Tag: Native People

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South Dakota

The Black Hills

The United States ceded South Dakota’s Black Hills to the Sioux in 1868, in the Treaty of Fort Laramie. The government intended that the Fort Laramie Treaty would settle the disposition of rights between the US, the Sioux, and the Arapaho, but what the government got was a mess. The Ponca, for instance, were not invited to Fort Laramie, but the reservation that the government had already ceded to the Ponca by treaty in 1858 was re-ceded to the Lakota without Ponca consent. Ultimately the US forcibly removed the Ponca to a new reservation in Oklahoma. It’s estimated that one in four of the Ponca died during the removal.

Photograph of General William T. Sherman and Commissioners in Council with Indian Chiefs at Fort Laramie, Wyoming, 1868, National Archives and Records Administration.

The Lakota1 didn’t actually live in the Black Hills. That was holy ground, and their claims to the Black Hills were relatively recent. Until the late 16th century the Lakota were concentrated in the upper Mississippi Valley–eastern North Dakota, eastern South Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Iowa–but were pushed west by the Anishnaabe and Cree, who in turn were being pushed west by Europeans. The Lakota took the Black Hills from the Cheyenne in 1776.

The geology of the Black Hills is complex. There’s some volcanic stuff, and some sedimentary stuff, and some metamorphosis going on, and layers of rock were deposited horizontallly beginning about 1.8 billion years ago. Beginning about 80 million years ago there was a period of North American uplift, known helpfully as the Laramide Orogeny.2 The uplift raised portions of the Rockies from Canada to Mexico, and also raised the Black Hills (which are a kinda Rockies’ distant cousin) so that all those horizontal layers were now tilted upwards. What we’ve all seen of the Black Hills, Mount Rushmore, is carved from the oldest granite core.

The granite core of the Black Hills.

The highest peak in the Black Hills, Black Elk Peak, is 7,242 feet, which is pretty tall, but not above tree line, and roughly half the height of the tallest peak in the Rockies.3 It’s a smidgeon taller than the highest peak in the Applachians, Clingman’s Dome, at 6,643 feet.

In the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty the US gave the Lakota the Black Hills forever. The Lakota naively thought that “forever” meant forever. They didn’t know that the US were Indian givers.

Kmusser, Great Sioux Reservation as established in 1868 by the Fort Laramie Treaty, from Wikipedia.

In 1873 the US and Europe suffered a major economic depression. Before the Civil War, the US was principally a farming economy, and economic downturns weren’t so hard on localized farm economies. By 1873 railroads were booming, and they were the nation’s second largest employer. Railroad speculation was rampant, and then the railroad speculation economy crashed. It’s estimated that following the crash unemployment in New York City reached as high as 25%.

The 1873 Panic was caused in part by the conversion from a silver and gold monetary standard to a gold standard, which resulted in less money in circulation and higher interest rates.4 Suddenly there was no money to invest and railroads began to fail. Gold was rumored in the Black Hills, and President Grant believed that exploration for gold in South Dakota could both put the unemployed to work and increase the government’s gold supplies, resulting in more money in circulation and lower interest rates. In 1874 Lieutenant Colonel George Custer led an expedition of somewhere north of 1000 men, including the 7th Cavalry, geologists, biologists, photographers, and journalists, into the Black Hills to, among other things, explore the possibility of mining for gold.

View of General Custer’s Camp, Black Hills, S.D., postcard printed 1947, Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pcrd-1d06527.

It’s unclear if the Custer expedition found any significant gold, but true or not rumors of gold finds leaked. In violation of the Fort Laramie Treaty prospectors poured into the Black Hills. The flood of Americans annoyed the Lakota greatly, because they had those silly notions about forever. The US offered to buy the Black Hills, but not for what the Lakota thought it was worth, so the US took the hills without payment. The Lakota learned that in the context of the Black Hills, “forever” meant less than ten years. The Lakota went to war, and Custer was one of the big losers. The Lakota were also one of the big losers.5

Charles M. Russell, The Custer Fight, 1903, Library of Congress.

