My mother told me when I was 4 or 5, close to the age my own daughter is now, that we were descended from Pocahontas. She showed me her grandmother's picture in the family album. Her name was Sarah Smith, and my mother told me that she was descended from Pocahontas and John Smith.
I could tell from the picture that she was certainly a real Indian. She looked like every other Indian picture that I'd seen from that era, with the stiff, tense face that came from sitting still for the daguerreotype. Three pretty dark-haired girls stood around her and my grandmother, two years old, sat open-mouthed on her lap. To judge from my grandmother's expression, she was drooling but the spit didn't stay on her chin long enough to register on the plate.
Of course, when I got a little older and started looking things up on my own, I discovered that Pocahontas had married John Rolfe, not John Smith; and while she did have living descendants in Virginia, we're almost certainly not connected. It also didn't fit with my mother's claim that we were Cherokee, unless there were other Indian relatives in the family album.
I asked my grandmother what tribe her mother had come from.
"She was Irish," she said.
"She doesn't look Irish in the picture."
"Ha, driver's license pictures are wonderful compared to daguerreotypes. It's amazing that she even looks human."
But I did know that I was some fraction Indian, probably Cherokee. One of my mother's cousins had researched it and had followed the family history from Tennessee to Oklahoma down the Trail of Tears. Rumor had it that he had lived there and studied and even learned the language. When his daughter was born, he named her Nokwisi, Little Star. I remember my mother's aunts clucking that was a cruel name to give a little girl, but my mother thought it was wonderful and I did too.
I've since heard the phrase "related to Pocahontas" used to disparagingly describe someone with Native blood. My mother heard an off-handed insult and thought it was something she could be proud of. I was proud of it too. I tried to read everything I could find about Indians, not just children's books, but anthopologists' texts and biographies. It drove me crazy that my grandmother wouldn't answer my questions. I wanted to know everything that I could. I used to drive the other kids in my neighborhoods nuts. They didn't mind playing Indians sometimes, but I wanted to do Iroquois long houses or pre-Columbian Hopi and I wanted my details as perfect as I could make them. They didn't take too kindly to my protests when they tried to introduce pretend horses into the game.
When I was about twelve, I had the chance to meet my cousin Nokwisi. She had platinum blonde hair and blue eyes and insisted on being called Kim. All during my childhood, I had this image of my Indian cousin Nokwisi. She nearly reached imaginary playmate status - Nokwisi would have liked my games, Nokwisi wouldn't have thought me strange. And then when I met her, although she was a sweet girl with a pleasant laugh, she was just another blonde Kim.
Now, there are a lot of blonde people paying money to sit in sweat lodges, and people claiming to be shamans. There are also a lot of Native Americans wishing that we would leave them their religion after we have taken so much else. I donŐt know what I think about that. I'm reluctant to chase after their religion myself, but I suspect I know the wistfulness and respect that underlies the desire to have some claim on those cultures.
I'm just a little afraid that my grandmother might have been pure Irish after all, and I don't have any connection to these imagined ancestors. But whatever my real ethnic origins, Native culture and Native religions are a part of my own past and internal landscape. It means more to me than something that came out of a book, even if ultimately that's all I really had.
The stories that we chose for this anthology show Native culture and Native religions with respect and love, and in many cases a little bit of the wistfulness that I feel in not knowing whether the blood link that I've lived with for so long is real or not. Whatever your own background and beliefs, I hope these stories resonate with you.
Dawn Albright, Boston