In the days marking the founding of our nation, both celebrating the dream of a diverse and inclusive free society of equals wherein race has no meaning under law and in which we are co-owners of the state and guarantors of each other’s universal human rights and rights as citizens, and questioning the legacies of history we must keep and those we must escape as nightmares of systems of oppression, including white supremacist terror, theocratic patriarchal sexual terror, authorized identities, imperial conquest and dominion, hierarchies of belonging and exclusionary otherness, and elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege, I find myself interrogating our constructions of national identity.
This Fourth of July holiday week finds us confronted with an injustice which signposts a whole history of injustices and calls into question ideas of national identity as designed state terror and a ground of struggle as history and systems of oppression; Traitor Trump, Rapist In Chief has threatened our founding principle of birthright citizenship and the revocation of citizenship of those who do not submit to his criminal regime of white supremacist terror and theocratic patriarchal sexual terror defined by him as The Good.
I am not among those whom a Nazi and rapist may count as a fellow of Good Moral Character. Ideas of The Good as authorized identity do not in general sit well with me, because they differ by the interest of who is telling it.
Whose Good? This is always the question when we speak of good and evil, in terms of authorization and enforcement of virtue. Auschwitz was not a universal good, though it served the power of the Nazis. The same may be said of our secret prisons, foreign oubliettes, and concentration camps for nonwhite others, now both migrants and citizens as well as political dissidents. Between the prisoner and his guard, I know whose side I am on.
As written by José Olivares in The Guardian, in an article entitled Trump seizes on ‘moral character’ loophole as way to revoke citizenship; “A justice department memo directing the department’s civil division to target the denaturalization of US citizens around the country has opened up an new avenue for Donald Trump’s mass deportation agenda, experts say.
In the US, when a person is denaturalized, they return to the status they held before becoming a citizen. If someone was previously a permanent resident, for example, they will be classified as such again, which can open the door to deportation efforts.
The memo, published on 11 June, instructed the justice department’s civil division to “prioritize and maximally pursue denaturalization proceedings in all cases permitted by law and supported by the evidence”. Immigration matters are civil matters, meaning that immigrants – whether they are naturalized citizens or not – do not have the right to an attorney in such cases.
Muzaffar Chishti from the Migration Policy Institute, a non-partisan thinktank, explained that much of immigration law was based on discretion by government officials. To revoke a person’s citizenship, US officials must demonstrate that they are not of “good moral character” – a subjective and broad term with little defined parameters.
Now, the recent memo lists a broad range of categories of people who should be stripped of their naturalized citizenship status, providing further guidance as to who is not of good “moral character”. This included “those with a nexus to terrorism” and espionage, war criminals and those who were found to have lied in their naturalization process. Officials still need to prove their case, Chisthi explained.
“[The administration] can’t, on their own, denaturalize people, they still have to go to a federal district court,” said Chisthi. “Denaturalization finally does belong to federal district courts – but they are obviously keen on finding every way they can to denaturalize people they think did not deserve to be naturalized.”
However, the justice department’s memo is not solely confined to those expanded categories. It gives more discretion to officials to pursue these cases, prompting a fear for analysts and attorneys that the directive by the Trump administration is overly broad.
For Jorge Loweree, director of policy for the American Immigration Council, a new category in the memo stood out to him: individuals accused of being gang and cartel members.
Loweree is concerned “because of the way that the administration has treated people that it deems to be gang members”, he said. “ It wasn’t that long ago that the administration flew hundreds of people from the US to a prison in El Salvador on, in most instances, flimsy evidence.”
Although the memo marks an escalation by the Trump administration it is not entirely news, and in recent decades, other nations have also engaged in seeking to strip citizenship from certain people.
Denaturalization in the US has a long history. Throughout the 20th century, those seen by the US government as potential enemies to US interests were stripped of their citizenship. Journalists, activists and labor leaders, accused of being anarchists and communists, were frequently targeted.
Politically driven denaturalization fell off in the late 1960s, when the US supreme court ruled that denaturalization could only take place if someone was found to have committed fraud or “willful misrepresentation”, as USA Today explained earlier this year, leading to a lull in denaturalization cases. Denaturalization categories were narrowed, with cases focusing mostly on former war criminals, such as Nazis, who had lied in their documents to gain status in the US.
In recent decades, starting under the Obama administration, the US government escalated its denaturalization efforts. Matthew Hoppock, an immigration attorney based in Kansas who follows and analyzes immigration policies closely, said that the Obama-era enforcement efforts were limited to specific cases. The operation, called Operation Janus, began reviewing fingerprint cards to determine whether naturalized citizens had lied during their citizenship process.
Through 2017, Hoppock, who accessed denaturalization data, found “it’s about 10 to 15 cases a year that they bring nationwide,” adding that “those were typically human rights abusers, Nazi guards, and cases like that.”
