As a Cherokee without tribal affiliation with Scottish and English ancestry as well, my “cherokeeness” is often questioned and marginalized. The discussion continues to my explanation that I should not have to choose which ancestry I prefer and that one ancestry does not negate the other. A motif in these discussions, however, is that I am not a thoroughbred Cherokee. The underlying counterargument, of course, is that the Cherokees faced one of the largest exterminations in world history, let alone in America.

Genocide is a provocative and powerful term. The Holocaust is the acceptable example for genocide. In the same century, however, the Armenians faced extermination by Turkey and the Rwandans’ own civil strife involved eradication of a population. The United States’ own program of eliminating a population came before all of these. The controversial element is that as a society we can recognize undeniably the Holocaust as evil, but we skirt around the Armenian tragedy, and so often ignore the reality of the Cherokee elimination. Without doubt, the Trail of Tears is one of the most famous elements of American history and appears in school textbooks, but a full examination is often neglected. Our study does not include the word “genocide,” but rather we examine it as a forced march or some other tragedy that we distance ourselves from (some of us do not find this distance so easy). The propagated story does not tell how the Cherokees were eliminated not just by the forced march, but by interbreeding so that so much of the population does have “diluted” blood.

Ishaq D. Al-Sulaimani delves into this often untold account of “genetic warfare.” Al-Sulaimani presents the realities of the slaughter and enslavement of the males while the women were refused tribal rights and inheritence. The schism created was not only a mixing of blood, but a clear removal from the once dominant culture. Al-Sulaimani notes that 90% of Cherokees are less than 1/4 Cherokee (even those with tribal affiliation). These powerful statistics and facts are often misunderstood or not known. The facts demonstrate the ludicracy of claims that Cherokees without tribal affiliation somehow are less Cherokee; that Cherokees that are interracial somehow have less of a right to identify with their Cherokee heritage; and that the stereotype of Cherokee culture and its ancient nation are the only model for claiming Cherokee identity.

Without staying too long on my soap box, I again have to reiterate, as in my previous entries, that nobody has a right to determine somebody else’s identity. Yes many of us are white or black, but we are also Cherokee. We must continue to identify with this ancestry as 90% of us are mixed and if we lose this identity, then the US extermination of our people may yet be succesful.