Population and Geography

South Dakota, with a 2024 population of 924,669, is the fifth-least populous state. At 77,116 square miles, it is the 16th largest state by area, and with 12 people per square mile it’s the fifth-least densely populated state.

With seven Sioux Reservations spread across the state, about 8.5% of the South Dakota population is Native American. Anglos are the largest group, at 80.5%. Hispanics are 5.1%, Blacks 2.6%.

File:National-atlas-indian-reservations-south-dakota.gif

Sioux Falls in the state’s southeast, roughly where Minnesota, Iowa, and South Dakota meet, is South Dakota’s largest city, at 209,289. Rapid City in the Black Hills has a population of 79,894. There are no other South Dakota cities with populations greater than 50,000. Pierre, the state capitol, has a population of 13,788. Pierre isn’t on an interstate highway.

The Black Hills are South Dakota’s only mountains, and they’re an isolated range in the state’s far west.6 Tourism has replaced mining as the Black Hills’ principal industry, and towns like Deadwood, Custer, and Keystone are tourist destinations.

Badlands National Park, parts of which are in the Pine Ridge Reservation, is located south and west of the Black Hills. The badlands are the product of deposition of horizontal layers of soft sedimentary sandstones, siltstones, limestones, shale, and other stuff that are eroded by wind and water into magnificent layered displays of time. The oldest formations are from the Western Interior Seaway and date from 75-69 million years ago. The most recent formation includes a layer of volcanic ash from volcanoes in Utah and Nevada, and are 34-30 million years old.

South Dakota is divided roughly in half by the north-south Missouri River. The east of the state is plains: the Dissected Till Plans (which also covers parts of Iowa and Nebraska, and which is an excellent place to grow corn), the Couteau des Prairies (which also covers parts of Minnesota and Iowa and is an excellent place to grow corn), and the James River Basin which cuts eastern South Dakota north to south.

Other than the Black Hills, South Dakota west of the Missouri River is arid, and is part of the Great Plains.

In addition to the Missouri River, the James and the Big Sioux Rivers cut the eastern half of the state north-south and meet the Missouri at the Nebraska state line. The east-west Grand, Moreau, Cheyenne, Belle Fourche, Bad, and White Rivers are spaced fairly evenly through the western half of the state, and they also feed the Missouri. All of the state’s best-known trout streams, Rapid Creek, Castle Creek, and Spearfish Creek, are small, relatively isolated creeks fed from springs and runoff in the Black Hills.

Black Hills Fish

The Black Hills are not only geologically isolated, they are biologically isolated as well. During Custer’s expedition, William Ludlow, the chief engineer for the Corps of Engineers’ Department of the Dakotas (and an angler), declared that there were no more suitable streams for trout anywhere than those of the Black Hills. He also noted that, in fact, there were no trout. He was right on both counts. There were the important game species of chub, suckers, and dace,7 but no trout.

We have spread more trout to more places than any other species of fish. I can now fish for trout in Texas, Chile, New Zealand, and Costa Rica. I have fished for non-native trout in non-native habitat from Argentina to Utah, and have fished for non-native species of rainbow or brown or brook trout just about everywhere. We love to move the various species of trout around, and they often thrive with changes in scenery.8 By the 1880s we were introducing trout into the Black Hills.

The Black Hills trout streams are now managed with reproducing wild fish supplemented by stocking, but none of the trout are native.

Politics

All of South Dakota’s state officials, from Governor on down, are Republicans. Even Kristi Noem’s dog was a Republican, for all the good it did her.

South Dakota has only a single member of Congress,9 and he’s Republican. Both US Senators are Republican.

In the 2024 election, Donald Trump received 63.43% of the South Dakota vote. The \counties that didn’t vote for Trump were either Clay County, where the University of South Dakota is located, or majority Native American.

Wikipedia, 2024 South Dakota presidential election results by county.

Kristi Noem’s Dog

The character of some places is forever shaded by a single moment: the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, David Crockett died at the Alamo, Charleston fired on Fort Sumter, North Dakota fracked . . . In South Dakota, Governor Kristi Noem shot her dog. Then she bragged about it.

