[dovelady]

Hello everyone. My sister Annie (Settewindx2) and I have just started to get active on this board. I have been signed on for a long time under the name of Barb, but I wasn’t active. My Barb name doesn’t work anymore so I took this name Dovelady, which I have had for many years as a screen name on other places.

For those of you who don’t know us yet, we are Tom’s first cousins – once removed. We share a common Great Grandmother, Angeline Ellen (Harding-Hardy-Hardin) Groat. My Grandmother, Elsie May Groat Dunn and his Grandmother Sylvia Matilda Groat were sisters.

Grandmother was born in 1900. And as we all know, being an Indian here in the States at that time was not a popular and so many of them tried to hide their heritage. We have an oral history that Grandmother was born on a reservation and drank mares milk as an infant. We can’t prove it though. It is just oral history from my father. But when she was 4 years old her father got a land grant which just happened to be right between two Reservations. Coincidence? I don’t know.

Our Grandmother spoke the native tongue when my father was a small boy. He remembered being a young boy and sitting in the kitchen listening to his Mother and Grandmother speak ‘the language’. One day he got curious and asked her what she was saying and what type of Indian they were. Grandmother told him to shut up and never mind and then told him they were Cherokee.

From that time on, my Grandmother would not speak ‘the language’ in front of any of the kids. However, she did hang on to one word which Tom was able to decipher or have translated for us. When Grandma got frustrated with my father she’d yell at him and say Ne Ka Shae . Which , to make it short, means “long Briar’ or basically he was an irritation. LOL

But, like so many others, at other times Grandmother would deny being Indian and claimed to be ‘Black Dutch’. Other times when Daddy asked her about what kind of Indian they were she would tell him some other tribe. I wish he was still alive so I could ask him if it was Blackfoot.

Knowing all of that, I am amazed that we have a picture of her wearing the tunic with the holy symbols on it. Since my father was born in 1927. Even though she was ‘ashamed’ or ‘fearful’ of being identified as an Indian she still wore her symbols. That amazes me. So maybe she wasn’t so fearful as I was led to believe. Also, all you have to do is take a good look at her to know she is Indian.

Daddy also said that she and the other adult members of her family wore a medicine bag. (I described what it looked like under the subject of ‘Tom’s Family’. But so you don’t have to go over to that string, I’ll describe it here again.)

Daddy said that the medicine bag was made out of a flat circle of soft leather. Holes were punched around the edge and then a thong was woven in and out of the holes. Herbs and such were placed in the bag and then the thong was pulled up tight and the bag would close.

Since I wrote the last post, I do remember my father telling me they did bead the bags, but he didn’t remember what the designs were. (I’ll try to see if I can find my notes from when I talked to him to see if I forgot anything about them.) He also said that the medicine bags were worn long and tucked into their shirts and rested between their breasts. I guess over time the bags softened and flattened. But Daddy said that when they opened the bag again to add more herbs or whatever else they kept in there, the bag would lay flat.

I wish I had more pictures of Grandmother when she was younger. I have some when she is older, But most of her stuff was lost when she died. I am hoping that my Aunt, who is the only sibling of my father’s left, has some I could get copies of. But, from what my father said, when Grandmother died, most of her stuff went to her 2nd husband, Clyde Williams, and we don’t know what happened to it.

I started doing genealogy because my father wanted me to find proof of him being Cherokee. Well, I didn’t find it before he died, except for Tom confirming that the name Grandmother called him was indeed an old Cherokee language.

I quit doing genealogy research a couple years ago because I got frustrated at the ‘real’ Indians putting me down and calling me all kinds of names and such. I turned my back on that part of my heritage because I was so frustrated with the anger and prejudice I found in the NA community. Then when my Father died a year ago I packed it all up and put it away and called it quits.

Then a couple months ago my sissy, Setterwindx2 wanted to start helping and so I got the boxes out again. Then Tom contacted me out of the blue and so here we are.

One more thing I remembered that my Father used to say all the time was ‘Split The Blanket’. He would use this term when he was cutting someone out of his life, or when he spoke of him mother and father’s divorce. — Just a little bit of trivia there

It is great to find a commuinty where we are welcomed and honored for what we are not ridiculed for what we are not.

Ok. I don’t know if Annie wants to add anything to this or not. And I may add more later on if something comes up. But at least you have a slight introduction to who we are.

Barb and sissy Annie (Setterwindx2)

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