Buffy Sainte-Marie and birth cert of relative indicating “non-white” ancestry
I wrote a short piece recently about the controversy surrounding the “outing” of singer-songwriter and indigenous rights activist Buffy Sainte-Marie.
This “outing” by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC) concerned the unearthing of Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate showing her to be the birth child of Italian-American Albert Santamaria and his wife Winifred Irene Kenrick.
Sainte-Marie had presented herself over many years as being the daughter of First Nations people – further claiming she had been removed from her community and merely legally adopted by the people named on the recently unearthed birth certificate.
This documentation has led to Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s claims to indigenous ancestry and identity being very publicly called into question.
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It must be stated at the outset that whatever the case of her biological birth, her DNA has no bearing whatsoever on her standing as a beloved and respected member of the Piapot Cree community of Canada.
The belief that “blood” determines identity is an attitude stemming directly from the history of colonialist racism pervading every level of society for over 400 years in the Americas.
But a human being’s true identity does not flow from their DNA, skin color, or some imaginary “race” category which they were assigned by racists.
Real identity comes from our actions and our lived culture.
Because we are ALL descended from one small population bottleneck of between 40 and 1000 individuals 70,000 years ago in Africa.
To believe that we are now somehow fundamentally different to one another on a biological level is to think of humans as pedigree animals, in which some of us have selectively bred so carefully as to create a “better” strain of human.
Yet we know from the science of genetics that human population groups have never managed to remain isolated long enough to develop into “races” with any meaningful differences.
I have been writing about this for years.
Why do I bother?
Because the hypocrisy of one group of people telling others “who they really are”, BASED ON BLOOD, is beyond outrageous.
The USA in particular practices this form of hypocrisy on an industrial scale.
So-called “white” people will point excitedly at people like Buffy Sainte-Marie, and label her a fraud, BECAUSE HER CULTURAL IDENTITY DOES NOT MATCH AN EXPECTED GENETIC INHERITANCE.
Yet most of the “white” people in America with no recent immigrants in their family will happily refer to themselves by ethnicity – German, Italian, Scots-Irish, etc. – while having only a small genetic component from that one specific ethnic group, and having even less cultural commonality with any such group. Wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day won’t cut it.
Now, with that out of the way, on balance it seems clear that Sainte-Marie DID misrepresent her genetic inheritance in order to “add value” to her cultural identity.
This is of course seen as deeply dishonest by those people who claim to know exactly who they are.
The real ethnic background of many, many “white” Americans is mischaracterised almost every single day. By the media. By their own families. By themselves.
Some don’t even know it. Others do.
The question then becomes…why do so many self-identifying “white” people get so angry when someone rejects “whiteness” to claim a “non-white” identity?
It is surely for the people whose identity has been appropriated to feel anger and betrayal.
Is “white” anger really about honesty and authenticity?
Could it be that many Americans have fought so hard to arrive on the white mountaintop, they can scarcely believe that a fellow traveller would turn around and head straight back down?
It diminishes the value of the identity. It’s disrespect for the ascendant gang.
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Colonialism is the ultimate destroyer of the link between ancestry and culture.
In order to justify themselves – the robbers of land and resources, the exploiters of labor, must constantly reinforce a message of superiority.
Superiority of DNA (aka eugenics).
Superiority of culture.
Any people opposing the stealing of their labor, the taking of their land, must be constantly, incessantly portrayed as inferior to the colonising or enslaving group.
And once everything tangible has been taken, to ensure that the disempowered do not rise again in anger, the underclasses’ very sense of self-identity must be erased.
This combination of assaults on the enslaved and colonised has created millions of humans who float untethered and emotionally bereft in a sort of no-man’s-land, belonging nowhere and to no one.
If we do not see this, understand this, then we are either extremely lucky or a descendant of the colonising group. Or we are simply plugging our ears and averting our eyes.
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I have been discussing these ideas online for years, and as the news about Buffy Sainte-Marie broke, many discussions came to the boil.
Many of my friends online are the descendants of what I like to call “Old Mix Americans“, the people formed from the splinters of colonialism.
The disappeared people between the written lines.
We know we’re “not quite white”, but there is no place in America for people who do not claim a simple “racial” identity.
The boxes we were once invited to tick – Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native American – have expanded somewhat in recent years, but there is still no suitable identity or ethnicity for those of us of Old Mix ancestry.
Some might say “Get over it. Just call yourself American.”
But for some people, simply saying “I’m American” is too blunt and ill-defined. “American” is a word freighted with multiple meanings – national, political, colonial.
To say “I’m American” with pride almost suggests that a person buys into the entire myth of America, wholesale.
And many of us born in the USA do not buy into “the official story”.
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I have a pretty serious database, built over many years, which I use to try and document “Old Mix America“.
This makes it relatively easy for me to pop in a name, and be able to place people within a geographical, historical, and demographic context.
As regards Buffy Sainte-Marie, it became obvious fairly quickly that she is part of the Old Mix story.
When addressing the ethnic background of Sainte-Marie’s parents, CBC simply states that:
“Albert’s parents were born in Italy, while Winifred’s mother and father were of mostly English ancestry”.
For a start, the CBC News story failed to make clear the existence of family correspondence (readily available online) in which Sainte-Marie’s great-grandfather Frank Atwood wrote to one of his daughters explaining his Seminole origins on his mother’s side.
Perhaps even more interesting is the birth certificate of Sainte-Marie’s Aunt Lucille, on which we find an infant girl born in 1914, clearly stated as being “colored”.
This was no small thing in 1914. For Lucille to have been called “colored” on a birth cert in 1914 means she was clearly seen as such.
Throughout American history, if the father was white and the mother was ambiguous or dark, “brown” children would be listed as “white”, to avoid a punch in the nose.
I have quite literally thousands of records on file in which the exact same person was noted variously as “white”, “black”, “mulatto”, “Indian”, or “free person of color”, depending on the location or racism of the record-taker.
While pondering why Sainte-Marie’s aunt was recorded as a person of color, other anomalies became apparent.
Why did Sainte-Marie’s mother and aunt – Lucille Winifred Kenrick and Winifred Irene Kenrick (who were also the two siblings nearest each other in age) – why did both carry the name “Winifred”?
And before you ask, yes, they were definitely two separate people.
Of course sometimes a name might be given to more than one child as a way to honor an especially beloved friend or ancestor, yet my own research can find no other “Winifreds” in this family tree.
This got me to wondering if these girls might be TWO adopted children, with both given the name of their possibly deceased mother? Perhaps an indigenous mother, as Sainte-Marie’s mother did mention Mi’kmaq ancestry?
While the case with Buffy Sainte-Marie’s own birth certificate is unclear, older birth certificates were able to be legally amended in the USA if a child was adopted.
AND OFTEN WITH NO RECORD OF THIS AMENDMENT.
Provisional family tree of Buffy Sainte-Marie
Some of the Lakota I wrote about recently who were stolen and placed with “white” parents have birth certs showing the white parents as their biological parents. When these adoptions took place under the aegis of church institutions, the paperwork could be, shall we say, sketchy at times.
This issue touches me personally.
I was formally adopted aged 5 by my stepfather. When I was legally adopted, my own birth cert was amended.
My Missouri birth cert shows me as “Robert Brian ——-“, birth son of Robert ——-, my stepfather.
AND I WOULD HAVE NEVER KNOWN MY ACTUAL BIRTH FATHER IF FAMILY MEMBERS HAD NOT INFORMED ME.
When I joined the army at 17, when I got my first passport, I had to order a notarised copy of my birth certificate. All showed my stepfather as my biological father.
In legal and documentary terms, my original birth cert showing my true name at birth, my true ancestry, has been expunged and “disappeared”.
But onwards.
The possibility of Mi’kmaq ancestry on the maternal side of Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s family becomes even more of a possibility when we investigate further, and find her family tree reaching north into Nova Scotia, which is of course one of the heartlands of the Mi’kmaq and related Métis people.
I make sure to mention the Métis, because the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia have been intermarrying with peoples outside their tribe or nation since at least the 1500s.
Basque, French and English fishermen, and later, colonial settlers.
During the 1780s, at least 3,500 African-Americans including slaves and Black Loyalists – formerly enslaved people from the American colonies who had fought for the British in exchange for their freedom – arrived in Nova Scotia.
Needless to say, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy were the most likely to intermix, and the Métis of Nova Scotia and Canada were a people much like the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.
