What makes someone Native American, and do I count as Chickasaw?
By Beth Dedman
March 9, 2019
Updated March 10
A bronze statue of a man greeted me in the afternoon of a cold February day in Sulphur, Oklahoma. He wore thigh-high leather boots, a loincloth, feathers in his mohawk, and held an arrow in one hand and a shield in the other. Seeing the mostly naked man at the Chickasaw Cultural Center only made me feel colder. He looked striking and noble and not much like me.
My pale skin and green eyes looked nothing like the man towering before me. I am technically Chickasaw, but not actually Chickasaw. There are 6.8 million American Indians and Alaskan Natives living in the U.S., according to the U.S. Census Bureau. But I didn’t know whether I really counted as one of them. I didn’t know what it really meant to be Chickasaw.
But as I entered the garden, a familiar name greeted me.
CHICKASAW NATION
HONOR GARDEN
Sulphur, OKLAHOMA
BILL ANOATUBBY GOVERNOR
Bill is my 73-year-old great uncle. I had come to the cultural center because I wanted to understand how I could possibly be Chickasaw and yet entirely not Chickasaw. Bill had compiled documents of our family history and lineage as far back as the 1800s, and I needed to see them.
The last time I had seen Bill was the summer of 2017 when I was 18. The higher education office of the Chickasaw Nation had awarded me with the Chickasaw Governor’s Scholarship, which I was to accept in a special ceremony at the McSwain Theatre in Ada, Oklahoma, near the headquarters of the Chickasaw Nation.
The McSwain Theatre was old, built in 1920 for silent movies, and hadn’t been updated much since then. I sat in a theater chair, looking onto the empty stage as I waited for other scholarship recipients to fill the seats around me. My mom and I got there a little early, so I sat in the student section by myself.
I had only been to one Chickasaw event before then. Growing up in Texas kept me hours away from the Chickasaw lands. My mom took me to a convention in Dallas when I was younger, but the only thing I remember about that convention is winning a tin of chocolate-covered potato chips. I hardly counted that as participating.
Sitting in the theater, waiting for the ceremony to start, was the first time I had ever really thought about how disconnected I was from the Chickasaws, and I became increasingly aware that I do not look Native American. I am only an eighth Chickasaw, and the other seven-eighths was made up of every ethnicity Europe had to offer. And I was about to go onstage and expect the Chickasaw people to accept me as one of them. I felt like I should just leave. I didn’t belong there. I would rather get a loan than embarrass myself in front of a theater full of Chickasaws.
I began to feel less like an imposter.
Another girl found her name placard on the seat in the row in front of me and sat down. She brushed her blonde hair over her shoulder as she adjusted herself in her seat.
Okay, maybe I’m not the only white person here.
I heard my mom speaking to somebody, so I turned around to see that the auditorium had filled up with parents and Chickasaw officials. That’s when I saw that she was talking to Bill.
He was shaking hands with elders and parents as he walked down the aisle with a kind, old smile stretched across his round face. I stood up to greet him, and as he moved along the line of people, he shook my hand like everyone else before me. He did a double-take and realized he had greeted his grand-niece like all the strangers he had greeted before her. He laughed as he pulled me in for a hug.
I felt more at ease, standing there with Bill, being greeted like family. Here stood my justification for being in this place, laughing and smiling and greeting students. I belonged when I stood by Bill.
But Bill had a ceremony to run and I had to sit back down. More students filled the seats. I was shocked to see how many of them looked like me.
There were some girls who definitely looked more Chickasaw than I did. They had that beautiful, long, black hair that I envied because my thin, brittle hair could hardly ever get longer than my shoulders before I needed to cut it. They had golden brown skin, which looked healthy and sun-kissed, unlike my pale, pasty skin.
But as I watched the girls onstage dancing in their traditional Chickasaw dresses – each a solid color with long sleeves, a high neck, a patterned apron and a golden crown – I once again felt like an outsider. I had never seen a dress like that, and instead of recognizing the music that played around them, I felt as connected to these dancers as I had to the Luau dancers I had seen in Hawaii.