The first Trump administration marked a significant uptick in denaturalization efforts. The Department of Homeland Security at the time stood on the shoulders of the Obama-era operation, supercharging it to strip citizenship from people accused of cheating in the process of applying for citizenship as a foreign-born individual. The administration’s goal at the time was to examine 700,000 files but, as Hoppock states, due to the high cost and time-consuming nature of the cases, the administration barely made a dent.
But as Chisthi further explains, much about the first Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda was only a “dress rehearsal” for policies being pursued this year. Now, under the second Trump administration, denaturalizing people has risen up the priority list.
Meanwhile, the terrorist attacks on the US on September 11, 2001 radically changed how many countries dealt with national security efforts and other countries also began to explore the denaturalization of certain people.
According to research from the analysis organization Global Citizenship Observatory, or Globalcit, based in Italy, and the Institute of Statelessness and Inclusion (ISI), based in the Netherlands, between 2000 and 2020, citizenship revocation expanded dramatically in some countries, especially in Europe, and especially for minority groups. During this period, 18 countries in Europe, researchers found, expanded their denaturalization powers in the name of national security and counter-terrorism.
A report from the European University Institute’s Global Citizenship Observatory, published this year, highlighted certain countries with broad and ambiguous denaturalization laws. In Bulgaria, for example, a person’s citizenship could be stripped for “serious crimes against the country.” And in Vietnam, acts that “harm the country’s prestige” are also grounds for revocation.
There have been recent shifts in certain countries, related to denaturalization cases. In Latvia, citizenship can be revoked if the person serves in the security or armed forces of another country. However, in 2022, amid the war caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, an exception was introduced to allow Latvians to fight for Ukraine.
Just this year, the report says, the Swedish government recommended a constitutional shift that could revoke a person’s citizenship due to “threatening national security”. In Germany, some political parties discussed the push to revoke citizenship for “supporters of terrorism, antisemites, and extremists”. And Hungary introduced a constitutional amendment to allow the temporary suspension of citizenship on “security grounds”.
As the European University Institute’s report highlighted, last year, Kuwait introduced amendments that would revoke citizenship of people who were involved in fraudulent conduct, crimes involving “moral turpitude” or where the state’s interests are deemed at risk. more than 42,000 people reportedly lost their citizenship, the report says.
“We’ve seen dictators use the taking-away-of-citizenship as a way to control a population or bend people to their will,” Hoppock said. “I don’t know if the Trump administration is going to use it this way. This memo is pretty milquetoast – it just says we don’t really have any priorities any more.”
But, Hoppock added, the new memo is a huge departure from past efforts. “Unfortunately it could be abused by a system that likes to go after its adversaries,” he said.
All experts told the Guardian that resources will be a major factor in the Trump administration’s push to revoke some people’s citizenship. Already, the federal government’s resources are stretched thin, for a variety of reasons.
“The most important thing is: how much resources is the administration going to put into it, to target prosecutions?” Chisthi asks. “And that will determine whether this will mostly be an exercise in getting a lot of people anxious or actually producing outcomes of denaturalizations.”
Loweree is wary.
“Resource constraints would be a significant limiting factor in this type of thing,” he said. “But we have seen the administration do anything and everything it can to pursue its immigration agenda, in all instances,” he said.”
I believe loss of citizenship and exile are natural consequences of treason, as for example that of Trump, his regime, and the January 6 Insurrectionists. But of no other crime, and not for merely being different or inconvenient to the power of those who would enslave us.
I believe in the total abolition of authorization and enforcement of virtue by the state; of police and of prisons, of borders, propaganda, and surveillance. Let us send no armies to enforce virtue, but to liberate only.
Law serves power, order appropriates, and there is no just authority.
And I believe in the justice of citizenship by declaration in a borderless state; if you’re crazy enough to want to be one of us, who are we to say no?
The whole project of America has always been a desperate gamble, and our unique national identity as a Band of Brothers, “out to set other men free” as Chamberlain says in the film Gettysburg, originates in our social equality as outcasts and misfits united in revolutionary struggle to make a new dream real; that each of us has value because we are human, and we will have no lords and masters above any one of us. We began as we find ourselves now, fighting for each other’s humanity against impossible odds, in this moment against a captured state rather than a foreign colonial empire, but as so often in an existential crisis.
There is an iconic conversation between George Washington, about to be hanged, and Mick Rory who has come from the future to rescue him in Legends of Tomorrow, Season Two Episode 11 Turncoat; and in this historical moment wherein the fate of democracy and humankind hang in the balance, I answer now with the words of Mick, no one’s idea of a hero or even of a good man but my idea of a man like myself, of an American as national identity, and of becoming human as a path of resistance to tyranny, seizure of power and freedom, and revolutionary struggle.
