Echoing what was stated above, I have a little personal history involved here, too.
Many, many moons ago, a full-blooded Cherokee maiden whose parents were on the Trail of Tears made her way out of the reservation in Oklahoma by working as a servant in a home in Fayetteville, Arkansas. In 1867, she married the son of a local preacher who had returned to Fayetteville after fighting in Arkansas's fourth infantry battalion for the Confederacy during the Civil War, and they moved shortly thereafter to a farm in Collin County, Texas. For nearly fifty years after that, she lived on that farm, and every time the census came around, she put down on paper that she was white, claiming various states as her birthplace (Louisiana in one census, Indiana in another, Michigan in another, and so on). She also always made sure her three children were listed as white. The reason? She was scared to death that if her husband ever died and the government ever came to the farm, they'd round her up and send her back to the reservation she was raised on, the same way they had with her parents. Having taken a white name by marriage, she always hoped that she would go unnoticed if that time ever came. She did, however, keep records of the family line on the inside of the cover of the family Bible, and that and several black and white pictures of a very, very Cherokee woman in her late 60s next to her white husband have been passed down to posterity.
That woman was my three times great grandmother.
Her grandson - my great grandfather - was only a quarter Cherokee. But as many of American Indian descent know, native features can display themselves very prominently in descendants who are overwhelmingly European by heritage, and the pictures make that clear, too. His father was a white blacksmith from Alabama who had married his much younger mother (his third or fourth marriage; we're not sure which) after coming to Texas to get away from the economic depression of the turn-of-the-century deep South. Although his mother died when he was very young, my great grandfather apprenticed as a blacksmith under his father for all of his formative years, eventually inheriting the blacksmith practice as an adolescent.
But nobody trusted an Indian blacksmith, even if he'd spent years learning from a white blacksmith they'd done business with before.
So, looking for work, my great grandfather took the family line back to Oklahoma, which until just recently had been referred to as Indian Territory. There, he found work, though not as a blacksmith, because even there, nobody trusted an Indian blacksmith. Instead, he took up carpentry, and he kept in line with the family tradition of always putting the "W" down on the census forms in case the government ever came back looking for us. He eventually purchased a home in Chickasha, Oklahoma, where he married a white woman and fathered two sons, including my grandfather. In his later years, he would make frequent trips to the reservation in Oklahoma, hoping to reconnect with his ancestral roots. At one point, he even made arrangements for a Cherokee cremation ceremony, though that was later vetoed by his second wife who wanted to be buried alongside him.
My grandfather took a very different approach. Being only an eighth Cherokee by this time, he could pass for white - you could see hints of native heritage if you looked closely, but it wasn't readily apparent to the naked eye. After growing up in dust bowl-era Oklahoma, he left to work in the oil industry in Texas supporting the war effort (he was ineligible for the draft due to a childhood injury). After coming to Texas, he never moved back to Oklahoma, and he never spoke of his heritage to anyone outside of the family; as far as the general public was concerned, he was English like his mother and his father's ancestry was Walsh like his last name. He was terrified that if anyone found out about the Cherokee in him, he would lose work like his father had, and he strictly adhered to that policy right up to the day he died. Only at small family gatherings was it a permissible topic of discussion. My grandmother, who is now 95 and full-blooded German from a Texas German-speaking family, still doesn't like talking about it for fear of judgment. When brought up around her, it is always treated as a touchy subject; as far as I know, she never even told my grandfather's in-laws about it. If old habits die hard, I suppose old social stigmas do, too.
One of the things I appreciate most about my alma mater is the fact that it does embrace the Indian history in our area, and that it does keep the Cherokee and the other tribes at the forefront of the local collective conscience. I deeply appreciate that I went to a school where the fact that I have a few drops of Cherokee blood coursing through my veins wasn't looked down on as grounds for shunning, but rather accepted and if anything, thought of as pretty cool. Is PN-G perfect in this respect? No. Are there things we could do better? Probably. But the Port Neches-Groves Indians have done way more to honor the Cherokee way of life and to make people aware of the Golden Triangle's American Indian ties than any white liberal arts professor at any highfalutin university ever has or ever will (I say that as a recent, if cynical and disenfranchised, UT grad, fully cognizant of how UT professors have decried PN-G specifically for our use of the American Indian likeness).
And I fully agree with the sentiment expressed by Usedtocould: that there is an opportunity available to modern day Indian tribes involving sports franchises which use Indian imagery that those tribes would be wise to take advantage of. We would be much better served by taking these high profile academic and corporate entities and using them as a vehicle to raise awareness of the American Indian plight and to recruit support for American Indian causes than by protesting the names. I understand the objections to terms like "redskins." I also understand that people are a lot more likely to get on board with an exhibit in a professional sports stadium honoring a particular tribe and its customs that hundreds of thousands of fans from across the country will see every year than they are a negative attack campaign against a popular sports brand. How many more impoverished schoolchildren on a reservation in New Mexico will benefit from an annual fundraiser by the Cleveland Indians than by a protest on a college campus in South Dakota? How much more will students at PN-G learn if the high school partners with the Coushatta reservation in Livingston to offer a special class on American Indian heritage than they will from thousands of angry tweets? There's a much better chance of bringing what's left of American Indian culture back from the brink by working with what we've got than by destroying the only remaining visible signs that Indian nations ever ruled the North American continent.
But I'll get off my soapbox now.
PS: @RoschonsBigBro, I really hope you've got another little brother somewhere in Mid-County. Also, tell Roschon UT's nice and all, but I'd much rather see him go to Alabama. The Tide wins championships. Roll Tide and Scalp 'em.
