RE: Ancestry
July 26, 2014 at 9:21 am
(This post was last modified: July 26, 2014 at 9:57 am by The Grand Nudger.)
Con-men and drifters....and you can't trust either when they tell you where they're from. I suppose if you really want to know where you're from you'd have to get sequenced (family histories and genealogies are notoriously unreliable). For example, there are a great many irish-cherokee, but probably just as many irish-african, and one of those things was acceptable whereas the other was not. So which story do we think that our forefathers preferred to tell themselves and others?
The Cherokee had an impetus for assimilation. The 5 Nations had been using them as a farming ground for a sort of prisoner taking luck building spiritual war - since they had tried to eschew conflict amongst each other - and conflict with europeans before, during, and especially after the beaver wars. Essentially, their pool of prospective captives had been reduced to minor tribes, minor, politically and militarily speaking. They needed conflict in order to maintain a system of honor and personal worth that was central to their culture. With no one to fight, no one can be "brave". Amusingly, killing the other guy was the least worthy thing you could do under their system. They saw it as fundamentally more cowardly and of lesser value. It's easy to ambush a guy in the woods and hit him in the head with a rock, it's not so easy to bring him back to your village bound and subdued, ready to be assimilated into your tribe to replace lost members or build a bigger base (thus building spiritual power). Anyone who's interested in this sort of stuff outta check it out, it's really fascinating. A captive could literally become a lost tribe member, taking his name and possessions - wife and children. They were actually auctioned off to grieving widows, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons (the unwanted would be killed, generally). They were expected to fulfill the duties and obligations of the person whose place they had taken (or else they could end up like the unfortunate un-picked). I could rattle off about 40 racist anti-cherokee jokes off the top of my head, all of them coming to us from those noble savages, the native american tribes. My ex-wife could probably identify a few hundred coming from the Sioux alone (directed towards their neighbors). Point is, while we can fully accept that the fate of the native tribes was terrible, they weren't actually doing much differently to each other before or after we had arrived. They didn't need our laws or our religions to act shittily, and in an entirely recognizable manner. We had done largely the same when we (as europeans) were at their point of development. Had we not come along, the 5 Nations were already gearing up to oppress this continent and nothing would have stood in their way - save, perhaps, the western tribes - much as they stood in our way - for as long as they could.
My family is irish/?. Could be cherokee, could be "other". I'd be willing to bet it's both. I do loves me some fried chicken and big bootied women...
Given name was Mc'Cumail (before adoption). That much can be traced back to ellis and name shortnening common to the time period. Mc'Cumail becomes Mc'Call, Mc'Cool, Cole, Cool, Call - or just plain ole Mack. On my mothers side, we're the product of a man who had 8 wives in 3 states. He had a mule, a sack of bibles, and some salted pork, traveled up and down the appalachian mountains hawking everything but the mule, pretending to be a doctor, or, sometimes, a vet - but mostly a preacher. He couldn't actually recall (or didn't care to recount) who was who's when he inevitably packed up his brood and left momma behind - so the family tree stops being certain at that point on that end. Like I said..con-men and drifters...
(there's more irish blood in the us than there is in ireland..fractions at a time, lol)
The Cherokee had an impetus for assimilation. The 5 Nations had been using them as a farming ground for a sort of prisoner taking luck building spiritual war - since they had tried to eschew conflict amongst each other - and conflict with europeans before, during, and especially after the beaver wars. Essentially, their pool of prospective captives had been reduced to minor tribes, minor, politically and militarily speaking. They needed conflict in order to maintain a system of honor and personal worth that was central to their culture. With no one to fight, no one can be "brave". Amusingly, killing the other guy was the least worthy thing you could do under their system. They saw it as fundamentally more cowardly and of lesser value. It's easy to ambush a guy in the woods and hit him in the head with a rock, it's not so easy to bring him back to your village bound and subdued, ready to be assimilated into your tribe to replace lost members or build a bigger base (thus building spiritual power). Anyone who's interested in this sort of stuff outta check it out, it's really fascinating. A captive could literally become a lost tribe member, taking his name and possessions - wife and children. They were actually auctioned off to grieving widows, fathers, mothers, daughters, and sons (the unwanted would be killed, generally). They were expected to fulfill the duties and obligations of the person whose place they had taken (or else they could end up like the unfortunate un-picked). I could rattle off about 40 racist anti-cherokee jokes off the top of my head, all of them coming to us from those noble savages, the native american tribes. My ex-wife could probably identify a few hundred coming from the Sioux alone (directed towards their neighbors). Point is, while we can fully accept that the fate of the native tribes was terrible, they weren't actually doing much differently to each other before or after we had arrived. They didn't need our laws or our religions to act shittily, and in an entirely recognizable manner. We had done largely the same when we (as europeans) were at their point of development. Had we not come along, the 5 Nations were already gearing up to oppress this continent and nothing would have stood in their way - save, perhaps, the western tribes - much as they stood in our way - for as long as they could.
My family is irish/?. Could be cherokee, could be "other". I'd be willing to bet it's both. I do loves me some fried chicken and big bootied women...
Given name was Mc'Cumail (before adoption). That much can be traced back to ellis and name shortnening common to the time period. Mc'Cumail becomes Mc'Call, Mc'Cool, Cole, Cool, Call - or just plain ole Mack. On my mothers side, we're the product of a man who had 8 wives in 3 states. He had a mule, a sack of bibles, and some salted pork, traveled up and down the appalachian mountains hawking everything but the mule, pretending to be a doctor, or, sometimes, a vet - but mostly a preacher. He couldn't actually recall (or didn't care to recount) who was who's when he inevitably packed up his brood and left momma behind - so the family tree stops being certain at that point on that end. Like I said..con-men and drifters...
(there's more irish blood in the us than there is in ireland..fractions at a time, lol)
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