Jewish Indians

-- Cherokee proverb

In this chapter, we will disentangle as best we can the migration stories of two southeastern tribes, the Choctaw and Cherokee. We will also glance at the Yuchi, Natchez and Tihanama Indians. Additionally, we will consider the origins of some apparently unrelated Indians such as the Hopi and Maya.

Cushman’s History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw and Natchez Indians was first published in 1899. The son of missionaries, its author spent his entire life among the Choctaws, first in Mississippi and then in Oklahoma. Because of the work’s long gestation, its length, its scholarship and the numerous interviews it contains with chiefs and other leading men of the nation, it is prized not only as an original source for Choctaw history, but also as a valuable introduction to southeastern Indians in general, one that could only have emerged from a single opportune moment in history. Aside from treating events and personages not touched upon elsewhere, Cushman’s book is a unique source for Choctaw religion and clans, subjects ignored by most writers. It was edited in 1962 by Angie Debo, the celebrated chronicler of Indian removal, and reissued with an introduction by Choctaw historical expert Clara Sue Kidwell in 1998.

One thing that can be said at the outset is that Cushman does not lightly suffer fools. He dismisses most previous scholarship by commenting that one contemporary author "has displayed as much knowledge of the North American Indians as might reasonably be expected to be found in a Brazilian monkey if writing its views upon the characteristics of the Laplanders in their icy homes" (pp 38-39). Unlike many Indian historians, Cushman feels entrusted with a powerful responsibility. He seeks to relay to posterity the traditions he has been privileged enough to share with as little alteration as possible. In this regard, his is more a compilation of storytelling than a collection of research.

The figures mentioned or quoted by Cushman constitute a veritable Who’s Who of Choctaw affairs. Among those with whom he shows familiarity are:

This list demonstrates that he moved easily among the Choctaw, Creek and Chickasaw with their half-breed planter society, old French aristocracy, merchants and backwoodsmen. His territory was the Old Southwest lying between Pensacola and New Orleans, the Tombigbe and the Tennessee.

On the basis of sacred legends, Cushman derives the origins of the Choctaws from Mexico (p. 18). They and the Chickasaw long ago crossed the Bering Straits ("’Big Waters’ far to the northwest") in boats ("canoes") and migrated down the Pacific coast "the same as the Cherokees" (p. 22). Like the Cherokee and Creek Indians before them, they were forced out of Mexico by political reversals. They crossed the Mississippi River "with a force of ten thousand warriors" (p 18) and followed their "warrior-prophet" Chahta to Nanih Waiya, the mound near present-day Philadelphia, Mississippi. In their travels, a pole representing their people was borne before them and placed upright in their campground each night. In the morning, the tribe set forth in the direction the sacred staff leaned. They came to rest at Nanih Waiya ("Leaning Mound") because the stick stood perfectly upright, a sign their wanderings were over (pp 149-151, 231-233, 298-300).

What kind of Indians lived in the territory the Choctaw and Chickasaw carved out for their new home? According to their traditions, reports Cushman, as confirmed by excavations of bones in Tennessee, it was a "race of white giants":

Cushman then recounts the discovery in 1880 at a burial mound site near Plano, Texas, of human bones "of enormous size . . . the femoral bones being five inches longer than the ordinary length, and the jaw bones . . . so large as to slip over the face of a man with ease" (pp 151-52). Even if the short-stature original Choctaws exaggerated the height of the ancient Indians they encountered, the archeological record bore out their large size. Further, these ensconced older occupants of North America were identical with the Allegewi or Taligewi overthrown by the Algonquian armies from Asia under the Delaware Indians somewhere around the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi (p 152) – a name meaning "those who inhabit the mountains over there," and probably the same as Cherokee or Tsalagi. Many historians have identified these former giants of the land with the builders of the Adena mounds.

The word Nahoolo or Nahullo "is now emphatically applied to the white race and no other . . . The Nahullo were of white complexion, according to Choctaw tradition, and were still an existing people at the time of the advent of the Choctaws to Mississippi" (p 153). In agreement with Cushman, Adair, who lived among the Chickasaw, often refers to the Nani Ishtahoolo, departed ghosts of the land who were vested with spiritual powers and whose descendants were priests and magicians, ishta designating a "clan" or "tribe" and nani, people (Adair pp ). Their cries and magic spells could still be heard in the mounds like those at Ocmulgee. These references suggest that the "Indians" who preceded the Asian tribes invading North America from Mexico were, as we would say today, Caucasian.

