ANNA'S LEGACY

My mother grew up in a dismal, deteriorating small town in southeastern South Dakota, inside the Yankton Sioux reservation, during the 1920's and 1930's. She (Dorothea), her parents, and her six siblings somehow crammed into this little house. 

When the kids in her family misbehaved, they were called dirty little Indians. My mom and her siblings hadn't been told that they also had some African heritage, so they didn't know why some kids in town also taunted them with the slur nigger.

Her father died when she was 17, but Dorothea managed to graduate from high school as an excellent student.

Her older brothers joined the military, and her mother took the remaining four daughters and moved West in hope of a better life. Dorothea had a challenging start to her new life in Southern California, but things eventually evolved and she ended up spending the majority of her years there, living a good life.

So my big question is, with such challenging and dismal years in her youth, why, in the early 1950's did she make sure that her three children all became enrolled Sioux tribal members? Far removed from South Dakota, in sunny Southern California, why did she not just let it go?

What is it about Native American heritage that remains so special, even in light of its long and tragic history of struggle? Why do I and some of my cousins remain preoccupied with that small percentage of our DNA identity? My generation of the family is far enough removed from this heritage, in both time and circumstance, that it could never be our main personal identities. Unless it somehow comes up in conversation, I don't mention to people that I'm a tribal member.

Yet I think that everyone in this branch of the family holds this sliver of heritage close to his or her heart. In genealogy, the number one false family story in the U.S. is that great grandma was a Cherokee maiden. Well, in our case great grandma Anna Dezera really was a Native American, a Yankton Sioux woman who married a soldier from the nearby military outpost. They spent the rest of their lives eking out a living by farming the reservation allotment land that she had been granted.

Great grandpa Micheal Howard & son Edward

In my full family tree, I have branches with many ethnicities and from many countries. They contain plenty of stories of courage, struggle, and achievement. But this single Native line of my heritage keeps drawing me back to it as I do my research. Rest assured that mine is not the common case of romanticizing the lives of the 19th century Indians. It turns out that my male Yankton ancestors made a specialty out of becoming scouts and interpreters for the U.S. government. Great grandmother had three husbands. Great grandmother's brother was indicted and convicted for running liquor into the reservation.

Nativism in the larger sense is flourishing throughout the planet right now, in a strange backlash against the monetary and technological trends of globalization. People more than ever, it seems, are staunchly clinging to identities based on city, state, region, country, ethnicity, sexuality, politics, religion, or sports. Take your pick. It's apparently strong in human nature to want to identify with a group. So perhaps being identified, if only to a degree, with a culture as unique as the Sioux, is something our family just cannot let fade away, as years pass and new generations arise.

An annual Indian Census record

To me, genealogy research is not just about collecting names and dates. It is about describing and documenting how, over centuries and decades, the gift of life was passed down from one generation to the next. It seems that it's impossible for me to fully describe that special regard I have for that part of me that is linked to the first people to inhabit this continent. So I continue to honor the ancestors by speaking their names and telling their stories.