The reason that my father made this demonstration was also to show our family's knowledge of the history and orginal language the Cherokee people. Why?
Stick Ross Mountain is an unimpressive peak. It's more of a gentle hill,
really, poking out from behind the Wal-Mart just west of Tahlequah, the capital
of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma.
But to the Cherokee, the
900-foot crest was remarkable enough to be named for a revered 19th-century
member of the tribal council. Stick Ross is thought to be the grandson of Chief
John Ross, who led the tribe along the Trail of Tears. Ross the younger was a
respected Native American and a skilled diplomat who acted as a liaison between
tribes and local townsfolk. "He knew sign language and spoke Cherokee and
Seminole. He was a trapper and a farmer and a rancher," says Stick's
great-grandson, Leslie Ross, a 56-year-old retired civil servant whose greatest
joy is recounting the Stick trivia he learned from his family in Muskogee. "And he was sheriff at one time, too. He was
pretty renowned in Tahlequah. Stick may have died an exemplary citizen of the
Cherokee Nation, but he was born into slavery.
And yet, three-quarters of a
century after the death of Cherokee legend Stick Ross, there's no room for his
great-grandson in the Cherokee Nation. Leslie Ross has been denied citizenship
in the tribe on the grounds that he is not truly Indian. "They said I
don't have any Indian blood. They say blacks have never had a part in the
Cherokee Nation," says Ross, his usually calm voice swelling with
anger. "The thing is, there wouldn't be a
Cherokee Nation if it weren't for my great-grandfather. He was more Indian than the Indians!"
Ross is just one of at least
25,000 direct descendants of Freedmen who cannot join Oklahoma's largest tribes. Once paragons of racial inclusion
and assimilation, the Native American sovereign nations have done an about-face
and systematically pushed out people of African descent. "There's never
been any stigma about intermarriage," says Stu
Phillips, editor of The Seminole Producer, a local newspaper in central Oklahoma. "You've got Indians marrying whites, Indians
marrying blacks. It was never a problem until they got some money."
In 1980, there were 50,000
members of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma; today, there are more than a
quarter million. But even as the official ranks of the Five Civilized Tribes
have swelled, they've revised membership guidelines to exclude the Freedmen.
In 1983, the Cherokee tribe
established a rule requiring citizens to carry a Certificate of Degree of
Indian Blood. This federal document is available to anyone whose ancestors
are listed on the Dawes Roll
Not all tribal members
reject the merits of the Freedmen's cause. Seventy-year-old John Cornsilk, who is seven-eighths Cherokee, opposed the 1983
decision to rescind Freedmen's voting rights - which he said happened because
many Freedmen were backing a progressive candidate running for chief. Tribal leaders,
he says, "colluded and drew up a new set of rules that said only people
that could produce one of those cards could be a member. What the Cherokee
Nation of Oklahoma has been doing in regard to disenfranchising the Freedmen is
all totally illegal."
Cornsilk's son, David, has taken up his father's cause. While
working in the tribe's enrollment office in the 1980s, he found that about a
third of the Freedmen applications had some documented Native American
ancestry. When higher-ups told him that these people could not be enrolled, he
became an advocate for the Freedmen from the inside, helping black plaintiffs
prepare to file suit in tribal courts. "I came to realize that this was a
deep-rooted problem, that racism in my tribe was profound," he says. "They
were perpetrating a genocide, a paper genocide."
And so, in recent years, a
rush of Indians has come forward to claim tribal citizenship and get their
share of the benefits. These are boom
times for the Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma - the Cherokee, Chickasaw,
Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole - due in no small part to the 1988 Indian Gaming
Regulatory Act that allowed the tribes to construct their own casinos. (This is
also the year that my father confirmed an agreement with
the Ebos of Nigeria (The Assembly of Yahweh). The Chickasaw's net assets have more than
doubled to $315 million in the two years since it opened the mammoth WinStar Casinos complex in Thackerville.
The corporate arm of the Cherokee Nation, Cherokee Nation Enterprises, is on
track to make nearly $70 million this year thanks to a new casino in Catoosa.
Then there's the government reparations fund.
In 1990, the Seminoles
received a $56 million settlement as compensation for the seizure of the
tribe's ancestral lands in Florida
almost 200 years ago.
