Louis Moore of Garland, Texas: "You're what? By how much?" Native American heritage spawns questions, myths, and identification with others who are oppressed

I'm very proud of The Great Seal of the Chickasaw Nation that is displayed in the living room of our home in Garland.

I was privileged to be born a Texan—and, of course, a U.S. citizen at the same time.   

I also was privileged to be born with Native American ancestry on my father's side. His father—my grandfather—was fastidious despite prejudice all around him to make sure all proper paperwork was in order for himself and his family. Because of that, I am a full citizen and elder of "the unconquered and unconquerable" Chickasaw Nation.

The pain my grandfather and other Chickasaw ancestors went through helps me empathize with other nonwhite groups that have suffered greatly because of prejudicial acts.

Because those on my mother's side were Scotch-Irish, some people don't understand my full Native American citizenship and ask me, "What percentage Indian are you really? You can't be full-blood. You look like a lot less. How can you be a Chickasaw citizen?"   

We recently received some correspondence from a friend that, lightheartedly, described me as "part Chickasaw". However, legally, you are or you aren't a Chickasaw citizen. There's no in-between category. "Part" has no place in our Chickasaw Nation's laws or vocabulary.

What most people don't understand is that the U.S. government used blood quantums as one of many cruel means to try and assimilate Native Americans into the white culture—as a tool to erase the "Indian" tribes from history.

 
Had our government used the same means to describe African-Americans, who in many instances also have "white" ancestors, the technique would have backfired, exposing an additional ugly and despicable underside of American slavery—the assault of many female slaves by their white masters.

  As Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts has found out during her career, the matter of Native American blood quantum is badly misunderstood and misused by the American public today.

   I know several other Garlandites, including one prominent pastor and one formerly active politico, who are like Senator Warren—they know beyond a shadow of a doubt that they have Native American roots and can even identify the tribe, but they just can't prove or document it.

  
Sometimes various Garland residents have asked for my help in establishing their Native American roots. Unfortunately, the U.S. government has made it next to impossible for them to do that unless one of their lineal ancestors actually had the courage to register by signing up for the Dawes Rolls. (Dawes Rolls are the Congressional-mandated listing of all tribal members in the U.S. as of December 31, 1906).

   And furthermore, they must go through much government red tape (a series of birth certificates, death certificates, and even notarized, sworn statements from older relatives attesting to their parentage).
   

Unfortunately for Senator Warren, who grew up in the same era on another side of Oklahoma City from me, her grandparents or great-grandparents must have been, for whatever reason, frightened of acknowledging their Cherokee heritage and decided against registering on the government's Dawes Rolls, even though they apparently talked about their Indian heritage privately and quietly at home—a not-uncommon practice in the late 1800s and early 1900s, when some groups treated Native Americans as badly as they did African-Americans.
   

My paternal grandfather, on the other hand, was straightforward and proud of his Chickasaw heritage—and probably a little bull-headed about it, too. He was willing to endure whatever discrimination might come his way to publicly align himself with his roots. His great-grandmother had been a substantial property-holder in Mississippi but was forced to leave her native land during the 1830s "Indian removal" because of her Chickasaw bloodline. In fact, the last Chickasaw group of 186 people (including my grandfather's grandfather and grandmother and his father) to leave their homeland in Mississippi is named in history books for her—Delilah Love Mitchell Moore.

Before Delilah was forced to depart with her whole household and extended family, she even deeded some of her land as a gift for what is now the town of Holly Springs, MS. This one-time prosperous Southern lady lost everything due to the persecution of Native Americans. Today she lies buried in an unmarked grave in Ft. Washita, OK.

Despite her means and because she was Chickasaw, Grandmother Delilah is buried in an unmarked Oklahoma grave.

My grandfather carried this tragic family story etched on his heart throughout his life, so not identifying as a Chickasaw went against every fiber of his being. He signed when asked.   

Unfortunately, the senator has none of the official documentation that I have on file both at the Chickasaw capital in Ada, OK, and locked in my bank's safety deposit box in Garland.

  By the way, my bloodline includes some Choctaws, too, but the predominant strain is Chickasaw. One is allowed by law to be a member of only one tribe, usually the dominant strain.   

To fully understand the whole debate over blood quantum, one has to study Native American history and the U.S. government's massive efforts in the 1800s and early 1900s to amalgamate the Native peoples, especially the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole), into the white culture.

   The modern Chickasaw Nation was among the first tribes in the U.S. to outlaw "the white man's" blood quantum formulas. Most tribes today have followed suit and done away with it.

   Before the U.S. government effort began in the early 1800s, Chickasaws and other tribes had their own way of identifying and accounting for their tribal members. One had to have a bloodline that included Chickasaws, a parent who was a member of the tribe, and also a desire to identify with the Chickasaw Nation.   

Toward the end of the 1800s and into the early 1900s U.S. government agents often would try to get uneducated and abused Native Americans registering for the government's official Dawes Rolls to describe themselves as one-half, one-fourth, one-eighth, one-sixteenth et al. Chickasaw, Choctaw, Cherokee, and so forth in hopes that when the percentage down the line would eventually get so small, tribal members would begin thinking of themselves as all white—and the tribes would fade into history.

Many who gave out those percentages really didn't know enough about their own personal genealogy to provide accurate percentages, a fact the Chickasaw citizenship office in Ada often cites. That office scorns any written percentages in the historical records as pure fantasy.

 The policy didn't work. By the 1960s, the tribes were reorganizing after being marginalized and almost destroyed between 1907 and the late 1960s. Today, Chickasaw citizens like me make sure that their children, grandchildren, and so forth, are officially registered and certified.   

Ironically, blood quantums were not something the government ever tried to force on African-Americans, despite the fact that it was common knowledge that black slave women were often forcibly raped or used as sexual objects by their white masters—thus producing children of truly "mixed blood". President Thomas Jefferson and his black slave, Sally Hemings, are the most prominent examples. Only in recent decades has the Jefferson family been willing to admit publicly its ties to Sally and her descendants, who were looked down on by white society as only African-Americans.
   

In my college days when I was involved in the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, one of my African-American friends said rather bluntly, "Look at my family and you'll see that all 10 of my brothers and sisters and I have slightly different skin tones, even though all 11 of us have the same mom and dad. That's because of what the white slave masters did to my female ancestors. They raped them. Or used them as sex objects. And they often got them pregnant. Out of their behavior came children of so-called mixed blood. And they refused to acknowledge them, too. My white ancestry shows up in these variations of skin tones."

  My friend claimed that a great number of African-Americans have white ancestry in their heritage, too. That made me wonder why the public brands all African-Americans as "black" when many are indeed "part white".
   

Had the U.S. government tried its blood quantum technique on the African slaves, it would have had to admit that an incredible amount of unreported sexual assault occurred to black slave women by their "masters" or male members of their "master's" household during the days of slavery—something our political leaders until late were loathe to do. So the issue of "blood quantum" never arose in the African-American community. Ignoring the sexual abuse of female slaves was shameful on the part of our government!

 For nearly 50 years now I have voted not only in local, state, and U.S. federal elections but also in tribal elections, too. I also regularly have participated in tribal meetings.

 I'm proud of those facts. I'm also proud of my grandfather who laid the foundation so that I, my children, and my grandchildren have a very fine, provable Native American heritage!