>> From the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. ^M00:00:03 ^M00:00:18 >> Roberto Salazar: Good afternoon and welcome to the Library of Congress. Native American History Month programming is made possible in part by the Office of Equal Employment Opportunity and Diversity Programs in association with the American Folk Life Center and Native American Employees of the Library. Illustrating today's program also is a display of collection items from the holdings of the Library's Curatorial Divisions and the Veterans History Project. We're very thankful to the Curatorial Divisions for providing of their time, their staff time to select, present, and safeguard these treasures that include maps, manuscripts, photos, and books. One item of special note is the ^IT Cherokee Phoenix ^NO, a rare original volume which is described as a gold-level treasure from the vault of the Serial and Government Publications Division. One of four volumes, it documents efforts to connect Cherokee nationals and gain support for Cherokee autonomy. We invite you to peruse and view these items after today's presentation. You will also be able to purchase a book from today's presentation, ^IT The Cherokee Diaspora ^NO for a very special price of $32 and our guest speaker, I'm sure, will make himself available, we hope, to sign your copy of the book. My colleague, Carrie Lyons, will now join me in introducing today's program and our featured speaker. ^M00:01:51 ^M00:01:57 >> Carrie Lyons: Thank you, Roberto. Good afternoon to everybody. I am Carrie Newton Lyons. I am a section research manager and attorney at the Congressional Research Service. I'm also an enrolled citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. First, I'd like to thank everybody for coming to our program today to celebrate Native American Heritage Month and I'm going to give a special thanks to all of my colleagues at CRS who are out here to support me. So thank you very much. My deepest gratitude to all of you. This program came about -- about six months ago in a meeting that Jennifer Manning and Eric Eldridge and I were having in my office. We were discussing how we needed to get an early start on planning for Native American Heritage Month. And naturally, I got off topic and started commenting on my desire to write an article about the belief of many Americans that they have Native American ancestry or Indian blood. Well, I was talking about it because I'd had a friend who had recently revealed that he thought he might have some Native American ancestry. And I'm sure you've seen all of the commercials for these DNA testing companies where people discover that they have a percentage of Native American blood. Well, two weeks later, Jennifer sent me an article from ^IT Slate Magazine ^NO titled "Why Do So Many Americans Think They Have Cherokee Blood?" And I had been scooped by our speaker today, Professor Greg Smithers [laughter]. But it became very clear that issues of identity and questions about who are our people are incredibly important in America. And the further evidence is the success of these DNA testing companies and the multitude of genealogy research sites that you can find on the internet. It also became clear that Professor Smithers would be a great person to come and speak to us in honor of Native American Heritage Month. And that his research, and his articles, and his books are helping to resolve some of those issues that we're all grappling with. Now, before I turn it over to Professor Smithers, I just want to give a few brief details about him. He received his BA in History from Australian Catholic University and his PhD in History from the University of California at Davis. He currently teaches at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond. And he is the author of several books including one that you could purchase today on race and history. I am thrilled to have him with us here today. So please help me welcome Professor Greg Smithers. ^M00:04:32 [ Applause ] ^M00:04:38 >> Gregory Smithers: Thank you all for coming today. Special thanks to Carrie Lyons, of course, and Roberto Salazar for inviting me. I'm delighted to be here. And before I get started, let me just acknowledge the Algonquin-speaking ancestors who are the traditional owners of the soil that we are now all standing on. I've been teaching for quite some time now in various parts of the world, in Australia where I was born and raised, in Hawaii, in Scotland, and of course, here in the United States -- in various parts of the United States. And it never has ceased to amaze me when I teach classes on Native Americans in the Southeast, how that student body who takes that class insists that they -- as the title of this lecture indicates, have a grandmother or more typically a great-great grandmother who has stories of their Cherokee ancestry. So common was this several years ago that I started taking a head count. And it never ceases to amaze me. It's about 25% of the class of about 40 students who claim that they have Cherokee ancestry. And this has been the case whether I was working at the University of Aberdeen in the north of Scotland, or giving guest lectures at the Australian National University in Canberra, or working back here in Virginia and other parts of the United States. This is quite extraordinary and so, that was the genesis for this book, to try and understand why so many people think that they have Cherokee ancestry in their family and I do apologize to Carrie for scooping you on that ^IT Slate ^NO article. But I do believe there's much more to be written about this topic. I don't believe that anything that I had written or other scholars of the Cherokee experience have written is the final word. I think this is an ongoing conversation that we are having and are involved in. I'm hoping that our knowledge is being deepened by the work that we are producing both for academic audiences but also for popular audiences and the readers of publications like ^IT