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 questioning the legacies of history 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; Leonard Peltier has been denied parole, and President Biden continues to evade his duty of care for others in not offering him a pardon.
We must apply the rule of the use of social force we use in Palestine regarding Resistance and liberation struggle to our own imperial conquest and dominion of indigenous peoples; there is no right of defense against those a state is Occupying. What is the crime of Lenard Peltier? In the shadows of five hundred years of Conquest, he resisted.
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 written by Adria R Walker in The Guardian, entitled Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted over 1975 FBI killings, denied parole; “Leonard Peltier, the 79-year-old Indigenous activist who has spent nearly 50 years in prison for the 1975 murders of two FBI agents, has been denied parole. Many fear the ruling all but ensures that the longest-imprisoned Indigenous American will die behind bars.
Peltier has maintained his innocence since he was arrested in connection with the deaths that occurred at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation in South Dakota. For decades, advocates such as Coretta Scott King, Nelson Mandela, Pope Francis and James H Reynolds, the US attorney who handled the prosecution and appeal of Peltier’s case, have fought for his release.
Despite evidence of prosecutorial misconduct and due process violations throughout his trial, Peltier will now remain in prison at least until 2026, when the US Parole Commission set his next hearing. His health has severely declined over the past few years, and his supporters considered his most recent hearing, which occurred last month, his last chance of not dying in prison.
On 26 June 1975, years-long tensions between Oglala Lakota traditionalists, who sought to govern in customary ways, and assimilationists, who wanted to adapt to American standards of governance, culminated in a standoff at the Pine Ridge Indian reservation. Two FBI agents in unmarked cars pursued a vehicle they believed to be operated by Jimmy Eagle, for whom they were serving an arrest warrant, onto a part of the reservation that was occupied by traditionalists.
In the chaos, a shootout erupted and the FBI agents were soon joined by more than 150 Swat team members and other law enforcement. By the end, two FBI agents and a member of the American Indian movement (Aim) – a cold war-era liberation group that supported the traditionalists – had been killed.
Peltier was among the four men who were indicted in connection with the agents’ murders.
Since then, the FBI has been the staunchest opponent of Peltier, his claims of innocence and his supporters’ calls for his freedom. Mike Clark, president of the Society of Former Special Agents of the FBI, called Peltier a “cold-blooded murderer”. When Bill Clinton had the opportunity to pardon Peltier as he was leaving office, hundreds of federal agents marched to the White House in what CBS news called an “unprecedented protest”.
But former FBI agent Colleen Rowley has said that the federal agency has a “vendetta” against Peltier.
In a 2023 letter to Joe Biden, she wrote: “Retribution seems to have emerged as the primary if not sole reason for continuing what looks from the outside to have become an emotion-driven ‘FBI Family’ vendetta.”
Tensions between assimilationists and traditionalists
Forty-nine years ago, Peltier, a citizen of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, became an activist in Aim, which sought to force the American government to recognize Indigenous sovereignty, to preserve Indigenous culture and traditions and to eradicate the discrimination Indigenous people faced, along with other goals. Early in its history, Aim had occupied Alcatraz, a former prison in San Francisco Bay; taken over a replica of the Mayflower II ship; marched on Washington DC in what was called the “trail of broken treaties”; and occupied the Bureau of Indian Affairs headquarters.
In the 1970s, tensions between then tribal chair Richard “Dick” Wilson, who was pro-assimilation, and traditionalists began to mount at Pine Ridge. Oglala Lakota traditionalists alleged that Wilson showed preferential treatment, including access to jobs and assistance, to other pro-assimilationists. As Aim sought to unite Indigenous nations and people, they allied with the traditionalists. Wilson allied with the FBI.
In 1973, traditionalists and Aim occupied the Pine Ridge hamlet of Wounded Knee to protest the abuses they were suffering. Though it was winter, the Department of Justice cut off electricity, water and food supplies to Wounded Knee and sent hundreds of FBI agents, federal marshals, police and military personnel to suppress the siege. Press were barred, too, but Kevin Barry McKiernan, a 30-year-old journalist, was smuggled in. For the Minnesota Leader, McKiernan detailed the scramble for food and the prevalence of gunfire and chaos on the reservation.