The casino profits and
make-good money have increased the standard of living for the recognized
members of the tribes who make their homes in some of the poorest areas in the US. Cherokee Nation Enterprises allocates 25 percent of
profits to the Cherokee government, which distributes the money in ways
designed to help end the cycle of poverty - college scholarships, health care,
and low-interest home loans. And the Seminole Nation offers grants for home repairs,
which many of the ramshackle structures in Seminole County can sorely use. On the outskirts of Wewoka, the county seat, families
loll on wooden porches that seem one gust of wind away from collapse.
For the better part of the
20th century, black Indians were permitted to vote in elections, sit on tribal
councils, and receive benefits. Tribal leaders now insist that the Freedmen
were never actually citizens and that they will never attain the honor of
membership because they don't have Native American blood.
Outraged, numerous Freedmen
have turned to the courts for help. In the most celebrated case, a black tribal
leader named Sylvia Davis filed suit against the Seminole tribe in 1994 to get
her son a $125 clothing stipend from the Seminole reparations money. But US
courts have repeatedly refused to meddle in Indian affairs, noting that the
sovereign nations determine their own membership criteria. Davis suffered a serious - and perhaps final - setback
last year, when the Supreme Court refused to consider her appeal of a lower
court's ruling that the Seminoles could not be sued in federal court. (The Bush
administration filed a brief on behalf of the tribe.)
The activities from that
year have lead to the establishment of the "International Decade of the World's
Indigenous People (1995-2004)". In July
and August of 1996, the Washitaw empress lead an emissary to the Summer conferences at the United
Nations offices at Geneva, Switzerland. During the
14th session of the United Nations Working Group on the Indigenous
Peoples, the Washitaw de Dugdahmoundyah
was recorded as "the Oldest Indigenous People on Earth" in the final list of
all attendees.
2000 AD
In 2000, the Seminoles
expelled all 2,000 black members and denied their families a cut of the reparations
money - never mind that their ancestors joined the tribe in the 18th century,
endured the march from Florida
to Oklahoma in the 1830s, and have considered themselves Indian
for generations.
Also in the year 2000, for
the first time since the Cherokee council was disbanded, on May 5th
2000 the Judicial Committee
was formed and at the same time the planets of the galaxy aligned with one
another since 6000 years ago. And the
same day my father Howshua (of the Black Indian organization 'the Tabernacle Congregation
of Prayer') was made one of the judges (or chiefs) among five others: Rabbi Sholomo Levy
of Eloheim Hebrew Congregation, Rabbi Capers Funnye Jr of Beth Shalom B'nai Zaken Ethiopian Hebrew Congregation, Princess Zeridah Yehudah Ha'Sh'ar Universal
Cultural Center, Brother Yirmeyahu Shlomo of Shlomo Beth Yisrael, and Moreh Elisha of House of Israel Hebrew Class.
Now, just as the Freedmen's
struggle appears all but lost, new hope is emerging from an unlikely place -
the front lines of genetic science. Last year, several Freedmen leaders were
approached by a molecular biology professor named Rick Kittles. As head of
African Ancestry, a company he had recently founded to sell DNA testing
services to amateur genealogists, Kittles promised to reveal any customer's preslavery roots, whether they stretch to the Tikar of Cameroon or the Mende of
Sierra Leone. Mr. Kittles, whom works at
Howard University, was contact by, my father, Howshua on the subject of DNA testing of
Black Indian.
Kittles heard about the
Freedmen's plight from a friend at the University of Oklahoma and wondered how the black Indians' genetic makeup would compare to
other subsets of the African-American population, such as the isolated
residents of South
Carolina's Gullah Islands. He visited the 2004 conference of the Descendants of the Freedmen of
the Five Civilized Tribes, an organization dedicated to ending
"discrimination against people of mixed Indian African descent," and
offered free DNA tests. There are many light-skinned tribal citizens with less
than 1 percent Indian genetic material; most Freedmen claim to have at least
that much. So they began taking Kittles' test in hopes that science would
succeed where rhetoric, litigation, and historical documents have failed.
"It's important that
we be able to establish that we are Indian people, not just African people who
were adopted into the tribe," says Marilyn Vann, who is suing the Cherokee Nation for citizenship. [The
proof of her claims is to the left showing a shaved-head ancient black Indian
(from the site Cacaxtla in Mexico that dates from 650 to 900 A.D) long before black
slaves or Europeans ever arrived on the shores of the Americas. Found in 1975 and excavated by the National
Autonomous University of Mexico]. "If you're the average tribal member,
you don't want to be discriminated against because you look Indian. So how can
you discriminate against other people just because they have some African
features?"
"I have something for
you."