“ Washington: I’ve been a soldier since I was twenty years old. But our cause is the cause of all men. To be treated equally, regardless of hereditary privilege. We must prove to the world that you don’t need a title to be a gentleman. The British may be dishonorable, but I am not. By my death, I will prove to the Crown what it means to be an American.
Mick: You don’t know the first thing about being an American. We’re misfits. Outcasts. And we’re proud of it. If they attack in formation, we pop ’em off from the trees. If they challenge you to a duel, you raid their camp at night. And if they’re gonna hang you, then you fight dirty. And you never, ever, give up. That’s the American way.”
We live now in such a time of decision, in which tyranny and liberty play for the fate of humankind.
I have often said that we are made of the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and that this is the first revolution we all must fight, the struggle for the ownership of ourselves.
Who defines us? This is the great question posed by democracy versus tyranny, monarchy, and fascisms of blood, faith, and soil, by hierarchies of otherness and belonging, and by elite hegemonies of wealth, power, and privilege; intrusive forces against which stand the American idea of a free society of equals, born in the Forum of Athens and in the Trial of Socrates at the founding of our civilization as a democracy based on questioning authority, and reborn throughout time like a phoenix as we are threatened by tyrants who would turn citizens into subjects, dehumanize and commodify us, and steal our souls. And this we must Resist, by any means necessary as written by Sartre in his play Dirty Hands and made a battle cry by Malcolm X.
There are those stories which must be kept, and those we must escape; and if we are very lucky, they are not always the same.
As I wrote in my post of July 8 2023, I Am the American Revolution: An Interrogation of Our Embodiment as Living History and Becoming Human as Seizure of Power From Authorized Identities and Falsification as Imposed Conditions of Struggle; I bear a nation on my journey through time, a prochronism or history expressed in my form and identity like the shell of a fantastic sea creature with its many chambered spirals of being, meaning, and value.
Herein I interrogate and problematize epigenetic history as a motivating, informing, and shaping source of social and personal identity construction, which must always include the primary struggle between authorized and national identity and those we create for ourselves.
Always there remains the struggle between the masks made for us by others, inclusive of our parents and our ancestors, and those we make for ourselves. This is the first revolution we must fight; the struggle for ownership of ourselves.
Since Flag Day I have been thinking of national identity as constructions in service to power and authority; of monuments, names on maps, our Pledge of Allegiance, strategies of co-optation by those who would enslave us and claim to act in our name. In the middle of this I discovered an article written by Jonathan Nicholson in Huffpost, entitled Legacy Of The Trail Of Tears Complicating Bid For Cherokee Representation In House: Lawmakers are open to honoring an 1875 treaty, but intertribal disagreement raises the question of who will be represented.
To this I wrote the following reply; Who is a Cherokee, an American, or a member of any nation? Who decides, and who gets a vote? How if those you claim do not claim you?
I am thinking of the tribal membership my family is denied as descendants not of a Cherokee as family history claims but of a probable black African slave of the Cherokee. Since the Revolutionary War, we identified as Native American and European Mixed Ancestry, technically Louisiana Creoles though my father described himself as a Cajun whose family came to America from Alsace; DNA says otherwise. In retrospect, my father’s practice of Voodoo as the traditional family religion should have been an enormous clue.
This has redirected my thinking on the question of national identity and its weaponization as a means of subjugation and what Noam Chomsky called The Manufacture of Consent, a text which served as my primary teaching tool on the subject of propaganda for Forensics class for many years.
I believe both in writing as a sacred calling to pursue the truth and in truth which is immanent in nature and written in our flesh, so I choose to use myself and my unique history as the subject of my interrogation of identity. As Virginia Woolf said in her lecture of 1940 to the Workers’ Educational Association; ’If you do not tell the truth about yourself, you cannot tell it about other people.”
As I wrote in my post of November 4 2022, Hidden Costs of Unequal Power in the Falsification of History as Authorized Identities: Day of the Dead Part Two, Case of the Phantom Ancestor; In contemplation of the echoes of our past as multigenerational history and of our ancestors as ghosts who possess us, literally as our DNA and metaphorically as family stories, I find intriguing the effects of falsified and obscured history on self-construal and the creation of identity.
We bear the shape of our stories as a prochronism, a history expressed in out form of how we have made choices in adaptation to change across vast epochs of time.
How if intrusive forces impose conditions of struggle which interfere with this process as assimilation, silence and erasure, or internalized oppression?
Here I have a ready example in the case of a phantom Native American ancestor substituted for an erased African one as internalized oppression under conditions of survival and resistance to slavery.
As I wrote in my post of January 25 2021, The Search for Our Ancestors and a Useful Past: Family Histories as Narrative Constructions of Identity; One of the great riddles of history is untangling the knots of meaning, often shaped by erasures, silences, lies, and misdirections, which arise from the motives of our sources.