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All of the foregoing is not an apologia for cultural appropriation. No one is saying that Buffy Sainte-Marie was Seminole or Mi’kmaq or even Métis based simply on her mixed ancestry.
And this is the entire point of this essay. To be a person living 60 years ago without a cultural community to “explain” being seen as a person of color – a female person of color at that – must have been well nigh unbearable.
Were Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s mother and aunt the ones who were actually adopted? Was anyone adopted? Dunno.
Did Sainte-Marie’s mother have a child by a man other than her husband? Perhaps a man of color? Dunno.
Did a girl born into a house where she was a dark-skinned child among whiter siblings cause her to shoulder a part of her mother’s hidden back-story? Again, dunno.
Did a woman born into a country which utterly denigrated brown and black people while elevating “whiteness” simply stumble upon a way to make being “brown” a survival advantage? Maybe.
Put even more bluntly, who among us would have chosen in 1963 (pre-Civil Rights Act) to accept a life of discrimination over acceptance?
Who among us would have taken the time required every single living day of our existence to patiently explain to bigots that in spite of our skin color, in spite of our “mixed race” appearance, in spite of having the taint of possible illegitimacy, in spite of being a woman of color in a white man’s world, in spite of not even knowing WHY we look the way we do, in spite of ALL this, we deserve dignity and respect and a fair crack at success?
Really? Would we take such a path?
Or would we, as a profoundly conflicted young woman with an identity crisis did, try to paper over some very complex personal and familial issues with a simple, more easily digestible (and dare I say, marketable) story?
A story which brings us love and acceptance into the bargain?
There is a difference between wrong and REALLY WRONG.
Perhaps we should all step off the treadmill of social media-induced rage, where The Left simply screams “Appropriation!” and The Right yells “Pretendian!”, and look at the life story of one girl, one woman, in holistic context.
Isn’t this the very essence of “Judge not lest ye be judged”?
As a very thoughtful First Nations elder pointed-out on TikTok this week, only Buffy Sainte-Marie knows the reasons she rejected her birth family, and why she so desperately wanted to “belong”.
The elder’s advice to Buffy? To become a real elder herself, by speaking the truth. Forgiveness can then follow truth.
From a less judgmental distance, the career, the inconsistencies, and the current battle over the legacy of Buffy Sainte-Marie seem really to be a weird and horribly surreal part of the larger tragedy of American racism.
The people who will suffer most from the outfall of this are of course the Cree Nation and other indigenous peoples.
Old Mix Americans, unable to belong anywhere else, will continue to be packed by others into boxes marked “black” or “white”. Or they will choose themselves to self-identify simply as a “color”.
Multi-ethnic people having no real cultural identity with which to anchor themselves will always be nobodies or “colors”, until they choose otherwise.
And once they choose to be more than a color, let their new identity be based on truth.
Only when we reclaim our true selves are we ready to be claimed and adopted by others.
#BuffySainteMarie #history #racism #IdentityPolitics
The 300 Year Fire
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinGreat Fire of London, 1666
In late summer 1666, London was tinder-dry, and coming off the back of a two-year drought. A small fire in a bakery, along with an indecisive and incompetent public official, led to the incineration of 87 churches, a cathedral, and 13,200 houses. 7 out of 8 Londoners were left homeless.
Fast-forward 300 years to summer 1966. Violent race riots raged in 43 USA cities, including Chicago, Cleveland, Ohio, Atlanta, Georgia, and San Francisco, resulting in 11 deaths and more than 400 injured.
Surely there can be no connection?
Consider this. In 1666, in the American colonies of Virginia and Maryland, there were barely more than 500 people of African descent. Many of these were free landowners, others were serving out indentures similar to people of European origin. A few were of course outright slaves.
With a glut of tobacco on the market, the colonial economy was experiencing a downturn.
Land, jobs, and money were becoming scarce for the poor of Virginia and Maryland. Many people were beginning to seek better opportunities elsewhere, in Pennsylvania and the Carolinas. Many poor “whites” and free people of color had begun moving inland to the colonial frontier, beyond the reach of tax collectors, masters, establishment churches, and colonial bureaucracy.
The aftermath of the Great Fire of London had created a building boom there, and with it came a huge demand for skilled labor – making indentured servitude in the colonies no longer such an attractive option for the poor of England.
Back in Virginia, with indentured labor (both black and white) in short supply, the rich and powerful hit upon an expedient solution. They simply began to enact legislation during the 1660s and 1670s specifically designed to denigrate and limit the rights of “black” people, in order to create a new “lower class” legal caste – which it was hoped would become a source of free, enforced labor, replacing indentured servitude.
These laws included:
Banning inter-ethnic marriages and sexual relations
Depriving “blacks” of property rights
Prohibiting “blacks” from bearing arms or travelling without written permission
Declaring that it was no longer a crime to kill an unruly slave in the course of punishment
Prohibiting masters from freeing slaves unless the freedmen were deported from the colony
Banishing any white man or woman who married a “black”, “mulatto”, or American Indian
And thus began the slow descent into vicious bigotry and racism, another kind of fire which would rage for another 300 years, and longer.
This is the essence of historical contingency.
How humans react to events then (and now) have consequences far beyond the bounds of their own short lives.
History does not automatically move in a progressive arc toward human betterment. We can, and often do, move backwards.
The kneejerk erosion of “lesser” rights today makes it easier for the next generation to remove even more important rights and freedoms.
Color-based slavery and “racial” bigotry were not inevitable in America.
How different things might have been, but for a careless accident in a London bakery 350 years ago…
#greatfireoflondon #slavery #history
The Scots-Irish Did Not Single-Handedly Create America
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinAlfred Bailey and wife Sarilda Perkins
America’s first inner identity, its first distinctly “American” culture, is “Southern Appalachian”.
Before Appalachian culture came into being, America was largely a land of immigrant administrators, speculators, members of religious sects, colonists, convicts, servants, and slaves of many different cultures and ethnicities.
English, Africans (including the Gullah and so many others), Scottish, Irish, Welsh, German, French, Dutch, Swedish, Spanish, Portuguese, Jewish, Romani, Greek, Minorcan, Malagasy, et al.
Were these people changed by being in America? Sure. But in the earliest days, they tended to live, marry, work and migrate as ethnic enclaves, religious groups, or extended family groups.
There were Scottish communities around Cape Fear and in the Carolina backcountry. Quakers tended to settle near one another in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Tennessee and elsewhere. German-speaking Mennonites did the same. French communities existed in places such as Manakin Town. Minorcans in Florida. Welsh towns in Pennsylvania. Jewish communities in Georgia. Displaced indigenous groups such as the Lenape and Catawba in various locales.
Unlike the people just mentioned, folks arriving in America from Ulster in Ireland were not a single, cohesive ethnic group. Some were Anglican. Some were Presbyterian. Some were Catholic. Many were Quakers. Some were English, some were Irish, some were Scottish, and a good few were Welsh. Many were French, German, or Flemish.
Some of these individual groups from Ulster stuck together in America, for a while…
But Southern Appalachia changed all that. Southern Appalachia was and is different.
“Southern Appalachian” equals “multi-ethnic”. Period.
There is no sustainable argument for a majority “Scots-Irish” culture in Appalachia.
The music said to be “Scots-Irish” is the same music which was played throughout the British Isles by English, Welsh, Irish, and Scots during the age of fiddle tunes and broadside ballads.
Feuding and fighting are not specific remnants of “Scots-Irish” culture. Feuding is a feature of remote rural insular communities everywhere; in fact, almost none of the mountain feuds of Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, or Kentucky were fought by people with roots in Ulster.
The cultural sideline most embraced as being a “Scots-Irish thing” – distilling liquor – was also practiced by mountain folks with German and French roots. We can know this by reading contemporary letters and wills leaving stills to relatives and children. Most everyone made booze of one kind or another from whatever was at hand. Barley. Corn. Potatoes. Apples. Peaches. In an age before painkillers and anesthetics, before colonisers acquired herbal knowledge of their new surroundings, alcohol was a treasured blessing (and often a social curse).
The multi-ethnic character of Appalachia is there for all to see in other historical records, for those who care to read them.
Revolutionary War Rolls. Land bounties and land warrants. Wills. Census records. Marriages. Entries in family Bibles. Court proceedings. Newspaper accounts. Contracts of land and personal indenture.
