Quote:
Originally Posted by LadyRobyn
If you don't mind me asking...
Some things a few of you have mentioned, (jessaka's great-grandmother and the trail of tears, redbird learning the teaching of his people etc.) got me to wondering.
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My father's family is from OK, mostly. His mother was half Apache and was born in a covered wagon outside Paint Rock, TX, and she married a Cavalry sergeant major who went all over the world. They had 5 kids who were born every which where, but all went back to OK when he retired from the Army. She had a lot of relatives in OK and wanted to be around them - one of them, her brother, was Farmer Ray who played ball for the St Louis Browns. One of my uncles said they all knew they were Indians, but it was 'socially inhibiting' in those days, so they just didn't claim it. One of the more interesting bits about the grands was that being in the cavalry in OK, he was busy chasing Indians, and some of her relatives worked with him as scouts to help him catch others of their relatives. My uncle said at times like that it got very tense at home, but people did whatever they had to in order to survive and feed their families. Whatever they did, it worked. My father and all his brothers and sisters went to the university at Norman, and all of them graduated with honors and some of them went on to graduate schools of one kind or another. My father went to the Naval Academy in DC, and two of his brothers went to whatever the Army equivalent was in DC. Eventually my father switched too, because he loved playing polo and the Navy didn't keep horses. So I have roots in OK. Even in Alaska I had roots, that's where my father was born when his father was stationed at Fort Seward. He claimed he wasn't even entirely sure he was American, because he was born somewhere in the Chilkoot Pass, and no one knew whether it was on the US side or the Canadian side.
I don't reallly think there's any way to trace any of them, because my grandmother apparently changed the names of her relatives and offspring on a whim. She'd just decide one day she was tired of 'Frank' and he was now going to be 'Henry' and so he was. Her name, though, before she got married was Jenny Running Deer.