If you have a German wirehaired pointer and it has messed up your pheasant hunt, you don’t have to shoot it. There is a national rescue just for GWPs. I don’t think Kristi Noem is on the board. For a good discussion of what went wrong with Kristi Noem’s dog, All Things Outdoors did a nice job.

German Wirehaired Pointer, the State Gun Dog of South Dakota. Sourced from Wikimedia Commons.
  1. Lakota is one of two closely related Siouan language groups, Dakota and Lakota. The Dakota are further divided into the Eastern Dakota (the Santee) and the Western Dakota (the Yankton and the Yanktonai). The Lakota people are also known as the Teton Sioux. ↩︎
  2. Sarcasm. Geologists can be baffling unintelligible when they name things. I might bet that orogeny means the process by which mountains originate, but I wouldn’t give my odds at better than 50-50. ↩︎
  3. Mount Elbert, Colorado, 14,440 feet. ↩︎
  4. It’s often said that Nevada silver had paid for the Civil War, but banks far preferred a gold-based currency. The conversion from a silver/gold currency to a gold currency was also happening in the newly united Germany. Germany pretty much mirrored the US during the depression. ↩︎
  5. In United States v. Sioux Nation of Indians, 448 U.S. 371 (1980), the Supreme Court awarded the Lakota a $108 million judgment against the US for the uncompensated taking of the Black Hills. The Lakota refused to accept the judgment, wanting not compensation but return of the Black Hills. The damages were set aside in an interest bearing trust, and are now valued at close to two billion dollars. Seems like a lot, but I’d guess that buying the Black Hills would cost more. ↩︎
  6. There’s also a sliver of the Black Hills in Wyoming. ↩︎
  7. Sarcasm. Chub, suckers, and dace, whatever their excellent personalities and ability to dance well, are not considered important gamefish. ↩︎
  8. The only game animal we’ve moved around as much as trout may be the pheasant. Pheasant hunts in South Dakota may be common, but they ain’t natural. Pheasants originate in Asia. ↩︎
  9. There are currently seven states represented by a single congress member, Alaska, Delaware, Montana, North Dakota, South Dakota, Vermont, and Wyoming. ↩︎

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Kānaka Maoli

Kamehameha the Great, King of the Sandwich Islands, c. 1816. Oil on canvas, Anonymous copy, Chinese. The Boston Athenaeum.

There are 1.4 million people in Hawaii, of whom 960 thousand, nearly 70 percent, live on Oahu. It’s the most diverse state in the nation, with a population that’s 25 percent white, 2 percent black, and 37 percent Asian (Filipino, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Indian). More than 23 percent of the population reports its ethnicity as multiracial. About 10 percent of the population is Hispanic. About 10 percent of the population is Native Hawaiian, Kānaka Maoli. 

Hawaii is in the Pacific Ocean, 3800 miles and four time zones from Houston. It’s roughly the same latitude as Merida in the Yucatan. There are eight major islands, one of which, Ni’ihau, is privately owned, and one of which, Kaho’olawe, was used until 1990 as a military bombing range. Nobody lives there. Molokai was a leper colony. Lanai, Oahu. Kauai, Maui, and the Big Island, Hawaii, are all  tourist destinations. The largest city, Honolulu, is on Oahu.  

The principal businesses are sugar, pineapples, military, and tourists. 

Hawaii was first settled in the 13th century by Polynesian immigrants, likely from the Marquesan Islands and the Society Islands, more than 2000 miles away. In England, King John was signing the Magna Carta. Robin Hood was in Sherwood Forest, or not. Meanwhile the original settlers of Hawaii were traveling 2000 miles by double-hulled canoe.

First representation of polynesien outrigger canoe made for the exploration of near islands
Biblioteque Nationale de France

Or maybe it was settled in the 5th century, when Rome was withdrawing from Britain and the Anglo-Saxons were coming in from mainland Europe. Arthur was king. Or not. 