In no county of the Southern Appalachian heartland – the hill and holler country of Eastern Kentucky, East Tennessee, western parts of Virginia and North Carolina, and southern West Virginia – in no county there, none, can the MAJORITY of people be demonstrated to be descended from Ulster folk.
Whatever Google tells you, whatever the new-fangled AI claims to “know”, those search engines and large language models will only regurgitate what has been said the most times by the most people.
The majority of people in the 1970s and 1980s thought that eggs and butter were unhealthy, and that margarine was “good”. We now know that everyone, from “experts” down to the man in the street, was simply repeating “received wisdom”.
Received wisdom is often wrong.
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Someone recently asked “Why would people say they were Scots-Irish if they weren’t? What could they hope to gain through this deception?”
Perhaps the most important thing to point-out when answering this question is that most old Southern Appalachian families have people of color in their family tree somewhere.
And this is surely why <some> Americans have been so determined to insist that “Southern Appalachian culture” equals “Scots-Irish culture”.
If America’s first non-indigenous core identity and culture could in fact be shown to be fundamentally multi-ethnic instead of “Scots-Irish” – and this CAN be shown – then one of America’s earliest, largest and richest cultural identities – “Appalachian” – can no longer be considered the sole province of “Protestant white folks”.
This would force us to change our image of the families travelling in covered wagons. It changes our mental picture of the people in the forts and blockhouses of frontier Kentucky. It changes the color of many women sitting at spinning wheels and looms in log cabins. It makes us question everyone. Tavern keepers. Keelboatmen. Loggers. Soldiers. Longhunters. And when we begin to question everyone, and we begin to see the many different ethnic groups intermixing, we begin to see a brown people.
And if you are the sort of person who believes that your culture, your “American-ness”, your “specialness” resides in your “whiteness”, this is a big problem for your entire sense of self.
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Always, always remember that America, perhaps more than any English-speaking nation, is full of people carrying surnames which bear no relation to their ancestry.
African-Americans carry Irish and Scottish surnames.
American Indians carry Irish and Scottish surnames.
As do people of Jewish and Romani ancestry.
During the late 1700s and early 1800s, America’s binary racial caste system forced such multi-ethnic “brown people” of Appalachia to declare themselves “white”.
This was not some personal proto-identity politics, about wanting to identify with the “ascendant race”. This was a matter of deadly, legal seriousness.
Being declared a “mulatto” or “colored” could see any number of rights withheld.
Voting rights. The right to attend local schools. The right to own a gun.
Picking and going by a “white” name – often a name borrowed from a neighbor with Irish or Scottish roots – was the absolute basic first step in disguising one’s true ethnicity.
Not every family claiming a spurious “Scots-Irish” background did this for consciously racialist reasons.
Many supporters of the Royalist or “Tory” cause found their lives and farms and personal property under threat by “Patriots” during the 1770s and 1780s. Many chose to pack-up and head for the mountains.
All things English became hugely unfashionable and undesirable in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution – a war which might arguably be better described as America’s First Civil War.
People from Ulster – especially Presbyterians already hostile to Anglican English interests – were early and avid supporters of the “Patriot” cause.
It seems pretty obvious that former Tory/Loyalist families in Southern Appalachia would not have been keen to advertise their past affiliations, nor their roots, among such neighbors.
Especially if these erstwhile Tories appeared “racially dubious”.
Given a choice between English-speaking “white” identities, many opted for “Irish” over “English”.
Remember that the term “Scots-Irish” wasn’t yet in wide usage, and certainly not among the descendants of Ulster folk. They simply called themselves Irish or Scots.
My own great-great-grandfather Hogan – a nut-brown Melungeon – claimed to have been born in Ireland on his military service records. He was not born in Ireland. Nor was his father. Nor his grandfather. But his claimed birth in Ireland helped to deflect uncomfortable questions in a deeply, deeply racist country.
Another British and American invented ethnicity – “Anglo-Saxon” – makes no room for brown people. But Anglo-Saxon racism always did allow for the idea of brown Irish people. Hell, the English were positively determined to prove the “racial inferiority” of Irish people ever since they first decided to steal their country.
In other words, my brown ancestors could have never gotten away with saying they were “Anglo-Saxon”, and certainly did not want to admit to being part Indian or African.
Somewhere along the line, one side of my family became “Hogans”, and in doing so, they also became Irish, and over time, “white”.
Similar stories unfolded all over Appalachia.
There are some family lines of people named Vance, Myers and McInturff who call themselves “Scots-Irish”, when they are in fact of German descent from people surnamed “Wentz“, “Mayer” and “Meckendorf“.
For multi-ethnic Appalachians, to be “Irish” was a simple form of shorthand.
Being “Irish” was to be aligned with “whiteness”.
Being “Irish” was to be aligned with American, as opposed to English interests.
The history of Southern Appalachia during the 1700s and 1800s is one of the most richly fascinating stories imaginable.
We are doing this story a grave disservice by hiding it under a reductionist blanket of “Scots-Irishness”.
©2023 Brian Halpin
#beforewewerewhite #scotsirish #appalachianhistory
Weaving the Past
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian Halpinl to r, Edith Weaver, wife of Daniel Pettiford; Lynn Weaver; Morticia Weaver
Someone recently left a comment under another BWWW blog, in which I mentioned some of the non-European ancestors of a popular country music artist who is widely perceived as “white”.
The person commenting suggested that the use of comparative DNA analysis and genealogy by this blog and podcast to highlight non-European ancestry might be causing confusion, because using “white” society’s historical methods for assigning ethnicity via “blood quantum” and ancestry does not place adequate focus on “culture” as the central determiner of identity.
The most important thing to say here is that this blog and podcast NEVER presumes to assign an ethnic identity to anyone; and certainly not on the basis of ancestral lineage or DNA.
While genealogy and DNA cannot tell us who we are TODAY, they CAN tell us something about who our ancestors were or were not IN THE PAST.
It is absolutely true that our present identity is (or should be) built mostly from our lived culture, not our DNA.
But a problem arises when people try to ascribe certain aspects of their current lived culture to particular historical ethnic groups, in order to bolster a particular historical myth or worldview.
The most egregious example of this is when people identify as “white”, and then go on to claim for this caste identity virtually every notable American achievement.
Doing this allows them to express pride in their “race”. By extension, “pride in being American” and “American exceptionalism” become bound-up with this so-called “high-achieving race”.
Another regional example of this is the widespread claiming of “Scots-Irish” identity among Appalachians, with a self-reinforcing virtuous circle in which people claim that identity, look around at how their community lives, and then say “This is Scots-Irish culture”, and thus “Scots-Irish culture = Appalachian culture”.
I have written elsewhere about how this identity came to be the “go-to” ethnic identity for multi-ethnic Appalachians who stood to lose almost everything if they did not fall into the right category within the American racial caste system.
Just because a group of people have come to repeat a falsehood again and again does not make it harmless.
If we throw our hands in the air and agree to cede this territory, and allow “white” and “Scots-Irish” to become the blanket terms describing Southern Appalachian culture and ethnicity, then we cede true history itself, and agree to live a mythology.
The truth and lived experience of millions of people becomes null, void, extinct.
I am sharing a short extract from a memoir written in the 1920s by an old man named Thomas Weaver.
These sorts of memoirs are scarce as hen’s teeth. Most underclass rural Americans at the time had little access to education and were thus largely illiterate. If they were free people of color, this counted doubly.
Thomas Weaver was born in the North Carolina Piedmont. His family pioneered and settled in Indiana during the 1840s.
The Weavers might have gone down in history as simply another family with an Anglo- or Anglicised German-American (Weber) surname, taking the trail west like thousands of others.
From their movements and locations, some might even have suggested or presumed they were “Scots-Irish”.
But thanks to genealogical and historical records, along with DNA data and the great good fortune of his rare literacy, we learn some astonishing things.
He himself states that he was “…of largely Indian extraction of the Cherokee tribe of North Carolina”.
It is unclear whether “largely Indian” meant that he was aware or unaware of his other ancestry, which appears to have included South Asian people brought into the Carolinas as labourers during the 1600s and 1700s.
At any rate, as a person of color along the American frontier who narrowly escaped death and being captured and sold into slavery, his is an extraordinary story, and a very American story.