Today is my sister Erin’s birthday; I sent her a greeting which referenced some of the Defining Moments of her personal history as I remember them; “I remember when you used to play on the Magic Bus with Ken Kesey’s daughter, our family’s discovery when you were in seventh grade that you were writing poems and stories in some of Tolkien’s invented languages and had puzzled out his sources and taught yourself a working knowledge of several ancient languages in order to write in them (Old Norse, Old Welsh, Gothic, and Old English), when you gave the Valedictorian Address for the International College at UC Santa Cruz and then went to university in the Soviet Union as a Pushkin scholar, when Rolling Stone called your reporting on the Fall of the Soviet Union the best political writing in America, and when we celebrated your six hundredth publication. I have always been glad that in writing and the world of literature you have found your bliss.”
Among the messages which followed Erin posted a photograph which symbolizes her search for belonging, membership, and connection through the family history of our ancestors, a typically American quest for meaning as many of us share a trauma of historical abandonment and displacement, and pathologies of identity falsification and disconnectedness from relationships with families and communities, anchorages which in traditional societies nurture wellness and growth. These maladaptive disruptions and obfuscations often result from intentional breaks with the past as liberation on the part of new immigrants who wish to create themselves in no image but their own; but often they are legacies of denial, silencing, and erasure by authority as well.
Our family history claimed Cherokee as the identity of an ancestor who we recently discovered was not a Native American but African, and probably a slave of the Cherokee, the descendants of which the tribe refuses to recognize as tribal members. As the only nonwhite General in the Confederate Army was a Cherokee, this erasure of disturbing history and inconvenient truths is unsurprising; and authorized lies can become truths when there are no counternarratives.
The truths with which authority is uncomfortable are the ones which are crucial to seizures of power and liberation, and it is to the empty spaces in our narratives of identity, the voices of the silenced and the erased, and to stories which bear the scars of rewritten history, to which we must listen most closely.
The Four Primary Duties of a Citizen are Question Authority, Mock Authority, Expose Authority, and Challenge Authority.
Erin has claimed Native American Cherokee as her racial and historical identity since childhood, enthralled with the story of an Indian great grandmother, studied traditional drumming and made pilgrimages to pow wows, learned what vestiges of Cherokee language and culture she could find, and as an adult went to the tribal archives in search of our ancestor.
There she hit a wall of silence; no records of such a tribal member exist. Worse, no living speakers of Sa La Gi could be found; when asked where the native language speakers were, the curator of the tribal historical archive pointed to an old vinyl record which held the voices of the last known bearers of an extinct language. All was dust, lost on the Trail of Tears.
No crime against humanity can be more terrible than the erasure of an entire people and civilization, as the United States of America perpetrated against many indigenous peoples both on our continent and throughout the world as imperial conquest and colonial dominion. Like slavery with which it is interdependent and parallel, colonial imperialism is a central legacy of our history for which we have yet to bring a Reckoning.
Like many tribes and peoples, the Cherokee had been eaten by our systems of unequal power as human sacrifices, and had no truths or songs of becoming human to offer. Here was an unanswerable tragedy of loss of meaning and belonging, which finds echo in our modern pathology of disconnectedness.
Or was deliberate obfuscation; what didn’t they want known?
Like many Americans, Erin pursued our elusive history and ambiguous identity for decades through genealogical research and recently the Pandora’s Box of DNA testing, where she struck gold; her test revealed no discoverable Indian ancestry, but instead an intriguing African heritage. Near her fifth decade of life, suddenly she was no longer Native American and Cherokee, a discovery which must have been a life disruptive event, but one balanced with the gift of an unlooked-for membership and belonging.
More importantly as regards race and other constructions of identity, who decides? And what happens if those you claim do not in turn claim you?
Of Non-European DNA; 1.2% sub-Saharan Africa, including: .9% Ghana / Liberia / Ivory Coast / Sierra Leone and .3% Senegambian and Guinean. There is also an Islamic Diaspora component; .7% North Africa, including: .2% Egypt and Levant and .5% broadly West Asia and North Africa, and .5% Central and South Asia including: .2% North India and Pakistan and .3% South India and Sri Lanka. These probably represent two different lines of descent, occurring at between five and eight generations of separation respectively.
Who were these mysterious and wonderful ancestors, and where was the cherished Native American heritage? Like much of nature, DNA is tricky; each generation is a total randomization of information potential, so you can inherit traits from ancestors anywhere in your history back to the dawn of humankind, in virtually any proportion of traits from any combination thereof.