Indigenous Hawaii is Polynesian, as is a vast settled area of the Pacific. With the Easter Islands, New Zealand, and Hawaii as the three corners, the Polynesian Triangle, the area settled by Polynesians, covers a whole lot of blue on a map. The Polynesian languages are derived from a Southeast Asia language group out of Taiwan, but genetic evidence traces Polynesian origins to earlier Asian migrants to New Guinea. 

File:Polynesia-triangle.png
The three corners of the Polynesian Triangle: 1: Hawaii, United States; 2: New Zealand; 3: Easter Island, Chile; Other island groups: 4: Samoa; 5: Tahiti, French Polynesia. From Wikimedia Commons, by user Kahuroa. 

Captain James Cook put Hawaii on navigation charts in 1798. He had already made first contact with Australia and circumnavigated New Zealand (to prove it wasn’t part of a larger, undiscovered southern continent), but on his third voyage Cook went and got himself killed by the Hawaiians. It was very unfortunate for all concerned, but particularly for Cook.

Death of Captain James Cook, oil on canvas by George Carter, 1783, Bernice P. Bishop Museum

Before 1798, before 1820 really, the pre-literate history of Hawaii is mostly oral tradition, archaeology, and speculation, just like everyplace else with an indigenous population. Hawaii is different though because the first contacts were well-recorded. It helped that the New England missionaries and their descendants lived in the Hawaiian Kingdom for 70-odd years, plus the Hawaiians themselves quickly became literate. In the 19th Century, Hawaii may have been the most literate country on earth. They also surfed. 

Even after contact the Hawaiians were polytheistic, polygamous, radically hierarchical, and incestuous (at least among the royalty). Historically they had practiced slavery, infanticide, human sacrifice, and capital punishment for breaking the codes of conduct, the kapus, that governed society and religion. It was a jolly sort of place, even if women could be put to death for eating with men, or for eating a pork chop. The last recorded human sacrifice occurred in 1809. 

Notwithstanding speculation about the modern Islanders’ fondness for Spam, the native Hawaiians did not practice cannibalism. They did eat dogs. 

Between 1782 and 1810, Kamehameha the Great waged a war of unification against the other high chiefs, and consolidated island governance. Whalers arrived in 1819, and for the next 50 years Hawaii was a center for Pacific whaling. The same year, Kamehameha II, Liholiho, sat down to eat with women and ended the kapu prohibitions.  He also disbanded the priesthood–the kahuna, both big and small–and destroyed the polytheistic shrines.  

In 1820, Congregational missionaries arrived from New England,  and they and their descendants would wield an outsized influence on the Islands. They brought education, which many Hawaiians took to, and they brought Christianity, which many Hawaiians also took to. The New Englanders were disturbed to find Kamehameha II married to multiple wives, including both his half sister, his first wife, and his sister, his second wife. Apparently that sort of thing wasn’t common in New England, particularly among Congregationalists.

Daniel and Charlotte Dole, c. 1853. 

For a place that developed the ukulele, Hawaii in the 19th century must have been pretty tense. There were the rigid, pious, and fanatical missionaries; there were the licentious whalers and merchant ships coming into port looking to have a good time (and having it); there were the Native Hawaiians who were being marginalized by land privatization and population changes. Large numbers of Japanese and Chinese workers were brought in as agricultural laborers. Commercial interests–as often as not the enterprises of the missionary descendants–were beginning to dominate the economic life of the islands.  To top it off there was international intrigue. Hawaii didn’t have to be American. It could have been French, British, Russian, even Japanese. It could have been Hawaiian.

Sanford B. Dole, c. 1902, Library of Congress

I thought that Texas was the only Republic to enter the Union, and here late in life I’ve realized I was misled. Hawaii was (1) a kingdom under the House of Kamehameha and then the House of Kalākaua, and then (2) the Republic of Hawaii under its president, Sanford Dole. The monarchies weren’t exactly paragons of governmental virtue, but their overthrow involved sugar tariffs, rich sugar planters, the price of sugar, landowning descendants of missionaries, and price subsidies paid to Louisiana sugar interests and sugar beets in Colorado.  Did I mention sugar? I’m sure there were some Dole pineapples in there somewhere. Hawaii was finally brought into the States as a territory in 1898, 100 years after Captain Cook, because our destiny as a world power required a powerful navy, and Hawaii was a key to a powerful navy.  Really.