The Yuchi and Natchez Indians, too, were often noted to be rather light complexioned. The former’s name means "Children of the Sun." But as explained to this author, the term did not so much indicate that they came from the south but referred to the fact that their lighter hair became noticeably bleached in the summer months. In particular, the medicine men among them were expected to have bluish gray eyes ("goose eyes") and light hair (Mahan p. 95). The phrase "people of the sun" was widespread in Africa as a name for those Egyptian pharaohs who were light-skinned – a possible clue to sorting out this welter of peoples.

As for the Chickasaw, Cushman notes that they have no record of their history before the colonial period, although it is assuredly "the same as the Choctaws, being one tribe and people until the division made by their two chiefs Chikasah and Chahtah many years after their arrival and location east of the Mississippi River" (p 358). Of the Natchez, Cushman records that they, "if tradition may be believed, also came from Mexico where they had lived for centuries" (p 440).

Cushman’s work thus reveals a "lost" white prehistory of Eastern Native America before the influx of Asiatic Indians from Mexico. Of interest for our thesis is that, through the Choctaw half-breed Israel Folsom, Cushman states that the Indians all believed themselves to be of Jewish extraction, though he himself dismissed that theory (pp 296-97). In its defense, however, though he probably discounted it, many of the first white pioneers among the Choctaw and Chickasaw – e.g., Pitchlynn, Colbert, Cooper, Gunn, Nail, Stuart – have Melungeon surnames. As argued in When Scotland Was Jewish, they were likely Jews or Crypto-Jews.

Official histories of the Cherokee do not agree about their origins. Some say they came from the West, others from the Northeast. Estimates of their first emergence as a people vary from 33,000 years ago to less than 1,000. Anyone attempting to reconcile these traditions faces a difficult task. According to the tribal history commissioned of Robert Conley in 1998, no one really knows from whence the Cherokee came, although it is not impossible that they like other ancient Indians have always been in North America. The Bering land bridge theory, he admits, does receive support from a migration legend told to the Carolina merchant and Scotsman Alexander Long in 1717. Recorded by Thornton (in Conley p. 2), it goes as follows:

On the face of it, then, the Cherokees first went north, then turned west, crossed a mountain range, then "went through darkness" (on which, anon) before coming to a place to settle. Perhaps this part of the national myth ends when the people inhabited the western part of the future United States, for other tribal memories have them moving back East to the Appalachians. Several stories tell of their going so far east they had to turn south, where they wandered through endless swamps under the guidance of a she-panther and her cubs. Putting these traditions together, it is possible that the Cherokee remembered fulfilling the prescribed pahos, an obligation placed on Indians by the Creator to travel to the limit of the four directions before returning to the center. The symbol for such a pilgrimage is the swastika, its bent ends indicating where the tribes reached their four turning points. If this is the case, the Cherokee were successful under the guidance of their holy men in completing their wanderings. Accordingly, they would have been honored for having achieved a greater degree of perfection than others. The Hopi were critical, for instance, of the Bird Clan people who went south and stayed there in luxury and idleness.

A medicine tradition taught to the author was that the Cherokee came from the Northeast and traveled through darkness under the surface of the earth, being led by Great Spirit to their place of emergence. Another story, perhaps corrupt, alludes to the Cherokees’ original homeland as a "floating island" off South America (Mankiller 1993, p. 11). At any rate, migration myths are one thing, origin stories another. The Cherokee also have the Earth Diver creation story of a water beetle or crawfish diving into the primordial waters to bring up a small bit of soil that expands to form land. One set of stories attempts to explain national origin, the other, creation of humans.

