Charles Curtis: Native American 31st Vice President of the United States

There have been numerous claims of NA ancestry among former and current politicians at the highest levels of government. The only U.S. Vice President with fully documented NA ancestry was Charles Curtis, V.P. under Hoover from 1929 to 1933. Curtis was almost one-half NA. His mother, Ellen Pappan Curtis, was one-quarter Kaw, one-quarter Osage, one-quarter Pottawatomie, and one-quarter French.

Allusions to NA blood have been associated with Thomas Jefferson and Bill Clinton. In the 1880 presidential race between John Adams and Thomas Jefferson, some of Adams’ closest supporters accused Jefferson of being “a mean-spirited, low-lived fellow, the son of a half-breed Indian squaw, sired by a Virginia mulatto father.” The mudslinging did not hurt Jefferson, as he won the election. The allusion to Jefferson’s NA blood was reported in the book, The Johnny Cake Papers, written by Thomas Hazard in 1867.

More recently, former President Bill Clinton has declared that his grandmother was one-quarter Cherokee.

In the upcoming 2008 Presidential election, a number of candidates are claiming NA blood, among them Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and John Edwards. Hillary has stated that her maternal grandmother, Della Murray, was “from a family of French-Canadian, Scottish and Native American ancestry.”

Barack Obama asserted in his autobiography that “a distant ancestor” of his maternal great-grandmother “had indeed been a full-blooded Cherokee.”

John Edwards has claimed an Amerindian ancestor named “Kasoinah,” also known as Joanna, wife of James Rea of Henry County, Virginia.

Other than former Vice President Charles Curtis, none of these claims have been documented.

For further information, please see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Curtis and http://www.wargs.com/political/2008.html.