We call it "paper and pencil" genocide, the attempted erasure of our identities in official records. Several years ago I came across the entire 1832 census of the Creek Nation in Alabama. At least one-third of the people were listed as "mulatto." Anyone doing genealogical research knows that "mulatto" was a vague term, often meaning various kinds of ethnic mixture (black-white, white-Indian, black-Indian). Nonetheless, several thousand free "mulatto" people lived in the Creek nation (right alongside the slaveholding, cotton-growing South that was slowly overcoming it.)
Despite this complexity of the old Creek Nation, recent forces found it necessary to "cull" all names from the 1832 census that were "mulatto," and also those names which were Anglo names. Two racist assumptions dominated: one that any "mulatto" was not really a Creek Indian, and that anyone with an English name was not any Indian either. So both of these categories of Creek citizens have been erased from the historical record.
CHANGE OF ETHNIC IDENTITY OF INDIVIDUALS:
While poring over the census records of my own relatives, one household identified itself as Creek, but the 1880 census taker chose to list both parents and all of their children as "MU" (mulatto). One married daughter lived in the household with her husband. She was listed as MU, and her husband as "B", for black.
In the 1900 census, the "black" son-in-law is listed as the head of household, and his Indian wife has magically been transformed into a "black' as well, along with some of her unmarried siblings. The irony is that this family lost their official Creek identity while residing on land inherited from their Indian ancestors! (Creek was still being spoken in the household long after that.)
THE PROCESS CONTINUES:
Recently, a married Indian couple I know had a baby. When filling out the application for the child's birth certificate, they listed their ethnicity as "Native American." When the birth certificate came back, the mother's date of birth was incorrect by one day. They sent it back demanding a correction, and also sending an original of the mother's own birth certificate to prove her correct date of birth (recorded by the same city agency as mother and son were born in the same city).
At first, the agency refused, then demanded the couple pay for the city's mistake. Finally, the city relented ( and kept the money) and provided a corrected birth certificate for the child, with one catch----the "new" birth certificate still showed the incorrect date of birth for the mother,
with a line drawn through the incorrect date and the correct birthdate handwritten above it!
This created the appearance that someone had tampered with the birth certificate to alter the mother's date of birth, when in actuality, the handwritten date was the true date of birth.
The wife smelled a rat, suspecting that the reason for all the confusion was that they dared to declare themselves and their newborn to be Native American. The sloppy-looking corrected birth certificate might be enough to question the family's genealogy and therefore any future claims of Native American identity. Fortunately, this couple is immersing their child in Creek culture so there will be much more on which to base an Indian identity.
