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  #21  
Unread 06-20-2019, 05:45 PM
Matt Q Matt Q is offline
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Erik,

I think I understood Smith's account very differently from you.

In the parts you're objecting to, I'd say that he's reminiscing his childhood fancies. And if you can't be fanciful as a child, when can you be? He saying: this is what I thought as an adolescent. "I decided I was an Indian" refers to that.

His adult assertion of Native American heritage isn't based on the "capricious grounds" as his appearance and his relative lack of bodily hair, it's based on this:

"It was not until much later that I discovered that we did indeed have Choctaw blood. My cousin William Carroll Tabor, a member of the House of Representatives in the First Oklahoma legislature of 1903, put in a claim to the Dawes Commission stating that his great-grandmother Rebecca Tubbs Williams was the daughter of Chief Moshulatubbee, the head of the Choctaw nation at the time of the removal from Mississippi to Oklahoma. That claim was denied but it was always understood in my mother's family that her grandmother Catherine Williams, about whom she had often spoken to me, was definitely a Mississippi Choctaw."

best,

Matt
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  #22  
Unread 06-20-2019, 06:04 PM
Erik Olson Erik Olson is offline
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How was it discovered that we did indeed have Choctaw blood? A cousin William Carroll Tabor once put in a claim that his great-grandmother was the daughter of a Choctaw Chief, and this was not accepted or he would have said so but was 'contested.' Mind you, registration in the national registry known as the Dawes Rolls was critical in the issue of Indian citizenship and land claims.
Where such a claim might yield the rights to land
expect a hundred forgeries at hand.
America at that time was full of profiteers trying to secure land by hook or crook, force or fraud.
While it could have been the case that his cousin's great grandmother was half Native American, the fact of a contested claim by itself does not necessarily prove that he did indeed have Choctaw blood. So it still seems on too narrow grounds to conclude that he is indeed Indian. An odd tradition took root in the U.S. Early European settlers, after having displaced the greater part of those they called Indians through an unholy trinity of violence, disease, and starvation, forced the survivors of the largest tribe, the Cherokee, to move from the land east of the Mississippi. But then attitudes started to shift, and European Americans—most especially in the South—began to tell tales, however frequently invented, of their Indian forbearers. Native Americans, and the Cherokee in espcial, became idealised as 'noble savages' who had fought for self-determination, as Southern states were preceding the Civil War. Not only did the expedient of claiming Native American identity 'prove' their ties and rights to the soil, but it also allied them with a group that had taken up arms to resist federal authority and keep independence, much as the southern states preceding the Civil War.
For all we know, Smith's family could be one among countless others to pass down some vestige of this kind of tale. As for William, the identification appears to have fulfilled a psychological need by accounting for his different appearance from his peers in adolescence and blamelessly so. It is not my intention to blame him for entertaining any notion, however fanciful, in his youth. He has, however, countenanced the same identification into adulthood without any new grounds for it come to light but a cousin's claim. I dunno. Smith means well, is a fantastic poet; could use more objective support in claiming a whole heritage, though, if you ask me. Anywho, way to go, Joy Harjo!

As for the announcement: The Library of Congress states of Smith: William Smith is of European and Choctaw Indian ancestry. He served as the Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library from 1968 to 1970. But he was a Consultant you might say? According to this site, The name was changed by an act of Congress (Public Law 99-194), which states that the position “is equivalent to that of Poet Laureate of the United States.” Whether Smith really is the first poet laureate of native American ancestry and whether or not he would call himself that, The Library of Congress does register him as such on their own site, calling him of Choctaw ancestry; only to call another person the first ever, in stark contradiction with themselves. If William is what he is claiming to be, by active asserting or not denying, then the announcement robs him of his due. Further, the self-contradiction undermines the credibility of the Library of Congress, it leaves confusion hanging in the air, and it distracts from the celebration for Joy Harjo.

Best,

Erik

Last edited by Erik Olson; 06-21-2019 at 04:24 AM.
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  #23  
Unread 06-20-2019, 07:13 PM
Matt Q Matt Q is offline
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Erik,

In your previous post, which I was responding to, you'd said that Smith's claim to Native American heritage was "fanciful credulity" and delusional, in that it rested on two things: his appearance and his relative lack of bodily hair. That seemed rather an unfair assessment to me. So I thought perhaps you had misread the article.

What you are saying now is a little different. I would point out that irrespective of the cousin's motives, the woman that Smith's cousin made the claim about to the Dawes Commission was not the Choctaw grandmother of which Smith's mother spoke, but a different woman. So it's not the case that Smith's claimed Native American ancestor was contested by the Dawes Commission, or that we have evidence of any grounds for self-interest or financial motive with regard to her.