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“…The writer of this memoranda was born in Guilford County. North Carolina, February 17, 1841, and my father and Mother started to Indiana, September 28, 1846. The first thing that happened after we had been only three days on the road, I, with another little boy, were stolen. The mode of theft was by enticing us into a shop by showing us bright, new tin cups, something we had never seen before. It took all the afternoon to find us. Had it not been for a kind lady that saw the man take us into his Shop they never would have found us, and I can now say, thank God for the lady, as she gave the snap away. She saved us from Being taken away that night and being sold.
Well, we traveled on for about a week without anything transpiring, crossing several rivers the names of which I do not remember. My faithful little dog Ut his name, traveled with us about three days, and as he did not like to travel he turned and went back to his old home. At one time he saved my life, when I had rambled off into the weeds and laid down to sleep, by killing snakes until he was bloody all over. When he got time he ran to the house and mother saw what had happened to save my life; he had killed some fifteen or twenty snakes and how they came there I will never tell.
We will now go on as we are about four days on the road, and A very serious thing happened just after we had crossed a river by Ferry boat. A man was chopping wood a little ways from the ferry, and he came down to our wagon train and demanded Hardy Evans to show his free papers, to which Hardy objected, and without further words he struck Hardy on the cheek with the pole of his axe and smashed his cheek bone into his mouth and throat, a happening that caused us to have to stop there one week, and if the people had Caught him that afternoon they would certainly have killed him. Well, when Hardy got so he could travel, we started on our journey again.
This being the third week we had now reached the summit of the Blue Ridge mountains, at Wytheville. We then came down the Mountains until we reached the Kanawa river valley, and the next day we crossed the river, by ferry boat, and you may guess how afraid I was to get on that boat. After we had crossed the river and traveled a short distance, we came to the Kanawa Salt Works, and oh, what a sight it was, to both old and young. They were hauling salt in very large kettles, and hauling it around like gravel. We passed this place and the slogan was, “On to Point Pleasant.” But we had to yet cross the Gauley mountains and Gauley river, over which is the natural bridge. When we arrived there we children soon discovered something which to us was wounderful. We would throw stones over the precipice and when they would strike the bottom the echo would sound back and oh, how curious it was to us. But this fun was all broken up when out mothers came up. They caught us up by the nape of the neck, or any old way as for that matter, and threw us right and left out into the middle of the road, and made us get away from there in a hurry.
Now on to Point Pleasant. We arrived there about the close of the third week on the road. Agnin here were ferry boats, steam boats, horse boats, row boats, and pole boats, but our fathers chose the steam boat, and they in a very short time landed us in old Ohio. now the slogan changed to “On to Chillicothe,” where we will drink plenty of coffee.
Oh now we had traveled all these miles together, but now had come to the parting. Uncle Jim Pulley left us and went to Cincinnati, and in a few more days we all would be separated…”
*****
#beforewewerewhite #southasianamerican #americanfrontier
Longing and Belonging: The Strange Case of Buffy Sainte-Marie
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinBuffy Sainte-Marie and birth cert of relative indicating “non-white” ancestry
I wrote a short piece recently about the controversy surrounding the “outing” of singer-songwriter and indigenous rights activist Buffy Sainte-Marie.
This “outing” by Canadian Broadcasting Corporation News (CBC) concerned the unearthing of Sainte-Marie’s birth certificate showing her to be the birth child of Italian-American Albert Santamaria and his wife Winifred Irene Kenrick.
Sainte-Marie had presented herself over many years as being the daughter of First Nations people – further claiming she had been removed from her community and merely legally adopted by the people named on the recently unearthed birth certificate.
This documentation has led to Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s claims to indigenous ancestry and identity being very publicly called into question.
*****
It must be stated at the outset that whatever the case of her biological birth, her DNA has no bearing whatsoever on her standing as a beloved and respected member of the Piapot Cree community of Canada.
The belief that “blood” determines identity is an attitude stemming directly from the history of colonialist racism pervading every level of society for over 400 years in the Americas.
But a human being’s true identity does not flow from their DNA, skin color, or some imaginary “race” category which they were assigned by racists.
Real identity comes from our actions and our lived culture.
Because we are ALL descended from one small population bottleneck of between 40 and 1000 individuals 70,000 years ago in Africa.
To believe that we are now somehow fundamentally different to one another on a biological level is to think of humans as pedigree animals, in which some of us have selectively bred so carefully as to create a “better” strain of human.
Yet we know from the science of genetics that human population groups have never managed to remain isolated long enough to develop into “races” with any meaningful differences.
I have been writing about this for years.
Why do I bother?
Because the hypocrisy of one group of people telling others “who they really are”, BASED ON BLOOD, is beyond outrageous.
The USA in particular practices this form of hypocrisy on an industrial scale.
So-called “white” people will point excitedly at people like Buffy Sainte-Marie, and label her a fraud, BECAUSE HER CULTURAL IDENTITY DOES NOT MATCH AN EXPECTED GENETIC INHERITANCE.
Yet most of the “white” people in America with no recent immigrants in their family will happily refer to themselves by ethnicity – German, Italian, Scots-Irish, etc. – while having only a small genetic component from that one specific ethnic group, and having even less cultural commonality with any such group. Wearing green on St. Patrick’s Day won’t cut it.
Now, with that out of the way, on balance it seems clear that Sainte-Marie DID misrepresent her genetic inheritance in order to “add value” to her cultural identity.
This is of course seen as deeply dishonest by those people who claim to know exactly who they are.
The real ethnic background of many, many “white” Americans is mischaracterised almost every single day. By the media. By their own families. By themselves.
Some don’t even know it. Others do.
The question then becomes…why do so many self-identifying “white” people get so angry when someone rejects “whiteness” to claim a “non-white” identity?
It is surely for the people whose identity has been appropriated to feel anger and betrayal.
Is “white” anger really about honesty and authenticity?
Could it be that many Americans have fought so hard to arrive on the white mountaintop, they can scarcely believe that a fellow traveller would turn around and head straight back down?
It diminishes the value of the identity. It’s disrespect for the ascendant gang.
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Colonialism is the ultimate destroyer of the link between ancestry and culture.
In order to justify themselves – the robbers of land and resources, the exploiters of labor, must constantly reinforce a message of superiority.
Superiority of DNA (aka eugenics).
Superiority of culture.
Any people opposing the stealing of their labor, the taking of their land, must be constantly, incessantly portrayed as inferior to the colonising or enslaving group.
And once everything tangible has been taken, to ensure that the disempowered do not rise again in anger, the underclasses’ very sense of self-identity must be erased.
This combination of assaults on the enslaved and colonised has created millions of humans who float untethered and emotionally bereft in a sort of no-man’s-land, belonging nowhere and to no one.
If we do not see this, understand this, then we are either extremely lucky or a descendant of the colonising group. Or we are simply plugging our ears and averting our eyes.
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I have been discussing these ideas online for years, and as the news about Buffy Sainte-Marie broke, many discussions came to the boil.
Many of my friends online are the descendants of what I like to call “Old Mix Americans“, the people formed from the splinters of colonialism.
The disappeared people between the written lines.
We know we’re “not quite white”, but there is no place in America for people who do not claim a simple “racial” identity.
The boxes we were once invited to tick – Black, White, Hispanic, Asian, Native American – have expanded somewhat in recent years, but there is still no suitable identity or ethnicity for those of us of Old Mix ancestry.
Some might say “Get over it. Just call yourself American.”
But for some people, simply saying “I’m American” is too blunt and ill-defined. “American” is a word freighted with multiple meanings – national, political, colonial.
To say “I’m American” with pride almost suggests that a person buys into the entire myth of America, wholesale.
And many of us born in the USA do not buy into “the official story”.
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I have a pretty serious database, built over many years, which I use to try and document “Old Mix America“.
This makes it relatively easy for me to pop in a name, and be able to place people within a geographical, historical, and demographic context.
As regards Buffy Sainte-Marie, it became obvious fairly quickly that she is part of the Old Mix story.
When addressing the ethnic background of Sainte-Marie’s parents, CBC simply states that:
“Albert’s parents were born in Italy, while Winifred’s mother and father were of mostly English ancestry”.
For a start, the CBC News story failed to make clear the existence of family correspondence (readily available online) in which Sainte-Marie’s great-grandfather Frank Atwood wrote to one of his daughters explaining his Seminole origins on his mother’s side.
Perhaps even more interesting is the birth certificate of Sainte-Marie’s Aunt Lucille, on which we find an infant girl born in 1914, clearly stated as being “colored”.