Slate Magazine ^NO. Today, there's approximately one million Americans who self-identify as Cherokee. That is people who believe that they have a Cherokee ancestor somewhere in their genealogy. That's become an important article of an individual's identity, it seems, in the late 20th and early 21st century. And this explosion -- for one of the better expression, in people who claim Cherokee ancestry, begins in its modern formation around the late 1960s and early 1970s. And it seems to have become mainstream during the early 1970s and it coincides with a public service announcement that featured the gentleman you see there on the screen. He's -- his stage name was Iron Eyes Cody. Some of you are no doubt old enough to remember that commercial and his work in Hollywood, in film and on television. Iron Eyes Cody was the child of Sicilian immigrants, born in New Orleans. He appropriated an identity for himself as a Cherokee man and he became quite a successful actor in his own right. If you ask his descendants, his son and grandchildren, they will insist that Iron Eyes Cody was indeed Cherokee. Now the evidence is contrary to that but the question remains, well why? Why were there so many people like Iron Eyes Cody who appropriated such an identity in the late 20th century -- from the 1970s forward? Part of the answer to that is directly related to what some historians and sociologists refer to as the ethnic revival movement. Ethnic revivals begin in the 1970s and what they basically entail are Americans rediscovering and reconnecting with their ancestry -- their ethnic ancestry. This is also the era one must keep in mind of multiculturalism. The Western world is embracing ideals around multiculturalism in the 1970s and 1980s. And it's during this era then when people discover that they're Irish, that they're German, that they're Hungarian, that they're Italian, and that they're Native American. That these identities -- excuse me, begin to proliferate throughout American culture. Part of this is a cynical attempt, as the historian Matthew Frye Jacobson has pointed out to try and mitigate the impact of racial tension that existed in 1960s and 1970s America to try and flatten out racial experiences. ^M00:10:08 That we are all immigrants and that in some way, racial suffering and racial experiences have a degree of equivalency about them. And that's -- that is, indeed, misleading. And I can go into more details about that. But that gives you some sense in the modern context of where this proliferation in people claiming Cherokee identity comes from. Navajo was, at one point, the most popular identity for people to self-identify with in the United States in the 1950s and '60s and that's largely a product of Hollywood filmmaking. Thank you, John Wayne. But Cherokee becomes the identity of choice and it still is today for people who insist that they have Cherokee ancestors. So I'm going to come back to this question then and take a detour through some of the major points that I talk about in ^IT The Cherokee Diaspora ^NO because it's in that book that I wanted to understand this modern phenomenon. ^IT The Cherokee Diaspora ^NO is really a book about origins and becoming. It's a story that places history and heritage in conflict. Heritage is that phenomenon scholars point out of creating meaning. And that's what many Americans have been doing not only since the 1970s but for quite some time, almost from the beginning -- indeed, from the beginning of our republic trying to create and cultivate some sense of meaning. Historians sometimes in a rather snobbish fashion are dismissive of the heritage industry. We trade in evidence we like to convince ourselves. We get at the facts of the past. But as I like to remind my students, all facts are mediated. They don't understand what I'm talking about but by the end of 16 weeks, they get it [laughter]. I nail it into them. So who are the Cherokee people then? Let me give you a brief introduction to the Cherokee people, their culture which I have devoted my career and adult life to. The Cherokee are an Iroquoian-speaking people descended possibly from migratory people from the Northern Great Lakes. And they migrated southward and settled in and claimed as their hunting territory parts of what is today Virginia, West Virginia, North and South Carolina, Georgia, Alabama, Tennessee, and Kentucky. The linguistic and ethnic heritage that the Cherokee brought with them to help them found their communities in the -- that were thriving by the time the Spanish encountered them in the 16th century, carried with them the legacy of their Northern Great Lakes heritage. Iroquoian etymology is evident in a number of the town names in Cherokee country in the southeast. Towns such as Seneca and Kituwa underscore those links. Most archaeologists believe that the Cherokee people have been in the southeast, in the Appalachian Mountain region of the southeast for at least 4000 years, if not longer. And the archaeological evidence is dynamic and constantly changing so that we're always reevaluating that chronology. By about 1000, the Cherokee understood themselves to be "the principal people", the Tsalagi became politically identifiable as town and clan communities throughout the southeast. And as I mentioned, when De Soto and his Spanish entrada moved through the south from modern-day Florida all the way through the mountain south and interior south during the period between 1539 and 1542, they encountered wonderfully dynamic, sophisticated and I should point out, interconnected societies. Societies that had long engaged in trade, diplomacy, marriage. Most Native People in the southeast practiced exogamous marriage practices. That is they married outside of their clan groups. These were incredibly rich and sophisticated societies that the Spanish encountered. Above all, it's important to note that the Cherokee people lived in towns. Their identities were centered on towns, in fact, by the 17th and 18th century. The