Liliuokalani of Hawaii. Frontispiece photograph from Hawaii’s Story by Hawaii’s Queen, Liliuokalani (1898)

By 1900, there were only about 30,000 Native Hawaiians. When Captain Cook reached the islands, the population estimates are from 100,000 to one million, but the archaeological record supports a population of up to 300,000. There hadn’t really been wars to reduce the population, not after Kamehameha the Great anyway, but there was plenty of disease, measles, tuberculosis, influenza, and whatnot, particularly tied to ships transporting miners for the 1840s California gold rush. There was also plenty of intermarriage, so that the 20 percent multiracial ethnicity will include many Hawaiian descendants. There was at least some out-migration. With a current Hawaiian-only population of about 140,000, the Native Hawaiian population has grown since the end of the monarchy. 

There is a modern Hawaiian separatist movement, or a lot of them, and unlike other indigenous American people Native Hawaiians do not have sovereignty, so there are also native sovereignty movements (which I think may be different from the separatist movements). 

What’s all this got to do with fishing? No idea. 
 

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Indian Territory

Map of the Indian Territory, 1892, Library of Congress

I have a new friend, at least on Facebook. We sat at the same table at a lunch, and then last Saturday night we were at the same party. I talked to her husband (who was from Salt Lake) about where we should fly fish in Utah. He suggested Provo.

She works for the Anti-Defamation League. In the interim between our meetings eleven Jewish congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation were murdered. It had been a brutal week, and maybe particularly so for her. This week’s been brutal too, with another mass shooting in California. We are a violent people.

Because of her work I suspect that more than most folk she is attuned to racial and ethnic incongruities, ranging from unintentional slights to out-and-out violence. At one point in our conversation I must have mentioned we were going to fish in Oklahoma, because I said the word Indian and I think she cringed. A few sentences later she said Native American. I took it as a gentle correction.

For most states, Virginia say, or Washington or Wisconsin or Texas, first people history is a repetitious prologue. Before X happened, there were Native Americans: Caddo, Wichita, Comanche, Cherokee, Umpqua, Powhatan, Ojibwe, Fox and Sauk, Alabama, Coushata, Seminole, Karankawa . . . Everywhere there is that iteration, speculative and archeological, and then X happened, X being when the Americans came, or the British or the French or the Spanish came, and the part of the story about the indigenous people ends.

Where did they go? For most states, after the prologue, it’s oblivion. Maybe extermination by violence and disease, or to smaller and ever more confined spaces, but someplace out of the way, someplace else. In San Antonio once, talking to a federal park ranger at a Spanish mission, he pointed across an open field to the local Hispanic neighborhoods and said that’s where I grew up and that’s where the native population is still living. He said that they, part of his ancestors, were incorporated into Spanish mission life. Early Thomas Jefferson thought the answer for the Indian conflict was for the Native Americans to become farmers and join into the new way of life. Tell that to the Cherokee. Late Thomas Jefferson pushed for removal. Mostly late Thomas Jefferson won. 

 In Oklahoma, A History, Messrs. Baird and Goble write that every place has its birth story, and sometimes more than one. They suggest three for Oklahoma: the forced immigration of the Five Tribes; the Oklahoma land rush; and the oil boom.  Of course before the five tribes, before the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, there were already Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita in Oklahoma. Even in Oklahoma there is that first people prologue.

National Park Service, Trail of Tears National Historic Trail

The problem with referencing Indians, whether the term of choice is American Indian or Native American or Indian, it is always imposed. Among American indigenous people there was never an Indian. There were Yamparika Comanche, or there were Powhatan, or there were Karankawa. Any label that suggests a unified indigenous people is an exonym, and any one is as artificial as any other. Every one of the labels has its critics, but each also has its supporters. Columbus’ word wasn’t so much a misnomer as a creation, and it’s useful and ubiquitous.