Now to me, it seems unlikely that Smith's mother would think her own grandmother was Native American if, in actual fact, she'd been a white woman. Of course I'm assuming that she'd met her grandmother, but it sounds very much like she had, given that she spoke often about her.

Clearly, none of the above is objective proof, and such proof, I imagine, might not be easily found. However, to me, it places Smith's belief in a rather different light than you'd initially presented it. I don't think it's delusional to believe your own mother, and if there were also physical traits in his family that were suggestive of Native American ancestry (and he's not the only one to have remarked on his own features in this way), then overall, it doesn't seem to me to be unreasonable conclusion for him to have drawn.

best,

Matt

Last edited by Matt Q; 06-20-2019 at 07:19 PM.
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  #24  
Unread 06-20-2019, 08:05 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Anyway, I think it's safe to say that as an enrolled member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Joy Harjo's identification as the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate is more solid than Smith's, even if Smith did publish a book of poetry which makes much of his identification with Native Americans. His self-identification wasn't just an item of passing conversational interest to him, but he wasn't an enrolled member of a tribe, either.

After reviewing what Smith himself said about the basis for his self-identification, I'm inclined to view that self-identification in light of what Erik mentioned above: namely, that there is a well-documented phenomenon of Southern Whites claiming descent from Native Americans. And usually, as in Smith's family lore, the claimed ancestor is the daughter of a chief. I.e., the equivalent of royalty. (As in Disney films, no one cares about ordinary girls.)

Although Smith claimed Choctaw heritage rather than Cherokee heritage, his book's title mentions the Cherokee people, so I don't think the Cherokee emphasis of the following two articles makes them irrelevant to Smith's circumstances. There's some fascinating stuff in both, but I'll just quote a few snippets from the second.

Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood? The history of a myth. (Slate, 2015)

No, you are not part Cherokee: Why tribal family lore is so common among white people from Oklahoma to Georgia (Timeline, 2016)

Quote:
For white people to claim distant Cherokee heritage in 1855 or so had the interesting effect of “legitimating the antiquity of their native-born status as sons or daughters of the South,” as Gregory Smithers writes in Slate. In a crucial moment of swelling Southern pride, pointing out that your family had been here long enough to intermarry with Cherokees was a method of staking a claim to Southern identity. Southern white identity.

Their descendants believed them, and then they had children of their own who also believed these stories, and so on. Johnny Cash probably wasn’t faking it on purpose — he just believed his grandparents.

Cherokee heritage claims became somewhat of a norm in the white American south — to the extent that a son of two Sicilian immigrants, born in 1920 in Louisiana, was himself compelled to claim Cherokee heritage. His name was Espera Oscar de Corti, aka Iron Eyes Cody, and in 1971 he starred in the famous “Crying Indian” PSA as the crying Indian.

Five years later, The Education of Little Tree was published, and went on to become a smash hit. The book depicts a young part-Cherokee boy who’s sent to live with his Cherokee grandparents, who nurture his moral compass and his love for the earth. In a jarring plot twist, it turned out that The Education of Little Tree was actually written under a pseudonym by Asa Earl Carter, a staunch racist from Alabama who was a Klansman and wrote speeches for George Wallace (including the famous line, “Segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever!”). Carter believed he was part Cherokee, a fact that didn’t stand in the way of his white supremacist values.
Both articles provide much food for thought.
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  #25  
Unread 06-20-2019, 08:55 PM
Matt Q Matt Q is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Julie Steiner View Post
And usually, as in Smith's family lore, the claimed ancestor is the daughter of a chief. I.e., the equivalent of royalty. (As in Disney films, no one cares about ordinary girls.)
Not quite. As I said to Erik, this is not the ancestor that Smith is claiming. His cousin made that claim, and it related to a different woman. As Smith points out, it wasn't upheld by the Dawes Commission. On the other hand, no special 'princess' claim is made for Smith's mother's grandmother, who is Smith's claimed Choctaw ancestor. Just an "ordinary girl" in this case.

Part of the reason I'm pointing this out is, obviously, that I'm pedant. But also because Smith's claim seems different from the general case quoted in the articles you've linked to, in that (he says) his mother says her grandmother, who his mother knew and spoke of often, was Choctaw. That's quite a specific claim. Smith was told by someone who knew the ancestor in person -- at least that's how it reads to me. This is not the case in the articles you've linked to, where the claimed ancestry is vague and more distant in time. If his mother's claim is false then what do we conclude: that his mother lied, or perhaps was mistaken: she thought her grandmother was a Native American, but actually she didn't know what Native Americans looked like? Maybe she was too young, I guess.