This was no small thing in 1914. For Lucille to have been called “colored” on a birth cert in 1914 means she was clearly seen as such.
Throughout American history, if the father was white and the mother was ambiguous or dark, “brown” children would be listed as “white”, to avoid a punch in the nose.
I have quite literally thousands of records on file in which the exact same person was noted variously as “white”, “black”, “mulatto”, “Indian”, or “free person of color”, depending on the location or racism of the record-taker.
While pondering why Sainte-Marie’s aunt was recorded as a person of color, other anomalies became apparent.
Why did Sainte-Marie’s mother and aunt – Lucille Winifred Kenrick and Winifred Irene Kenrick (who were also the two siblings nearest each other in age) – why did both carry the name “Winifred”?
And before you ask, yes, they were definitely two separate people.
Of course sometimes a name might be given to more than one child as a way to honor an especially beloved friend or ancestor, yet my own research can find no other “Winifreds” in this family tree.
This got me to wondering if these girls might be TWO adopted children, with both given the name of their possibly deceased mother? Perhaps an indigenous mother, as Sainte-Marie’s mother did mention Mi’kmaq ancestry?
While the case with Buffy Sainte-Marie’s own birth certificate is unclear, older birth certificates were able to be legally amended in the USA if a child was adopted.
AND OFTEN WITH NO RECORD OF THIS AMENDMENT.
Provisional family tree of Buffy Sainte-Marie
Some of the Lakota I wrote about recently who were stolen and placed with “white” parents have birth certs showing the white parents as their biological parents. When these adoptions took place under the aegis of church institutions, the paperwork could be, shall we say, sketchy at times.
This issue touches me personally.
I was formally adopted aged 5 by my stepfather. When I was legally adopted, my own birth cert was amended.
My Missouri birth cert shows me as “Robert Brian ——-“, birth son of Robert ——-, my stepfather.
AND I WOULD HAVE NEVER KNOWN MY ACTUAL BIRTH FATHER IF FAMILY MEMBERS HAD NOT INFORMED ME.
When I joined the army at 17, when I got my first passport, I had to order a notarised copy of my birth certificate. All showed my stepfather as my biological father.
In legal and documentary terms, my original birth cert showing my true name at birth, my true ancestry, has been expunged and “disappeared”.
But onwards.
The possibility of Mi’kmaq ancestry on the maternal side of Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s family becomes even more of a possibility when we investigate further, and find her family tree reaching north into Nova Scotia, which is of course one of the heartlands of the Mi’kmaq and related Métis people.
I make sure to mention the Métis, because the Mi’kmaq of Newfoundland and Nova Scotia have been intermarrying with peoples outside their tribe or nation since at least the 1500s.
Basque, French and English fishermen, and later, colonial settlers.
During the 1780s, at least 3,500 African-Americans including slaves and Black Loyalists – formerly enslaved people from the American colonies who had fought for the British in exchange for their freedom – arrived in Nova Scotia.
Needless to say, those at the bottom of the social hierarchy were the most likely to intermix, and the Métis of Nova Scotia and Canada were a people much like the Melungeons of Southern Appalachia.
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All of the foregoing is not an apologia for cultural appropriation. No one is saying that Buffy Sainte-Marie was Seminole or Mi’kmaq or even Métis based simply on her mixed ancestry.
And this is the entire point of this essay. To be a person living 60 years ago without a cultural community to “explain” being seen as a person of color – a female person of color at that – must have been well nigh unbearable.
Were Buffy Sainte-Marie‘s mother and aunt the ones who were actually adopted? Was anyone adopted? Dunno.
Did Sainte-Marie’s mother have a child by a man other than her husband? Perhaps a man of color? Dunno.
Did a girl born into a house where she was a dark-skinned child among whiter siblings cause her to shoulder a part of her mother’s hidden back-story? Again, dunno.
Did a woman born into a country which utterly denigrated brown and black people while elevating “whiteness” simply stumble upon a way to make being “brown” a survival advantage? Maybe.
Put even more bluntly, who among us would have chosen in 1963 (pre-Civil Rights Act) to accept a life of discrimination over acceptance?
Who among us would have taken the time required every single living day of our existence to patiently explain to bigots that in spite of our skin color, in spite of our “mixed race” appearance, in spite of having the taint of possible illegitimacy, in spite of being a woman of color in a white man’s world, in spite of not even knowing WHY we look the way we do, in spite of ALL this, we deserve dignity and respect and a fair crack at success?
Really? Would we take such a path?
Or would we, as a profoundly conflicted young woman with an identity crisis did, try to paper over some very complex personal and familial issues with a simple, more easily digestible (and dare I say, marketable) story?
A story which brings us love and acceptance into the bargain?
There is a difference between wrong and REALLY WRONG.
Perhaps we should all step off the treadmill of social media-induced rage, where The Left simply screams “Appropriation!” and The Right yells “Pretendian!”, and look at the life story of one girl, one woman, in holistic context.
Isn’t this the very essence of “Judge not lest ye be judged”?
As a very thoughtful First Nations elder pointed-out on TikTok this week, only Buffy Sainte-Marie knows the reasons she rejected her birth family, and why she so desperately wanted to “belong”.
The elder’s advice to Buffy? To become a real elder herself, by speaking the truth. Forgiveness can then follow truth.
From a less judgmental distance, the career, the inconsistencies, and the current battle over the legacy of Buffy Sainte-Marie seem really to be a weird and horribly surreal part of the larger tragedy of American racism.
The people who will suffer most from the outfall of this are of course the Cree Nation and other indigenous peoples.
Old Mix Americans, unable to belong anywhere else, will continue to be packed by others into boxes marked “black” or “white”. Or they will choose themselves to self-identify simply as a “color”.
Multi-ethnic people having no real cultural identity with which to anchor themselves will always be nobodies or “colors”, until they choose otherwise.
And once they choose to be more than a color, let their new identity be based on truth.
Only when we reclaim our true selves are we ready to be claimed and adopted by others.
#BuffySainteMarie #history #racism #IdentityPolitics
Does Country Music Have A Color?
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinThis week I realised I’ve been failing.
A person familiar with this blog and podcast said:
“You’ll always be on an uphill struggle. It looks like you’re trying to tell white people that they’re not white. Then they look in the mirror, and see a white person.”
The entire premise of Before We Were White is about trying to explain that in American history, “whiteness” has slowly morphed over the centuries from being a simple observation about someone’s complexion into a stand-in word for RACE, with RACE then being used interchangeably with the word ETHNICITY.
At the end of this weird algebra (complexion = race, race = ethnicity, ethnicity = culture), people come away believing that culture, identity, and skin color are inextricably linked.
After 400 years of mental and linguistic programming, some Americans cannot wrap their heads around the idea that we are the ones who connected the dots between real and imaginary things.
There is a real thing called “ethnicity”. There is a real thing called “culture”. There is even such a thing as “population groups” where certain types of physical features like hair or skin color are more common.
And then there is a fake thing called “race”.
In the USA, the overlap and intermixing between all of these things – both real and imaginary – is constant and ever-changing, and is often determined by where we grew up.
It is often in those very places where people maintain the most distance between these imaginary “races” that we see the most cultural overlap.
It’s complicated.
Now I could continue with some lengthy speechification trying to lay out the difference between outward appearance, lived culture, and actual genetic ancestry, but I suspect I’d lose a lot of readers just one or two more paragraphs down the line.
So instead, let’s talk about Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs.
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It is a marvelous thing to see Tracy Chapman being noticed by the Country Music Association this year.
As the original singer/songwriter of Fast Car (which has charted after being covered by country singer/songwriter Luke Combs), Chapman is receiving much belated additional recognition for a song she first released 35 years ago, a song exquisitely expressing human weakness and pain, poverty and pathos, hope, memory, love and disappointment, all with diamond-sharp spareness.
In other words, the perfect country song.
And you’ve got to admire Luke Combs for spotting it.
I was brought up in a time before autism was diagnosed. I’ve never bothered to find out if I’m “on the spectrum”, because if I’m not hindered dramatically by my need to arrange coffee mugs according to size and color, I can just keep on keeping-on without being defined by what others might perceive as a “condition”.
People are just different to one another in a million different ways. It keeps things interesting.
Anyway, this pertains to the way I have a memory for stuff. Not a photographic memory, but a memory which interconnects disparate things at great distances.