Cherokee people, many schoolchildren come to my classes. By the time they get to college and they have some rough understanding that Cherokee people belong to matrilineal clans. And that is absolutely true, seven matrilineal clans connect people from the different towns in the 17th and 18th century. But on a day-to-day basis, if you were to meet your average Cherokee, say on the upper trading path that ran through the Overhill Cherokee towns in modern-day Tennessee, you would encounter people who would identify their name and which town they were from. Which gives you a sense of what was most important to their identity as Cherokee people in the 17th and 18th century. It was a connection to place and ecology, the ecology of a region and an ecology that connected one's town to a region as well. And this is what makes the removal of Cherokee people in the early 19th century so traumatic. Because this is literally a ripping of people from a sense of place that leads to a discombobulation in one's mental compass of the world and their sense of community. And above all, community was hugely important to Cherokee people. These are people who nurtured reciprocal cultures for many hundreds and thousands of years in the southeast. At the same time, as I detail in the book, the Cherokee people also nurture migration stories. There are some wonderful migration stories that the Cherokee relate to Europeans when they begin to arrive in the interior south on a more regular basis in the 17th and 18th centuries. Some of these stories talk about Cherokee ancestors crossing a great bridge that later sank to the bottom of the ocean. Others talk about Cherokee ancestors, the Ani-kutani, a group of priests -- seven priests who allegedly migrated from a mythical island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean and ultimately settled and helped to establish the seven mother towns in Cherokee country in the southeast. And there are other stories too, of movement and resettlements, about stories of Cherokees migrating to the darkening lands, that is, lands west of the Mississippi River. And some, the so-called Lost Cherokee, migrating to the base of the so-called Mexican Mountains -- you might all know them as the Rockies -- and not returning. So there are stories of movements, resettlements that exist within Cherokee folklore and mythology and Cherokee oral histories. And in some ways, I think that these histories are part, though part of the way to explaining why there are so many people in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and other parts of the world who believe that there are connections to a Cherokee ancestry. Cherokee people have long been mobile. They have been willing to adopt outsiders into their communities and families. So it comes as very little surprise then that there would be so many people who have these vague stories that have become vaguer over time that connect them to some sense of Cherokee-ness or Cherokee identity. ^M00:19:01 ^M00:19:06 On the screen there, what you see is a reproduction or a recreation, I should say, of a typical Cherokee town that Europeans would have encountered on a regular basis in the 17th and 18th century. This is a town where one's identity would have been totally consumed by the day-to-day operations of agricultural production, of cultural engagements, of educating children which was the job of the women of the town and the uncles of the children. Fathers had very little to do with their children in most Native Southern societies during the 17th and 18th century. And that's a product of these being matrilineal societies. Cherokee people began to move their towns over the course of early 18th century. ^M00:20:03 Certainly after the major schism that occurred throughout the Native South that led some societies to reform after the Yamasee War, a major battle that took place very near the Lower Creek towns in 1715 through '18. This had an impact. This war had an impact on all of the Native South. For the Cherokee people, this war in the early18th century was the beginning of sustained and almost daily contact with the British. The British coveted the Tennessee River, the little Tennessee and the other navigable rivers that ran through Cherokee country as highways of the 18th century that would provide them with access to the Ohio and Illinois Valleys to connect plantations and markets and make settlement possible. The problem was that chiefs like John Jolly who you see on the screen there, they controlled the Native South. This was Native country. And it's really not until the late 18th century that the British are able to acquire the type of control that they hoped for and indeed the ultimate control over the Native South. It really doesn't come until the Removal Era in the 1820s and 1830s. It requires effort to remove over 70,000 Native Americans from East to North America before Anglo-Saxon people can dominate the Native South and the Ohio and Illinois Valleys. Now for many Cherokee people like Chief Jolly, who you see on the screen there, they begin to grow despondent and resentful of the aggressive of Europeans. And they begin to relocate their towns. They begin to do that firstly by relocating towns to the interior of Cherokee country which goes a long way to explaining why there are so many Cherokees removed from Georgia in 1838 and '39. They had been taking refuge in what becomes the colony and ultimately state of Georgia since the middle of the 18th century. That's not enough for some people. Certainly, it's not for John Jolly and his followers who become what I refer to in ^IT The Cherokee Diaspora ^NO as the vanguard of diasporic communities. They migrate to Arkansas Territory and they migrate not as they had once done as men engaged in hunting and slave-raiding. They migrated as entire communities with relatively balanced gender ratios. This is something that is entirely new in modern Cherokee history than at the beginning of the 19th century. By way of party