THAT CHEROKEE GRANDMOTHER
One of the puzzling phenomena around American indigenous people is that so many people claim that they have a “Cherokee grandmother” that it has become a running joke. Plainly some people, usually obviously “white”, believe this without evidence and somehow think it is a good thing, even a redeeming fact. Accidentally in my prowling to understand population genetics so as to profile my own family, I found the explanation, expounded in this video. This is not a joke version, but serious demographics..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zOnWcdBamTM
The new word to explore is “Melungean.”
“Melungeons (/məˈlʌndʒən/ mə-LUN-jən) is a term for numerous groups of people of the Southeastern United States who descend from European and Sub-Saharan African settlers. … Tri-racial describes populations who claim to be of mixed European, African and Native American ancestry.” (Wikipedia)
“Some of the most prominent surnames that have been claimed as potentially associated with a Melungeon identity include Bowling (Bolin), Bunch, Chavis (Chavez), Collins, Epps, Evans, Fields, Francisco, Gibson, Gill, Goins, Goodman, Minor, Mise, Moore, Mullins, Osborn(e), Phipps, Reeves (Rives, Rieves, Reeves, Reaves), …”
The term “Melungeon” has generally been applied to a widely distributed group of people associated with the general region of Tennessee, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Kentucky in the United States, but generally regarded as particularly concentrated in the general area of Eastern Tennessee, Southwest Virginia, and Northwest North Carolina. Appalachia.
In terms of my own family, I would expect to look for Melungeon people on my mother’s side that goes back to Cochrane and Pinkerton, in Virginia. What information I have is Scots-Irish connected to the Appalachians, which were settled after the earlier coastal colonists had filled up that terrain. In terms of temperament, the people I knew from that side tended to be hot-tempered and defiant, long gangly folks who pushed out to the edges. Some say they overwhelmed the Quakers in Pennsylvania.
Though controversial, this group as imagined has given rise to books like “Born Fighting: How the Scots Irish Shaped America” by Jim Webb. Formed by borderland fighting between England and Scotland and the Ulster Irish who resisted English authority, these are the likely people to have been driven to inland mountainous places, picking up people of color and presenting them as Cherokee, rather than African. The Red River people rose in a similar way from the combined Hudson’s Bay trappers and factors who took indigenous wives, forming a “Métis” identity. I have a short stack of books that treat the Melungeon people as distinct, but haven’t read them yet. I know a few people around here and from the Sweetgrass Hills who likely fit the description.
I don’t know of any organizations or institutions that have formed around the presumed identity, but the people seem to drift towards military. They love to write about themselves, maybe partly because their very existence is argued about — some wanting to be respectable Downton Abbey people, and others wanting to be Daniel Boone. Clearly some are like steady, dependable Clark of Lewis and Clark, but others of us are like Lewis.
Euro factions produced by war and ecology are several. When they throw off diaspora to America, they often try to stick together, possibly establishing churches where their language could be spoken. A powerful group comes from Germanic people and dominates in the US until the Latinx group eventually pushes them aside. The German-Austrian people valued order, hierarchy, status, and efficiency. As the country moved into the industrial revolution and after WWII into high technology, the German disposition thrived.
Celts, a big part of the Scots-Irish culture, did not take life easy. They were adapted to opposition, innovation, and the edges of population densities. The Roman Empire, which contributed so much of the culture of the Germans and English, did not persuade the Scots, Irish, Welsh.
Of course, the Sub-Saharan Africans brought to America as slaves and the indigenous people who had been the only ones here, had nothing to do with the Roman Empire and had every reason to resist and escape. They were not major components of the Melungeon, particularly in terms of culture, but because they were dark the preferred explanation for their darkness was “Cherokee” the way in some parts of the country, especially in Canada, people who had apparent indigenous genes were explained as “French.”
Much of recent political reaction to white settlers and colonizers has been about the German/Roman Empire version. The Melungeon people were much more inclined to join tribes than to fight them, maybe particularly in Michigan where they liked to re-settle along the rivers. The area was for a while the Old Northwest Frontier, confusing people living in the Pacific Northwest.
My paternal grandmother was named Beulah Swan Finney Strachan. “Beulah is primarily a female name of Hebrew origin that means Married.” I’m told Swan is a Métis name. ”The name Finney is of Gaelic/Irish origin and considered patronymic as it is derived from the medieval Irish name O’ Fiannaidh.” Her family had hard luck: a brother who died of alcoholism, a sister who ran off with a seducer and died when she gave birth to his baby, and a nature vulnerable to anxiety. She sounds Melungeon to me, but she was both protected and submerged by my grandfather who came directly from Scotland as an adult with his fiery father, two sisters, and his mother, born Catherine Welch. “Sam” had no middle name but always added an “S” to make his name look more official. The Strachans were educated urban Scots.
But when they got to America, the easy fertile land had all been taken. They ended up homesteading near Faulkton, South Dakota, on land recently occupied by Brulé Sioux. Their culture held them steady but they didn’t thrive until they sold farm machinery in Canada. There was no Cherokee grandmother and no pretense of one.
I feel like a Melungeon with a Celtic heart. “After the Celtic invasion of Britain about 500 BCE what is now Scotland was occupied and controlled by the Celtic people known as the Picts. This name came from the Latin word pictus meaning painted. They decorated their bodies with dyes.” That ought to fit in pretty well with today’s culture, the parts out West that accept such things as tattoos and metal bits.
In the course of doing this research, I learned that “sub-saharan Africa” was the source of slaves because northern Africa was mostly “Arab”. Maybe I have a Taureg grandmother who painted herself blue! I’m not, but it’s story material.