I see the name “Luke Combs“, and my mind lights-up like a blinking Christmas tree. I know that the surname “Combs” is a country American way of spelling the old surname “Coombs”, which comes from a pre-English word used by ancient Britons. I know that there were free persons of color living in Jamaica since the 1600s using that surname, and that those people were slaveholders. The former English women’s national soccer team player Alex Scott is descended from them.
I know that Jamaica and the rest of the Caribbean was connected to Charleston, SC and Providence, RI by an umbilical cord tended by seafaring smugglers and slave traders.
I know that almost everyone with roots in colonial America bearing that surname is likely to be at least part Melungeon or Old Mix American, meaning that they will have some ancestry from places other than Northern and Central Europe.
So of course I had to go to my computer and check.
Anyone who has seen Mr. Combs will know he is a big, stout fella, light of complexion and red of hair.
Tap, tap, tap goes the keyboard. And my weirdly wired memory hasn’t failed me.
Yes, Mr. Combs has English and Scottish and German ancestry. But he also has ancestors from the remote corners of Southern Appalachia, from places like Lost Creek, West Virginia. Surnames like Gibson and Brock, which speak of indigenous American and Jewish ancestry. Surnames like Boyett, one of the few Appalachian families shown by DNA to be of Romani or “Gypsy” ancestry.
But this is America, and this is Nashville. This is country music, country music is “white”, and so is Luke Combs…
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Before We Were White was never about trying to claim that all “white” folks were once “black”.
It’s about trying to remind Americans of the time before “white” became the primary identity replacing “ethnicity” or culture.
Before the rural American underclasses became “white” – especially during the fraught early years of frontier colonialism – we were a hundred different colors along a spectrum, and most of our ancestors clumped around a shade of brown found somewhere near the middle of that spectrum.
Luke Combs, with his pale skin and red beard, and Tracy Chapman, with her dark skin and black hair, look about as far from one another on the color spectrum as two people are likely to get.
The wonders of the internet, of record digitalisation, of modern genetics, allow us to see what could never be seen before. We can learn just how intertwined all of our stories really are, even when a look in the mirror would make us think otherwise.
But any genetic inter-relatedness shared between Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman would really be little more than an interesting side note.
What really matters is how the power of music can remind us just how much we have in common at the level which really matters.
In our shared culture.
#countrymusic #tracychapman #lukecombs
A Trip to the Badlands
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinTekakwitha Indian Mission, South Dakota, 1958 – letter to prospective adoptive parents
It took this podcast two years to find its first listener in South Dakota.
South Dakota is a big state with a small population – less than a million souls, in fact – making it the fifth least densely populated state in the union.
Still, we’ve managed to find more listeners in states with even fewer inhabitants, including Alaska, Wyoming and Vermont.
It’s not all about us, though.
But still. What’s going on up there?
South Dakotans vote conservative. Only five out of South Dakota’s 33 governors have been members of the Democratic Party. A rush of blood to the head once saw South Dakotans vote a Norwegian-born left-wing agrarian populist into office back in 1897, but that dissociative fugue passed quickly, and Republicans have held the top office now for nearly half a century.
Today, South Dakota is governed by a woman born with the name Kristi Lynn Arnold, more widely known by her married name, Kristi Noem.
Born in South Dakota in 1971, Ms. Noem was first elected to state office in 2007 at the age of 36, as a member of the state’s house of representatives.
Noem is a conservative with a big “C” for “Calculating”, portraying herself in whichever light will make her voters think she is “owning the libs”:
> Endorses Donald Trump? Check.
> Endorsed by Donald Trump? Check.
> Flags, trucks, and cowboy hats regularly used as campaign props? Check.
> Camouflage jackets and guns on her social media? Check.
> Well-paid positions for family members? Check.
> Support for new oil pipelines? Over Lakota lands? Check.
> Calls progressive senate candidates “communists”? Check.
> Sends South Dakotan national guards to the Texas/Mexico border as a publicity stunt? Check.
Note: The labor of undocumented immigrants (including children), underpins many South Dakotan businesses.
> Covid pandemic public health measures ignored? Check.
Note: Covid cases quadrupled after Noem encouraged people from all over the USA to ignore the pandemic – inviting them to attend an annual motorcycle rally in the state.
Nearly 400,000 answered the call-out she made on Fox “news”, and this superspreader event made South Dakota a Covid hotspot. Most of the dead were undocumented immigrants and indigenous Americans working in poor conditions in meat-packing plants.
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This latter point brings us to the very heart and hidden meaning of much rural conservatism, especially in the western states of the USA.
At its core, Noem-style conservatism is about a weird form of self-aggrandisement. It’s all about proclaiming the virtue of hard-working people, people supposedly raised from the Dakota soil – a soil consecrated during its appropriation by European-American settlers/colonisers, and enjoyed by their descendants.
Truckers. Ranchers. Farmers. Oil workers. Everyone a “lift themselves up by their own bootstraps” kind of voter.
And then we do a bit of research. We read some history.
Kristi Noem, like many Dakotans, is descended from mostly German and Scandinavian immigrants.
Her second great-grandfather (whose name she carried at birth – Arnold) was the son of Alsatian immigrants, and like so many others, arrived in Dakota Territory during the 1880s in a railway boxcar.
While the US Army was still rounding-up and killing Indians there.
There is no doubting that many of these immigrants were leaving bad conditions back in their homelands. Unemployment and famine were especially common in Sweden and Norway during the 19th century.
Many immigrants lived in sod cabins due to a lack of timber, and Dakota soil was not easy to farm.
So hard work was certainly a given.
But one thing is never mentioned by the conservative descendants of these immigrants when they tell their story of bootstrapping.
It takes land to get started in your new life in America as a hard-working farmer.
And it’s much easier to get your hands on land when it is being given away cheap or free by the US government.
And where did the US government get this land? Why, from the dispossessed Lakota, of course.
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This post hasn’t the room to recount the history of the Indian Wars in the west. Everyone has heard of Little Big Horn and the Massacre at Wounded Knee (let’s hope they have, anyway).
But some things which are lesser-known and not widely understood need and deserve mention.
Even after the bloodshed in South Dakota was over, and indigenous peoples had been forced onto reservations, the US government and “white” settlers couldn’t leave them be.
The US government very cleverly changed the laws in relation to indigenous landholding.
Whereas most indigenous peoples viewed land as a resource to be held communally, the Dawes Act of 1887 forced indigenous Americans to subdivide and allocate set parcels of their reservation lands to INDIVIDUAL tribal members.
Once reservation lands had been parcelled-out this way, any land not allocated to a specific tribal member was deemed “surplus” by the state and federal government, and opened to non-Indian settlers.
The poorest of the poor among European immigrants tended to take-up this “surplus” reservation land, and the US government hoped in this way to dilute and break the cohesiveness of indigenous communities.
With their communities shattered in this way, the US government and religious groups then began to step in, opening Indian Boarding Schools where the now impoverished Lakota might send their children to “become white”.
Children were often not even “sent” – they were kidnapped outright, with many being placed into foster homes where they were treated for years as little more than free domestic laborers.
In some of the worst cases, children were quite literally “loaned-out” to be sexually abused.
So here we are, in 2023, with people like Kristi Noem and Donald Trump stoking their fruitcake base, a base galvanised by QAnon and tales of paedophile rings, when the real paedophiles were always right there in the open.
In the swanky apartments of rich financiers in New York, and in the Indian Boarding Schools of South Dakota.
Not under pizzerias in DC.
Meanwhile, the charming legislators of South Dakota signed “HB 1104” into law in 2010, ensuring that the victims of cultural genocide and sexual abuse are unable to hold the perpetrators to account.
This is how American conservatism buries real history, so all that remains is their self-penned stories of heroism and bootstraps.
I have no idea if I’ll still have my 5 listeners in South Dakota after this…
©Brian Halpin 2023
#history #southdakota #kristinoem #lakota
Hate and the Ownership of Identity Politics
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinEli Sumner with wife Minerva Riddle and mother-in-law Susanna Wilson Riddle. Black to white in three generations.
Many conservatives these days claim to be exhausted by identity politics.
Hell, I’m an Old Leftie, and some days even I find myself wishing the news cycle would focus more on the immediate existential problems of corporate greed, war, and climate change.
But here is the problem.
Identity goes to the very heart of human existence.
What we think we are, what others think we are, and the contested ground in between – this is where our self-confidence, our concept of history, ideology, culture and national identity are formed.