knowledge perhaps, Chief John Jolly is the man who adopts Sam Houston as his son. And indeed, when Sam Houston's wife leaves him while Sam Houston is governor of Tennessee, Mr. Houston has a mental breakdown and seeks refuge and comfort from his adoptive father, Chief Jolly, and indeed migrates with the "old settlers" to Arkansas Territory. The movement of Cherokee people west then begins to really accelerate during the first couple of decades of the 19th century. The man you see on the screen there and I'm not sure if there's a picture of him. This image is from the Library of Congress collections, I should point out. And in fact, most of the images from the book do come from the Library of Congress' collections. This is Tahchee or Dutch. He becomes -- he's a great warrior chief and historians have written much about his knife and various poses that he has throughout his adult life, prominently displaying his knife to the artist making the rendering of him. He is -- he's a celebrated war chief among the Cherokees and he leads a group of Cherokees into Arkansas Territory and ultimately into Texas. What's interesting about Dutch -- and I go into much more detail about Dutch in the book, but what's interesting about Dutch's followers is many of them break off and settle in Northern Mexico during the 1830s. This is as a result of the Texas effort to remove Native Americans from the Republic of Texas. Others try to stay in Texas and assimilate into white settler communities or join Comanche communities who continue to terrorize Anglo-Texan communities well into the 19th century. And others ultimately of Dutch's followers are relocated in 1837, '38 into Indian Territory. One of the more interesting things about Dutch's followers is that some of them seem to exist as small communities, very small communities isolated from both settler communities and other native communities that are indigenous to Texas and its Cherokee search parties that find them. Chief Ross, when he's reestablishing government in Indian Territory after the Removal crisis, sends out Cherokee search parties to look for lost Cherokees and they're often delighted to discover that there are people who speak their language and they can be reconnected with a sense of community again. And this is very important. This sense of community remains important through the 19th century through the trauma of Removal. And I should point out something about Removal. It is an effort that embodies the exploitation of peoples, the expropriation of their lands, and the use of technology. Railroads, steam boats, and so forth to relocate tens of thousands of people from land that southerners covet for their slave plantations. And so in the midst of all of this, how does one maintain a sense of community which is so important to being Cherokee? Part of the answer to that resides with people like Sequoyah who you see on the screen there. Sequoyah is the man who is responsible for inventing the Cherokee syllabary, a phonetic system of writing that does catch fire among Cherokee people during the early 19th century. Sequoyah is -- Sequoyah makes quite a deal of money actually selling jewelry that he manufactures during his adult like and he's something of a cattle rancher for a period as well during his early life. He has links to some of the great Cherokee chiefs of the late 18th and early 19th century such as Tahlonteeskee who I write about in great length in the book. Tahlonteeskee is one of those chiefs who leads the vanguard of Cherokee settlements in the early 19th century. So in other words, Sequoyah grows up, certainly not impoverished but certainly not willing to be passive in the face of settler encroachment upon their lands and settler cultural imperialism. And so he sees -- the story goes in his adult life, Cherokee people being intimidated by European Americans being able to speak without talking. "There's nothing special in that," Sequoyah allegedly says. And so he sets about trying to come up with a system of writing that can connect Cherokee people, to enable Cherokee people to speak without talking. Now, sure but now the Cherokees think he's absolutely nuts when he's doing this. But as I say, it does catch fire very quickly and you do have as over here, you can see after the talk an example. One of the great examples of bilingualism in early 19th century America, the Cherokee Phoenix which in many ways is a product of Sequoyah's fabulous invention and the hard work of Elias Boudinot, the first great editor of the Cherokee Phoenix. Who also plays a significant role in using language and culture to try and connect people over vast distances in this new reality that is Cherokee life in an American imperial context. So it is then by the 1830s in that awful era of Removal that separates families -- Cherokee families that leads to great suffering on the part of Cherokee communities -- that creates two separate homelands for the Cherokee people. ^M00:30:04 One that the Cherokees have to recreate for themselves in diaspora in Indian Territory, which is located in modern-day Eastern Oklahoma. This becomes a political homeland for Cherokee peoples living throughout the Americas and beyond. But what gives that homeland -- that political homeland its enduring meaning during the 19th century and into the 20th century is the recognition that there are some of our ancestors the Cherokees note in their writings, in their lectures and so forth. Cherokees who remain in North Carolina, in the ancestral homelands and it's very important then that these political and western -- political homeland remain connected to the ancestral homeland of the Appalachian region. And we do see and I talked -- I write about this in great length in the book. Cherokee people coming, traveling back and forth on a regular basis during the 19th century and the 20th century to remain to try and cultivate a renewed sense of community. And it is quite possible within the context of that movement of people that new