If you were the last one, what would you do or be able to do? This is a question posed throughout the ages about your last day of life on this planet. Very good question but for this context would it matter if you were a Cherokee and a full-blooded one?
How important can this be to those who aren’t and never can be anymore? What do you mean you may think or ask?
When a full blood and say a white have kids, they are then one-half ndn. Even if those kids grow up and have kids, they become depending on who they have them with, either three-fourths or down to one-sixteenth and so on. It can never come back to a full four-fourths.
There can be no more but by an act of congress! (I joke but stranger things do happen and have)!
Now the joke part with the Treaty of 1868 it made negro slaves citizens of the tribe and the blood quantum dropped further.
Some may have but probably the vast majority were full blood negro or black if you prefer.
That’s the truth.
So, this becomes important in the life of that last individual on how to spend time on that day
A parade you say to honor the last one? A fake gold medallion too? Maybe visit some place you’ve longed to see or visit friends, and family?
Where will you be at work, school, with family, at a ball game, or in a nursing home?
Where will you be?
What if no one knows that you are the last full blood? Will it matter to them?
Maybe you passed from this life as a drug addict, or alcoholic, or a homeless individual? Would the authorities who find you care? Would you wind up just another nameless individual left out in the Potters’ field?
Not even with your Ndn name but listed as John Doe?
How would your tribe know?
Then this question what would become of the tribe?
A tribe with the last known one dying ceases to be a unique people or group of people.
Interesting that so many that now have some degree of ndn blood but there aren’t many full ones left. There is probably a number but even that is wrong?
Huh? What the heck, you do you mean. But you just “said”.
I know and now here, is another problem with the last full blood we will never know when!
Unless we use DNA or God forbid A.I..
Now on to this deal of degree of Ndn blood. Here is a question do they really know how many are left?
My card lists me as ¾ Cherokee but even that is wrong! I am a fullblood, but grandpa and grandma weren’t married. His family probably didn’t want his or her, (pardon my use of it, their bastard offspring) at the dinner table.
Now we know human nature and also our culture includes adultery, drugs, drinking, and so forth. Many births came from these and in reality, fullbloods. But since neither party would admit or claim them, they became ½ bloods.
See the fullblood problem and the census problem?
So, we won’t know when the last known fullblood dies.
When the tribe acknowledges that the last one has died what becomes of the tribe? It is no longer a unique tribe of people but just a group of people with some degree of Ndn blood.
Sorta sounds like the Melting Pot thing.
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