Are we really who we think we are in our heads? Are we what others see us as? Are we a mix of the two? Are we something else altogether, which neither side is able to see clearly through the fog of bias?
I’ve said it before, and see no reason to change my mind:
The Political Right, the wealthy, and the powerful HATE identity politics because they invented identity politics. They believe that only they should be allowed to dictate the terms of “identity”.
It’s a simple power thing.
Patriarchy is a way of wielding power in order to define and limit female identity.
The “lazy poor” and the “self-made man” are other identities constructed by those in power as a way to justify their position of power.
But the invention of “race”, and the enforcement of a “racial” caste system, were (and still are) the ultimate expressions of identity politics.
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It has always been easy for those who control identity to gather willing minions to do the dirty work of patrolling caste boundaries.
This is why it has become a truism in America today to say that the white underclasses consistently vote against their own self interests.
People on The Left ponder why this should be so.
It is really quite simple.
Most humans crave status. Siblings vie for the attention of parents. As adults we seek the approval and admiration of our friends and colleagues. We want to be “identified” as “special”.
This is why children love superheroes. Deep down, children do not want to be FANS of superheroes. They are projecting, because they want to BE a superhero.
The status. The adulation of the masses. Being able to kick the school bully’s ass. Just being born “special”.
But most of us grow up eventually. We learn that being generous, that doing good, is its own reward. We don’t rescue a drowning child to hear the cheers of onlookers.
It is damning indictment of contemporary American culture that superhero movies have become the mainstay of ADULT entertainment.
Boys used to outgrow the dumb Chuck Norris/Steven Seagal stuff. Girls without a note in their head eventually learned to accept that singing into their hairbrush in front of a mirror wasn’t going to turn their Broadway dreams into reality.
But most humans will still never outgrow a deep-seated wish to feel “special”.
Those with real access to opportunity (and yes, those with luck and determination) can eventually “feel special” through their achievements. Rewarding career, nice house, good education, relationships, nurturing of talents and interests, etc. It’s called “self-actualisation” in the language of psychologists.
Many of the white underclasses are born into challenging circumstances, where the odds of having attentive parents, attaining a good education, a level of economic security, and reaching personal fulfilment are slim in the extreme.
Circumstances which are usually even more challenging for people of color.
Which leaves very few routes to a feeling of being special, let alone having a realistic shot at “self-actualisation”.
*****
Psychologists have long recognised that humans’ sense of happiness and well-being is tied to their status in relation to those around them. The countries in the world which consistently place highest in the happiness ranks are those with the least disparity between rich and poor. Where each citizen feels empowered.
Humans can be very happy with very little, as long as everyone is in the same boat.
In the USA, where wealth disparity is absolutely shocking, there are a lot of unhappy people – to put it mildly.
“The System” seems rigged, and in many ways, it is.
Higher education is out of reach for many.
Health problems can lead to bankruptcy.
People are widely addicted to opioids and other substances.
Working-class wages barely cover the rent. A house mortgage is now a pipe dream for most.
Crime and violence caused by economic and social inequity creates a nagging sense of constant fear.
Living paycheck to paycheck doesn’t leave a lot of room for “empowerment” or “feeling special”.
And yes, I know.
Not everyone is a victim, and some people are just too lacking in motivation to put in the hard work required to earn their feeling of “specialness”.
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So here we have hundreds of thousands of members of the “white” underclasses (yes, the word “underclasses” hurts, because it’s an accurate description of the disempowered).
A group of people who will often turn toward quick-fix methods of feeling empowered or “feeling special”.
Never quite became a martial arts master? Buy a few guns. Pretend it’s not about fear and feeling disempowered.
It’s about simple self-defence, right?
No, even better, it’s about protecting your family and community. Noble, and manly.
Wait, wait. It’s about “protecting freedom and liberty”. Now you can feel very special indeed.
Go the whole hog and join a militia. Now you’re the real Alpha dog. Go online and troll all the “Libtards” and “Beta cucks”.
Show up at the US capitol for the next election!
But then again, maybe all of that sounds a bit too much like work.
There is one super-easy last resort. No effort whatsoever required.
Just choose to believe that you were actually “born special” in some way.
Born American. Born “white”.
*****
Everybody knows how hard it is to build a big cardhouse (do kids still build cardhouses?).
And everybody who ever built one, and has siblings, knows how easy it is to blow down a house of cards.
The American racial caste system was designed by people who blow down other people’s cardhouses.
Because it’s easier to elevate oneself socially by denigrating others than to actually earn your social status through hard work, generosity, or other achievements.
It is not “I feel proud and special because I can take my parents out for dinner”.
Instead, it’s “I feel proud and special because someone is stuck cleaning dishes while I dine out”.
This is not a social behaviour unique to the USA – it’s only been developed and perfected there in a very specific way.
And when there is no obvious difference in wealth or physical appearance, unpleasant people will make themselves superior to others in other ways.
It’s just so much easier than trying to earn respect through actions, ability, or simple decency.
Don’t believe it? For centuries in France, there was a social class called the Cagot.
They were treated to all intents and purposes the exact same way people of colour were treated in the USA under Jim Crow.
But they looked no different to anyone else. No one knows why they were so hated and despised.
It just seems that having someone to look down on, to feel superior to, is a habit practiced by lazy, hateful, and unthinking people everywhere.
*****
Back to identity politics in the USA.
Anyone who claims that racism is now only part of America’s past is either wilfully blind, or a master gaslighter. Probably both.
I am no fan of the American two-party system. Both parties are in the pocket of Big Business.
But one party is now teetering on the edge of becoming a White Christian Nationalist neo-fascist front.
55% of voters for this party support a man who is a grifter and inveterate liar. A racist. A misogynist. A mocker of disabled people. A criminal. A sexual predator and assaulter of women.
Their superhero.
Why? Because while pretending to be an enemy of “wokeness” and “identity politics” he actually speaks to the oldest form of identity politics in America.
That some people are better than others by birth. Go back and listen to his “good genes” speech at a campaign rally in Minnesota.
“You have good genes, you know that, right?” Trump said.
“You have good genes. A lot of it is about the genes, isn’t it, don’t you believe? The racehorse theory. You think we’re so different? You have good genes in Minnesota.”
And who has “bad genes”?
Well, Barack Obama, I’d imagine – at least according to The Book of Donald.
Does anyone, anyone, believe that Obama would have even been elected, never mind served-out his term if he had been caught on tape bragging about grabbing women “by the pussy”?
Yes, conservatives hate identity politics.
BUT ONLY WHEN IT’S NOT THEM CHOOSING WHO IS IDENTIFIED AS WHAT.
It is the business of this blog and podcast to put the concept of “white race identity” in the trash can of history.
It is one thing for scholars and academics to say that “race is a social construct”.
It is quite another to demonstrate it with historical records, DNA, and photographs.
Americans are all brothers and sisters, whether they like it or not, and we’re gonna prove it.
#beforewewerewhite #identitypolitics
Floridian Minorcans and the Impossibly Tangled Web of Southern Appalachian Ancestry…
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinMenorcan village
DNA without history tells us less than half of any story.
Many Southern Appalachians report elevated levels of “Iberian” in autosomal DNA tests.
There are a myriad of reasons this might occur, including Sephardic Jewish or Romani ancestry.
Less obvious is the possibility that some mountain folks might be part Minorcan…
I have written elsewhere about French Acadians (of what was later called Nova Scotia) adding to the ethnic mix of the Carolinas in the aftermath of their “Great Expulsion” from Canada following the end of the French and Indian War in 1763. Many of these refugees to the Carolinas were already “Creoles”, or mixed-ethnic, following a century and a half of intermarriage with the Mi’kmaq, and other tribes of eastern Canada.
For anyone with deep roots in southern Appalachia, it would no doubt come as a surprise to find some of their deepest family roots might have first grown in soil many hundreds of miles to the north. Yet it is indisputably true. There are people in Tennessee today sharing DNA with historical Mi’Kmaq leaders.
But what of the lands to the south of the Carolinas? Could people from there have added to the great southern Appalachian melting-pot of colonial America?
In 1763, British military success in French Canada led indirectly to the Spanish ceding of Florida to Great Britain. Desperate to make an economic success of her new possessions, the British Crown offered generous land grants to anyone willing to relocate to their new jurisdictions of British East Florida (capital at St. Augustine), or British West Florida (capital at Pensacola).
