Cherokee/Blackfoot ????

[Wojapi4Me]

I've noticed a lot lately that many people are claiming to be Cherokee/Blackfoot. I know that the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana is relatively small so how are all these people a mixture of Cherokee and Blackfoot? Granted, most of these are of the...how do you say...well, we'll just say "out there" persuasion.

Has anyone else noticed this?

[WhoMe]

For some reason the following are on the top 5 lists of tribes nonIndians wan-na-be?

Cherokee
Apache
Lakota
Blackfoot
and Yaqui


Even actors/actresses wan-na-be these tribes too and often list them on their bios.

I once met this rich white lady that REALLY was. . . "searching."

She told me that she was an Indian and her tribe was. . . Well. It was a tribe that. Well, a tribe that has a foot in it's title.

I said, "OH, your a HOTFOOT Indian!"

She said, "Yes! That's it!"

[Emmy]

I've noticed a lot lately that many people are claiming to be Cherokee/Blackfoot. I know that the Blackfeet Tribe of Montana is relatively small so how are all these people a mixture of Cherokee and Blackfoot? Granted, most of these are of the...how do you say...well, we'll just say "out there" persuasion.

Has anyone else noticed this?

because somewhere some1 read that a lost tribe down south was blackfoot. i hear it alot when ever some tells me they r black foot i ask them: apakuni, siksika, or kainai? they end up sayin the one from down there and i say none of them. then they get mad and walk away.

[DANCINGEAGLE]

because somewhere some1 read that a lost tribe down south was blackfoot. i hear it alot when ever some tells me they r black foot i ask them: apakuni, siksika, or kainai? they end up sayin the one from down there and i say none of them. then they get mad and walk away.

You go girl. Tell them like it is. Some people want to belong soooooo bad.

[Wojapi4Me]

Emmy, that's awesome LOL

The reason I started this thread was because I've been hearing lots of people at pow wows stating they are Cherokee/Blackfoot and then I've seen countless people here on pws.com with that as their tribal affiliation. I know of one family here in Cherokee that has that mix, and their grandpa is from Montana. I'm sure there are others who are Oklahoma Cherokee mixes, but was curious as to where all these yahoos get that mixture to claim?

[tsuj510]

Singerdad, yeah its like I said in my email to you.

I dont know the history of the Blackfoot side of the story, but I have heard reputible employees of CNOT say that when the Invaders did the Land Grab, they had all of these newspaper ads up nationwide saying, "is your last name Smith (for example)? If so, you may be able to claim this land in Indian Territory" and the rush was on. Outsiders did not realise that some Indians had adopted white last names and thats the beginnnig of this whole mess. That's why some whites hear names like Bollen (I'll use my family name here for illustrative purposes) and think "Oh I must be Cherokee.."
when in fact, it was not the case..
Does anyone know the other side of the story? I'd like to know the Blackfeet Lakota/Blackfoot Confederacy side of things.

[Emmy]

i dont know about what he said but i know here on the east coast there are people who believe they are blackfoot. i dont know too much about it but when u google it it says something about eastern siouan or wikipedia says it was a band of cherokee that had black roots

[Blackbear]

I also thought it had to do something with a chief named Blackfoot and everyone assumed they meant he was a blackfoot.

[Str8Dancer49]

Back in the 1970s this wannabe guy named Jamake Highwater claimed to be Cherokee and Blackfoot. He was one of the first new-agey guru types, and wrote some BS books about Native art. He also had a TV show called "The Primal Mind" (don't that sound just sooooo new-agey?!). I'd bet that's where this particular combo of Cherokee/Blackfoot got popularized.... ex-hippies thinking their down with this pseudo indian just claimed the same tribes as him, probably as a kind of hippy-trippy solidarity..... after all, the flower power movement also tried to co-opt the word n!##er for any one who thought they were downtrodden or oppressed, so there were a bunch of white trust fund babies saying they were the N-word..... they must've all switched to being Cherokee/Blackfoot after getting ahold of Highwater's garbage.

[wyo_rose]

wikipedia says it was a band of cherokee that had black roots

That's what I heard. So instead of saying they're part black, they say blackfoot??????

[Emmy]

That's what I heard. So instead of saying they're part black, they say blackfoot??????

i guess. i dunno. i had read it

[Wojapi4Me]

Interesting Read

Ok...this essay supports the thoughts of Emmy and several others. Found this as I googled Cherokee Blackfoot...check it out...

