First Actual Post, Titled “Why I Think Grandpa Was Either Fibbing or Misinformed When He Said That We Are Of Cherokee Descent”

Plain and simple, my Grandfather, God love him, was a racist, as were many of the people from his generation. He wasn’t racist because he was a bad person, he was racist simply because that was the way it was back then. That being said…

The Cherokee are generally referred to as the “civilized tribes”, because of their advanced, almost western styles of governance and social order. I’ve also read that they were often times more fair complected than other tribes, and that some members even had light hair. These two things made it more appealing to the racists of times past, and when they discovered that they had Indian heritage of any sort, they usually decided without any evidence whatsoever that this heritage had to be Cherokee, what with their western ways and light skin. That is why every white guy (like me) you’ve ever met that claims he has Indian heritage claims that it is Cherokee – because his family were racist as hell and didn’t want to be associated with those other, more savage (and brown) folks from other tribes.

Do I think this is evil? Not really, more just a symptom of a dark episode of our collective past. I don’t write this to condemn it so much as I write it because it does us all well to remember the bad things of the past, so we don’t forget them and make the same mistakes again.

Now, enough hippy-dippy bullcrap. On to some hunting, fishing, and liberal bashing…