All right. What does this have to do with Minorcan-Iberian ancestry?
Every schoolchild has heard of the Jamestown and Plymouth colonies, but most would be surprised to learn that the largest colony ever started in the present-day USA was in fact “New Smyrna“, which was near present-day Daytona Beach, Florida. A ruthless and ambitious Scotsman named Andrew Turnbull, with a wife from Smyrna (Smyrna was ethnically Greek in 1763, but now lies in present-day Turkey), gathered over 1,400 people from Mediterranean ports under contracts of indenture, and sailed for British East Florida.
The majority of these indentured labourers would hail from the Balearic island of Minorca, near Spain.
Harbour in Menorca, circa 1890
To make a long story short, the colony was a disaster – constantly beset with disease, supply scarcity, and unrest, due to brutality and broken promises. When Florida was restored to Spanish rule in 1783 following Britain’s defeat at Yorktown in 1781, most Floridian Loyalists relocated to British holdings in the Caribbean.
But not all of them…
Many former Loyalists or “Tories” elected to take their chances under the returned Spanish administration. Some built thriving businesses based on trade with the Choctaw and Creek nations. Some intermarried with Minorcan survivors of the failed Turnbull plantation. Traces of this curious amalgam of Spanish, English and Minorcan culture survive in St. Augustine to this day.
But what is most relevant to us, when we regard this small, but compelling episode from early American history?
It is this. The British Proclamation of 1763 (which had prohibited settlement within Indian lands west of the Appalachians) was null and void by 1783. An independent America had absolutely no intention of honoring British treaties – especially as many “patriots” had been “paid” for their service with promises of land in Indian Country.
With new opportunities opening up in places like Kentucky and Tennessee, many former loyal subjects of the British crown in Florida packed their bags and headed north into southern Appalachia just like many “patriots” carrying land bounties. Many of these early Anglo and Scottish Floridians quite likely carried something of Minorcan, Italian and Greek history with them, in the form of DNA.
All of this I learned, trying to figure out why my Swaffords of Sequatchie Valley, Tennessee have ancestors who appear on a 1786 Census Roll for Mobile, in Spanish Alabama.
Good genealogy is often good history.
#BeforeWeWereWhite #FloridaHistory #AppalachianHistory #minorca
On the Origin of the Term “Hillbilly”
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinUsage and meaning of archaic term “Billie”
The word “hillbilly” is commonly said to have an origin among those Appalachians claiming a Protestant “Scots-Irish” identity, folks whose forefathers were supposedly supporters of William of Orange (“King Billy” to his Protestant English and Scottish supporters, b1650, d1702).
This is almost certainly a false folk etymology.
The so-called “Glorious Revolution” of 1689, in which “King Billy” (Willem Hendrik of the Dutch Republic) overthrew James II/VII of England, Scotland and Ireland, predates by over two centuries the first attested use of the word “hillbilly” in America.
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Those who listened to our Black Paddywhackery podcast episodes will have heard that many, many people arriving in America from the province of Ulster in Ireland during the 1700s were not a cohesive or homogenous group in any ethnic sense.
Northern Ireland in the 1700s was after all a multi-ethnic frontier colonial enterprise, just as Kansas in the mid-1800s was a hodge-podge of “Old Mix Americans“, recent European immigrants, and indigenous peoples.
The descendants of people arriving in America during the 1700s from this multi-ethnic colonial Ulster would spend the next 100-200 years in America calling themselves English, Welsh, Scots, Irish, or indeed, “American”.
The one thing they certainly never called themselves was “Scots-Irish”.
That “ethnicity” or identity would only be invented after the American Revolution – becoming particularly popular in the 1840s and 1850s, as a way to differentiate themselves from what they perceived as the low-life Catholic Gaelic-speaking peasant scum arriving in America to escape the Great Irish Famine.
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Back in the 1690s, in the years after William of Orange arrived on the scene in the British Isles, it was also a time of hunger and famine – but back then it was in Scotland.
So the 1690s saw a massive wave of Scottish economic migrants and famine refugees making the short boat journey to Ulster, a place relatively unscathed by famine at the time.
These desperate Scots came from many different backgrounds – they were not all Scottish Presbyterians, nor were they all cheerleaders for “King Billy”.
Many of these Scottish economic migrants to Ulster would have moved on for America within only 1, 2, or 3 generations, and it seems unlikely that they saw themselves as anything other than “Scots”.
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Most of the earliest settlers to move into the mountains of Southern Appalachia after the American Revolution came from the adjacent states of Virginia and North Carolina.
The Virginia and Carolina backcountry around the year 1790 had about 2 people of actual Scottish ancestry to every 1 person of Ulster background, and as we have just heard, many of these people of Ulster also saw themselves as Scottish.
87,895 actual Scots in Virginia and North Carolina, 1790
43,894 people of Ulster background in Virginia and North Carolina, 1790
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On balance, it seems more likely that the general Scots-English slang word “Billy” was in widespread use in frontier times – and not specific to people from Ulster, let alone the Americans who would later call themselves “Scots-Irish”.
In 1790 (among people of Scottish background) “Billy” would have been used much in the same way Americans now use the term “buddy” or “guys”, as in “Hey you guys, lets go for a cold beer”, or “How’s it going, buddy?”
In the British Isles, “Billy” has largely been replaced by terms like “lad” or “bloke” or “mate”.
Like many other old words from the 1700s, the term “Billy” lingered-on in remote mountain places in America.
As Appalachians began to seek work in places far from their mountain homes in the late 1800s and early 1900s, non-Appalachians would have heard them using the word “Billy” among one another.
And it would be these outsiders who would add “hill” to the word “Billy” to describe the mountain people they looked down upon.
#BeforeWeWereWhite #hillbilly #FolkEtymology
The “Black Dutch” of Appalachia
/0 Comments/in Blog /by Brian HalpinScene along Rhine River during the 1600s, Herman Saftleven
The German word for “German” is “Deutsch”, and in America, “Deutsch” got misconstrued as “Dutch”. The so-called “Pennsylvania Dutch” or Amish and Mennonite communities are not Dutch – they are German.
In the late 1600s and early 1700s – during the Nine Years War [1688-1697] and the Wars of the Spanish Succession [1701-1715] – tens of thousands of German peasants became refugees, displaced by war and famine.
Many travelled up the Rhine as far as the major port city of Rotterdam in order to flee via boat to the UK or America.
German Sinti (German Romani, or “Gypsies”) were being viciously persecuted in the contested lands of Alsace-Lorraine and the Rhineland-Palatinate between Eastern France and Western Germany at this time.
A medal struck just after the wars in the Rhineland, showing Heidelberg Castle
Many of these Gypsies fled along with Palatine Germans to Rotterdam, where they spread outwards to other coastal towns and ports of the Baltic and North Seas, seeking and negotiating terms for a passage abroad.
Some signed formal indentureship agreements before sailing, but more were simply transported abroad to be auctioned as servants upon arrival, after which they were expected to complete a five to seven year term of work – in often harsh conditions – all to “pay” for their passage.
Palatine or Sinti, these were the people known as “Redemptioners” in colonial American history.
The most desperate and impoverished were often simply plied with alcohol before being kidnapped by ruthless merchants working in tandem with unscrupulous ship’s captains.
Columns of newspapers were filled with ads placed by masters looking for runaway servants.
By 1763 there were enough Sinti living just outside Philadelphia that they were able to form themselves into a small community, living outdoors among the white oaks lining Conestoga and Mill Creek.
Sinti in 1930s Germany before Nazi murder of the Romani people began
There can be no doubt that many of these people followed the same path south into the Shenandoah Valley as other Germans, along with displaced indigenous peoples, English, Welsh, and Ulster people.
There can also be little doubt that many of the aforementioned runaways – the poorest members of the underclasses – took indigenous or mixed-ethnic partners as they moved along and beyond the frontier of European settlement.
While the German-speaking populations of Switzerland, Austria, and Germany have always had a small percentage of relatively dark-complected people (just like most European populations), the sheer number of such people among 18th century German speakers in America strongly suggests the likelihood of other influences on their appearance – Jewish, Sinti, indigenous American, or African-American, among many others.
These are part of the people often called “Black Dutch” among Southern Appalachians, and their surnames – Kiser, Rhinehart (Reinhardt), Justice, Renner, et al – often survive alongside the people called Melungeons.
#history #melungeons #BlackDutch