Cherokee blood: Why do so many Americans believe they have Cherokee ancestry?

Cherokee blood: Why do so many Americans believe they have Cherokee ancestry?

Gregory D. Smithers, author of The Cherokee Diaspora, says that Cherokee openness to intermarriage, education, and travel in search of opportunity, and the fact that some Cherokee were slaveholders, gave people all over the US and of all races a plausible connection to the tribe. In addition, Smithers says that after the nation's removal to Oklahoma, "the tribe came to be viewed more romantically, especially in the antebellum South, where their determination to maintain their rights of self-government against the federal government took on new meaning. Throughout the South in the 1840s and 1850s, large numbers of whites began claiming they were descended from a Cherokee great-grandmother." A commenter, Geoffrey Sea, has some interesting assertions: "[After the Dawes Act of 1887], the Cherokees actively pursued enrollment and intentionally inflated their rolls in order to increase federal allotments. Cherokee recruiters fanned out through the Tennessee and Ohio valleys, enrolling many Native Americans as Cherokee who in fact had different ancestries. In particular, in the hills of Kentucky, Ohio, and West Virginia many of the Shawnee, Miami, Sac-Fox and Potawatomi descendants who had escaped removal were enrolled as Cherokees around the turn of the century, because they encountered no recruiters from their own tribes. The grandchildren of those enrollees genuinely believed they were Cherokee.... In addition, many fake "Cherokee" organizations and "bands" sprung up, claiming bogus connections to the tribes. Near Portsmouth,Ohio, there is a burial ground where bones from a nearby construction site were reburied, along with markers that pretend to be Cherokee Tsalagi language but are actually gibberish."

MORE: The blog Thoughts from Polly's Granddaughter, written by Twila Barnes, an expert in Cherokee genealogy, frequently deals with mistaken claims of Cherokee ancestry. She points to extensive official rolls going back to 1817. The most popular post on the site lists celebrities who have made unsubstantiated claims of Cherokee ancestry. She has looked carefully into Elizabeth Warren's claims and has found them to be without factual basis.