On average, you will have a quarter from each grandparent at two generations of separation, and if grandmother only passes on 20%, grandfather must pass on 30%. Sometimes gene sequences are not passed on, so its possible for a known ancestor to be unconfirmable by a DNA test, and for siblings to have differences. I look like our mother, of Austrian family with hazel eyes though sadly I did not inherit her glorious red hair; my sister looks like our father whose glossy black hair fell in tight wringlets around his shoulders.
At seven generations distance you will probably inherit less than one percent from each of the 128 ancestors in that generation, or be undetectable; the percentages are 12.5 for great grandparents at the third generation from you, 6.25 at the fourth, 3.12 at the fifth, 1.56 at the sixth, and .78 at the seventh.
DNA tests from cousins can be used with a family tree to triangulate and identify which DNA components came from which ancestors; a female cousin from one of my father’s two brothers tests as 70% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 19% Ireland and Scotland, 6% Sweden, and 5% Norway. A male cousin from my father’s second brother tests as 1% Benin and Togo and 1% Cameroon, Congo, and Southern Bantu peoples, an approximate match with my sister’s Sub Saharan Africa descent, the remainder being 47% Northwestern Europe and England/Wales, 32% Norway, 11% Ireland & Scotland, and 4% Sweden. My sister’s European DNA tests as 44.7% French & German (I don’t even want to think how these people would react to being classified together genetically as one people), 24.8% British & Irish, 19.5% broadly northwestern European, .2% Scandinavian, and 5.8% southern European, which includes 3.1% Italian and 1.1% Spanish and Portuguese.
Illustrative of the vagaries of inheritance are the differing proportions among three first cousins, two of whom inherit nothing from a paternal grandmother shared by all three, whose family came from Genoa Italy after the Napoleonic Wars. They were still living in an enormous stilt house in Bayou La Teche built from their ship, guarded by ancient cannon, when my mother visited them in 1962.
But the best way to discover our origins is through family history, which can be consistent over great epochs of time. So we come to the origin story of the photograph and of my family in America, well documented as Kentucky and Revolutionary War history whose dates can be confirmed precisely by public records. of how a mixed and diverse community of Revolutionary War survivors came to be living in Cape Girardeau, Missouri.
A direct patrilineal ancestor of mine, Henry, had been captured along with much of his family in the June 21 1780 British assault on Ruddle’s Fort during Bird’s Invasion of Kentucky. One hundred fifty British Regulars of the 8th and 47th Regiments, Detroit Militia, and six cannon of the Royal Regiment of Artillery, with one thousand or more warriors from the Shawnee, Huron, Lenape, and other tribal allies of Britain, compelled the surrender of the fort by cannon fire and a guarantee of status as British prisoners of war offered by Bird, who when the gates were opened broke his word and loosed the native troops to sack the fort and take slaves.
Over two hundred pioneers were killed in the attack; the remains of twenty of them were later put in iron caskets specially made in Philadelphia and sealed in a cave by a descendant of one of my family’s survivors who had moved back near the site of Ruddle’s Fort, where they remain today. The inscription on the stone archway on a cliff overlooking the Licking River reads, “Please do not disturb the rest of the sleeping dead, A.D. 1845”. I have often wondered what was so terrifying about ones own family that they needed to be entombed in iron and sealed in a cave, and why they are called “the sleeping dead’.
Near the site of the burial chamber was The Cedars, a stone home rebuilt in 1825 at a cost of $40,000 by Charles Lair, a Ruddles Fort descendant using one of the many variants of our family name. The Cedars burned in 1930; it had fifteen rooms including six bedrooms and two kitchens, a drawing room with a carved mantel, dining room, library, and a hall with a staircase.
Henry and his brothers George Jr and Peter were listed among the 49 men of the Ruddle’s Fort garrison, and many had their families with them. Survivors were marched with those of other raided forts, four hundred seventy in all, to the heartland of the Shawnee nation in Ohio and to villages of their captors along the way, though Bird still had 300 prisoners with him when he reached his base at Fort Detroit, six hundred miles from Kentucky; some were then sent another 800 miles to Montreal. Britain did not release its prisoners until fifteen years after the war, and many never found their families again.
Henry was held as a slave and/or prisoner of war until he married into the tribe four years later, making him fully Shawnee under tribal law though he was by modern constructions of race an ethnic European. His story is interwoven with that of his childhood friend and neighbor Daniel Boone, and he was among those with whom Boone discovered a route through the Cumberland Gap and explored Kentucky. I like to imagine Henry as the hero in the film Last of the Mohicans, a fictionalization of the July 14 1776 abduction and subsequent rescue of Boone’s daughter Jemima and two daughters of Colonel Richard Callaway, Elizabeth and Frances, from Chief Hanging Maw of the Overhill Cherokee, leading a mixed band of Cherokee and Shawnee.
