Today I want to take a minute and reflect a bit on one of my little known ancestors, someone that has been in my family verbal history, but not until my mom dug back into her paternal family line did we have any specific details.
You see, even though there is no trace of it in my blood, or my mom’s blood, there is Cherokee as far back as the 1800’s in our family line. It is sobering reading about this special great-great-great-great grandma of mine (I might have missed a few greats there). I will call her “M”. She was born in 1810. Yet due to her father’s poverty, she was brought into another family as a servant from the time she was 6 until the time she was 18. Three years later she married someone from that family, and together they had 13 children. One of them fathered the family line from which my maternal grandfather descends. She lived until she was 78, dying in 1889 in Tennessee.
I have been trying to sit in the reality that I long to honor this woman, and the family from which she came, and I’m not sure how to do that other than to sit in the knowledge and grieve a bit. I’ll admit, this past summer when I was out on my paddle board on the lake, I wondered what it would be like had her culture survived for me in my family more, instead of being assimilated and dissolved. In today’s world, like I said… it’s sobering and brings repentance.
So today, on Indigenous People’s Day, I just want to honor her and her legacy. I wish I knew more. I wish her life had been different. But I am grateful that her name remained in the historical records, and I am grateful that the knowledge that her son’s Cherokee name survived in my family’s verbal and written historical records. I wonder if I will meet her someday in eternity.
I know there are discussions in lots of places about how to repair the past. It’s a complex issue, and all I can say is that I do a lot of reading about it to try and understand the reasoning. I also have been praying and discerning what I think is an essential question:
How do we (white people) think about all this, with compassion?
Especially knowing some of “M’s” family that were not married to white people may very well have been part of the Trail of Tears (that part isn’t documented specifically with regards to my ancestors), there have been a number of thoughts in my head around this. Recently, I read a few older articles explaining that many bones of Indigenous tribes are in the process of being released back to their descendants for burial in tribal lands. **
Maybe you wonder why it matters….. but it brings closure. Somehow we get it when soldiers are killed in battle. I hope we can frame this around why this is important for Native/Indiginous cultures.
I know I can’t wrap my head around it but so much, but then again all the ancestors I know about are buried in cemeteries in Idaho. I can visit them. I remember my mom and dad taking me to put flowers on the graves when I was younger. Yet those graves only go back three generations. I have no idea where M is buried.
Returning bones to ancestral lands is deep in the story of a people of faith. This very thing is recorded in scripture, and although we might acknowledge it, we probably skip over this too easily.
If you are familiar with the story, Jacob was a father whose youngest son Joseph had some dreams and visions that his older brothers didn’t really like. They sold him to some travelers and eventually he landed in Egypt, serving Pharaoh. After a few not-so-great things happened to him, he ended up becoming second in command and essentially saved all of Egypt and the surrounding areas when, after God gave him a dream, he prepared the nation for a 7 year drought and famine. His family came looking for food, and were later invited to live there after a great reunion of the brothers. They lived in honor there in Goshen, while Joseph continued his job working as head of the land. Joseph was buried in Egypt when he died – but not without making his descendants promise to take his bones when they left. So, when Moses and the Israelites left over 400 years later, Moses took Joseph’s bones back with him (Ex 13:19) and buried them in Shechem on a plot of land that Jacob had purchased (Joshua 24:32).
There’s something significant and faithful about all this, I know.
As far as I know, “M” is buried in her native land, and that brings me some peace. I wish there were a better way I could honor her….
But today, today I will tell her story.
** https://www.centredaily.com/news/local/education/penn-state/article272526848.html
** https://www.history.com/news/how-boarding-schools-tried-to-kill-the-indian-through-assimilation
Finding the Life 