For most of us there aren’t day-to-day reminders of American Indian history and culture. Unlike, say, statues of Robert E. Lee, we don’t have many monuments about that other national tragedy. Oklahoma is one we’ve got, but if I think about Oklahoma (and I don’t generally) it’s as a collection of tropes: red state, cowboys, oil, tornadoes, Dust Bowl, and Indians. Tropes are useful as shorthand for things that are more complex, but only to the limits of our own understanding.  For Indian, the complex thing contained in the Oklahoma trope is the geographical summation of every betrayal, every displacement and epidemic, every conflict, but there are the Native Americans who are there now, and whose families have now been there for generations. There are people who are Oklahomans.

S.C. Gwynne writes about the Comanche as cruel and violent. He writes that they were finally confined to Oklahoma only because they came across another people equally cruel and violent: Texans. The Searchers after all is not bad history. But Texans were not uniquely violent. There was plenty enough violence to go around. Oklahoma is one of the proofs. There are now 39 recognized tribes shoehorned into Oklahoma, from the Comanche in the southwest to the Cherokee in the northeast, and every tribe’s place in Oklahoma is both a conclusion and a continuation.

Did I mention before that we are still violent?

Usually I’m pretty comfortable dealing with information, sorting through and coming out the other side with a notion of what happened.  I can’t seem to do that with Oklahoma. I have only a vague notion of what happened to its first people, what happened with the forced immigration of the other tribes, the betrayal of the white land rush, and how that fits together now: those are matters for real and dedicated scholars.  All I can do is look at the mess with confusion as to the details, and a bit more knowledge that among those Oklahoma tropes there is something important, and something worth remembering.  

Creek Orphans Home Baseball Team, 1904, Oklahoma Historical Society, Alice Robertson Collection.

 * * *

There’s a cold front in, with a heavy north wind and daytime temperatures in the 50s.  Our skiff is in the shop, and the temperature’s dropped too much too fast for bass or sunfish. The first stocking of trout in the Guadalupe isn’t until next weekend (when we’ll be in Oklahoma). We drove to Surfside Beach to check the jetty: I had wanted to try spey rods in the surf.

Didn’t happen.  I have never seen either the surf or the tide so high. 

On the other hand, Killens Barbecue isn’t really out of the way coming back from Surfside. And by 2:30 there was hardly any line.  We did catch it at a bit of a lull though. 

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Pikeminnow

Kris caught a northern pikeminnow (Ptychocheilus oregonensis) in Oregon. Pikeminnows are the largest member of the minnow family, Cyprinidae. It’s a native of Oregon and of the Columbia drainage. It’s nativity is right there in the species name: oregonensis.

The current world record pikeminnow weighed over 13 pounds, and Kris’s fish was small, no more than half a pound. Other than being caught, the fish was in no way remarkable.  It’s apparently common to catch big pikeminnows, as long or longer than 24 inches and weighing more than three pounds. They can live longer than 15 years, and they reach sexual maturity from three to eight years. They spawn in the spring, and females can release up to 30,000 eggs.

Even though they’re not an invasive species, they are a fish of “ecological  concern.” They are voracious piscivores, thrive in the dammed Columbia drainage, and are hell on smolt salmon. Hell and dam. They’re ugly, with their ragged scales and harsh jaw. They’re not considered edible, though somebody surely eats them. Anglers hate them. If ever there was a trash fish, it’s the pikeminnow.

Before the northern pikeminnow was the northern pikeminnow it was the northern squawfish. It was renamed by the Names of Fishes Committee of the American Fisheries Society. A bit later the same Committee renamed the Jewfish as the goliath grouper.  Goliath grouper is a pretty good name, certainly a better name than Jewfish, but if I were a pikeminnow I’d feel slighted.

Florida goliath grouper, Jordan, David Starr (1907) Fishes, New York City, NY: Henry Holt and Company

The fish is also known as the Columbia River dace, and Columbia River dace would have been a pretty cool name. But no. Pikeminnow.

