Native on the Dawes Rolls.”

The Dawes Rolls were designed to be a definitive citizenship list for the Five Civilized Tribes (Choctaw, Cherokee, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole). When the rolls became final the lands held by the tribes were to be divided among tribal citizens. Become an Indian, get some land.

“‘What we had was simply white people claiming to be Indian,’ [Gregory Smithers] said. ‘They were early wannabes, just like we have today. Five-dollar Indian is just another term for that.’”

Melungeons

Melungeons

by Justin Durand

The Melungeons are a tri-racial group, descended from Europeans, Africans, and Indians. Although the term Melungeon refers to a specific group, it has become a generic label for many similar groups: the Carmel Indians of southern Ohio, the Brown People of Kentucky, the Guineas of West Virginia, the We-Sorts of Maryland, the Nanticoke-Moors of Delaware, the Cubans and Portuguese of North Carolina, the Brass Ankles of South Carolina, and the Creoles and Redbones of Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana.

The earliest dictionary definition says a Melungeon is “One of a very dark people living in the Mountains of Tennessee” (Funk & Wagnells, 1893). A slightly later definition called them “a dark people of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina with a discernible mix of ‘white, Indian and black blood'” (Century Dictionary and Encyclopedia, 1906). The name probably derives from the French word mélange, a mixture.

The Melungeons lived originally in Appalachia, primarily in the Cumberland Plateau of Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Tennessee. Roberta Estes says, “The Melungeons were a group of individuals found primarily in Hawkins and Hancock Counties of Tennessee and in the far southern portion of Lee County, Virginia which borders Hawkins and Hancock counties in Tennessee. At one time isolated geographically on and near Newman’s Ridge and socially due to their dark countenance, they were known to their neighbors as Melungeons, a term applied as an epithet or in a pejorative manner.” (Estes, 2012)

The ethnic mixing that resulted in the Melungeons began in 17th century Virginia at a time when African servants were not yet considered to be chattel slaves, but were indentured servants who were freed when the period of indenture expired. Typically, the European ancestors of the Melungeons were marginalized colonists in Virginia, whose ancestors came from England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, the Netherlands, and Germany. The African ancestors of the Melungeons were Bantu Africans — the Kimbundu-speaking people from Angola and Kikongo-speaking people from the historic Kongo region along Africa’s lower west coast.

This mixed group began to form separate communities when the first anti-African laws began to restrict their freedoms about 1660. Their descendants were pushed to the margins of society and many of them eventually gravitated to the mountains of southern Appalachia where they mixed with Indians, chiefly the Cherokee and Choctaw.

Because of racism in the American South, the Melungeons historically denied their mixed ancestry and attempted to explain their color by various stories. Some claimed to be descendants of Turks and Moors liberated from the Spanish by Sir Walter Drake and dumped at Roanoke Island, North Carolina in 1586. Some said they were descended from Portuguese sailors shipwrecked or abandoned by the Spanish before the English arrived in Virginia and discovered in the Appalachian Mountains by the English in 1654. Some looked to Sir Walter Raleigh’s Lost Colony or to the DeSoto Expedition. Others looked further back and claimed to be descendants of settlers from ancient Carthage, of the Lost Tribes of Israel, of Old World Gypsies, or of the mythical Welsh Indians.

A DNA study by Roberta Estes, et al. in 2013 showed “the families historically called Melungeons are the offspring of sub-Saharan African men and white women of northern or central European origin” (Estes, 2012; Loller, 2021). FamilySearch criticizes the study on various grounds.

In 2013 I warned, “A lot of nonsense has been written about the Melungeons, with infighting among groups who advocate competing theories. Sources must be used with extreme caution.” That’s just as true today.

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Revised Sept. 26, 2021.