Though it is unclear which category it falls into, Mooney gives the following "cosmogonic" myth, as recounted to James D. Wafford, a storyteller from the former Cherokee Nation in northern Georgia, by his grandmother:

We have to regard this as a literary version of something oral and older. Signs of its "improvement" are the standardized language, carefully placed connectives, emphasis on conflict, logical development, and anthropological context, all non-Native traits. Paul Russell of Hartsville, Tennessee, whose grandfather is on the Eastern Band of the Cherokee Indians’ rolls, relates a rather different version. Under the name Two White Feathers, he is principal chief of the Tihanama People, an Indian group we will consider later in the chapter.

The version above is obviously the original story. In the context of one Indian speaking to another, Russell’s oral version has an authority absent in Mooney’s. Recounted partly in sign talk, partly in the Tihanama language, it fits with what we know of traditional American Indian teaching. It has a circular structure, humor, and gratuitous details not necessitated by any editorial agenda. It is presented as a story that "belongs" to a tribe, the Cherokee, one that has been told and heard many times, one, moreover, that should be carefully preserved. Its moral is to teach the meaning of the tribe’s name. Ani-Yunwiya is usually translated Principal, or Real, People. In the light of this eponymous myth, however, it is perhaps better rendered as "Mainline," or even "Ruling." The Cherokee believed each species of being had their chief. Thus the humble sparrow was the chief of the bird clan. Use of the suffix ya points to the Yunwiya being regarded as the chiefs of human beings. As the Hopi in their capital of Oraibi chose their chiefs from the Sun and Bear clans, the Cherokee of Tennessee selected theirs primarily from the Wolf Clan.

Curiously, even the Hopi, thought of as the typical desert people, attribute their first arrival in the American Southwest to passage by boat across the Pacific Ocean. Their deluge legend recounts how Spider Woman saved them when Sótuknang the Creator destroyed the world by flood. They made:

Corroborating both the Sacred Dog origin story and the Hopi account of seafarers in the Pacific Ocean is a modest little book titled A Cherokee Vision of Eloh’. Printed in Cherokee and Roman letters and in the Cherokee and English language, it tells of a unique "heritage of history, spirituality, and prophecy," drawn from oral tradition "in a matter sensitive to native understanding" (Meredith et al. 1981 p 11). Its principal source is the vision of Cornsilk, a leader of the Cherokee ghost dance religion, as retold by Sakiya Sanders, a member of the Keetoowah Society in 1896. Of course, the resemblance of Eloh to the Hebrew name for God has often been pointed out. The document narrates the migration of seven out of an original number of twelve clans across a large body of water to North America. The motivation for this was to escape the frequent floods in the old country (p 15). Before leaving, the Cherokees built a "store reaching to heaven," but this was destroyed by "the gods" (p 17). "Other red tribes or clans to the Cherokee tribe began to come also from the old country . . . for many years, never knowing that they crossed the great waters" (p 17):

In the course of time the old pathway which had been traveled by the clans was cut [broken] by the submergence of a portion of the land into the deep sea. This path can be traced to this day by the broken boulders. This was of no surprise to the clans as they were used to the workings of the floods.

Long years after they had settled in their new homes in the new country[,] they began to hunt for the clans of the Cherokee tribe; . . . after a fruitless search for the others finally gave it up and established a new system of seven sacred clans to the tribe. From that day to this[,] they have been searching for the five lost clans of the Cherokee (p 17).

In time, however, a black race of terrible invaders came in boats over the sea. The first wave of these was repulsed by the Cherokee warriors, as were "thousands upon thousands" of them, until the Cherokees discovered a dragon’s poison to kill them and prevent any further irruptions. After that, they lived for "ages" in peace, and "knowledge of the war with the dark invader became in the course of time only a story" (p 23). The rest of the story describes the coming of the white man, whom the Cherokee welcomed at first but soon discovered to be a "race of deceit and cunning." The newcomers’ religion, Christianity, is dismissed as "the writing of a strange teaching that the white invader claimed to have spoken from heaven[,], the truth or untruth of which the red tribe had to find out for themselves" (p 29). There are also multiple waves of white men landing in North America in this version of prehistory.

