A Genetic Record of Conquest and Dominion: A Cherokee Story

Here are further thoughts that came to me as I read David Reich’s Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Pantheon, 2018). See my previous essay for more about this book.

All of human history has consisted of conquest and dominion. One human group, whether tribe or nation, has conquered one or more others for as long as there have been humans. And in the course of these conquests, the conquering men have had children by the conquered women.

That is certainly what happened in America. Europeans came to America and started conquering Native Americans. Except when they intermarried with them. When they did so, it was usually a white man with a Native woman. This happened over and over again in my family. My sixth great grandmother, Nancy Ward, was a full-blood Cherokee who married a white trader, Bryan (Bryant) Ward. Their half-Cherokee daughter, Betsy Ward, married the white general Joseph Martin. Their quarter-Cherokee daughter Nancy Martin married a rich white (German) ferryboat owner named Hildebrand. Their one-eighth Cherokee daughter Elizabeth Hilderbrand (somewhere along the line the r was added to the name) married a white man, James Pettit. Then things reversed temporarily when their one-sixteenth Cherokee daughter Minerva Pettit married Usquuh-ne, a.k.a. Lewis Hicks, who may have been full-blood Cherokee. But at least on the maternal Cherokee side of my family, it has mostly been white men and Native women. The picture is of Elizabeth's grave in Ft. Gibson, Oklahoma (1801-1887).

This is also what happened to black people. Most American blacks (except the Gullah speakers from the islands off the coast of South Carolina) have partial European ancestry, mostly from white men, many of them slave owners.

The historical evidence for this is reflected in the genetic evidence. In your cells, the Y chromosome (if you have one) came only from your father, and your mitochondrial DNA (abbreviated mtDNA) came only from your mother. In a perfectly fair admixture (in which, for example, white-mother-Native-father pairings were as common as white-father-Native-mother pairings), the Y:mt ratio would be 1:1. But among American blacks, the ratio is 4:1 white to black. In some populations in Central America, as in Colombia, the ratio is as high as 20:1.

To put it in personal terms for me: Up to my great grandfather Andrew Hicks, all of the mtDNA was native. At that point, beginning with my white great grandmother Mary Franklin Hicks, all of the mtDNA was white. My grandfather married a white woman too. I got all my mtDNA from my mom, but it was probably all white. Therefore, perhaps all of my Y chromosomes, and all of my mtDNA, are white. My native genes are mixed into the other chromosomes somewhere.

Back to the white Y chromosomes. Did the white Y chromosomes in my family, and maybe yours as well, come from white men raping dark women, or from dark women choosing white males in order to get some of their wealth and status? Undoubtedly some of both. Both of these Y sources constitute oppression of women: rape is absolutely direct oppression, while the appeal of white wealth and status is an indirect, and possibly subconscious, oppression. In the case of white male owners and black female slaves, it is difficult to see it as anything except rape, since the woman had literally no choice in the matter.

But in my family, things were a little more complicated. As musician Becky Hobbs wrote in her musical Nanyehi, which was about our shared ancestress Nancy Ward, “Cherokee women have always done and will always do whatever they want.” Bryan Ward did not rape Nancy. But the white connection gave Nancy Ward status and respect in the eyes of the white conquerors, and she used this status to her advantage. (She already had status in the eyes of Cherokees.) One of the things she did was, I believe, to arrange to have her half-white daughter Betsy married to Joseph Martin, later a general. This gave Betsy influence in the white world far beyond what a full-blood Cherokee was likely to have. General Martin did not rape Betsy. The trader Bryan Ward and the general Joseph Martin got advantages among the Cherokees because they had Cherokee wives, and Nancy and Betsy got advantages from Betsy marrying the general who was in charge of Cherokee-white relations. All of this status and advantage came to a screeching halt when Elizabeth Hilderbrand Pettit, one-eighth Cherokee and Nancy’s great-granddaughter, had to go on the Trail of Tears to Indian Territory along with all the full-bloods, and take little Minerva with her.