relationships are forged with non-Cherokee people that give rise to these family stories that I hear so often in my classes from my students. I should point out also at this point that in the decades between the 1830s and the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, there is a phenomenon sweeping across the Old South. It is the phenomenon of white men claiming that they have Cherokee grandmothers. This is not a phenomenon. Why? Why did this catch fire in the Antebellum Decades? Well part of the answer goes to the idea that American colonialism had successfully in the minds of white Americans removed all Cherokees from Eastern North America. And so by claiming a Cherokee identity like claiming an Indian mascot, you are engaging in a form of cultural appropriation and cultural imperialism that denotes your -- in this context racial, political, and military superiority. That's one aspect of this. But the other aspect of this relates to the growing tensions that emerge between North and South during the Antebellum years, the 1830s through the 1850s. This growing suspicion that there was this authoritarian, overreaching federal government that was trying to impinge upon the rights of Southerners were just like the Cherokees who were removed by this overbearing, overreaching federal government in the 1820s and 1830s. And so there's this false sense of identity and misleading use of history. Indeed, I would say a cultivation of a heritage here that goes part of the way to explaining why you have this phenomenon in the Antebellum Decades. And it's this phenomenon and many of the students that I've had here and oh, down in Virginia tell me that their ancestors relate that it is during the early 19th century that their relatives, they found letters in old suitcases and so forth, of relatives talking about their Cherokee ancestry during these decades. I think that is very revealing about the cultural context then in which this belief begins to emerge. At the same time -- at the same time and I should say it's easy to be cynical about some of this stuff. But at the same time that all of this is happening, Cherokees continue to be moving throughout the Americas. The image on the screen there is an image of the California road that Cherokees regularly took to California in search of gold? But some settled and of all the satellite Cherokee communities in the United States today, the satellite communities in Northern and Southern California are among the most active. And many of them can trace their ancestors back to Tennessee, Georgia, and the Old Nation prior to Removal. Interestingly, this California road didn't end when it got to California. Many Cherokees decided after they didn't find gold in California that they would hop on a steamer in San Francisco Bay and head to the antipodes, to Australia, and try and find gold in the Victorian Gold Rush that was occurring simultaneously. This was quite an extraordinary transnational exchange of cultures that took place then. Many Cherokees returned again impoverished from their efforts to try and find gold. But there are examples of Cherokees who did stay and intermarry in Australia. And I've met many of those ancestors over the years while I've been researching this book. The overarching memory that dominates Cherokee stories of migration and resettlement is what was called in the 1830s by the Cherokees, the Great Immigration. I'm not going to tell you how that term, the Trail of Tears came into being. You have to buy the book to find that out [laughter]. But this was truly, as I mentioned, an example of the use of technology, political power, military power. And it's this migration, this forced migration that dominates narratives of what it means to be Cherokee going into the late 19th century. And it's really not until the era of the Dawes Act and Allotment that we begin to renew conversations about what it means to be Cherokee. During that latter period in the 1880s, when the Dawes Commission is doing its work and land is being allotted in Indian Territory, what becomes Oklahoma -- there are many Cherokee people who refused to have anything to do with the commissioners. They are both disdainful of and distrustful of federal officials. And with good reason. They've heard the stories. There are many stories that I collected from the 1920s -- that date to the 1920s and '30s which go a long way to explaining why many Cherokee people would avoid federal officials. Now that has an enduring impact upon Cherokee identity to this day. Because there are tens of thousands possibly of Cherokee people, some of them working in academia, who now have a very clear sense of their Cherokee ancestors but they do not appear on the Dawes Roll -- that list of names that determines one's connection to the Cherokee Nation and eligibility into the Cherokee Nation. So this is really a fraught period that's in some ways marks a new beginning then. If the Great Immigration of the 1830s marked this sort of dramatic beginning for Cherokee people's living en masse in diaspora, then a period of relative stability certainly upset by the Civil War which I talk more about in the book, is again unsettled and new understandings emerge out of the Allotment Era. And in many ways, the debates about what it means to be Cherokee that emerged out of the 1880s and 1890s are even more fraught and traumatic and really quite visceral and violent in some cases during this era. This is also the era then in the late 19th century where we do see a further dispersal of Cherokee people. Cherokee people deciding that this is no longer Indian Territory. Oklahoma is no longer a viable option for their families. Many people choose to live in diaspora. Narcissa Owen is one of those. She's well known in Washington, DC at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. She marries a prominent railroad engineer and lives for a period in Lynchburg, Virginia and travels back and forth during her life between the Cherokee Seminary which is