Cedric Sunray: Jim Crowfeather alive and well in Indian Country

Over the years I have visited and fellowshipped with a great number of tribes situated in the Eastern and Southern regions of the United States. Through this experience I have noticed a telling reality that has long been silently acknowledged, but rarely publicly spoken about. On one exceptional occasion thirty-five years ago, this silence was broken.

In 1978 Terry Anderson and Kirke Kickingbird (Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma) were hired by NCAI to research the federal recognition issue and present a paper on their findings to the National Conference on Federal Recognition which was being held in Nashville, Tennessee. Their paper, “An Historical Perspective on the Issue of Federal Recognition and Non-recognition” closed with the statement, “The reasons that are usually presented to withhold recognition from tribes are 1) that they are racially tainted with the blood of African tribes-men or 2) greed, for newly recognized tribes will share in the appropriations for services given to the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The names of justice, mercy, sanity, common sense, fiscal responsibility, and rationality can be presented just as easily on the side of those advocating recognition.”

Of 55 continuous, identifiable, cohesive Indian communities in the Eastern and Southern regions of the United States (of whom I have intimate knowledge of) were found that of the 29 federally-recognized entities, all but six have been listed in historical records as having mixed-white ancestry, as well as some of course being listed as of primarily Indian ancestry. In the remaining six (all of who battled the BIA more so than the other 23), as well as 26 more that were not federally recognized, it was found that all had some perceived or real association in historical accounts to have some measure of mixed-black ancestry.