The occupation lasted 71 days, with 14 Wounded Knee occupants injured, and three killed, including Ray Robinson, a Black civil-rights activist from Alabama.
After the 1973 military action at Wounded Knee, Wilson outlawed Aim and barred traditionalists from meeting and attending traditional ceremonies, but the unrest continued. Peltier was among the dozen Aim activists who returned to the reservation to assist traditionalists, setting up camp at Jumping Bull ranch at Pine Ridge, the site of the 1975 melee.
‘It occurred to me that another injustice had occurred’
Peltier’s trial was rife with inconsistencies and errors.
The all-white jury did not hear about the underlying tensions between the two factions at Pine Ridge reservation, context that could have helped them understand why Peltier and other Aim members were there in the first place. A juror admitted that she was “prejudiced against Indians” but was still allowed to remain on the case. Witnesses claimed that FBI agents had threatened and coerced them into their testimonies. And the prosecution withheld ballistics evidence, including the fact that Peltier’s rifle could not be matched to shell casings in the trunk of the FBI agents’ car.
Peltier was found guilty of the murders and given two consecutive life sentences. One of his current attorneys, Kevin Sharp, said he had been moved to take on Peltier’s case after a supporter sent Sharp a file including trial transcripts, court opinions, Freedom of Information Act documents from the FBI and newspaper articles.
“It occurred to me that another injustice had occurred,” Sharp, a former federal judge, said. “The misconduct in the investigation, the prosecutorial misconduct, disturbed me. And so I contacted that person and said: ‘Look, if Mr Peltier wants me to represent him, I will do it pro bono.”
Since joining the case, Sharp says he has been frustrated with “the system that refuses to acknowledge the government’s role in what happened in June of 1975, refuses to acknowledge the context of what happened, refuses to acknowledge the violation of rights that happened”.
‘The prosecution and incarceration of Mr Peltier is unjust’
Earlier this year, Brian Schatz, the US senator from Hawaii and chairperson of the Senate committee on Indian affairs, led a group of senators including Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Mazie Hirono and others, in urging the US attorney general, Merrick Garland, to allow for Peltier’s compassionate release. The seven senators wrote a letter to Garland in March.
“Mr Peltier, who has been imprisoned for the past 49 years and is suffering from severe health conditions, should be able to return home and live out his remaining days among his own people,” the letter reads.“It is time that the federal government rectifies the grave injustice of Mr Peltier’s continued imprisonment, and strongly urge you to allow for his compassionate release.”
Reynolds called Peltier’s conviction and continued incarceration “a testament to a time and a system of justice that no longer has a place in our society”.
“With time, and the benefit of hindsight, I have realized that the prosecution and continued incarceration of Mr Peltier was and is unjust,” Reynolds wrote in a July 2021 letter to the president. “We were not able to prove that Mr Peltier personally committed any offense on the Pine Ridge Reservation.”
On Peltier’s 79th birthday last year, hundreds of supporters rallied outside the White House urging Biden to grant clemency. Through a statement in which he also thanked his supporters, Peltier himself was able to speak.
“I hope to breathe free air before I die. Hope is a hard thing to hold, but no one is strong enough to take it from me,” Peltier wrote. “There is a lot of work left to do. I would like to get out and join you in doing it.
Neither Peltier nor his supporters are confident he will live to see his 2026 parole date.”
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.
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 in 44 B.C. We once, and briefly from 260 to 274 A.D., ruled what is now France, Spain, and the British Isles as the Gallic Empire.
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 Eqyptian-Levantine DNA was remains an open question, which is another story. She herself claimed to have been a Mughal courtier 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 among the cacophony of multitudes sings of liberation.
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.
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?
WARRIOR The Life of Leonard Peltier film
In the Spirit of Crazy Horse: The Story of Leonard Peltier and the FBI’s War on the American Indian Movement, Peter Matthiessen
Last of the Mohicans film
https://ok.ru/video/967004064409
Indigenous activist Leonard Peltier, convicted over 1975 FBI killings, denied parole
Legacy Of The Trail Of Tears Complicating Bid For Cherokee Representation In House/ Huffpost
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
The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice
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 