“Squawfish” may have originally derived from squawkfish, from the noise a pikeminnow makes when caught. Apparently American Indian names for the fish are often onomatopoeic. That’s not the name that caught on though. “Squaw” is probably derived from a Massachusett language word for woman, but it is considered particularly derisive, connoting subordinate status, sexual availability, stupidity, and squalor. Nobody needs that around. 

Columbia River dace, Evermann, Barton W. (1893) Reconnaissance of the streams and lakes of western Montana and northwestern Wyoming, Bulletin of the United States Fish Commission, vol. 11, 1891, Government Printing Office 

In addition to the fish, there are plenty of geographic references to squaw, most notably Squaw Valley Ski Resort in California, and the Names of Fishes Committee may not get around to those any time soon. Of course there’s plenty of uses of Indian identity that are generally considered offensive: the Washington Redskins, the Cleveland Indians’ Chief Wahoo, and the Atlanta Braves’ tomahawk chop just to name three.  I’m personally offended by the tomahawk chop, though it’s probably because I saw it so often when the Astros and the Braves were in the same league. The Braves had Smoltz, Glavine, and Maddux. We could have used some pikeminnow for Smoltz.

There’s also Elizabeth Warren’s claim to Indian ancestry, which the Cherokee Nation, one of the three recognized Cherokee tribes, now finds offensive. Warren is originally from Oklahoma, and last week she released genetic testing data after a dare by President Trump. It’s a thing for whites (and blacks) in Oklahoma and the South to claim some trace of Native American ancestry, particularly Cherokee, and for such stories to be part of Oklahoma family lore. Senator Warren’s claim should surprise no one who knows her home, and it is the Oklahomanness of her claim that interests me. The problem with her claim is that she listed herself as a minority based on her Native American heritage in an Association of American Law Schools directory, and Harvard briefly touted her as a minority based on her claims. She did not, as the more inflammatory accounts state, list herself as Native American on job or law school applications.

1983 University of Houston Law Center Yearbook

Based on the published reports of her DNA testing, Senator Warren’s genetic claims are remote, but they are there. Senator Warren could claim she likely had ancestors who were Cherokee, just as I could claim to have likely had ancestors who were French. It would be overdone for me to claim to be French, but growing up in a culture, Oklahoma, where that heritage was peculiarly valued, the claim is common, even among those (unlike Senator Warren), who don’t have Senator Warren’s genetics.  That for whatever reason is Oklahoman.

Kris is a big fan of Senator Warren, having had her as a law school professor long before the Senator’s Harvard days. Kris thought her brilliant, passionate, and an excellent teacher.  I never had her as a teacher, don’t have strong opinions about her, and only note that the Senator’s Oklahomanness will follow her into 2020.

After I first posted this I came back and rewrote it because of Kris’s fondness for Senator Warren.  My original tone was unnecessarily glib and dismissive, and didn’t really say what I wanted to say.  What I wanted to say was that white and black Oklahoma has a history that is so intertwined with American Indian Oklahoma that they believe, true or no, that they are fundamentally, at their literal roots, a part of it.

In the interim, the principal chief of the third major Cherokee tribe, the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, the Cherokees who never left North Carolina for Oklahoma, were more circumspect and fair in their statements about Senator Warren’s genetic announcement. “Like many other Americans, she has a family story of Cherokee and Delaware ancestry and evidence of Native ancestry.” She had not claimed tribal membership.

“Senator Warren has demonstrated her respect for tribal sovereignty and is an ally of the Eastern Band. As such, we support her and other allies — regardless of party — who promote tribal sovereignty, tribal self-determination, and protection of Cherokee women.”

Meanwhile there is a bounty paid by the Bonneville Power Authority on pikeminnows caught in the Columbia River. As I said, they are not a sport fish, so the bounty is to encourage anglers to target and remove large numbers of fish.  One to 25 fish pays $5 per fish, 26 to 200 fish pays $6 per fish, 201 fish and up pays $8 per fish. A tagged fish is worth $500. There are stories of fisher folk making a living on the pikeminnow bounty. Tempting.