located in the Cherokee Nation and Washington, DC. But Narcissa Owen is in some ways fortunate. She was able to put her name on the Dawes Roll. She was able to prove beyond a reasonable doubt her Cherokee ancestry at the end of the 19th century. But many others were not. And I want to sort of conclude by pointing to the Cherokee Citizenship Commission which, to my mind, the evidence suggests that this commission has an enduring impact upon what it means to be Cherokee in the 21st century. ^M00:40:08 This is the commission as I detail in the book which separates families based upon race, ethnicity, language, and culture. There are some really quite heartbreaking stories of Cherokee Citizenship Commission as using their positions for political reasons to punish political opponents. Now this is not uniquely Cherokee. This is something that is very human, I think, in a modern context to do such things. But nonetheless, many of the stories that emerged out of the Cherokee citizenship commission are really quite fraught and for African-American people in particular. The Cherokee Citizenship Commission is something of a disaster for many thousands of people who by genealogy and by virtue of their ancestors being enslaved by Cherokee slaveholders at the beginning of the Civil War are cast out of the Nation during this period. Their evidence, no matter how clear it is of Cherokee ancestry or connection to Cherokee citizens is deemed never quite good enough by most of the commissioners. So then, this brings us to today then and the 2000 census where "Cherokee" emerges as the largest self-identified segment of the Native American population. At that time, there was a little under 730,000 people who self-identified as Cherokee. The second largest group at the time were the Navajo with a little under 270,000 people self-identifying as Navajo Indians. By 2010, that number had increased again to a little under 820,000 Americans who self-identified as Cherokee and according to some of the latest data as I mentioned in the beginning of this talk, there is now close to a million Americans who self-identify as Cherokee. Keeping in mind that there are only three federally recognized Cherokee tribes, the Cherokee Nation, the Keetoowah band of Cherokee, and the Easton band of Cherokees in North Carolina. These groups keep a very, very close eye on all of these people claiming to be Cherokee. And in fact, both the Easton band and the Cherokee Nation have established what they refer to as fraud list, a list that -- there are hundreds of these groups. It's really quite extraordinary how many groups there are out there claiming to be Cherokee. And I'm more than happy to address some of the complexities of that fraud list and the history behind it in question and answer. But it does, I just want to conclude by saying that one of the reasons -- at the end of the day, one of the reasons I think that so many people do claim to be Cherokee is because I do think Cherokee people are victims of their own success. They are -- as I was mentioning to someone before the lecture, they have a history of being superb diplomats, excellent lawyers, wonderful self-promoters and this is something that is evident. I wrote a piece in the ^IT Journal of Native South ^NO a year or two back that talks about the role that Cherokee heritage making among the Easton Band had in attracting ordinary Americans to Cherokee country in North Carolina. That success, I think, has contributed and led to the 1970s in the era that we're still living in -- in by helping to explain why so many Americans believe they have a Cherokee grandmother or great-grandmother. And on that note, I'll leave it there. And thank you for your attendance and more than welcome to take your questions. Thank you. ^M00:44:40 [ Applause ] ^M00:44:46 ^M00:44:55 Yes, ma'am. >> In the beginning of your talk, you mentioned that it was in the late '60s or early '70s when Americans started to discover their [inaudible] their ethnic ancestry. Was this even before Alex Haley published ^IT Roots ^NO or are there [inaudible]? >> Gregory Smithers: When does Haley publish ^IT Roots ^NO? Isn't that like 1971 or thereabouts? Who can correct me on that one? It's about the same era. Yeah, it's part of this general sort of cultural movement in the United States at the time for people to reconnect with their ethnic origins and their heritage. And I mean, ultimately this gives way to this sort of modern stuff that Carrie was talking about in her introduction with the DNA testing. >> 1976? >> Gregory Smithers: 1976 -- thank you. And I should point out too, the popularity of shows like "Who Do You Think You Are" and I think PBS has genealogical detectors or detectives or something. This is -- this is -- we're still in this moment, I think, of ethnic revival and people reconnecting with their ethnic heritage. One of the things that's interesting about this from my personal professional experience is that when I taught in the UK for several years, English and Scottish kids and adults that I spoke to couldn't understand why Americans were so obsessed with this stuff. They really -- they did not -- surprise, to my surprise, did not have that same sense of connection or desire to find out that connection that Americans do. And I think that must be -- that it had something to do with the settle colonial experience of the late 20th century that helps to explain that, I think. That sort of all the turmoil that went on in the 1960s and that resulted in so much urban unrest, I think people then sort of -- and the embrace of multiculturalism, I think it was then more acceptable post Jim Crow and post racial segregation and lynching to then fully trying to embrace one's roots. >> Do you have a question? Yes, [inaudible] in the corner? >> Would you say a little bit about Cherokee language revitalization? >> Gregory Smithers: Yeah, that's something that's very important that has been accelerating in both -- among all of the tribes, federally recognized