September 22, 2004

• Ancestry

  This is important, but not as important as some people believe it to
  be.  We are all ONE, after all, but genetic lines are relevant to
  many things.  My dietary requirements are a direct result of my
  ancestry.  Oddly enough, I seem to have inherited the biochemical
  makeup of my Native American ancestors even though their blood quanta
  are less in the aggregate than that of my European ancestors.  The
  foods I thrive on are corn, beans, squash, and peppers.  The ones
  that make me ill include wheat, olives and oranges.  Similarly,
  much of the culture of my native ancestors predominated in our family
  mythos, such as a reverence for the land and a close
  empathic/telepathic link with four-leggeds. 

  I may have inherited the skin and hair of my Celtic forebears, but
  beneath them are the bones of the Cherokee.  Once, while visiting
  the Native American Cultural Center in Wichita, I sat back behind a
  class of kindergartners listening to an old man in plains Indian garb
  telling Coyote stories from tribes far to the West.  Later on I
  talked to him in the gift shop.  He introduced himself as
  Glittering Rainbow.  He was an enigma, that old man.  He said
  he was Cherokee, wore clothing of Cheyenne design and jewelry from Zuni
  Pueblo, and told stories of the Navajo and Tohono O’odam.  But he
  had good eyes.  After a little conversation in which neither of us
  made eye contact (as we were both enculturated by our families), he
  revealed that he had managed to sneak a few looks at my face.  He
  said I had Cherokee cheekbones.

  The Cherokee is from my mother’s side.  She could document
  one-sixteenth Cherokee blood, a great-great grandmother on her mother’s
  side.  But I suppose there was more Indian blood in the
  family.  It certainly shows in her face and the faces of her
  parents, brothers and sisters, to a greater extent than one might
  expect if it was so greatly diluted.  That’s understandable,
  really.  The family had passed for white for at least two
  generations before I came along.  My grandparents were not proud
  of their Native heritage.  It fell to me to reclaim that pride and
  to trace the family tree.  It’s a sketchy tree on that side, with
  very little detail other than the one branch that goes back to my great
  grandfather Jessie Brooks whose mother was half Cherokee.

  I know more about my father’s side, because the Douglasses were
  storytellers and I have his oral history along with a sheaf of
  genealogical research done by cousins.  I even have a photocopy of
  a copy of my great grandfather Cyrus Dow Douglass’s discharge from the
  Union Army in the Civil War, and the story of how he lost his leg in
  battle in Missouri.   (from a Scott cousin on my mother’s
  side, I have the oral history that Jessie Brooks fought for the South
  in that war.)  My father said that one of his great grandmothers
  was Hunkpapa.  That’s one of the tribes of the Lakota, the ones
  the French called the Sioux.  She had to have been on his mother’s
  side, and that also had to have been where he got the Swedish ancestry
  he talked about.  None of that, not the Hunkpapa nor the Swede,
  which were all the ancestry I recall my father ever talking about, is
  in the genealogical documents from my distant cousin Jim Thompson,
  whose wife’s mother did most of the research.  That research
  focuses on the male line, which is always easiest to trace.

  That male line originated in Scotland, of course.  Douglass is
  Scots, related to the Black Douglas and to “The Douglas”, James, who
  carried out the dying wish of Robert the Bruce by carrying his embalmed
  heart on crusade.  Somewhere in time, my branch of the family
  doubled the esses.  The first American of that line was Abraham
  (either Abraham James or James Abraham, documents differ on that
  detail), born in Scotland.  He served in the Continental Army with
  George Washington at Valley Forge, and was with him when he crossed the
  Delaware.   This would qualify me for membership in the DAR
  (and Greyfox says I’d give them a fine injection of some sort of
  reality) except that our line may not be legitimate.  We cannot
  document Abraham’s marriage, nor do we have his wife’s name.  He
  had at least one son, James, and it is from that James that I trace my
  descent.  James’s descendants moved west and married into a
  broadly branching sampling of the American melting pot.  There are
  English, Irish, and German surnames in those lists, among others.

  [This will become the first of my links in the memoir thread, and will
  be expanded and have some ancestral photos added, sometime.  For
  today, I've had enough of it.]

  • 2:41 pm
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