I've been thinking all week about my "list of things I like to do," posted last Sunday. I wrote this list when I was 15, which minus 43...what's that? (getting calculator...) 28 years ago. Wow. I didn't know that one of the entries, "Discovering more about my Indian heritage" would be a life-long journey, leading me from Kalamazoo, Michigan to the mountains of Californian (where I started on the serious path of ceremony, self-discovery and healing,) and back to Hampton, Virginia where I unearthed all the bones of the family, and all the Indian and Free Persons of Color heritage. At 15, no one in my family talked about the past, and definitely not being Indian in public. It was a nostalgic private knowing, spoken of at family reunions and while washing dishes. This knowing was something that connected us smart-mouth kids to the old timey homesteaders. Those old people were country as the day was long, long Os and sharp "Ain'ts." I clearly remember asking "what's our tribe?" and my sassy mother quipping, "you've got some black, some Indian, some white, French, maybe German and a little bit of black." My ears burned that day b/c I was raised black, but culturally I knew our swampland blood came from somewhere else. That murky door of the past seemed to mock me.
Years later, and my eyes are bad now from the painstaking research, hovering over Census books, historical accounts and computer screens, I discovered the trail we took: My great-grandmother was the daughter of Willis Roberts, Jr. (who is buried in our family cemetery in Almena, MI). Willis, Jr. decided to leave his father and uncles in Indiana, where several mixed blood communities from Greenville, NC and Northhampton County, and Virginia, settled. They were escaping the changing times in the south. Both my grandparents' people were born in North Carolina and are listed as Indian, Colored, Free Persons of Color and Black, on tax records and the Census, over a 2-300 year span. Since the first Census in 1790. Okay, I didn't mean for this entry to be a history lesson (and I am on my way to a poetry reading at 2pm), but this is the story of my family. This is in my memoir. Reclaiming that Indian/Person of Color story. I started writing about this b/c I wanted to know, do we every really change, from who we are in the beginning, as a person? I didn't. I still, after years of silliness, having a beautiful daughter, and making too many mistake in my life, am hungry for my legacy. And then, I lay this same lens upon my roots and heritage, did we ever really change, in the blood, from being Indian, just because the titles and labels and some loyalties changed? I don't think so. Isn't this why those who can trace their lineage back to Kings and Queens, even by marriage, are proud? I am proud to be all of it, everything I have found and everything I still don't know. Indian, black, white, the French and German my mother said we are; I am proud to be a curious little tri-racial girl having lived up to some of the things I put forth for myself. No matter how many (generations, wars, marriages, laughter, walking) years later. What I found of our tribes is Cherokee, Coharie/Neusiok, Choctaw (father's side), and some others. But just because I am not fully sure of our tribes' names, who from what tribe married into another, I know who I am. Do you? http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/neusiokhist.htm
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