Carley Leonard

Professor Presnell
UWRT 1103
22 Oct. 2014
What Does it Mean to Identify as Native American?
My first source is the website Family Search and it is a website that allows people to trace back their genealogy. This particular website is actually made by the mormons of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The site basically allows you
to do things like search the names of people that you might be looking for to find out
basic information on a given person or trace back past relatives and make a family tree.
I used this website to try and search for my great, great grandfather to see if he was
listed as being Native American. I chose this as one of my five sources because I hoped
that it would give me the answer as to what my great, great grandfathers ethnicity really
was, or maybe show me others in my family that would be Native American. However, it
has shown me that the great, great grandfather that I had been told was full Cherokee is
actually listed as white on two different census.
The second source I have chosen to use is another website, which is the Bureau
of Indian Affairs website. This is a government website, so all of its information is provided by those who work as part of the U.S. Department of Interior Indian Affairs. There
are different parts to this website, as there are various tabs you can click on to view different information. Part of the website talks about what all the bureau does, another
shows FAQs which most of have to deal with legalities and relationships of native tribes
and the U.S. I have chosen this as one of my five sources because I am hoping that it
can give me insight as to the legal aspect of being Native American and what all that
consists of.
Another source I have decided to use for this paper is Whos a Native American?
Its Complicated, and the article from CNNs website that I am using from this web page
is written by Stephanie Siek - a CNN writer. This article that I am using talks about who
is really considered a Native American. It consists of an interview with Julia Good Fox, a
professor of American Indian Studies at Haskell Indian Nations University, and she essentially talks about how people are determined as Native American. She also points
out the differences between having Native American ancestry and citizenship - which
would come from a tribe. I have decided to use this online article because I want part of
my paper to talk about how one determines being Native American, and this shows a
pretty good angle on that.
The fourth source I have found to use would be Cherokee Indians, and it is an
online article on the history of Native Americans of the Cherokee tribe. The article was
written by Tyler Boulware and was edited by New Georgia Encyclopedia staff. This article has seven different parts to it, all talking about different elements of Cherokee history. First it talks about the Cherokee society, then goes into the early history of the Cherokee and their whereabouts. It then touches on the English-Cherokee Trade and Alli-

ance and continues to go into the Seven Years War. Lastly, it talks about NineteenthCentury Nationhood and Transformation and then Loss of a Nation. In part of my paper
I want to talk about discrimination, so Im hoping that with this article I can learn about
the discrimination of Native Americans in the past. Also, I feel that maybe I can find other helpful articles on this site.
My last resource is the Ninth Edition of This Land Was Theirs: A Study of Native
North Americans. This is one of a series of books, and it is written by Wendell H. Oswalt. There are 15 chapters to this book, all with very insightful information on various
aspects of past and present lives of Native Americans. I, however, only plan to use
Chapters two and thirteen from this book. Chapter two in on Indian-Non Indian Relations, so it mostly goes into the history of the European settlers coming to North America. It talks about the destruction and displacement of people, treaties that are made, the
making of the Administration of U.S. Indian Affairs, recent history and so on. Chapter
thirteens focus is on The Eastern Cherokee: Farmers of the Southeast, so this one focuses only on the Cherokees - which is what I had been told my great, great grandfather was. This chapter discusses various elements of the Cherokee tribe, such as historical developments, population and language, the Eastern Band of Cherokee and the
contemporary scene. With these two chapters of this book I feel that I can get information of the discrimination and hardships of Native Americans for my paper.