Henry, with his wife and a mixed band of Native American warriors and their former captives and slaves, joined George Washington’s army, possibly during the retreat from the Battle of Long Island in the fall of 1776, fought in the Battles of Trenton and Princeton that December, at Brandywine on September 11, 1777, and in the victory at the Second Battle of Saratoga on October 7 1777 which nearly ended the war and brought help from France.
Among the family members at Ruddle’s Fort were Henry’s two brothers. Peter, who was killed in action, his wife Mary who was captured with their two daughters, of whom Katarina was rescued in 1786 and another is mentioned as married and living in Sandwich Canada in an open letter written by Mary published in the Kentucky Gazette on April 7 1822 to their third child Peter, who vanished after the battle and whose fate is unknown. It reads in part; ”I was taken at Fort Licking commanded by Captain Ruddle, and was brought into upper Canada near Amherstburgh (Fort Malden) where I now live having been 16 years among the Indians. Your eldest sister is now living in Sandwich, but the youngest I could never hear of. Now, my dear son, I would be very glad to see you once more before I die, which I do not think will be long, as I am in a very bad state of health, and have been this great while. I am married to Mr Jacob Miracle (fellow captive from Ruddle’s Fort Jacob Markle) for whom you can enquire.” These are the words of a woman who had been coerced into marrying one of her captors by torture and had a son by him whom she raised with her youngest daughter by a husband who died defending her and their children from capture, two of whom had vanished in the cauldron of war and whose fates she never learned, though her youngest daughter was safe with George Jr’s family.
Also present were Henry’s second brother George Jr and his wife Margaret, who were captured and later freed, and their children Johnny, George III, Eva, Margaret, and Elizabeth. Johnny, 1776-1853, four years old when captured, was raised with Tecumseh and fought at his side as a British ally through the War of 1812. He married Mary Williams in 1799; they had eight children. Of Margaret we know only that she survived to marry Andrew Sinnolt in 1793. Eva, captured when 14 years old and taken to Canada, ran the gauntlet to win her freedom after six years of enslavement and two years later in 1788 married fellow Ruddles Fort survivor Casper Karsner.
Elizabeth Lale, 1752-1832, eldest of the children at 28, escaped from the Shawnee capitol city of Piqua on the Great Miami River in Ohio and survived a solo trek of hundreds of miles through the wilderness back to the colonies, then with Washington and Jefferson planned and guided General Clark with 970 soldiers in a raid which liberated many of the other prisoners of war held as slaves at the Battle of Piqua, August 8 1780. With her was Daniel Boone, who had also been held captive at Piqua by Blackfish, Great Chief of the Shawnee, between his capture at the Battle of Blue Licks on February 7, 1778 and his escape six months later in June. In 1783 Elizabeth married John Franks; they had two children.
And George III, 1773-1853, captured when seven years old, was taken in 1781 to a camp in Cape Girardeau Missouri, base of a Shawnee trade empire from which the entire Mississippi basin could be navigated, becoming the first white pioneer in the region, near the land which in 1793 was granted by Baron Carondelet to the Black Bob Band of the Hathawekela Shawnee.
Nearby was a Spanish land grant awarded to Andrew Summers for service in the Cape Girardeau Company of the Spanish-American Militia by Governor Lorimier, during a six week campaign in 1803. Andrew Summers had married Elizabeth Ruddle, daughter of Captain George Ruddle and granddaughter of Isaac Ruddle; Andrew and Elizabeth moved with their family to their land in Cape Girardeau after the War of 1812; later her father joined them, as did George Lale III and his wife Louisa Wolff. George and Louisa’s seven children were born there; the old Summers cemetery where George III is buried lies two miles SW of Jackson Missouri.
Many of my family who survived the Revolutionary War moved to Cape Girardeau where the families of George III Lale and Andrew Summers had established a community of pioneers and former slaves of Indians, apparently both African and European, and the Indians they had fought alongside and against, been captured by and intermarried with. In the end I think they understood each other better than those who had not survived the same collective trauma and shared history.
Our great grandmother Lilly Summers could claim direct patrilineal descent from the Summers family of Fairfax Virginia, descended from Sir George Summers, who commanded the Sea Venture, one of the ships which brought over the Jamestown colony in 1607, through the first settler in Alexandria, John Summers, who lived from 1687 to 1790 and had at the time of his death four generations of descendants, including some four hundred individuals. Lilly was equally descended from her mother, M.B. Croft who is listed as Dutch which probably means German, and her father John William Summers, of English lineage but designated as Cherokee in family records, which we now know is a fiction describing descent from a probable African slave of the Cherokee.
It is also possible that this ancestry came into the Summers line from fellow soldiers who served with them during the Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812, among them free Black militia companies which pre-existed the war, slaves promised freedom and armed by Andrew Jackson as the first Black company of the American army, a former Spanish colonial Black militia with whom Andrew Summers had served alongside against France, and Major D’Aquin’s Battalion of Free Men of Color from Haiti, professional revolutionaries and soldiers who had once been part of the French army. The origin of this DNA can be no nearer than Lilly’s paternal grandmother, at five generations separation from my sister and I.