A linebacker-sized man with
a shaved head and a disarming smile, Ron Graham is holding a manila
envelope stuffed with hundreds of fuzzy photocopies bearing lists of names and
numbers in chicken-scratch script. He ushers me to an
empty table in Dale Hall, on the University of Oklahoma campus in Norman. We're here for the third annual meeting of the
Descendants, the highlight of which will be Kittles' presentation on the
results of last year's DNA tests.
When he's not working in a
nearby xanthan gum factory, Graham moonlights as a
genealogist-for-hire and vice president of the Descendants. He specializes in
helping African-Americans who believe their Native American roots have been
obscured by a combination of government racism and tribal avarice. Like Vann,
Ross, and Davis, Graham took a DNA test to help prove his heritage and is in
the midst of suing the Creeks to gain membership. In the final days of August,
just as this issue of Wired hits newsstands, he will present his case, complete
with DNA test results, to the tribal council. Graham believes that, in the face
of scientific evidence, the Creeks will return his birthright.
Graham admits that money is
a factor in his crusade: His three college-age sons could benefit from federal
scholarships reserved for Native Americans. But he's not just looking for a
handout. He seeks recognition as a Creek because that's how he has
always identified himself. Graham fondly remembers his late father, Theodore
"Blue" Graham, dancing at the stomp grounds near the town of Arbeka, where Creeks in traditional dress would gather for
sacred ceremonies. Blue spoke Creek fluently and handed down some knowledge of
the language to his son. During one of his citizenship hearings with Creek
Nation officials, Ron was shocked to learn that he was one of the only people
in the room who could recognize the word for girl written in the tribe's
ancestral language. "My nation won't accept me because of skin
color," he says, shaking his head.
(The Bat-Creek inscription proves that our ancient
language is Hebrew)
Graham leafs through
documents that he believes will demonstrate his ancestors had considerable
Creek blood. He shows me a handwritten testimonial
from Keeper Johnson, a full-blooded Creek and member of the Creek National
Council, recognizing Blue as a fellow citizen. "I have known Theodore
Graham since 1946 as a Creek Indian," the note reads. "He was
traditional and spoke our language fluently. I always assumed he was Creek
decent [sic]." Graham also dredged up documents known as Proofs of Death
and Heirship, which list his father as one-eighth
Indian - 12.5 percent.
Then he flips to his trump
card. It reads, "Creek Nation, Creek Roll, Card
No. 191." The date stamp: Approved by the Secretary of the Interior March 3, 1902. Above the seal is the name Rose McGilbray.
When it was completed, likely by a clerk working for the Department of the
Interior, McGilbray was 35 years old. In a column
headed "Blood," the notation says "Full." "See, this
is my great-great-grandmother on my mother's side," Graham says. It's official recognition of McGilbray as a member of the Dawes Roll.
Now the
Oklahoma Freedmen find themselves haunted by a 99-year-old clerical error
motivated by racism or incompetence, or both. "To this day, in Oklahoma, we don't exist, our history doesn't exist. Everyone
should have the right to reclaim their heritage," says Anissia
Vo. Her grandfather, a Creek Freedman, said his dying wish was for his entire
family to become recognized members of the tribe. Vo,
who lives in Muskogee, has spent the last four years documenting her
heritage and struggling to get recognition from the Creek government. "My great-grandfather
was born Creek, his birth certificate says he was Creek. But when he died, he
died a black man. (as his forefathers were called
"black Indians", shown above from the
site Cacaxtla in Mexico that dates from 650 to 900 A.D) long before black slaves or Europeans
ever arrived on the shores of the Americas. Found in 1975 and excavated by the National
Autonomous University of Mexico].) It's upsetting to deal with someone telling
you, 'We don't care what you were yesterday - from now on you're going to have
to be someone else.' We want them to acknowledge our existence."
Even in the rare case that a
Freedman can trace an ancestor to the Dawes Roll, as with Ron Graham and his
great-great-grandmother Rose McGilbray, the tribes
find a new way to ensure that the Freedmen are always the odd men out. The
Creek tribal council has so far refused to believe that Graham is related to McGilbray. Which is why Graham turned to
science in search of irrefutable evidence. His test reveals that he's
genetically 9 percent Native American. If the tribes insist that
they'll only accept members who are Indian by blood, he'll show them what's in
his blood.