Cherokee-Blackfoot stories--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Back in 1991 i moved to Chattanooga from Minneapolis. Two years later i was invited to join in the founding and development of the Chattanooga InterTribal Association (CITA). Recently (ca.1997) an education graduate student at the local university told me that there was a local 'tribe' of Cherokee and Blackfoot over in the Cleveland, Tennessee area. I was amazed, given that the Blackfeet are a tribe from the Montana and Alberta, Canada area and the Cherokee from the Tennessee, Georgia and Carolinas area, and that these two very different Native nationalities were represented down here about 40 miles northeast of Chattanooga.
This was not the first time i had heard of this mix: back around 1994 a member of CITA had said that he was Cherokee&Blackfoot. I was puzzled by the fact that these two nations are separated by over 2,000 miles and at least ten Native nations in between (not to mention the differences in language and culture), and that these two nations have never shared any geographical proximity before or after the racial cleansing of this area (euphemistically referred to as "The Removal" or "The Trail of Tears"), ie, not here in the southeast United States or in Oklahoma or Texas. Moreso than simply puzzled, i became suspicious that the claimed incidences of Cherokee&Blackfoot mixing could be better explained by something other than a statistical anomaly.

So i've been wondering how this mixture of nationalities took place. Part of this curiosity is fueled by my own mixed-blood Native heritage - Blackfoot & Hunkpapa Lakota of Standing Rock. Among the Lakota/Dakota/Nakota Nation, Blackfoot is a clan that i've never heard anybody refer to apart from history and cultural texts. Another part of the mystery is the term "Blackfoot" itself: the tribe up north is called "Blackfeet", but most people claiming this mix with Cherokee blood refer to themselves as "Blackfoot" -- is it the same? or different? I haven't found "Blackfoot" people who know much - if anything - about the Blackfeet up north. What does this mean?

I've come to the conclusion, albeit based on personal observations, the following information and stories and my growing knowledge of Cherokee history, that for the most part, the claim to Cherokee and Blackfoot blood is actually a story intentionally designed by people's ancestors to cover up the African ("Black") bloodline in their past, and to disguise it as a racial group more commonly accepted in White majoritarian society - American Indian. Hence "Black" becomes "Blackfoot", and thereby more tolerable to White relatives.

Granted that there certainly are actual instances in which Blackfeet and Cherokee people have met and intermarried - i readily accept this. But down here in the South, and the Chattanooga area specifically, where Whites are now so ready to cite their Native American ancestors, there still exists a very deep racial prejudice among Natives and Whites against having African/Black ancestors. I hear about it all the time -- the bad-mouthing by Native full-bloods and mixed-bloods alike of a local full-blood Indian Commissioner who's reputed to have Black blood, fully intended as a racial slur; the active ignoring of the local African American community whose various members have, by far, more Native blood than their White counterparts; the attempts to cheapen the Indianess of another state official involved in American Indian politics by saying she's Black, not Indian, because she looks more Black; the self denial of any Black blood by a Native American very active in Tennessee Native politics who appears to have African ancestors. These incidents tell me that Black/african blood will be denied in most every person's genealogy.

In sum, my argument is based entirely on the philosophical principle of Occam's razor (see the bottom of this page for a more complete explanation) -- that when faced with differing explanations for an event, rational simplicity is best. So when given the concept of Cherokee & Blackfoot marriages and their general lack of explanation, i deduce from their geographical separation that it is unlikely that such a preponderance of marriages actually occurred between Blackfoot people of the Northwest and Cherokee people of the Southeast, and that a simpler, more logical explanation is that "Blackfoot" became a way of disguising African/"Black" relatives and ancestors.

I'm interested in what you think about this theory, especially if you offer proof to debunk or support it.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

tpkunesh

[Wojapi4Me]

Found this information as well:

Setting the Record Straight About Native Peoples: Southern BlackfeetQ: Did the Blackfoot Indians ever live in the South (Georgia, Virginia, the Carolinas, etc.)? Did they ever merge with the Cherokee tribe?
A: It's interesting how often this question comes up. The Blackfoot Indians are people of the Northern Plains--Montana and Alberta, Canada--where they still live to this day. Not only did they never live in the southern states, they were never forced to move to Oklahoma, so they never had close contacts with the Cherokees either before or after the Trail of Tears.

However, during the 1800's, a lot of Native Americans suddenly began to surface in the southeast identified as "Blackfoot" or "Blackfoot-Cherokee." There are several theories as to why. It's been suggested that "Blackfoot" may have just been a popular tribe around then, so great-grandma from South Carolina got remembered as a Blackfoot Princess or something like that, simply because it sounded more glamorous than Catawba. This kind of thing happened more often than you might think (coincidentally enough, many people have been incorrectly identified as Cherokees when they really belonged to some other tribe, as well). A second possibility is that "Blackfoot" may have been kind of a code word for a person of mixed Indian and African heritage. There's an interesting site about this idea here. Finally, I've heard it suggested that local white people may have called the Saponi people of Virginia and North Carolina "Blackfoot" for some reason. There's not a lot of evidence of this, but it's possible. As the Saponi were known for taking in escaped African slaves, perhaps the second and third theories might both be true.

[Morningstar Singer]

I thought that BlackFEET were sioux and the BlackFOOT were the ones from Montana. Is that a myth or has things changed?
thank you for answering.

[wyo_rose]

Nothing's changed, but you're mixed up.

The Blackfeet tribe is from Montana.

The rest is VERY interesting.