Celtic Blood, Cherokee Blood, and Nature's Earthly Spirits

Helen Terry Dunton c. 1912

When I asked my redheaded Great Aunt Violet, who died many years ago but in whose western saddle I still ride, to tell me what she remembered about my paternal grandmother, she said, "Well, besides being a crack shot with a rifle, Helen was part Irish, and part Cherokee, and that wasn't a very good thing to be back then."   Auntie Vi was from the Dunton clan, my father's clan. "We have Scots blood," was the pronouncement, and I took it to mean that Scots blood was somehow superior to the Irish blood my grandfather had married into.  The Cherokee blood was rarely mentioned, and never with "princess" lineage claims. I continue to research this claim but have found no direct lineage tying me to enrolled ancestors, only the names of distant cousins and ties to Cherokee communities in Oklahoma such as Wauhillau and Stillwell.

Beyond the American Pale

In David M. Emmons book, Beyond the American Pale: The Irish in the West, 1845-1910, he points out interesting contrasts between the "wild" Catholic Irish, and the more respected Scots Irish who had been the Protestant dissenters.  And he draws interesting parallels between England's attempts to rid Ireland of the Irish, and America's attempt to rid America of it's Native Americans.  "Both peoples had 'a wealth of folk tales and a host of legends...and strange beliefs touching every native plant and animal...for the Irish, every cave, rock, inlet, cove, headland, hillock, hill, drumlin, rill, pond, and bog and all who lived in, on, over, and under them had a name."
 

photo from Celtic Lady blog artist unknown

I am drawn to the old clan systems of the Irish and the Scottish, and to their beliefs (not strange at all) that all of nature is inhabited by spirits--not supernatural spirits, but earthly spirits. Perhaps the Little People of the Cherokees have more in common with leprachauns than we know.  Both cultures were also constantly telling and renewing their own oral histories.  And a good thing, Emmons points out, for the written histories of these tribal peoples were being penned by their conquerors.  "The Irish, after all," Emmon writes, "had no money to bribe the historians."  And being "cattle folk as the Indians were buffalo hunters...'they would rather have cow dung than soil' on their hands."

Chief Cherokee John Ross circa 1835


This quote will make you want to read Emmon's chapter "Savage Twins" cautiously.  I question the statements that generalize (such as implying that all Indians were buffalo hunters).  Or this one: "Neither people had well established work habits," he writes.  "Both were materially poor beyond powers of description."  He seems to draw his conclusions from post-contact historians and anthropologists (none of them Native to my knowledge). It's interesting to note that had the Cherokee leaders NOT been prosperous in the early 1800s, both in land and culture, and had the literacy of the entire Cherokee Nation and the Cherokee Supreme Court not been a threat to the encroaching nonliterate immigrants, and had the gold on the Cherokee land not been coveted, the Trail of Tears might never have been forced upon them.

Scottish Highlanders: Indian Peoples

For years, when I thought of Ireland and Scotland, I thought of our family's visits to both countries in 1964, of heather covered hills and stone cottages, of thatched roofs where flowers bloomed, of the Celtic blood in my grandmother's veins.  But it wasn't until I started research on my novel Shifting Stars that I began to understand the intermingling of culture and blood between the Scottish and Native Americans.  And it wasn't until Joe McDonald, president at the time of Salish Kootenai Tribal College in Pablo, Montana, gifted me with a copy of Scottish Highlanders: Indian Peoples, Thirty Generations of a Montana Family that I realized that the Montana McDonald's traced their roots back to the great chiefs of the Nez Perce Indians.  No doubt, there really is an Indian "princess" in their ancestry.  And no doubt, earthly spirits still inhabit the mountains and creeks and rocks and trees of their homelands.

What are the legends of your homelands?  Do you feel the presence of earthly spirits when you walk the familiar trails of your childhood?  Are you drawn to particular historical settings when you're browsing the bookshelves for a new novel to read?  Perhaps your ancestors are whispering in your ear.

NOTES:  Read about the top 30 Celtic blogs at Celtic Lady.  Read more about Shifting Stars.  Search the Native Authors website for books on traditional storytelling, legends, and beliefs.