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.

Oklahoma Evolution Workshop, Part Four

The evolution workshop for Oklahoma teachers continued after lunch. I had the first session. I began by advertising my own website, where you can find essays and photographs, as well as copies of scholarly articles  I have written. It has links to my YouTube channel and to this evolution blog.

Then I began with the story of the Ghosts of Evolution. (I have a recent YouTube video where Darwin discusses this subject.) I held up a big, sticky, green fruit of Maclura pomifera, known as bois d'arc, Osage orange, or horse-apple. The native range of this tree includes Oklahoma. I modeled the kind of questions that they can ask their students. Why do some plants produce juicy sweet fruits? Animals eat them, swallowing the seeds and transporting them to a new location. This is useful to the plant only if the animal swallows undamaged seeds, as we do with strawberry or kiwi seeds, or as raccoons do with persimmon seeds. With their finicky fingers, some raccoons could pick out the persimmon seeds, but this would waste valuable time, during which other raccoons would eat up all the fruits. The concept that students might grasp is coevolution. In this case, juicy fruits evolved in response to animals that eat them and disperse their seeds.

But what eats big, sticky bois d'arc fruits? In Oklahoma, someone will always say, horses. In other parts of the country, nobody may have any idea. But modern horses are not native to North America. There were native horses in North America at the end of the last ice age, but they have become extinct. Perhaps at the end of the last ice age, there were large animals (horses, mammoths, mastodons, gomphotheres, etc.) that ate bois d'arc fruits, but today, there are no native animals that eat them. Thousands of years ago, there was a coevolutionary waltz between bois d'arcs and gomphotheres; today, the bois d'arc is doing a waltz with no partner.

We went outside, into the cold wind. The temperature has dropped 50 degrees in two days. If you want to get kids outside and still teach them about evolution, just take them to an oak tree and ask them what they know about oak trees. The wood is strong. The trees live a long time. Acorns are large, as are the seedlings that emerge from them. Now, think about what kind of environment would benefit trees that have these characteristics. In an old, stable forest, large seeds and large seedlings would be better able to compete with the dense populations of plants that are already there. They invest for the long term in strong wood. Then take the kids to a cottonwood tree. Cottonwoods produce cheap wood and do not live very long. Their seeds are numerous and small. These characteristics make sense for trees that live near rivers, where they have a lot of water but also face a great risk of being destroyed in a flood. It would make no sense for a cottonwood to invest in wood that will last for centuries, since a cottonwood tree would probably get killed in a century or less. This may help students to understand that evolution does not always produce the same "superior" set of adaptations; the "superior" traits for a tree in an old, stable forest are different from those in a young, frequently-disturbed, floodplain forest.

Then Dr. Cecil Lewis had a second session, this time devoted to his specialty: the evolutionary and medical genetics of humans. He explained how population genetics works. A large, old population that has been large for a long time may have a great deal of genetic variation, including a lot of rare variants. Large populations can lose genetic variation if they become small--that is, they go through a population bottleneck. Small populations can lose genetic variation just by chance. If the population then grows rapidly, it retains the genetic makeup that it had while it was small. That is, a newly-large population will have no more genetic variability than it did when it was small. If you find a population that is large but has low genetic variability, this probably means that there was a recent genetic bottleneck. This appears to have happened in the human species. The entire human species, all seven billion of us, has the same amount of genetic variation that one would expect from a mammal population with only twenty thousand individuals. This suggests that (perhaps 70,000 years ago) our species had a brush with extinction--there may have been, at that time, only about twenty thousand of us.

You can make a closer examination of the genetics of human groups. The greatest genetic variation is in Africa. The genetic variation in the Middle East is a subset of African genes. The genetic variation in Europe is a subset of Middle Eastern genes; Asians are a separate subset. North American native genetic variation is a subset of Asian genes; South American native genetic variation is a subset of North American native genes. Each time a migration occurs, only a subset of people leave home, therefore some genes get left behind. Human genes, therefore, are an invisible record of the pattern of human migrations during the last 200,000 years.

Some human genetic patterns have resulted from natural selection. Lewis gave an example: the ALDH2-2 gene, the gene that codes for alcohol dehydrogenase. One variant of this gene is much more common in Asians than in anyone else. The Asian variant is the reason that Asians generally have a lower tolerance of alcohol than other people. However, since refiend alcohol is a recent invention, the Asian variant of the gene was probably selected by exposure to pathogens.