The host of the ceremony called my name, and I walked across the stage to accept the Chickasaw scholarship. I shook hands with Bill and two other Chickasaw officials and accepted my certificate. I felt like a bug under a microscope the entire time. The rest of the ceremony went by quickly, and as we gathered to take the group photo, I once again felt pride when Bill introduced me as his grand-niece and had me stand by him as the photographer snapped a picture from the balcony.
That wave of confidence died quickly during the reception when I spilled punch all over the snack table.
Even after that ceremony, I didn’t feel like I belonged in the Chickasaw culture. I have a card that says I’m a Chickasaw citizen, but I don’t look like one and I didn’t grow up on the Chickasaw Nation lands in southern Oklahoma.
That was the last time I participated in any Chickasaw event. And I was okay with it. I didn’t really belong there anyway.
…
Since then, the most I have interacted with the Chickasaw Nation has been with Germaine Fields, the woman on the other side of the higher education emails, who is in charge of scholarship applications.
Every semester, I fill out a new application, plug it into the online form and wait for an email informing me how much money I will receive.
My first year of college, I didn’t give it very much thought. I was living in Gibson Hall at the University of Arkansas, and tuition, room, board and fees totalled close to $18,000. I accepted any and all financial help I could get because I felt extremely guilty asking my parents to pay that kind of money.
By the time my second year rolled around, I had moved to a small house off campus with a couple of friends and paid about $300 a month for rent. The amount I needed to pay for tuition and cost of living went down after my freshman year, only coming to about $6,000 per semester. The Chickasaw Nation paid for nearly $4,000 of that.
During the Thanksgiving break, I sat in my parents’ house in Fort Worth, Texas, preparing my application for the spring semester, when I had a thought:
Was I Chickasaw enough to deserve this money?
I didn’t feel Chickasaw enough. My mom was one-fourth Chickasaw – was that enough? Her dad, Teddy Anoatubby, was one-half Chickasaw. That means there are three generations between myself and someone who was undeniably Chickasaw. I didn’t go to any events, and I didn’t speak the language, and I only knew the bare bones of Chickasaw history.
A statue of Chickasaw warriors ready for battle is on display in front of the Holisso Research Center in Sulphur, Oklahoma. Photo by Beth Dedman
Much of Chickasaw history prior to the Europeans showing up was passed through the generations orally, so there aren’t very many dates in Chickasaw history. The tribe settled in the Mississippi-Tennessee region after splitting off from the Choctaw tribe sometime prior to the 1600s. After a series of conflicts with American settlers, the U.S. government gave them no choice but to relocate. But not all of the Chickasaw people stuck with the tribe in the relocation. Some Chickasaws who were pale enough to pass as white remained in Mississippi and assimilated into white society. Now, the Chickasaw Nation designates which families still belong, not by genetics, but by whether their family can be traced to lands designated to the Chickasaw people in the Allotment Act of 1887.
Did I have any right to go around telling people I was Chickasaw? What did that even mean?
…
Sean Teuton, an associate professor of English at the University of Arkansas, studies Native American literature and is part Cherokee. He believes that part of the tragedy of Native Americans is that their heritage has been defined by legalistic parameters.
“Those people who have citizenship, who take it seriously – they know their families, they know how they’re all related, they even know their clan,” Teuton said. “Ultimately, it’s about the people that define native nations. It’s about the people through who it is maintained and established and that is recognized through relationships.”
Prior to allotment, tribes, especially the Cherokee, could allow whoever they wanted into their tribe, regardless of whether they had Cherokee blood. But, because the Native-American tribes had to defend themselves from the encroachment of American culture, they had to draw a line in the sand about who really belonged.
That’s why when Sen. Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts claimed she has Native American ancestry, I would have deferred her Cherokee citizenship status to the Cherokee people, not to a genetic testing service.
