Family Tales<\/strong> This is where I set down my research. Honestly, discovering this rich and tragic hidden family history was a bit unsettling. I\u2019ve 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\u2019m 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\u2019s stories who find themselves entangled in gossamer webs of some aged tale\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n Little People:<\/strong> It seems that nearly every culture I\u2019ve come across has some story of \u201clittle people\u201d. 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\u2013at least for those of us swayed by the revelations of science. For my ancestors, these stories suggest the \u201clittle people\u201d were an integral part of their ecology, real enough to have an active living relationship with\u2026which may be what truly matters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n copyright Ben Kamm, December 2014<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Family TalesI was told quite young that we had Cherokee ancestors on my mother\u2019s 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4276"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4277,"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4276\/revisions\/4277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sacredsucculents.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
I was told quite young that we had Cherokee ancestors on my mother\u2019s 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\u2019s Russian\/Jewish heritage begins with his maternal and paternal grandparents arrival on eastern US shores and whatever family remained in the \u201cold world\u201d was later lost to us in the smoke and tears of WW2. My mom\u2019s paternal line meanders back to late 1700s Ireland\u2013with side trails disappearing into the mists of Scotland, England, France, Germany\u2013a spicing of Blackfoot and negro rumors thrown in for good measure. But then looking at my mom\u2019s maternal side I discovered, literally, whole volumes.
My mother\u2019s mother\u2019s 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 \u201cfriend\u201d) 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\u2019s 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\u2013which came to her in a visionary dream. Lydia\u2019s father was Major George Lowrey (or Lowery) (named Agi\u2019li: in Cherokee \u201cHe Is Rising\u201d \u201cAspiring\u201d or \u201cStanding Tall\u201d 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\u2013he\u2019s in every book I\u2019ve come across on Cherokee history. He was said to be a great orator and have a \u201cdeep humor\u201d. He was something of a proselytizer of Christianity and the myth of progress and was instrumental in the Cherokee adoption of \u201cwhite\u201d civilization as a means of cultural survival. He was bestowed the honorary title of \u201cMajor\u201d 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 \u201cmay well exceed in weight of grief and pathos any other passage in American history.\u201d A Georgia Confederate colonel wrote: \u201cI 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.\u201d Lucy Benge, my 7x great grandmother and Lowrey\u2019s 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\u2013unique in the annals of history and a rather astounding feat for someone who had only ever seen a few \u201cwhite man\u2019s\u201d books and never learned to speak, read or write English. One of Lowrey\u2019s 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 \u201cGroundhog Sausage\u201d (literally \u201cpounded groundhog\u201d!). 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\u2019m related to several other prominent 18th century chiefs, British soldiers (such as John Stuart (know to the Cherokee as \u201cBushyhead\u201d) and Scottish, British and Irish fur traders ( Benge (Byng), Daugherty, Lowrey, Watts, Ward, etc.) that eschewed colonial culture and chose to live in the \u201cwilderness\u201d in the mid 1600s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
So\u2026 the ethnologist J. F. Kilpatrick edited the written recollections and stories of my great-grandpa George Lowrey\u2019s granddaughter (my great-grandma Esther\u2019s sister, I guess that makes her my great-great aunt?) Lucy Keys (her Cherokee name was Wahnenauhi: \u201cOver-There-They-Just-Arrived-With-It\u201d!?) This was published by the Smithsonian. It is within this collection that short stories of the \u201clittle people\u201d occurs.
I find it fascinating that part of the story is the \u201clittle people\u201d leaving \u2013departing for lands beyond\u2026and their name Nunne\u2019he (or Nuh-na-yie) translates as \u201cthey who continue to live\u201d. In ethnologist James Mooney\u2019s documentation of Eastern Cherokee in the late 1800s Nunne\u2019hi is a more general term for what he translates as \u201cdwellers anywhere\u201d or \u201cimmortals\u201d. The \u201clittle people\u201d are a diminutive subspecies referred to as Yunwi Tsundsi. One tale explains how prior to the Removal (Trail of Tears) the Nunne\u2019hi 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\u2019d like to think that some of my ancestors chose that route\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n