Among the documents of my genealogy and family history research I have a daguerreotype from the 1840’s of Elizabeth Lale, named for her ferocious aunt, daughter of parents from opposing sides of the Revolutionary War, Me Shekin Ta Withe (White Painted Dove) of the Shawnee and Henry Lale.
Born in 1786, Elizabeth had four sisters and two brothers including my ancestor George Washington Lale, named for the future President with whom Henry crossed the Delaware, and whose battle cry at Trenton in 1776, Victory or Death, Henry adopted as our family motto on our coat of arms granted by George Washington personally, unique to my knowledge as an American title in a nation which explicitly forbids all titles other than that of gentleman for all military officers as granted by act of Congress.
My sister and I are the fifth generation from Henry, and sixth from the original immigrant Hans George Lale who arrived with his family in Philadelphia in 1737 on the ship Samuel, sailing from Rotterdam.
As our family history and myth before coming to America is beyond the subject of my inquiry here, epigenetic trauma and harms of erasure and internalized oppression in the case of a phantom ancestor in the context of relations between indigenous and colonial peoples, I will question this in future essays.
Here are the generations of our family in America; my parents A.L. Lale and Meta (Austrian), Enoch Abraham Lale and Gertie Noce (Italian), Andrew Jackson Lale 1840-1912 and Lilly Summers, George Washington Lale 1790-1854 and Elizabeth Ross, Henry Lale 1754-1830 and White Painted Dove, and Hans George Lale 1703-1771 and Maria Rudes.
But its never as simple as that, each of us a link in a chain of being which encompasses the whole span of human history; migrations, wars, and the rise and fall of civilizations. Often our ideas of identity as nationality and ethnicity would have been incomprehensible to the people we claim membership with.
Take for example my family name; its original form is on Trajan’s Column in Rome, and Cicero wrote his great essay on friendship, Laelius de Amicitia, about an ancestor of mine; Gaius Laelius, whose political and military career as an ally of Scipio Africanus spans the Iberian campaign of 210- 206 BC where he commanded the Roman fleet at New Carthage, the African campaign of 204-202 commanding the cavalry at Zama, enjoyed two terms as praetor of Sicily from 196 and was granted the province of Gaul about 190, and in 160 BC met the historian Polybius in Rome, becoming his eyewitness source for the Second Punic War in The Histories.
Here I signpost that all of us are connected with the lives of others across vast millennia of history, often in surprising ways. If I accounted my identity and ethnicity as where my ancestors immigrated to America from, I would be German and not Roman, but it would not be the whole truth. We lived in Bavaria for generations until 1586, when we were driven out as werewolves during the start of an eighty year witchburning craze; Martin Luther called us Drachensbraute, Brides of the Dragon. During this time we absorbed many of the pre Christian myths gathered as Grimms Fairytales as family history. In Romania they still do the Bear Dance in honor of a deified ancestor of mine and the warrior brotherhood of berserkers he founded. And still a half truth, as this tallies only my patrilineal descent, and nothing of the half of myself from my mother, whose stories I will tell another time.
As events become more remote in time and memory, the boundary between historical and mythopoeic truth becomes ambiguous, interdependent, and co-evolutionary with shared elements which reinforce each other. This is true for narratives of national identity as well as self-construction in the personal and family spheres, in which such processes may be studied in detail. Stories are a way of doing exactly thing; both creating and questioning identity.
Often with family history we are confronted with discontiguous realms of truth as self-representation and authorized identity, always a ground of struggle as a Rashomon Gate. Such stories are true in the sense that we are their expressions as living myths, but are these narratives we live within and which in turn inhabit us also history?
Who are we, we Lales?
Native American, yes, if to a lesser degree and from different sources than we had previously imagined as an authorized identity and historical construction, Shawnee rather than Cherokee and generations more distant. Indian also in the sense of an ancestor from India over three hundred years ago, and that complex. Who this grand and mysterious ancestor and source of our Indian and DNA was remains an open question, and possibly a different ancestor than the source of our Egyptian-Levantine DNA, which is another story. She herself claimed to have been a Mughal courtier and friend of the princess and poet Zeb-un-Nissa abducted from the Ganj-i-Sawai in 1695 during the capture of the emperor’s treasure fleet by Henry Every, for whom her grandson the Revolutionary War hero was named. And in the place of the phantom Cherokee great grandmother, an African voice, slave or soldier or maybe both, among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.
In retrospect, that my father practiced Voodoo as the traditional family faith should have been an enormous clue to his ethnicity, Louisiana Creole of mixed European-African-Native American ancestry. He described himself as Cajun, which means French speaking and is a cultural and historical claim.