Searching for obscure
ancestors once meant combing through the bowels of the National Archives or
sending shot-in-the-dark letters to strangers who share a last name. Now anyone
with a budding interest in their family tree can order a DNA test kit. Swab the
inside of your cheek, mail the sample to a lab, which searches for variations
that appear in certain ethnicities, and in a few weeks you'll receive a CD
telling you your great-great-grandmother was born in Senegal. For those who
obsess over matters such as whether their heavy tooth enamel indicates Creole
roots, genetic tests are a quick way to separate scientific fact from family
fiction.
Many of the early adopters
shell out a few hundred dollars just to prove to themselves that their cells
are more exotic than their faces. "Ninety percent of the people
interested in Native American ancestry are people who look as European as
could be," says Tony Frudakis, chief scientific
officer of DNAPrint Genomics, a Sarasota, Florida,
genetic testing company. "They think they might have a Native American
ancestor three or four generations back. We call it the American Indian
Great-Grandmother Princess."
DNA tests works fine for
amateur genealogists, but they're hardly foolproof. Two of the three on the
market - Y chromosome and mitochondrial DNA - are limited in scope. The Y
chromosome test looks for variations on just 1.5 percent of a male's genes. The
mtDNA test reads a mere 0.005 percent of the
subject's genome. While these tests have shown an ability to identify Native
American gene lines, false negatives are a big problem.
The third type, known as the
genome-wide test, has proven more useful to the Freedmen. DNA Print's Ancestry-By-DNA
looks across all 23 pairs of chromosomes for mutations that seem to indicate
one ancestry or another. The company uses proprietary statistical software to
estimate what percentage of a person's genetic material originated where - 85
percent European and 15 percent East Asian, say, or 60 percent African, 20
percent Native American, and 20 percent European. "Chief John Ross was
between one-eighth and one-sixteenth Cherokee [12.5 and 6.25 percent],"
Leslie Ross says, "and my DNA test said I'm 3 or 4 percent."
But even the best tests have large margins of error.
"If you show a positive result of 4 or 5 or 6 percentage points, there's a
possibility that it isn't indicating Native American ancestry," Frudakis says. People with these levels of Indian blood
may simply have genetic roots in places like Greece or Turkey, whose natives can convey Indian-ness in their DNA. Pakistanis,
meanwhile, typically show 30 percent Native American heritage, for reasons that
are not yet totally clear to scientists.
[The answer is revealed here:
When King Solomon heard of the new world and started
a campaign to settle the land. So he
gathered people, women in general (1ki 11:1), by using Tarshish (England) (1Ki
10:22) to gather them from all of the Northern lands (the Vikings, the Carians, Etruscans, and the Ashkenazi or Anasazi) in Africa
(the Egyptians) and India as far as China near Xi'an,
home of the Terra-cotta Warriors (called themselves
Xi of the tribes of Shabazz and Shabti) and from all races of
people to build country of one people united from all people( A Jewish
nation). Viking women carried with them
the same style of hair & dress over to the Americas as remains with the Hopi women.]
The more tests that DNA
companies conduct, the more data they'll have for comparison, which should lead
to more accurate results. As the DNA databases grow, it may be possible to
identify ancestry by region - say, a Southwestern Navajo or a New England
Pequot. Kittles' database can already name the African tribes an
African-American customer descends from. Still, linking Freedmen to
particular tribes remains tricky because of all the intermarrying that
has occurred over the years.
Even if the testing
companies could narrow a person's origins to a specific tribe, would it matter?
The science might be improving, but the Indian tribes show no inclination to
accept it - or even consider it. "Our citizenship laws require you to
have a Cherokee ancestor who was on the Dawes Roll. Can a DNA sample
prove that?" says Cherokee spokesperson Mike Miller. "If I did a DNA
test, it might show that I have some German DNA. That doesn't mean I could go
back to Germany and say, I have German ancestry and I would like to
be a German citizen."
Germans or no other people,
however, were ever divided by color uses this Dawes Roll; nor trying to rebuild
and nations (with reparations money).
It's a crude analogy. Germany's citizenship laws don't require applicants to prove
that a relative was listed on a flawed census of people with purported Teutonic
blood. And if Miller so desired, he could become a naturalized German citizen
someday. The Freedmen have no such chance.
Other tribes are just as
closed-minded. When I ask Jerry Haney, the Seminole
chief who expelled the tribe's black members in 2000, whether he might
reconsider his stance based on DNA tests, he huffs. "They can claim all
the Indian they want," he says, "but they cannot become a member of
the Seminole Nation by blood. They're down there [on the roll] as Freedmen.