“Using a DNA test to lay claim to any connection to the Cherokee Nation or any tribal nation, even vaguely, is inappropriate and wrong,” said Chuck Hoskin Jr., the tribe’s secretary of state. “Senator Warren is undermining tribal interests with her continued claims of tribal heritage.”
The Chickasaws drew the line at the Allotment Act. I walked into the Holisso Research Center at the Chickasaw Cultural Center to find the documentation for it. I had driven six hours to meet historical society vice chairman Wilson Seawright to dive into my family lineage.
If I could trace my family to the Allotment Act, I counted as Chickasaw. The Chickasaw government said so. Ultimately, it’s up to every tribe who they can allow into their tribe. Luckily, I now had a rubric for finding out if I belonged.
…
I stood next to my grandmother’s casket Dec. 16, 2018.
It was silver, with a pink pillowed interior, and covered with purple bouquets. As I gazed down at her, it wasn’t grief that washed over me, like I had expected, but disconnect. Her glasses, her hair, her hands curled into arthritic claws. Her features were all just as they had always been. Colder, stiffer, sure. But easily recognizable as belonging to Barbara Anoatubby.
Except they didn’t put her teeth in right.
My grandmother almost never wore her teeth. And the mortician had put them in at an odd angle. For some reason, this made my grandmother, my Banana, completely foreign to me.
My grandmother was Irish, but she took the name of Anoatubby when she married my grandfather Teddy. But I suddenly felt as disconnected from the Irish people around me in that parlor as I did from the Chickasaws at that scholarship ceremony.
I suddenly felt very disconnected from the entire situation, from the coffin, from the woman in it.
This isn’t my grandmother, and the people in this funeral parlor aren’t my family.
Genetically, we were all very similar. But I had a sneaking suspicion that without my grandmother as a lynchpin between us, I might never see much of the Irish side of the family again.
My grandmother’s death caused me to go into an identity crisis. I began to question everything about myself. The entire winter break, so many questions I had never considered before bounced around in my head. Then, an old one pushed itself to the foreground.
Do I actually count as a Chickasaw?
My grandfather Teddy is the only connection I have to the tribe. Bill is Teddy’s younger brother. They are both half-Chickasaw, half-Scots-Irish. It was their father, Joseph, who was fully Chickasaw. He died when my grandfather was 9 years old because of a bleeding ulcer that ruptured while he was at work in a Kraft cheese factory.
With those being the only facts I knew about Joseph, I didn’t feel very connected to him or his culture. Teddy and Bill’s Scots-Irish mother, Opal, had raised them and their four siblings before them, but she didn’t know the Chickasaw culture and its ways, so the Anoatubby children grew up disconnected from half of their cultural identity.
Teddy never really dove into the culture of his father, but Bill had.
…
It was about 22 degrees outside of the Holisso Research building. When I walked in, I struggled to get my frozen fingers to sign in at the reception desk, hesitantly checking off “Chickasaw Citizen: yes” on the form.
“Are you the one from Arkansas?” the receptionist asked. I nodded. “He’s been waiting for you.”
A tall man greeted me wearing wire-framed glasses, shoulder-length gray hair streaked with white and a grandfatherly demeanor. I shook Wilson’s Seawright’s hand. He looked Chickasaw.
We sat in a quiet corner of the research library, and he asked what I wanted to find out. I told him about myself. I told him I was only an eighth Chickasaw. I told him I hardly knew anything about the culture or the language, and I only recently learned about Chickasaw history through my research. He asked me what I had come all the way from Fayetteville, Arkansas to Sulphur, Oklahoma to ask.
“Is there such a thing as being Chickasaw enough?” I eventually asked him.
Inter-mixing has been a part of Indian and Chickasaw history for so long that it is hard to find very many people who were full-blooded Chickasaw, Seawright said. There has been evidence as early as the American Revolution of intermixing between white and Native American peoples. Seawright himself is the child of parents who were both half-Chickasaw.
It always comes back to tracing the family ancestry.
