Family Tales

Family Tales
I was told quite young that we had Cherokee ancestors on my mother’s side, but nothing more. As I grew up, hearing one has Cherokee blood began to sound like a classic American cliche. I always assumed that digging up any information about said ancestry would be difficult at best. Several years ago, overcome by some esoteric mood, I began looking into the endless bifurcations of my genealogy. Knowledge of my dad’s Russian/Jewish heritage begins with his maternal and paternal grandparents arrival on eastern US shores and whatever family remained in the “old world” was later lost to us in the smoke and tears of WW2. My mom’s paternal line meanders back to late 1700s Ireland–with side trails disappearing into the mists of Scotland, England, France, Germany–a spicing of Blackfoot and negro rumors thrown in for good measure. But then looking at my mom’s maternal side I discovered, literally, whole volumes.
My mother’s mother’s mother, Ruth Ghan, was a mixblood Cherokee and the last in my line who knew the language; she intentionally did not teach it to my grandmother. Fleeing her Indian identity, she left Oklahoma for San Francisco, California around 1916 in her late teens. Her father, Darius Ward, was a cabinet maker who held various minor offices in the Cherokee government in Oklahoma. His parents, James Ward and Esther Hoyt Ward, died tragically before he was ten. Both James and Esther were born in the original Cherokee Territory (which includes the Carolinas, Tennessee, parts of Georgia and Alabama) and survived the trials of the Trail of Tears as children. James became a teacher at a Moravian Mission in Oklahoma. During the Civil War the Cherokee Nation was deeply divided and James was brutally murdered by his own people (including a family “friend”) because he came from a Southern family. Esther fled with her five children to church friends in Arkansas then Salem, Illinois, where she promptly died upon arrival. Esther’s father was Milo Hoyt, the son of a prominent early missionary, and her mother was Lydia Lowrey Hoyt, author of the first Christian hymn written in Cherokee–which came to her in a visionary dream. Lydia’s father was Major George Lowrey (or Lowery) (named Agi’li: in Cherokee “He Is Rising” “Aspiring” or “Standing Tall” due to his tall stature and reported regular presence standing next to government officials and missionaries as a translator, perhaps also his religious aspirations). He was the assistant principle chief (VP) of the Cherokee Nation during the time of the Removal / Trail of Tears–he’s in every book I’ve come across on Cherokee history. He was said to be a great orator and have a “deep humor”. He was something of a proselytizer of Christianity and the myth of progress and was instrumental in the Cherokee adoption of “white” civilization as a means of cultural survival. He was bestowed the honorary title of “Major” for his valor fighting alongside Andrew Jackson during the war of 1812. Of course, it was Jackson who was responsible for the forced removal of the Cherokee from their ancestral lands in 1838. Ethnologist James Mooney wrote that the Removal “may well exceed in weight of grief and pathos any other passage in American history.” A Georgia Confederate colonel wrote: “I fought through the Civil War and have seen men shot to pieces and slaughtered by the thousands, but the Cherokee removal was the cruelest work I ever knew.” Lucy Benge, my 7x great grandmother and Lowrey’s wife, was half sister of Sequoya (also a cousin of G. Lowrey), who in addition to lending his name to our largest trees, is remembered for being so enamored by the idea of the written word that he created an alphabet (syllabary) for the Cherokee language that was adopted and put into use by the entire tribe in a relatively few short years. Gifting his people their own writing and reading–unique in the annals of history and a rather astounding feat for someone who had only ever seen a few “white man’s” books and never learned to speak, read or write English. One of Lowrey’s ancestors was the blood-soaked war chief Oconostata who survived numerous massacres and helped ratify peace with the Iroquois and British. His name translates as “Groundhog Sausage” (literally “pounded groundhog”!). Things then begin to get a little murky at this period where matrilineal descent through the seven clans was still common. It seems that I’m related to several other prominent 18th century chiefs, British soldiers (such as John Stuart (know to the Cherokee as “Bushyhead”) and Scottish, British and Irish fur traders ( Benge (Byng), Daugherty, Lowrey, Watts, Ward, etc.) that eschewed colonial culture and chose to live in the “wilderness” in the mid 1600s.

This is where I set down my research. Honestly, discovering this rich and tragic hidden family history was a bit unsettling. I’ve always been intuitively aware of a subterranean chasm of grief in my maternal lineage and now that I have stories to illuminate that terrain it appears stranger and more expansive than I could have imagined. I’m still not quite sure how to relate to or fully integrate it. It evokes a new empathy in me for the characters in John Crowley’s stories who find themselves entangled in gossamer webs of some aged tale…

Little People:
So… the ethnologist J. F. Kilpatrick edited the written recollections and stories of my great-grandpa George Lowrey’s granddaughter (my great-grandma Esther’s sister, I guess that makes her my great-great aunt?) Lucy Keys (her Cherokee name was Wahnenauhi: “Over-There-They-Just-Arrived-With-It”!?) This was published by the Smithsonian. It is within this collection that short stories of the “little people” occurs.
I find it fascinating that part of the story is the “little people” leaving –departing for lands beyond…and their name Nunne’he (or Nuh-na-yie) translates as “they who continue to live”. In ethnologist James Mooney’s documentation of Eastern Cherokee in the late 1800s Nunne’hi is a more general term for what he translates as “dwellers anywhere” or “immortals”. The “little people” are a diminutive subspecies referred to as Yunwi Tsundsi. One tale explains how prior to the Removal (Trail of Tears) the Nunne’hi warned certain villages of grave misfortunes on the horizon and invited the people to come and live with them in their eternal lands within the mountains and rivers. I’d like to think that some of my ancestors chose that route…

It seems that nearly every culture I’ve come across has some story of “little people”. Whether this is some mythic impulse, a universal archetype necessary to the stories we tell or something that exists (or existed) outside of ourselves is a conundrum–at least for those of us swayed by the revelations of science. For my ancestors, these stories suggest the “little people” were an integral part of their ecology, real enough to have an active living relationship with…which may be what truly matters.