They're separate." (Here we go
again allowing the white man to separate us using money just as they did when
they hunted down our Black Indians forefathers for 50 dollars a scalp.)
Rick Kittles is one of the
last speakers at the Descendants conference. When he steps up to address the
crowd, he speaks briefly about the underlying science. He describes how African
genealogy is relatively easy to trace because of the population's high number
of polymorphisms - genetic variations unique to a particular group. Then he
gets down to business. He shows charts indicating that African ancestry in the
95 Freedmen he tested ranged from 4 to 76 percent, while European ancestry
varied from 0 to 62 percent. "Native American was surprising,"
Kittles says as he presses the slide clicker to bring up the figures that
everyone's waiting for. The range of Indian blood was from 0 to 30 percent, for
an average of just 6 percent - almost identical to an East Coast
African-American population.
The chatter in the crowd
stops. Kittles is telling attendees that, genetically, they are no more
Indian than blacks in New York City or Baltimore. "I
expected it to be higher because of the experiences you've had," he
admits. Then he offers a consolation.
(Unfortunately, our brother
Mr. Kittles is not aware of the study done in the
1920s. Columbia University anthropologist Melville J. Herskovits, renowned for documentation of African survivals
in American life, conducted interviews in New York, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. which determined that a fourth to a
third of African Americans had Indian ancestors. Today in North American
families, according to DNA test the figure is closer to 30%.30%.)
He explains that many
Freedmen display high levels of European ancestry, with the group average at 18
percent. He suggests that, ironically, this might be exactly what links them
genetically to the Five Civilized Tribes. Indians, he explains, were in contact
with white colonists starting in the 17th century, and there has been
significant gene flow between the two groups. As a result, many people who
identify themselves as Native American have very high percentages of European
DNA. East Coast African-Americans show much weaker links to Europe. So the Freedmen's levels of white genetic material may, in fact, be the very proof of Indian-ness that they're looking for.
To prove this hypothesis,
Kittles tells the attendees that more testing is in order. "If genetics is
going to help this cause, we really need to do tests on so-called purebloods,
to assess their European ancestry," he says, theorizing that they, too,
will have high levels of European blood. "I think that many of those so-called
purebloods aren't so pure."
It's not the definitive
result the audience expected. And yet, some find good news in the message. The
first woman to raise her hand is an elderly lady in the very last row, wearing
a flowing kente cloth dress. She leans forward in her
seat. "I just want to thank you," she says as loudly as she can
muster. Her test revealed 11 percent Indian ancestry. "It's true what
my grandmother said, that I did have Native American blood."
As I
wait for the day's final speaker, Sharon Lindsay Scott stops by my seat to say
hello. An attractive woman with light skin and prominent cheekbones, Scott has
the sort of face that might have convinced a Dawes clerk to place her on the
blood roll. She tells me she's a descendant of the Perrymans, an illustrious Creek family C with a lineage
that included a chief in the 1880s, Legus. Perryman.
But for reasons that are lost to time, her ancestors were made Freedmen.
"You know, the Dawes Commission would take
brothers and sisters and divide them up," she says. "They went by how
you looked, and a lot of the Creeks are darker-skinned. So you might be
a full-blood and …" Scott trails off in a sad laugh. "I mean, they
had no DNA testing back then."
With Graham's assistance,
she has pulled together copious documents that attest to her family's Creek
lineage and plans to submit her application for membership soon. The final
piece she'd been waiting for was Kittles' DNA test. Now she has it: 79
percent African-American, 19 percent European, and 2 percent Native American.
Which means her Indian DNA results could very well be just the result of
genetic noise.
The results leave me wondering whether the Freedmen are caught up in a false
hope. Will the intersection of Rick Kittles and a group of desperate would-be
Indians mark a turning point in their struggle for recognition? Or just another twist in a sad tale? I
ask Scott whether she expects her application to be rejected, considering that
her percentage of Indian blood is smaller than the test's margin of error. She
seems both surprised and slightly offended: "I don't see how they
can."
Race is a loaded word that
genetic testing companies avoid in favor of phrases like biogeographical
ancestry. No wonder. For centuries, science has been hijacked to validate racist
beliefs. Scientific journals from the 19th century are replete with discussions
of cranial capacity and brain weight, measurements used to explain why blacks
would never be as intelligent as whites. Then there are eugenics and social
Darwinism, used to twist Darwin's
findings and shape Nazi ideology.