tribes since the Second World War. The Easton Band put in place language revitalization programs in the 1950s and they sort of went dormant for a while. But they've been reignited again over the past 10, 15 years. And the Cherokee Nation is doing the same thing as well. So -- and this is urgent work. I should point out that it's being done because the language is the more dire report that I saw about six months ago suggested that there are only 500 fully fluent Cherokee speakers left in the United States. There are many more who have some smattering of the language and knowledge of the language. But in terms of being fully fluent and being able to relate the stories of what it means to be Cherokee and Cherokee folklore and historical narrative in the language -- to lose that would be -- would be a total tragedy and tantamount to a form of great cultural loss. So it's urgent knowledge that's being -- urgent work, I should say, that's being done. The problem, as I understand it from linguist friends that I have is that many children in Cherokee communities don't see the relevance of learning the language. Again, sort of universality of kids, I guess, and they don't recognize the cultural importance of this stuff until often it's too late until they're well into their middle age. And then their brains are not as plastic and -- why are you laughing, Carrie [laughter]? Our brains are not as nimble and able to sort of grasp the intricacies of learning a new language. So that's one of the major challenges that those involved in these efforts are facing. Just this one further thing about that. I will say that I have some good -- there are some good friends of mine and colleagues working at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and they are being very aggressive and very proactive in trying to ensure that the language remains alive. They are connecting with the Easton Band on a regular basis. They are holding symposia and workshops for both Cherokee and non-Cherokee people in the hope that this language will not die. So there are efforts that are being -- that are ongoing. >> All right, next is [Inaudible] -- >> [Inaudible] you shared some of those [inaudible] that your comment on Cherokee in the [inaudible]. Is it likely that that's really what they looked like or there was some artistic [inaudible]. ^M00:50:05 >> Gregory Smithers: That's a very good question. Yeah. >> But they don't -- I wouldn't have thought. >> Gregory Smithers: Now there's a couple of ways to actually answer that question. One is the artists often did take liberties and imposed on those Cherokee chiefs. We see this in 1730 and again in the 1760s, in 1763 when there are Cherokee emissaries who go to London. Some of the artists who reproduced the likenesses of those chiefs reproduced them in this sort of noble Greco Roman kind of form. This is, you know, the noble savage motif and imposing a sense of authenticity, indigenous authenticity on these, on these men. So that's one way to look at it. The other thing and I think there's more than a grain of truth to this is that by the 18th century, and certainly by the early 19th century when some of those images were produced, the Cherokee people had a long history, several centuries now of intermarriage. And so many Cherokees looked awfully like your average back country settler of Scottish or Irish ancestry. It was very difficult to distinguish based upon physical features. Cherokees from poor white settlers or white settlers, period. So that also, I think, goes to explaining the nature of those images. >> I was just wondering when you talked to your kids about -- your students, I'm sorry, not your kids [laughter]. >> Gregory Smithers: They are my children. >> What do you normally [inaudible] about, you know, how many of them identify as Cherokee or how many -- so you talked a lot about heritage but do you ever discuss the differences between people who culturally identify as Native American or Cherokee and the difference between people who just say, "I have a great-grandmother." >> Gregory Smithers: That's a wonderful question actually. Yeah, I do. We talk a lot about that. And for a lot of people, it's not something that's really lived. It's something that's just there. You know, Granny or Great-Grandma talks about it as you know, we have this Cherokee ancestors. And it makes us kind of exotic is the sense I get from these students. So there's not the sense that they're living. They're not living at a sense of Cherokee identity and this is very important because experience and experiential knowledge is at the core of traditional knowledge. So in that sense, what they're actually articulating, I find, is a racialized sense of indigeneity. That is to say, this sort of "Well, I have X amount of blood that is Cherokee, or Creek, or Choctaw and this makes me in some ways connected to this larger Cherokee diaspora or community of indigenous people." And it elides the sort of important cultural and linguistic factors that we've been talking about and sense of community that remains at the core of Cherokee identities in the 21st century. So yeah, so at the bottom line is my overarching sense of all this is that people have a very superficial understanding of what Cherokee identity means and when they do give voice to it, it's in this sort of very racialized blood quantum sense. >> So I know [inaudible] from Australia. I was wondering in your research, did you find any similarities between Cherokee Nation and the aboriginal tribes in Australia in terms of oppression? >> Gregory Smithers: Oh, yes [laughter]. My goodness, we don't have enough time to go into that. I've written about that and I have a revised edition of a book coming up called ^IT Science, Sexuality and Race ^NO which talks about that in great detail. Yeah, the parallels are quite striking and I originally got my start in studying Native American history as an undergraduate when I was working as a research assistant at ATSIC which is