The Indian in Me

There was a phrase I heard used by my mother’s mother. Maude Bradshaw. She was my size, and my mother’s size, so of course I deemed her my Little Grandma. Maude was a stern mother to her 6 children. Her words became legendary in our family and many of her practical ways are part of my life.

My Big Grandma was Cherokee and was a big woman, who I never heard claim knowledge from her heritage. Not like my Little Grandma who had a single black braid that when it wasn’t wrapped around the top of her head, it hung straight down her back. I never saw her to have any gray hair.

But she knew things. She could read the weather, knew the native plants and would simply say it was the “Indian” in her that provided these declarations.

But there was no real way to know if she had any Indian in her, because she was born and raised in Missouri where I was always told being Indian was against the law. And sure enough, according to the Thirteenth General Assembly 1845, an Indian didn’t have any standing in that state.

The Osage were moved out and some Cherokee were only passing through Missouri on the last leg of their Trail of Tears.

When I went to school at Black Hills State College in Spearfish, South Dakota and the administration was looking to move me into the dorm, out of off-campus housing (not saying why) they wanted to use BIA funds, but the blood quantum I have from my Big Grandma wasn’t quite enough to qualify, so they allowed my Little Grandma’s “Indian in her” statement to carry the day and squeeze me into the only semester I ever lived in a college dorm in my whole college career.

I spent decades working in Indian education enrolling students into JOM or Indian Title programs and heard countless stories of their ancestors’ tribal heritage. I always heard their claims, the thin connection we sometimes have to our past, as limited to the things our grandparents felt safe enough to say. It was dangerous for centuries to be Indian in America. They killed Indians for bounties, or for fun. And many of our people were diluted through rape with that story rarely carried forward. Shame and fear stuffed into mere statements of recollection or connection to the past with a simple phrase sometimes remembered. Adoption was another way tribal heritage has been lost.

Two of my “Indian” cousins were “got” through adoption. One died tragically before adulthood, the other has considered finding his “real” parents but has settled into knowing his Ma and Pa were just the best parents he could have “got.”

My son’s dad never told me about one of his brothers. Never. As it turned out, during the uranium mining years out on the Navajo Reservation he had a brother who had birth defects they didn’t understand. Family histories are tangled up with shame and misinformation.

Family history is fascinating to me. Doesn’t have to have been mine for me to find it interesting. For years pouring over those family trees and helping young people learn more about their relatives, not all of them qualified for Johnson O’Malley programs or even the Title programs, but they learned names of people who were their people, and what’s wrong with that?

We have all also becoming aware of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous men and women. This is not new; this is that other complication of the family histories. Where are the missing? Do they have families? Are they somewhere living quiet lives? Or are they long dead? Have they been forgotten?

The Indian in me thinks we find our dead in the wind in the forests; on the darkest night they are the brightest stars overhead in the Milky Way known to the Cherokees as the “White Road.” It may be there the answers to all the family mysteries are solved and the Indian in each of us may be found.

Respectfully Submitted ~ Rebecca Jim

 https://freepages.rootsweb.com/~jgood/genealogy/moIndianLaw.html#:~:text=Missouri%20became%20a%20state%20in,from%20a%20Goverment%20Indian%20Agent