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.

Another Creationist Intellectual Breakthrough

According to this photograph, which I took last week, creationists do not just reject evolution; they also reject standard English, confusing "ancestor" with "descendent." This is at a church in rural Oklahoma.

If you have not read the recent posts, see them below.

The Evolution of Religion

The evolution of religion is too big of a topic to cover in one blog entry or, as I am discovering, in a single encyclopedia entry (as I begin to work on the revised edition of Encyclopedia of Evolution). Religion, as Richard Dawkins points out, is a set of memes that propagate themselves through genetically- and socially-based instincts. Nevertheless, we can speculate about the evolutionary functions of some components of religion. I will speculate on one of them here.

On Memorial Day weekend, I met with some of my family at a cemetery to place plastic flowers on graves. This is nothing if not a religious ceremony. Winganon Cemetery is out in the country, several miles into the hills from Chelsea, a very small town in Oklahoma, which is over twenty miles from Claremore, which is a small city, which is over twenty miles from Tulsa. This is where my parents are buried, as well as the parents of my two cousins, whom we joined there. Also buried there are the grandparents and the great-grandparents that we all shared. Had my daughter not been kept away by a medical emergency, there would have been five generations, living and dead, represented at that place.

Religion is all about connectedness—in fact, that is what the word means, from the Latin ligere, from which the word ligament comes. We were there because our identities are not just who we are at this moment, but as descendants. The human mind operates in four dimensions—we are always thinking about the past and the future. Most humans, except for atheists, include an unseen spiritual world as part of this connectedness; even agnostics leave open this possibility.

We did not look very religious. We were trampling all over our parents’ and ancestors’ graves as we forced plastic flowers into adobe-hard ground. Then we stood in the sun or sat in meager shade to talk about current situations or about the experiences of our predecessors. One cousin and I shared war stories told by our deceased uncle. We did not have sanctimonious ceremonies. But we were doing exactly what our ancestors would have wanted us to do, had they been able to see us: we remembered them, and then built more connections. Neither my cousin or I had heard the stories told by the other.

The human mind works in four dimensions all the time. I realized this later as I reclined on the bed, beside a fan, with one of our cats. I just let my mind wander, and I suppose the cat was doing the same. But the cat was presumably thinking only about its comfort at the present moment, which vague memories of territoriality and food, and vague anticipation of hunger. My mind, however, wandered exclusively in the fourth dimension, remembering past events (most of them trivial) and wondering about the almost infinite possibilities for the future (many of them disturbing). The human mind, even at rest, lives in a cosmos of connectedness, which is to say, religion, broadly defined.