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Illustration: Chris Lyons
I never met my great-grandfather, but there’s a photograph of him burned in my memory. He’s standing with another man between what looks like a tipi and a totem pole. My great-grandfather is wearing three feathers on a band on top of his head, and the other man is wearing a large headdress adorned with feathers flowing down past his shoulders.
I’ve always been told that both of my great-grandparents on that side of my family were part Cherokee Indian, and I took pride in that. I was proud to have descended from the Indigenous people of this land and not only from colonial settlers. The more I learned about the atrocities committed against Native Americans, the more I wanted to be able to say it wasn’t my people who did those horrible things. My people were the victims, not the aggressors.
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My husband is an arts writer, and much of his work focuses on Indigenous projects. This has afforded us the opportunity to meet dozens of Indigenous people from tribes all across the country. I’m one of you, I always wanted to tell them.
But then I learned Cherokee didn’t wear elaborate headdresses or live in tipis like the one in the photo. Members of the Cherokee tribe did, however, set up roadside stands where tourists could pose with them for photos and buy souvenirs. And they dressed up how tourists expected, with giant headdresses, tipis and totem poles.
So, I began to wonder, was my great-grandfather one of those Cherokee dressing up on the roadside for tourists … or was he the tourist?
Searching for ancestry answers
My first instinct was to obtain answers through a DNA test. When the results came back, I was surprised to find no mention of Native American ancestry. So, I did a quick search on Ancestry.com, and although their site now has different verbiage, at the time it mentioned the lack of genetic data available to conclusively show a person descended from any specific tribe.
I then took to Google to learn more about the lack of American Indian DNA. I found the podcast All My Relations, hosted by Matika Wilbur and Adrienne Keene, with an episode that was exactly what I was looking for: Can a DNA test make me Native American?
One phrase spoken by guest Kim TallBear, a professor of Native studies at the University of Alberta, Canada, changed my perspective: “One does not have to be us to be good kin.” She went on to say, “You’re getting a lot of nonindigenous people wanting to be us instead of doing the work of being in good kinship. It’s a lot easier to take a DNA test and do your genealogy than it is to work to be in good relation with Indigenous people.”
In another episode, Wilbur said, “If you want to know what your purpose is, you only have to ask yourself how you will feed the people” — meaning how will you use your own talents and gifts to be in good kinship. So, I asked myself, instead of spending hours on Ancestry.com trying to prove my heritage, how could I spend that time trying to be in good kinship?
It wasn’t long after that I met Diane and Michelle Schenandoah, a mother and daughter of the Haudenosaunee, on a trip with my husband to Loveland, Colorado. We visited the studio of sculptor Jane DeDecker, who was working on the Ripples of Change monument to commemorate the women’s suffrage movement. The final piece is now on display in Seneca Falls, New York. Diane, a fellow sculptor, was hard at work helping DeDecker create Oneida Indian Nation activist and educator Laura Cornelius Kellogg, who is depicted as part of the monument.
While my husband interviewed Diane about her position as an Oneida faithkeeper and her depiction of Kellogg, I chatted with her daughter, Michelle, who is around my age, 40, and we are both nonpracticing attorneys. I shared that I’m a published author and was then running a public relations agency focused on book launches. Our talk quickly turned to the book Michelle wanted to write.
I felt an instant connection with Michelle and was inspired by the podcast message. This was the first time I felt I had a clear answer to the question of how I could be in good kinship: by sharing my experiences and resources with Indigenous people instead of trying to be one of them.
Being in good relation
Since then, I’ve spent time offering advice to Michelle, as well as other authors and documentary producers — who were either Indigenous or whose works featured an Indigenous person — about how to contact literary agents to get a book published and get media coverage for their projects. I’ve never charged for any of those sessions, and this work only scratches the surface of what I want to do in the future.
My husband and I travel the country year-round for our work, and the way I experience America has also been forever changed. I find myself asking: Whose land is this? Why do we celebrate colonization and the expansion of the West as if it were our great accomplishment as a nation? Why was I in my late 30s before I knew the true extent of what has been stolen from Indigenous people through broken treaties and meaningless promises?
I now seek out opportunities to learn more about the people whose land I’m visiting. I recently traveled to Yellowstone National Park with Ojibwe artist John Potter, and instead of seeing it as America’s first national park — and buying the celebratory 150th anniversary shirt in the gift shop — I saw it for what it was: ancestral homeland where Native people now must ask permission to enter.
That knowledge bleeds into other areas of my life as well. Because of what I’ve learned from artists like Potter, my husband and I have committed to only purchasing art that depicts Indigenous people or their culture that was created by an Indigenous artist. I don’t use words like “tribe” or phrases like “Indian giver.” A lifelong Atlanta Braves baseball fan, I no longer do the tomahawk chop or buy merchandise featuring it.
None of it is enough, but it’s a start. I don’t have all the answers. I don’t even know the right questions to ask sometimes.
The hosts of All My Relations often speak of consenting to learn in public, and that’s what I’m doing. I still make mistakes. I still say ignorant things. But my eyes and ears are open, and I’m grateful to all the Indigenous people who have been patient in their sharing and teaching.
I recently studied that photograph of my great-grandfather again, and found myself asking the question I started with: Was he Cherokee?
I still don’t know, and sometimes feel the pull to contact relatives and dig through documents on Ancestry.com. It’s difficult to squash that need to find an answer.
Then I remember Kim TallBear’s words.
I did find an answer. It just wasn’t the one I had been looking for.
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