the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Commission. You see, I came of age in Australia at a time when land rights, recognition of aboriginal land rights was foremost in everyone's political consciousness. And as an undergraduate, as a college student, I worked on researching, doing the historical research for some of those legal briefings that were being put together during the late '80s and early '90s. And it's at that moment that I realized, well there must be a broader context to this. And indeed there is. And it goes beyond the United States. In fact, it touches every set withcolonial nation state that there is today. So yeah. So the parallels are really quite striking of frontier violence, of the removal of people to access their lands and resources, the forced use of indigenous labor which is not often something we talk about but the British colonies could not have been possible if it was not for the Indian slave trade of the 17th century. And the selling of so many thousands of unnamed "Indians" into slavery throughout the British colonies and the Caribbean as well. So the connections then are just quite extraordinary across both time and space. >> You [inaudible] -- >> Thank you very much for your presentation. Fascinating and really interesting. >> Gregory Smithers: Thank you. >> There was an earlier question about the notion of when identity for Native Americans comes sort of into a vogue or part of the vocabulary and I think '76 is perhaps as [inaudible] goes, '76 is perhaps a little too late in the game. Unlike, you alluded to the Civil Rights Movement, for instance, of 1960s and certainly you'd want to take into account things like the occupation of Alcatraz by Native American [inaudible]. >> Gregory Smithers: Oh, I absolutely agree with you. >> Yeah and of course, you have AIM and the Second Wounded Knee, the massacres and, you know, also for instance that 1968, you have the Poor People's Campaign which brought together people from Native American communities with African-Americans. And also Hispanic people to march on Washington and actually set up a tent city which was the last major thing that Dr. King did and was planning on before he was assassinated. They still went ahead anyway. And then, you know, I was in the southwest recently and identity becomes a very interesting thing because you see the histories of people who had to go serve in the war with the Navajo Code Talker [inaudible]. But there were other groups from Native American -- from Indian country who were also recruited precisely to do the kind of work in the trenches and do a lot of, you know, break codes [inaudible] transmit secrets in languages. But yet, their polarization came when they came back and were denied full citizenship even though, you know, they had fought for the country in World War II. >> Gregory Smithers: Right. >> So I think there is a -- it's a moving target [inaudible]. >> Gregory Smithers: Oh, I absolutely agree with you. >> And then as you said, it's very complex but it's something to think about because in all these instances, identity is not just a claim in the name of multiculturalism but it's a very political act. It's a violent political act. >> Gregory Smithers: Right, yeah. No, I agree. I agree. No, I completely agree with everything you've said. For non-indigenous community members though, I think, it's really this culmination is, you know, the appropriation is what I'm referring to in the late '60s and early '70s. But you're absolutely right about that pre-history that you're talking about. A term that I don't particularly like to use but yeah, Cherokee Code Talk, as I should point out too and I mention this in the book. There were as many Cherokee Code Talkers or Code Breakers during the Second World War as there were Navajo Code Breakers as well. So yeah, so this -- and during the Second World War also, I should point out, that Cherokee people living in places like Illinois and Ohio throughout the east, in New England, in the Mid-Atlantic, they were very clear when they enlisted, who they were. So yeah, this is absolutely a political statement on their part but it's also just a statement of their being as human beings. They did not want any -- a single molecule of their identity as human beings to be taken from them by bureaucracy, or popular culture, or so forth. So I think that those are extraordinarily valid points you raised. >> Go ahead. >> Follow-up question. Were there among Cherokee people the same set of circumstances that happened with the Removal and the Indian Schools which their whole point was to [inaudible] Native American kids? Is that -- is there a similar thing going on with the Cherokee? >> Gregory Smithers: Yup, there is. Yeah and it lasts well into the 20th century as well. And again, this is one of the tragic consequences of the Dawes Act and the Era of Allotment more generally is that the federal government closes down those educational institutions that the Cherokee Nation had built and cultivated since Removal. The Cherokee male and female seminaries were the first advanced level educational institutions west of the Mississippi. And they are closed down by the federal government during the Allotment Era and this leads to this sort of tragic era of dispersing children throughout all corners of the United States and that is indeed something that I talk about in the book at great length. Because the consequences of it are really quite tragic, because many -- many children feel so ashamed of their indigenous heritage that they go to great lengths to try and hide it. So much so that some of those children refer to themselves as Swiss. You know, adopt this sort of Aryan identity in the early 20th century. So it's really quite sad and tragic what happened. ^M01:00:04 >> Please join me in welcoming him and thanking him [applause]. >> Gregory Smithers: Thank you. ^M01:00:08 [ Applause ] ^M01:00:13 >> This has been a presentation of the Library of Congress. Visit us at loc.gov. ^E01:00:20