But if the young discipline
of DNA testing has taught us anything, it's that the very notion of race is
fading, at least from a genetic perspective. The world is populated by
mongrels and half-breeds. Even those who base their self-worth on being of
"pure" racial stock probably aren't. Every family tree has a thousand
branches. "The technology will show how mixed we are," Kittles says.
"There is no line of distinction you can draw between groups. There will
be people who say they have 100 percent African blood. I can show them that
they have significant European ancestry, too."
So far, reams of historical
documents and legal briefs have gotten the Freedmen nowhere against a
century-old document created by clueless white bureaucrats and enforced by men
the Freedmen once considered brothers. The question is whether a tool created
by molecular biologists will have any more luck.
There are three types of DNA
test designed to pinpoint genetic heritage. Ranging in price from $99 to $299,
all three start with a swab of the inner cheek and provide results in two to
eight weeks. Here's what happens along the way.
The Y chromosome method
searches for genetic markers on the Y chromosome. A particular polymorphism, or
variation, on the DYS199 locus, for example, is unique to those indigenous to
the Western hemisphere. So anyone with that polymorphism has Native American
ancestry. This test has two problems: It measures only 1.5 percent of the
genome - so you may have Indian genes that don't show up - and it works only on
males.
To determine maternal
lineage, the mitochondrial DNA test looks for polymorphisms in mitochondrial
DNA. All humans have mtDNA, which is inherited from
the mother, so anyone can take the test. But since it measures just 0.005
percent of the genome, false negatives are a big problem. Also, mtDNA results will show the presence of, say, European and
Native American genes along the maternal line, but not the percentages of each.
The genome-wide technique
scours the entire genome for "ancestry informative markers" that
indicate "biogeographical ancestry."
Statistical software then analyzes the data to determine what percentage of
genes comes from where. This is the test of choice for the Freedmen. The good
news is that it's exhaustive. But it's also the most expensive option, and it
still can't trace a Native American's roots back to a particular tribe.
Our suggestion to Mr. Kittles and others that are
trying to identify the black Indians of the Americas they must first examine and compare the bones found
in 1975, 2 Negroid skeletons were found in the U.S.
Virgin Islands. One wore a pre-Columbian Indian wrist band. They were found in
layers dated to about A.D. 1250. In 1974, Polish craniologists revealed that no
fewer than 13.5% of the skeletons from the pre-Columbian Olmec cemetery of Tlatilco were Negroid.1
This is the source of clear evidence of the genetic
link between the ancient Black Indians of the past and the present Black
Indians of today. In the 1920s Columbia University anthropologist
Melville J. Herskovits, renowned for documentation of
African survivals in American life, conducted interviews in New York, West Virginia and Washington, D.C. which determined
that a fourth to a third of African Americans had Indian ancestors. Today in North American families the figure, according to DNA test the figure is closer to 30%. So what you can do to help us is to research what bones Palaeontologists discovered in the tombs of ancients Israelites in Israel and compare them with the bones of those ancient Black Indians to confirm what were their DNA connection.
But don't worry my brothers everything that has been done has been done to
the fulfillment of the words of the Great Spirits.
"Deuteronomy: 32:25: The
sword without, and terror within, shall destroy both the young man and the
virgin, the suckling also with the man of gray hairs.
De:32:26:
I said, I would scatter them into corners, I would make the remembrance of them
to cease from among men:"
When you stated that "many Freedmen display high levels of European ancestry, with the group average at 18 percent. He suggests that, ironically, this might be exactly what links them genetically to the Five Civilized Tribes. Indians, he explains, were in contact with white colonists starting in the 17th century, and there has been significant gene flow between the two groups. As a result, many people who identify themselves as Native American have very high percentages of European DNA. East Coast African-Americans show much weaker links to Europe. So the Freedmen's levels of white genetic material may, in fact, be the very proof of Indian-ness that they're looking for."
CHEROKEE INDIAN DNA RESULTS
In Europe, there also
seems to be an Adriatic or Balkan presence (Slovenia, Croatia, Italy, plus see
map). Hispanic matches (see 1880 Census of our father Sam as Hispanic) do
not necessarily point to ancestry in Latin America
but probably rather reflect mixed Iberian and American Indian ancestry.
Iberian ancestry could be very deeply seated, as people from the Iberian Peninsula are believed to have been the first to
colonize the British Isles after the last Ice
Age (Oppenheimer). The combination of Portuguese, Polish, Jewish American (Israel),
Egyptian and Arabian hits (see map) may indicate a degree of Jewish ancestry.
