Let it shine! The thinly spun gold of Native heritage in Georgia  BY JANE F. GARVEY
In years past, Georgia’s Native people had to hide who they were. But things are changing. Today, it’s cool to “be Indian.” And not just Indian, but to be correct with the regalia that are authentic to one’s people. On the Cherokee Reservation in North Carolina, most Cherokee interact with tourists while dressed in Plains regalia. Now, more and more, one sees authentic Cherokee attire. Born on that reservation, Georgia resident Diamond Brown, a full-blood Cherokee who does school performances and exhibitions of Native culture, observes: “We still exist, but we’ve been kind of forgotten, pushed to one side. I came out in Southeastern regalia about 12 years ago, and now in the reservation there are 15 more people that were doing Plains who have switched to Southeast. It’s a new thing for them to start doing Cherokee.” Brown teaches through his organization “Touch the Earth with Native People”; the latter is a term he prefers to “Native American.” His observation gets at the reality of Native life in the Southeast, because Georgia laws forbade appearing to be Indian in public. Of course, in daily life, he dresses—as did many 19th-century Cherokee—in contemporary attire, but recognizes that things are changing in Georgia for Native people. However, even today, many people still think Native cultures have vanished. Marilyn McGaughy, vice chair of the Georgia Council on American Indian Concerns, recalls a moment just a few years ago when she emerged from the museum at Ocmulgee National Monument near Macon and heard a small child ask his grandmother where all the Indians were in Georgia. “Oh,” said the grandmother, “They’re all gone now.”  Since Native peoples were rounded up and force-marched to Oklahoma in 1838, some Georgians have believed there were none left here. Moreover, unlike North Carolina, Georgia has no federally recognized tribes or reservations, a fact that may also account, at least partly, for why Georgia’s anti-Native laws remained on the books for so long. Georgia’s Council on American Indian Concerns, designed to protect burial and other heritage sites, was created by the Georgia Legislature only in 1992.
A retired psychologist with the state, McGaughey says she is of Cherokee and Choctaw descent. She, too, believes things are getting better: “Native people are beginning to expand their horizons,” says the Atlanta resident. Nealie McCormick, who chairs the council, agrees. With Creek and Blackfoot ancestors, he was born in Whigham, near Cairo and Bainbridge, close to the Kolomoki Mounds. To some degree, says McCormick, the Civil Rights Movement helped change the isolation in which Native people lived. “You were either black or white then,” says McCormick of how it was before the Civil Rights era, adding: “It was as if Native people didn’t exist at all.” And he adds that Georgia law also prohibited Native people from testifying against a white man in a court of law. “Which I violated until 1980,” he says laughing, as that’s the year it was abolished. Why was he testifying against whites? Because he was a police officer in Pelham and rose through the ranks to become the town’s chief of police in 1985. McCormick recalls that before the Civil Rights era, Native people endured a lot of social pressures, too, including threats of violence.  McCormick’s wife, Vonnie, is active in maintaining Creek culture. Today, she notes, there are some 3,000 people enrolled in the Lower Muskogee Creek Tribe, which retains a small reservation in Southwest Georgia. (Creek and Seminoles are both Muskogee.) The balance of the tribe extends over Southeast Alabama and Northwest Florida, all historically part of Muskogee territory.
Describing the enrollment requirements, she says a candidate must have “unbroken lineage starting with your birth certificate, your parents’ birth certificates, marriage certificates, census data and going back to the rolls.” The rolls she references are the lists of Native people whose names were recorded in a variety of circumstances, from those who endured the Trail of Tears ordeal in 1838 to those who were named in census rolls, such as the 1832 Creek census. There also are rolls from the War of 1812, of which the Red Stick Creek War (actually a civil war among the Creek) was part. She also points out that signatures of ancestors on treaties and other official documents are helpful in establishing who one’s forebears were. Stan Cartwright, second vice chief of the Perdido tribe based near Pensacola, Fla., is, he says, “on the master rolls of the Muscogee Creek Indian Nation of Florida, established in 1975.” Cartwright and his brother Rocky were born in “The Cove,” a secluded spot between Woodbury and Manchester in Meriwether County, Georgia. The brothers grew up in a house that had no indoor plumbing and no TV, he recalls. Repeating a story often heard among Georgians with Native heritage, Cartwright was about 10, he says, when an uncle pointed out, “We’re Indian.” From then on, he received instruction in the forest and river from his father and grandmother. “The Flint River runs through it,” he says of the family property, “and it’s surrounded by mountains. Six generations lived there. It hasn’t changed much.” Later, when he was about 19, his father showed him a cave where the family would hide when strangers were in the area. That experience inspired him to begin sharing programs with children, including his own, “so that they would know of their Creek bloodline.”  Today Cartwright, 56, is director of Career Technology Instruction in Meriwether County and, with his brother, produces free school programs to disseminate awareness of Creek heritage.