Of my father who is my link to this history of the founding of America as a reborn Rome with all of its shifting ideas of nationality and identity, who I honor among my ancestors, I say this; he was my high school English, Forensics, and Drama teacher, who taught me fencing and chess and took me to martial arts lessons from the age of nine, gave me a copy of Thus Spake Zarathustra in eighth grade which became a counter text to the Bible for me, and was an underground theatre director who collected luminaries like William S. Burroughs who told fabulous stories after dinner and Edward Albee whose plays he directed while I sat beside them as a child and listened with rapt attention to their conversations. He it was who taught me the principle of action; “Politics is the art of fear”. For one day he was arguably the greatest swordsman in the world, having defeated all the national champions at an international reclassification tournament, and went on to become a coach of Olympic fencers. He and my mother smuggled members of the Hungarian fencing team to America during the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, among other adventures. He grew up fencing and playing the treasured family Stradivarius, and his favorite story from childhood was how he got his nickname, Gator Bait; grandpa used to tie a rope around his waist and throw him in the swamp to splash about and attract alligators to shoot. One story he never told but his friend from the Korean War did, Gail Hutchins called Sparrow, was that they had escaped a North Korean POW camp with three others, one of whom died in the breakout, and the four survivors carried the dead soldier all the way back to South Korea. His last years were spent in seclusion flyfishing on a remote wilderness mining claim in Montana; he was buried with his treasured flyfishing pole.
His father had been orphaned as a child when his father, my great grandfather who was a gunfighter, died by accident in their home. As grandpa told the story to me; ”He had a hair trigger on his pistol and was practicing his quick draw. He slapped that hogleg; it went off, and blew a hole through his leg. He bled out, and I rolled him up in a carpet, put him in a flatboat, rowed him out into the swamp, and pushed him in. If you ever want to hear more about your family, go into the swamp and ask the gators.”
European and originally Roman, unquestionably; as a university student influenced by classical studies I responded to questions about my historical identity, nationality, and ethnicity in this way; “I am a citizen of the Roman Empire; that it has not existed for fifteen hundred years is irrelevant.”
I did so once to the wife of a poetry professor, who immediately whipped out a notebook and thereupon began taking notes on our conversations; this was Anne Rice, who based her character of Mael in Queen of the Damned on me as I was in my junior year at university, forty years ago now, before the summer of 1982 which fixed me on my life course as a hunter of fascists and a member of the Resistance.
Its always interesting to see ourselves through the eyes of others, and how we are transformed by their different angles of view; such changes and transforms of meaning are the primary field of study in history and literature as songs of identity and a primary ground of revolutionary struggle.
Anne Rice’s idea of Mael as the caretaker of Those Who Must Be Kept came from a comment of mine about the dead white men whose books created our culture for both good and ill during a discussion of the canon of literature; There are those who must be kept, and those from whom we must escape, and if we are very lucky they are not always the same.
Who are we, we Americans, we humans?
Identity, history, memory, which includes changing constructions of race; these hinge on questions which often have no objective answers.
We are as we imagine ourselves to be; the stories we tell about ourselves, to ourselves and to others, and the groups and historical legacies in which we claim membership, and who claim us in return.
Family history is always a personal myth of identity, though it may also be history.
As with all history, as narratives of authorized identities and in struggle against them as seizures of power, autonomy and self-ownership, and self-creation, a Rashomon Gate of relative and ambiguous truths, the most important question to ask of a story is this; whose story is this?
Gettysburg film; Chamberlain defines what it means to be an American
Why We Fight: speech of Sgt Buster Kilrain
Democracy and the Invention of the Human: The Trial of Socrates, I.F. Stone
Dirty Hands, Jean-Paul Sartre
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11098581-dirty-hands?ref=nav_sb_ss_2_11
Trump seizes on ‘moral character’ loophole as way to revoke citizenship
José Olivares
DC’s Legends of Tomorrow “Turncoat” Season 2 Episode 11
Last of the Mohicans film
https://ok.ru/video/967004064409
Louisiana Creole people
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Louisiana_Creole_people
Henry Louis Gates Jr on the myth of the Indian ancestor in modern Black culture
https://www.theroot.com/high-cheekbones-and-straight-black-hair-1790878167
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, Edward S. Herman, Noam Chomsky
Virginia Woolf: The Moment & Other Essays, Virginia Woolf
Best book on the historical pirates and Henry Every
Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History’s First Global Manhunt, Steven Johnson
The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/43758.The_Queen_of_the_Damned?ref=nav_sb_ss_1_19
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Laelius
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaius_Laelius_Sapiens
Laelius, on Friendship and the Dream of Scipio, by Marcus Tullius Cicero), J.G.F. Powell (Editor)
Torch of Liberty 