Still, contrast this with the person in the first article you link to: " “I cannot say when I first heard of my Indian blood, but as a boy I heard it spoken of in a general way,” Charles Phelps, a resident of Winston-Salem in North Carolina, told a federal census taker near the beginning of the 20th century."

Anyway, who knows. But let's says Smith is right. Does that make him the first Native American poet laureate? I don't think he'd have a strong case based on a single great-grandparent and no connection to living Native American culture, none that he mentions anyway. There's a much stronger case for considering him a white poet Laureate. His European heritage (biological and cultural) is much stronger. And I don't know that he'd claim to be a Native American either. His strongest claim in the article we've been reading is to a "modest measure of Choctaw blood". With Harjo, on the other hand, as you say, there's no question that she is Native American. I don't see it as problematic that she's being called the first Native American poet laureate.

Last edited by Matt Q; 06-20-2019 at 09:46 PM.
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  #26  
Unread 06-20-2019, 09:47 PM
John Isbell John Isbell is offline
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Matt: "And I don't know that he'd claim to be a Native American either. His strongest claim in the article we've been reading is to a "modest measure of Choctaw blood"."
This seems fair and important. There's a difference between believing you have some Native American ancestry and self-identifying as Native American. It's a common enough distinction today, I think. The upshot is that Joy Harjo's pathbreaking status here may be just what it appears after all; being both fair to the Choctaw nation and fair to Smith himself, who are really the two interested parties.

Cheers,
John

Last edited by John Isbell; 06-20-2019 at 09:52 PM. Reason: better phrasing, I hope
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  #27  
Unread 06-20-2019, 11:05 PM
Julie Steiner Julie Steiner is offline
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Thank you Matt, for the correction, and I concede that I was being unfair to Smith.

I agree with your statement that John quoted.

Michael, I'm glad to have been prompted to become more familiar with William Jay Smith, whose work I had not known before. I like some of what I've seen of it, and will certainly check out The Cherokee Lottery, which draws poetic attention to a great injustice in American history.
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  #28  
Unread 06-21-2019, 05:24 AM
Erik Olson Erik Olson is offline
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Q View Post
The woman that Smith's cousin made the claim about to the Dawes Commission was not the Choctaw grandmother of which Smith's mother spoke, but a different woman.
I never thought otherwise. The cousin of Smith had put in a claim about said cousin's great-grandmother, one Rebecca Tubbs Williams, alleging her to be none but the very daughter of the Chief of Choctaws—‘the head of the Choctaw Nation.’ The article allows that, for one reason or another, the claim was denied; and though the author might have omitted a denied claim by which nothing is proved, he includes it anyway, if for nothing else than to bring factual details of his relatives in association with the epithet of Choctaw so that subsequent claims to connections to that of all tribes might seem less accidental and more probable. It makes less isolated what Smith subsequently reports: that his mother was wont to speak of her grandmother, a Catherine Williams, as the one whom her family did not doubt was — ‘definitely a Mississippi Choctaw’. This makes the strongest of all the support or would-be support which Smith summons; yet this word of mouth is less than sufficient to be sure of indigenous heritage I am afraid; indeed, especially when considered with the fact that almost every family with lineage east of the Mississippi prior 1800 has an Indian ancestor, or at least according to the oral history passed down in the family, however invented more often than not. (As explained in more detail up-thread.) The single most persistent myth among American families is nowhere more common than in the region where Smith is from, many there having preserved exactly this kind of in-family claim with all the eagerness of romantic folklore, upon the same sort of support (pointing to one relative or another as their link to pure American blood, being indigenous through and through). It may or may not be true, for all I know, but what Smith has provided is not sufficient to settle the question, if you ask me, absent any objective corroboration.

You said:
Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Q View Post
So it's not the case that Smith's claimed Native American ancestor was contested by the Dawes Commission
Well, which one? I only meant to reference Rebecca Tubbs Williams, not Catherine Williams. The former was denied by the Dawes Commission, the latter affirmed by his mother's family; neither is objective proof, which Smith seems to be wholly lacking. I bow out now. It was a pleasure discussing this thorny matter with you.

Cheers,

Erik

Last edited by Erik Olson; 06-21-2019 at 04:10 PM.
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  #29  
Unread 06-21-2019, 05:21 PM
James Brancheau James Brancheau is offline
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Good god. Could it be that the Mr Juster planted a seed of discontent?

Last edited by James Brancheau; 06-22-2019 at 03:14 AM. Reason: No more GT threads for awhile...
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  #30  
Unread 06-21-2019, 06:14 PM
John Riley John Riley is offline
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My great-grandmother was full-blooded Choctaw and I've never considered myself Native American.
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