Chipa Wolfe, who often participates in pow-wows and produces craft markets, cautions about the “wannabee” problem. “It was certainly a different world in Georgia 20 years ago,” he recalls, “before it became fashionable to be an Indian.” Now, he laments, “it’s a mess,” referring to the many who cite family lore to support their claim to Native heritage. Descended from French and Cherokee ancestors, he’s married to Ruby, a full-blood Lakota, and lives near Jasper with a buffalo he raised from 5 days old, among other animals. Wolfe is cautiously optimistic about the future for Native people in Georgia. The “fashionable” aspect of finding one’s Native heritage is something he thinks pretty odd, he says, given that Native people “are such a unique feature in these parts due to the fact that they were killed off and run off. It’s a real irony, but it’s pretty much the case.” In addition to Cherokee and Creek, some Georgians cite Lumbee as part of their Native heritage. The word itself is of fairly recent adoption (1953) to refer to descendants of the Cheraw from Virginia, who came into South Carolina in the early 18th century.  Oxendine is a Lumbee-associated name. Senior Gwinnett County Judge James W. Oxendine, father of Georgia Insurance Commissioner John Oxendine, confirms the family’s Lumbee ancestry. A graduate of Vanderbilt Law School, the elder Oxendine says he’s the first person of Indian descent to practice law in Georgia. Born in Roberson County, N.C., the Lumbee center today, he served three Georgia governors and helped root out Georgia laws that were, as he says, “blatantly unconstitutional,” including the one that prohibited Native people from owning land. Such laws had been on the books since at least 1828, and weren’t scrapped until 1980.
Still not federally recognized as a tribe, the Lumbee have gotten political support for bills introduced in 2003 in the House of Representatives (H.R. 898) and the Senate (S. 420) that would extend full federal recognition to the Lumbee as a tribe. If successful, the process will conclude an effort begun in 1888. Georgians of Native descent include some residents from other parts of the country and elsewhere in the Americas. Georgena and Bronson Haywahe, their children, her siblings and parents live close to each other in Carrollton. He is a full-blood Assinaboine, a Native Canadian with connections to the Sioux people, while Georgena, who is Ojibwa, a people related to the Chippewa, was born on the southern side of the United States-Canadian border. The couple participates regularly in dancing exhibitions. Georgena stitched all the detailed beadwork for her outfit by hand. Her husband is highly regarded as a “grass dancer,” those who tamp down the grass with their dancing so others can perform afterward. Not all Native Americans participate in the cultural revival now in progress. Elmer Vallejo, also a Carrollton resident, acknowledges openly his Cherokee heritage and says he descends from people who went West on the Trail of Tears. But he does not participate in the cultural revival endeavors many Native people encourage today. Born in 1942 on the Oklahoma reservation, Vallejo is one of 19 children of a Cherokee mother and a Spanish father.  Vallejo’s Cherokee grandfather had adopted a Hispanic surname and presented himself as Hispanic rather than Cherokee. “Because of the reservation, you couldn’t go anywhere,” says Vallejo, “so he didn’t want any government telling him what to do, tribal or otherwise.”
Today, the reservation where Vallejo was born is headed by a chief who was educated at the University of Georgia in Athens. Re-elected this past June, Cherokee Nation Principal Chief Chadwick “Corntassel” Smith, born in 1951, received his bachelor’s degree in education, one of three academic degrees he has earned, in an Indian teacher training program in 1973. He reports there were some 15 colleagues in the program then and notes how richly ironic that was, given the state’s then-current laws against Native people. While the difficulty of determining Native ancestry remains a thorny matter for some, for Stan Cartwright, the whole business is summed up by a quote he likes to cite that he thinks originally came from Chief Spotted Owl, an Arkansas Cherokee. It goes like this: Indian blood is like gold; no matter how thinly spun, it still shines just as brightly.” Today Georgians of Native descent can let it shine without fear, encouraged by the more receptive atmosphere that has made life in this state easier in this century than it was in the last one. Long interested in Native American matters, Decatur-based freelance writer Jane Garvey holds degrees in languages from the University of Georgia.
Places to visit • Booth Western Art Museum, Cartersville, www.boothmuseum.org. (770) 387-1300. • Chieftains Museum, Rome, www.chieftainsmuseum.org. (706) 291-9494. • Chieftains Trail, four-gateway entry points: Ellijay, Rome, Marietta and Dalton, www.chieftainstrail.com. • Columbus Museum of Arts & Sciences, Columbus, www.columbusmuseum.com. (706) 748-2562. • Etowah Indian Mounds, Cartersville, www.gastateparks.org. (770) 387-3747. • Funk Heritage Center, Waleska, www.reinhardt.edu/funk. (770) 720-5970. • Kolomoki Mounds Historic Park, Blakely, www.gastateparks.org. (229) 724-2150. • New Echota State Historic Site, Calhoun, www.gastateparks.org/info/echota. (706) 624-1321. • Ocmulgee National Monument, Macon, www.nps.gov/ocmu. (478) 752-8257. • Indian history Web site: www.lostworlds.org. Events • Christmas at Chieftains, through Jan. 5, Rome, www.chieftainsmuseum.org. (706) 291-9494. • Georgia Chapter of the Trail of Tears Association Meeting, Jan. 12, Pickens County Library, Jasper, featuring historian Charles O. Walker. www.gatrailoftears.org. (770) 704-6338. • Native American Festival, held in March, Westville, www.westville.org. (888) 733-1850; (229) 838-6310. • Mother’s Day Pow Wow, May 10-11, Canton, www.rthunder.com. (770) 735-6275 • Indian Festival & Rendezvous, June 14-15, Cumming, www.cummingfair.net. (770) 781-3491. • 6th Annual Etowah Valley Indian Festival, Oct. 11-12, Cartersville, www.notatlanta.org. (800) 733-2280; (770) 387-1357. • Ossahatchee Indian Festival & Powwow, held in October, Hamilton, www.ossahatchee.org. (706) 628-7653. • Chehaw Native American Culture Festival, held in November, Albany, www.parksatchehaw.org. (229) 430-5275. • Stone Mountain Pow Wow, held in November, Stone Mountain, www.stonemountain.com. (770) 498-5600. |
