(The Cherokees alone account for more than 200 of these recently formed unaffiliated tribes.) All of these tribes have emerged at a moment when Native Americans have experienced skyrocketing growth in population. They range from the most difficult - federal recognition, which is required for running a casino - to state and local designations and on to unrecognized groups. State recognition is merely one of many legal mechanisms used to legitimate a Native American tribe. The Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama is, according to the University of Oklahoma anthropologist Circe Sturm, one of more than 65 state-recognized tribes, most of which have emerged in the last few decades in the Southeast. It is a way to assuage a new kind of ethnic unease that can be felt throughout Indian Country. In the same way that blacks poke fun at white men who can't jump or Jews mock goyim mispronunciations of Yiddish words, it is not meant as much to put down others as to enunciate the authenticity and insider status of the person telling the joke. "I just love that one, because of course the Cherokees didn't have a princess." This joke - about the white person claiming a Cherokee princess - is heard pretty often these days from any Indian, coast to coast. "I hear some people say that they have a 'Cherokee princess' up the line," Morgan said with a laugh. She confided that she knows that there are fake Indians - so-called wannabes - and she says she feels sorry for them. Morgan's sincerity and her profound pleasure at all these discoveries in her ancestral line now influences every waking moment of her life, she said.
"I have had to learn everything from the ground up, and I'm learning every day."
"I hate to put it this way, but I'm a completely new Indian," she said. She had been attending powwows for years as a white woman, but became official two years ago after her genealogical work was done.
Morgan, though, was happy to talk about her relatively new status as an American Indian. Hardly an hour went by over the weekend that the event's spokeswoman, Karen Cooper, didn't sidle up to ask me if there was anything she could do. All weekend at the Jaycee Fairgrounds, the Cherokees of Northeast Alabama whom I spoke to were quite nervous that I might pronounce them, as some put it, "ethnic frauds." Hickman, the genealogist, insisted upon knowing if I was "going to make fun of them." In the days leading up to the powwow, he called me repeatedly, his voice filled with panic. More than half my time with this tribe was spent dealing with their anxiety that I might make this observation.Īmong the newer tribes, this anxiety can get especially intense. In fact, every Indian at the powwow looked white. What she didn't say was that the teasing is connected to the fact that neither she nor Jo-Jo look as much like Indians as they do regular Alabama white folks. "Sometimes Jo-Jo gets teased for being an Indian at school, but he doesn't care," Morgan said. She was particularly proud of Jo-Jo only a teenager, Jo-Jo had been chosen to serve as honorary headman and lead the grand entry just after the grass dancers performed later that afternoon. With the help of an amateur genealogist named Bryan Hickman, Morgan was able to connect her line to its Indian roots, and she began to raise her son, Jo-Jo, as a Native American. She had brought along a copy of a century-old receipt entitling an ancestor to receive some money from the United States government for being an Indian. "The only real proof we had that we were Indian was this stub," Morgan went on to say. campground named Cedar Winds that will eventually expand to include an "authentic, working Cherokee Indian Village." The tribe is committed to telling its story, in part through an R.V. She is now a member of one of the groups meeting here in Jasper, the Cherokee Tribe of Northeast Alabama, which itself is new, having organized under that name in 1997. "My grandmother always told me that she came from Indians," Morgan told me. Morgan had only recently discovered her Indian heritage, but, she said, in some ways she had known who she was for years. On one side, under her camper's tarp, sat Wynona Morgan, a middle-aged woman wearing a modestly embroidered Indian smock and some jewelry.
We belong to the earth," small groups gathered to check out the booths selling Indian rugs, dancing sticks, homemade knives and genealogy books. Amid pickups with bumper stickers reading "Native Pride" and "The earth does not belong to us. On a crisp morning in March at the Jaycee Fairgrounds near Jasper, Ala., the powwow was stirring.
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