There appears to be no Eastern Asian or Subcontinental
Indian ancestry; apparent matches are probably due to accidental convergence.
There also appears to be no Sub
The
single most common male haplogroup among current
Cherokee tribal members who have tested is R1b.
How can this be, you ask? Clearly, one of three
possibilities exists:
1.
The Cherokee (or
those tribes who were assimilated into the Cherokee) adopted a European male
into the tribe or a European male fathered a child that was subsequently raised
as Cherokee.
2.
The R1b ancestor
was not adopted into the tribe, maintained their European/American identity but
married a Cherokee individual. This might be the case where one of the 8
great-grandparents in our example was white, and the other 7 were not.
3.
There
is some level of R1b admixture in the Native Population that preceded contact
with Europeans that we have not yet identified.
But my brother Yirmeyah
Amariel, the third son of Howshua Amariel, has help to provided this evidence
through a DNA test that verified the Phoenician/Hebrew/Indian
connection and the Amariel family Oral history:
Amariel Family DNA RESULTS
Test subject- Yirmeyah
Amariel
..
Using DNA Heritage to
explore our ancestry. The following report covers the background to
Y-chromosome SNP testing, human migrations, your own results and the
interpretation of those results.
:: Haplogroup Result:
The testing of your sample shows
that you were positive on the above highlighted markers. Additionally, you were
negative on the other markers within the panels tested. Knowing this we can
determine your haplogroup. An asterisk after the haplogroup
would designate that branch-defining markers below the haplogroup
have been tested but proved negative - e.g. I* or R1b3*
.
.
We determine you to be in
Y-chromosome haplogroup R1b3*
.
There exists a minor sub-clade of R1b3, characterized by additional downstream
mutation SRY2627 or M167 and named R1b3f (YCC 2003). This clade
shows a specific focal distribution area, being spread
only in limited geographic region in Iberia and France, mostly
among Spanish and French Basques (20%), Catalans (20%) and with lower frequency
in other Iberian populations and French (Rosser et al. 2000; Hurles et al. 1999). In other European regions this clade has practically not been detected. R1b3f haplogroup was referred as haplogroup
22 in earlier literature (Hurles et al. 1999; Rosser
et al. 2000). There is also another minor sub-clade
of R1b, namely R1b3d - defined by downstream mutation M153 and showing focal
distribution (16-3%) in some Iberian R1b lineages shows a frequency peak
(40% to 80%) in Western Europe and a decrease in Eastern (with the exception of
43% in the Ossetians) and Southern Europe, whereas
R1b variance shows multiple peaks in West Europe and Asia Minor. While R1b
variance displays a clear-cut northwestern-southeastern
decline in South East Europe, R1b frequency decline continues from Western
towards Southeastern and Southern
Europe. These spatial patterns might be due to the fact that R1b
lineages contain associated 49a,f haplotype
15 and 35 sub-lineages with opposite distributions possibly reflecting
re-peopling of Europe from Iberia and Asia
Minor.
.
Within
Europe, the Haplogroups
of R and I have undergone additional mutations so we find R1b spreading
northward from Iberia,
clades of I migrating
northward from both Iberia
and the Balkans, and R1a spreading outward from the Ukraine.
The
Birth of the West ;
pg 13 “Yet the Cretans were certainly
not Europeans in the modern sense of the term.
In the Palaeolithic Age and far into the Bronze Age the European lands
of the Mediterranean were inhabited by brown-skinned,
dark-haired races of unknown origin, but whom perhaps were descended from
the Aurignacians of the Ice Age. In Spain they were called Iberians,
in Italy
Ligurians…”
Phoenician
Western Sea-migration Chart
THE
PHEONICIANS- FROM THE LEBANON pg 137. "The
Phoenicians thus met a relatively civilized people at the southern tip of the Iberian Peninsula, with whom they could do solid
business. Consequently they immediately
set up their outpost at Gades. It was - as its name seems to indicate – a
fort on one of the small offshore islands they so loved.
Before
doing so, they would have passed through the Straits of Gibraltar, and seen
that beyond it stretched another endless ocean, far more
stormy than the one they knew, and moved by tides. This was a phenomenon which also amazed
Alexander the Great in India
centuries later. There were no tides in
the Mediterranean. How the Phoenicians reacted is not
recorded. They appear to have simply
grown accustomed to the fact and were soon feeling their way down the Atlantic
coast of Africa. According to as yet unconfirmed theories they
then even veered westwards and sailed as far as America. Professor Cyrus H. Gordon of Brandeis University in Boston at any rate put forward the
supposition that the Melungeons, a light-skinned
Indian tribe in East Tennessee came, as they
themselves believe, from Phoenicia.”