We see thus twelve divisions similar to the tribes of Israel, each occupying a part of the original land from which they were dispersed. We also pick out a structure recalling the tower of Babel; early invasions by Africans; and an ancestral home from which the Cherokee become separated by crossing what is evidently the Pacific Ocean. Moreover, their religion, "the ancient worship of the wise ones [magi] of heaven," was brought over from the old country "beyond memory" and "reorganized in the new country as the ancient religion" (p. 23). Once the last wave of white men had gained a foothold and begun dispossessing them of their land, in other words, the Europeans, there was nothing left for the Cherokee except to be "driven to the seashore [of the West Coast], where they will cross the waters[;] . . . landing in the old country from when[ce] they came. There, they "will find the five lost clans, became [sic] reunited into twelve clans, into one people again, will become a great nation known as the Eshelokee [Tsalagi] of the half-sphere temple of light (p 29). Much is made of this dome-shaped temple with sacred fire in its center, the cahtiyis (p 23), or temple. We glimpse it in the Cherokee council house, a seven or eight-sided round-roofed town hall. Notice, incidentally, the obsession with seven as a magical number, another Hebrew coincidence.

The tale of the Eloh’ contains much that resonates with Maya traditions, as recorded in the ancient Popul Vuh. Part Four of this long account of the beginnings of the Quiché people of the Guatemala highlands and southern Mexico tells of connections across the sea. In the translation of Dennis Tedlock (who, be it noted, gives no credence to the theories propounded here), we read:

And this is our root, we who are the Quiché people . . . There were different names for each of the peoples when they multiplied, there in the east . . . They came from the same place, there in the east . . . . And it isn’t clear how they crossed over the sea. They crossed over as if there were no sea. They just crossed over on some stones, stones piled up in the sand . . . Where the waters were divided, they crossed over . . .

And then they [the lords from the east] advised their sons: "Our dear sons: we are leaving. We are going back . . . to our own tribal place . . . . Such was the disappearance and loss of Jaguar Quitze, Jaguar Night, Not Right Now, and Dark Jaguar, the first people to come from beside the sea, from the east. They came here in ancient times. When they died they were already old. (pp. 158, 174-75)

Following the withdrawal of the strangers back across the sea to their homes there are 13 generations before the arrival of the Spanish around 1525 (p. 194-95). If we calculate a little more than 20 years for each, we get a span of about 300 years for the rise and fall of the Quiché kingdom. Tedlock calls this the Late Postclassic period of Maya civilization (from A.D. 1200 to the European invasion) characterized by "tribute collecting conquest states . . . giving mythic prominence to a divine king named Plumed Serpent . . . an alliance of noble lineages that was largely Mayan but included Mexicans whose native language was Nahau [Aztec] (p. 23). We shall return to Quetzlcoatl and his origins in a future chapter but can leave this topic for now by observing one striking element of the Popul Vuh. Like the tale of the Eloh’ it includes mention of black seafarers from Africa. Culture bearers from the east come to Meso-America and take local Indian wives to form a new ruling class. Moreover, the national memory reflected even in this, the oldest book of the Americas, is relatively short, measured in hundreds of years rather than thousands. Could it be that the chronicles of other Indians are of relatively recent fashioning?

The Tihanama are a small, very old, and rather obscure southeastern Indian group. The word represents the name of the tribe as well as its peculiar language, an isolate that is not assignable to any macro-linguistic family. It comes from tiha + nama[g] ‘eight arrow, direction, dimension’. Linguistically in a class by itself, Tihanama now serves primarily as a ceremonial language used in prayers, rituals and songs. Rita Coolidge’s "Cherokee Morning Song" on Robbie Robertson’s compilation Music for the Native Americans provides a specimen (see also Appendix 3). Probably less than 40 people speak it, and perhaps only three or four well, none as a mother tongue. Like most indigenous languages in the United States, Tihanama is practically dead.

Puzzlingly, Tihanama is not a pidgin language (see Appendix G). It does not behave like the cobbled-together lingua franca reconstructed by James M. Crawford (The Mobilian Trade Language, 1978) or the creolized languages studied by Emanuel Drechsel. It is primitive, but not simple. Its vocabulary contains words that are cognate with Algonquian languages (na "breath, vibration," cf. Ojibwe nese; ada "trade" cf. adaawe "buy something"; kanshe : giiwnaadzi "to be insane"), as well as apparent loan-words from Indo-European languages (buuja < Sp. bruja "witch", kalza < calabasa, pirl < pearl, kelo "pipe" > kaolin, apo "skin, covering" > Fr. peaux, hay-ii, an exclamation of approval, compare Heb. hayeh "this is life").