“Do you know your family name?” Seawright asked me.
“Anoatubby.”
He seemed to hesitate for a second and then disappeared behind a very official white door labeled “staff only.” He reappeared a few minutes later with a large white binder labeled:
GOVERNOR ANOATUBBY
ATCHISON ANOATUBBY
FAMILY FILE
RESEARCH
DOCUMENTS
I opened the binder to find a family tree outline, beginning with Bill and moving back toward Atchison Anoatubby, my great-great-great grandfather. Atchison signed the original deed among the Chickasaw lands. He was my connection to the Allocation Act.
I found the paper trail that proved my Chickasaw-ness. But I had always known there was one. I didn’t suddenly feel more Chickasaw. I still just felt like a dumb kid having a quarter-life crisis.
The Anoatubby family arrives on their allotted land circa 1890 in what is now Oklahoma. Atchison Anoatubby, my great-great-great grandfather, is the man standing on the left in the black suit and neckerchief. Courtesy of the Holisso Research Center
“You should really sit down and talk with your grandfather,” Seawright said.
I shook Seawright’s hand and thanked him for his help. I spent most of my day in the Chickasaw Cultural Center walking from building to building, looking at art, trying the Chickasaw Special (an Indian taco, pashofa, grape dumplings and a drink) and walking through the museum and the Chikasha Inchokka’ Traditional Village.
I spent about four hours at the Cultural Center and learned a lot about Chickasaw history and culture, which all felt foreign to me.
But I still didn’t feel any more Chickasaw. When it came time for the center to close, I packed up my camera bag and returned to my car for the two-hour drive to my grandpa’s home in Oklahoma City.
…
I rolled up to the Baptist Village Senior Living center around 7 p.m. and unlocked my grandfather’s apartment with a spare key my mom had given me.
“I’m back, Grandpa.”
Teddy emerged from around the corner to greet me. My grandfather never really looked like he was ever comfortable. He always bounced his hands on his side as he talked and always seemed to second-guess his words.
My grandfather Teddy Anoatubby stands in his home Feb. 16, two days before his 80th birthday. The Chickasaw Nation gifted him a bolo tie with the official Chickasaw Seal to identify him as an elder. Photo by Beth Dedman
As Grandpa offered me something to eat from the pantry, some of the words Seawright had said to me rang in my ears. I decided to take Seawright’s advice and talk to my grandfather.
Grandpa showed me the bolo tie the Chickasaws sent to him the day before. It had the official seal of the Chickasaws attached to a black leather strap. They sent it to him to recognize him as an elder.
“I never really participated much with the Chickasaws,” he said. “I wish I had.”
That made me pause. No wonder I felt disconnected. Being Chickasaw was something I had to seek out. It was a relationship I had to work for.
I realized as I talked with him that this was the first time I had ever spent with Grandpa by myself. Either my mother was there or my grandmother was. But now that Banana was gone and my mom was in Texas, I found myself alone with my grandfather.
I tried to ask him some questions.
I had to speak loudly so that he could hear me, and I often repeated questions when he got confused. He had never been much for talking, but this was the most I had ever talked with him about his life.
He was born in 1939. He joined the U.S. Air Force because he didn’t want to go to his senior year of high school. He was honorably discharged in 1957. He studied business when he went to a two-year college. He met my grandmother through a roommate of his in 1960. They got married in 1961. He lived in the Oklahoma City area for most of his life. The Department of Veterans Affairs put him on full-disability in 1964. He really misses my grandmother.
After a while, I think the questions made him too uncomfortable, and he became really insistent that I should watch a movie. He pulled out several DVDs from the hundreds my grandmother had collected.
I saw a collector’s edition of Hitchcock movies in a red velvet box on the shelf. I knew he loved old horror movies, so I suggested we watch “Rear Window.”
He popped popcorn and we split a Coke.
I have never felt as connected to my Chickasaw family as I did sitting in a reading chair, sipping Coke and munching on popcorn while I watched Hitchcock with my grandpa.