|
To gauge accurately the amount of Indian blood in the veins of the white
population of the American continent and to determine to what extent the
surviving aborigines have in them the blood of their conquerors and
supplanters is impossible in the absence of scientific data. But there
is reason to believe that intermixture has been much more common than is
generally assumed.
The Eskimo of Greenland and the Danish traders and
colonists have intermarried from the first, so that in the territory
immediately under European supervision hardly any pure natives remain.
The marriages (of Danish fathers and Eskimo mothers) have been very
fertile and the children are in many respects an improvement on the
aboriginal stock, in the matter of personal beauty in particular.
According to Packard ( Beach, Ind. Miscel., 69, 1877) the last
fall-blood Eskimo on Belle Isle Straight, Labrador, was in 1859 the wife
of an Englishman at Salmon bay. The Labrador intermixture has been
largely with fishermen from Newfoundland of English descent.
Some of the Algonquian tribes of Canada mingled
considerably with the Europeans during the French period, both in the
east and toward the interior. In recent years certain French-Canadian
writers have unsuccessfully sought to minimize this intermixture. In the
Illinois-Missouri region these alliances were favored by the
missionaries from the beginning of the 18th century. As early as 1693 a
member of the La Salle expedition married the daughter of the chief of
the Kaskaskia. Few French families in that part of the country are free
from Indian blood. The establishment of trading posts at Detroit,
Mackinaw, Duluth, etc., aided the fusion of races.
The spread of the
activities of the Hudson's Bay Company gave rise in the Canadian
Northwest to a population of mixed bloods of considerable historic
importance, the offspring of Indian mothers and Scotch, French, and
English fathers. Manitoba, at the time of its admission into the
dominion, had some 10,000 mixed bloods, one of whom, John Norquay,
afterward became premier of the Provincial government. Some of the
employees of the fur companies who had taken Indian wives saw their
descendants flourish in Montreal and other urban centers. The tribes
that have furnished the most mixed-bloods are the Cree and Chippewa, and
next the Sioux, of northwest Canada; the Chippewa, Ottawa, and related
tribes of the great lakes; and about Green Bay, the Menominee.
Toward the Mississippi and beyond it were a few Dakota
and Blackfoot mixed-bloods. Harvard (Rep. Smithson. Inst., 1879)
estimated the total number in 1879 at 40,000. Of these about 22,000 were
in United States territory and 18,000 in Canada. Of 15,000 persons of
Canadian-French descent in Michigan few were probably free from Indian
blood. Some of the French mixed-bloods wandered as far as the Pacific,
establishing settlements of their own kind beyond the Rocky Mountains.
The first wife of the noted ethnologist Schoolcraft was the daughter of
an Irish gentleman by a Chippewa mother, another of whose daughters
married an Episcopal clergyman, and a third a French-Canadian lumberer.
Although some of the English colonies endeavored to promote the
intermarriage of the two races, the, only notable case in Virginia is
that of Pocahontas (q. v. ) and John Rolfe. The Athapascan and other
tribes of the extreme northwest have intermixed but little with the
whites, though there are Russian mixed-bloods in Alaska. In British
Columbia and the adjoining parts of the United States are to be found
some mixed-bloods, the result of intermarriage of French traders and
employees with native women.
Some intermixture of captive white blood exists among
the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, and other raiding tribes along the Mexican
and Texas border, the children seeming to inherit superior industry. The
Pueblos, with the notable exception of the Lagunas, have not at all
favored intermarriage with Europeans. The modern Siouan tribes have
intermarried to some extent with white Americans, as some of their slid
in early days with the French of Canada. The Five Civilized Tribes of
Oklahoma--Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creeks, and Seminole, have a
large element of white blood, some through so, called squaw-men, some
dating back to British and French traders before the Revolution.
In the
Cherokee Nation especially nearly all the leading men for a century have
been more of white than of Indian blood, the noted John Ross himself
being only one-eighth Indian. Mooney (19th Rep. B. A. E., 83, 1900)
considers that much of the advance in civilization made by the Cherokee
has been "due to the intermarriage among there of white men, chiefly
traders of the ante-Revolutionary period, with a few Americans from the
back settlements." Most of this white blood was of good Irish, Scotch,
American, and German stock.
Under the former laws of the Cherokee Nation anyone who
could prove the smallest proportion of Cherokee blood was rated as
Cherokee, including many of one-sixteenth, one-thirty-second, or less of
Indian blood. In 1905 the Cherokee Nation numbered 36,782 citizens. Of
these, about 7,000 were adopted whites, Negroes, and Indians of other
tribes, while of the rest probably not one-fourth are of even
approximately pure Indian blood. Some of the smaller tribes removed from
the east, as the Wyandot (Hurons) and Kaskaskia, have not now a single
full-blood, and in some tribes, notably the Cherokee and Osage, the
jealousies from this cause have led to the formation of rival full-blood
and mixed-blood factions.
During the Spanish domination in the southeast Atlantic
region intermixture perhaps took place, but not much; in Texas, however,
intermarriage of whites and Indians was common. The peoples of Iroquoian
stock have a large admixture of white blood, French and English, both
from captives taken during the wars of the 17th and 18th centuries and
by the process of adoption, much favored by them.
Such intermixture contains more of the combination of
white mother and Indian father than is generally the case. Some
English-Iroquois intermixture is still in process in Ontario. The
Iroquois of St Regis, Caughnawaga, and other agencies can hardly boast
an Indian of pure blood. According to the Almanach Iroquois for 1900,
the blood of Eunice Williams, captured at Deerfield, Mass., in 1704, and
adopted and married within the tribe, flows in the veins of 125
descendants at Caughnawaga; Silas Rice, captured at Marlboro, Mass., in
1703, has 1,350 descendants; Jacob Hill and John Stacey, captured near
Albany in 1755, have, respectively, 1,100 and 400 descendants. Similar
cases are found among the New York Iroquois. Dr Boas (Pop. Sci. Mo.,
xlv, 1894) has made an anthropometric study of the mixed bloods,
covering a large amount of data, especially concerning the Sioux and the
eastern Chippewa. The total numbers investigated were 647 men and 408
women. As compared with the Indian, the mixed-blood, so far as
investigations have shown, is taller, men exhibiting greater divergence
than women.
A large proportion of Negro blood exists in many
tribes, particularly in those formerly residing in the Gulf states, and
among the remnants scattered along the Atlantic coast from Massachusetts
southward. The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma, having been
slaveholders and surrounded by Southern influences, generally sided with
the South in the Civil war. On being again received into friendly
relations with the Government they were compelled by treaty to free
their slaves and admit them to equal Indian citizenship. In 1905 there
were 20,619 of these adopted Negro citizens in these five tribes,
besides all degrees of admixture in such proportions that the census
takers are frequently unable to discriminate.
The Cherokee as a body have refused to intermarry with
their Negro citizens, but among the Creeks and the Seminole
intermarriage has been very great. The Pamunkey, Chickahominy, Marshpee,
Narraganset, and Gay Head remnants have much Negro blood, and conversely
there is no doubt that many of the broken coast tribes have been
completely absorbed into the Negro race.
Handbook of American Indians, Frederick W. Hodge,1906
http://www.accessgenealogy.com/native/tribes/history/indianblood.htm
BACK TO ARTICLE/CHAPTER LIST
NEXT >> |