But here is the most complicating factor. In three of the Cherokee-white marriages in my family history, the Cherokee woman was the squaw wife of a man who already had a white family. Bryan Ward had a white family down in Georgia, outside of Cherokee territory, and he eventually returned home to his white wife. General Martin had a white wife and family back in Virginia. Apparently, in both cases, the Cherokee women knew that they were second wives. Nancy’s great granddaughter Elizabeth Hilderbrand, however, did not. By Cherokee law, after about 1829, polygamy was illegal in the Cherokee Nation. When Elizabeth found out her white husband James Pettit had a white family in Missouri, she sued the crap out of him in the Cherokee Supreme Court and won. She was the only woman to do this in the history of the short-lived Cherokee Supreme Court. I’m proud of her. You can read about this in Theda Perdue’s Cherokee Women (University of Nebraska Press, 1998, page 151).

The biggest example of male warrior conquerors inseminating female victims was the empire of Genghis Khan. In some areas of western Asia that were once part of his empire, up to eight percent of males carry what was likely to be Genghis Khan’s Y chromosome, many centuries later. But this was not all rape. Genghis and Kublai Khan established empires that produced a lot of public works and other benefits for the conquered people. The men who ruled the empire must have been much in demand by the native women.

In all these cases, it was conquest and dominion, even if the dominion was one that the conquered women thought that they consciously chose. We just need to admit this fact about ourselves, our human species.

Human Racial History

There are some conservatives who believe in the superiority of European genes. But this is impossible. The reason is there are few if any European genes.

What we call “European” is a mixture of several different races, all of which were distinct from one another in the past but which, today, have blended together. Five thousand years ago, there were European races that do not resemble any modern races. One race had dark eyes, dark hair, and white skin; another had blue eyes, dark hair, and dark skin. These races did not become extinct, but all of their genes have been mixed together in Europeans. In addition to different Homo sapiens races, European ancestors also included some Homo neanderthalensis.

Take, for example, the famous “ice man” mummy Ötzi who got shot by an arrow as he crossed the Alps 5,000 years ago. He was a member of a race that no longer exists but was widespread in Europe 5,000 years ago.

At one time, Europe was the home of hunter-gatherers. Then people migrated from the middle east, bringing agriculture with them. In a separate migration, horsemen and herdsmen from western Asia brought Indo European languages. Europeans are the mixture of at least three human races, maybe more.

So, you Eurocentric racists, show me: will the real European please stand up?

The migration and subsequent blending of ancient races helps to explain some genetic anomalies from ancient times. The modern Europeans most closely related to Ötzi are the native people of Sardinia. How did that happen? Did Ötzi’s clan embark on an expedition to Sardinia, or maybe the Sardinians invaded Europe? Not at all. Ötzi’s race lived throughout Europe, but as later races migrated into Europe and intermixed, this intermixture did not occur in Sardinia. Sardinia contains a little remnant of Ötzi’s race. But even there, the Sardinians who most closely match Ötzi have mostly non- Ötzi genetic origins.

Such migrations and intermixtures have occurred throughout human history. People scratched their heads in confusion when it was announced that the natives of Papua New Guinea had up to six percent of their genes from the Denisovans, which were a race of Neanderthals who lived in what is now Siberia fifty thousand years ago. (Unlike European Neanderthals, who had red hair and light skin, the Denisovans were darker.)

I know that I, like others who are not expert geneticists, wondered if some Denisovans got on a boat and sailed down to Southeast Asia. But I should have known better, if only because the Papuans live not just in New Guinea but in the highlands, which is largely a world apart from the coastal plain. Any Denisovan voyagers would probably have left their genes among lowland populations. Instead, what probably happened is that people similar to the Denisovans lived throughout Asia, not just Siberia, and that the Denisovan genes were swamped out by human migrants everywhere in Asia except remote places like the New Guinea highlands.

That is, populations such as in New Guinea and Sardinia have remained partially genetically isolated. There are even some Amazonian tribes who have a little bit of Australian ancestry, even though they are mostly descended from migrants who came from Siberia. This suggests that, when the ancestors of Native Americans arrived, there were already some people living in the New World. This pre-Amerindian ancestry was swamped out everywhere except a few scattered tribes.

I got these ideas by reading David Reich’s book Who We Are and How We Got Here: Ancient DNA and the New Science of the Human Past (Pantheon, 2018). His main point can be summarized in this way, largely from his own words: The Tree of Life concept does not work for humans, because the branches of the tree keep rejoining. There has never been a single “trunk” of the tree in the past; it is mixtures all the way down (or up).

So the next time you start feeling racial pride (white power, black power, or frybread power) just remember who you really are.