According to elders of the tribe, the Eighth Arrow is the inner dimension of humanity that exists beyond the seventh direction of spirit; the other arrows are up, down, west, south, east and north. Another name for the tribe is Paint Rock Path People, or simply Paint Rock People (shish-mag-in-ya), given them because the Tihanama marked paths and traded dye stones. A famous example of Tihanama rock art is the painting of the Piasa on the banks of the Mississippi near Alton, Illinois, noticed by French explorers Marquette and Joliet in 1673. When asked what they call their language, a Tihanama tribal member will respond sha-shoda "spirit talk," or shasu-shoda "hand talk."

The Tihanama emergence story is nearly identical with the Hopi’s. Their migration stories tell of comparable wanderings to the ends of the earth. They originated in the American Southwest, where the ruins of Sholow, San Lorenzo, and Acoma testify to a time long ago when they lived together with the Hopi. Next, they migrated to South America. Returning northward, they stayed for many generations with the Maya. When they got back to the land of the Hopi, it had changed, becoming much drier. So they migrated east and crossed the Mississippi River to settle in Tennessee. The Yuchi became their greatest allies and the Shawnee their biggest protectors. Like the Hopi, they had always been known as a people of peace. One of their special offices was to conduct funerals for other tribes "singing the dead to the other side," as the ceremony was called.

The oldest historical reference we have to the Tihanama comes from 1525, from the first encounter of the Spanish with the Indians of the Southeast. When the conquistador Vasquez D’Ayllon was raiding the Carolina coast he captured a youth he named Francisco of Chicora. Taken to Santo Domino and later to Spain, Francisco gave the Spanish a large amount of intelligence about the Indians of the region. Among the tribes he described was a special class of Indians who "wore a distinctive style of clothing peculiar to themselves and cared for the sick, even going to battlegrounds and treating the wounded without regard to their being friend or foe." Their name began with the syllables tee eh, which the Yuchi understood as ti, "medicine," and eh,"big," thus identifying them as the Big Medicine People (Mahan p. 99).

In this chapter, we have emphasized several important points that open the way to a better understanding of Indians. First, all the oral traditions examined here involve boats. Vine Deloria in his book Red Earth, White Lies was perhaps the most caustic critic of what we saw in Chapter 1 is the favored alternative for the peopling of the Americas. He called the Bering Strait theory "scholarly folklore." According to Deloria, "The Bering Strait exists and existed only in the minds of scientists." Going farther, Stephen Jett, a prominent geographer at Johns Hopkins in Maryland, has, as it were, psychoanalyzed these attitudes in an important statement that deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

Western scholars, particularly Americans (who are imbued from an early age with the doctrine of the discovery of America by Columbus) have tended to assume: first, that the West (including Southwest Asia) has always been the leader in technological progress and that, as a corollary, other areas of the world did not have equal or superior sailing craft or navigational knowledge; and second, that European ships of the fifteenth century, which made transoceanic voyages only with difficulty, must have been superior to those of a thousand or two thousand years earlier. Hence, polygenesists [believers in simultaneous, separate origins] have contended that the watercraft of pre-Columbian times could have crossed the oceans only accidentally and by miraculous good fortune and that, therefore, there could have been no significant influence on ancient America from beyond the seas (qtd. in Van Sertima p. 56).

The second inference we can draw is that all Indian groups were multi-ethnic. Only this can explain the contradictory origin stories for a single tribe. The other side to this assertion is that the various strains must have joined the group at widely disparate times. Indian prehistory is like a palimpsest with the writing erased and the parchment reused over and over again. Third, oral history has a way of telescoping time so that we can never be sure of the scale. We saw with the Popul Vuh that the huge-imagined canvas of history can cover a mere three centuries. Such a timeframe agrees with the fast-changing pace of population structures we witnessed in the previous chapter. In the following chapter, we will take a close look through the lens of genetics at one of those Indian groups, the mixed breed society, many of its members of Melungeon ancestry, that once ruled the Cherokee and Choctaw.