THE
SHADOW OF ATLANTIS pg 160-161. “But during recent years about 2,000
prehistoric inscriptions have been found in Brazil. Many of them are in Phoenician, old Egyptian,
and Sumerian, and others in unknown alphabets resembling Iberian, Carian,
Etruscan, Cretan, etc.”
THE
SHADOW OF ATLANTIS pg 162. “Later M. Frot
wrote me a very interesting letter, which I give below in a brief English
translation: ‘The Phoenicians used in their South American inscriptions the
same methods which were used by the old Egyptians at the earliest period of
hieroglyphic writing. The same methods
were employed by the Aztecs and by that unknown race which has left its petro
glyphs in the Amazonian basin. The
results of my investigations are so striking that I am afraid to publish
them. In order to give you an idea of
them I will say only that I possess proofs of the origin of Egyptians: the
forefathers of Egyptians issued from South America
and once formed three powerful empires.
Two of them were founded in South America
and the third on the Old Continent. The
latter included North-western Africa, the Iberian peninsula and the islands of the ocean
neighbouring Europe.”
Cherokees of Tenessesse and Missouri confirm Amariel Family history with their DNA and history (Tenessesse Cherokee DNA press release showing Jewish connections and Missouri Cherokee Tribes proclaim Jewish Heritage.)
JEWISH DNA RESULTS:
Confirmation of the high frequency of Haplogroup R1a1
among Ashkenazim as compared to other Jewish and non-Jewish Middle Eastern
populations was found in a genetic study on Samaritan and Israeli groups (Shen et al. 2004). Although population samples were small,
consisting of twenty participants from Ashkenazi Jewish groups, all were
Eastern Ashkenazim of Polish ancestry.
Ashkenazi results were compared to other Jewish groups from Iraq, Libya, Morocco, Ethiopia and Yemen, as well
as to non-Jewish Samaritan, Druze and Palestinian populations. Shen found that haplogroup R was found in 10-30% of all the groups, with
the exception of Palestinians and Ethiopian Jews, though the majority belonged
to R1b and R*. In contrast, the
Ashkenazim had the highest percentage of haplogroup R (30%), with two-thirds of
those results found in haplogroup R1a (Shen et al. 2004).
Additionally, Behar’s (2004b, Supplementary Material) own data indicate
that haplogroups R1b, R1a and I comprise more than a
quarter of Ashkenazi DNA results.
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Haplogroup Projects
|
|
Note: Haplogroup projects are restricted to people who ALREADY have their
DNA results. These projects do not accept members who haven't taken a DNA
test yet since you need to know your haplogroup to join the correct project.
|
|
Project Name
|
Description
|
|
Y-DNA Haplogroup J
|
For all men whose DNA results
place them in Y-DNA haplogroup J
|
|
Jewish E3b
|
For Jewish men whose DNA
results place them in Y-DNA haplogroup E3b
|
|
Jewish R1b
|
For Jewish men whose DNA
results place them in Y-DNA haplogroup R1b
|
|
Jewish Q
|
For Jewish men whose DNA
results place them in Y-DNA haplogroup Q
|
|
mtDNA Haplogroup
K
|
For everyone whose mtDNA results place them in mtDNA
haplogroup K
|
|
mtDNA Haplogroup N
|
For everyone whose mtDNA results place them in mtDNA
haplogroup N
|
The results of the DNA testing of our Jewish brothers also discern
between haplogroup R1b, who are
the blood of the children of Israel, and from haplogroup E3b, J, Q (chart above), who are
converted to Judaism; both that are found within the Ashkenazi, Iraq, Libya,
Moroccans, Yemenis, Samaritans, Druses and some Ethiopians. In conclusion, from analyzing the Amariel
Family DNA migration results haplogroup R1b3 (chart number 6)
in comparison to that of the migration history of the Phoenician (Iberian)/
Hebrew/Cherokee people it is clear that they followed the same direction of
Phoenician migration from the land of Israel
(Phoenician Western Sea-migration Chart) to America verifying
the Amariel family Oral history. To
be used as one of many tools in our family’s claim to reclaim our inheritance
in the land of Israel for the upcoming Jubilee year. Further details and information on the Amariel Family is included in our book 'The Amariel Family Oral History'.
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