As a teenager, Warren\u2019s grandmother, Bethanie \u201cHannie\u201d Crawford, drove a horse-drawn wagon in 1888 from her native Missouri to the Indian territory that would eventually become Oklahoma, drawn by the prospect of land and opportunity. Several of her then four siblings came with her and several more would be born in the Cherokee Nation, Indian Territory, in the following years, according to the US Census of 1900. The Crawford sisters married the Reed brothers on the same June day in 1893, according to their marriage records. Laura and Everett had one son, Charles Reed, who was born in 1906, the year before Oklahoma became a state. He fathered one daughter, Ina Mapes.<\/p>\n
Both the Reeds and the Crawfords are identified as \u201cwhite\u201d on federal Census forms in the early 20th century that rely upon self-identification. While that may have been a simple statement of fact, they may also have been trying to obscure their ethnicity. At the time, the federal government was attempting to break up reservations by granting land allotments to individual Native Americans, pressing them to assimilate into white society and leave their tribal ways behind. The goal, as one officer bluntly put it, was to \u201ckill the Indian and save the man.\u201d Those who could pass for white \u2014 or convince the census taker that they were \u2014 sometimes did.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf someone was not white, they were a little bit less of a citizen,\u201d said Matt Reed, the curator of the American Indian Collections at the Oklahoma Historical Society in Oklahoma City, whose mother was a Pawnee Indian. \u201cIf you had darker skin, you were a lesser human. So, if your skin was light enough to pass as not being Indian, then you just passed as white and your life was a lot better off. A lot more people did that than you might think.\u201d
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\nRobert C. Boraker, a retired journalist and amateur genealogist who said he is Warren\u2019s fourth cousin \u2014 their great-great-grandfathers were brothers \u2014 said his father often told him that his grandmother, a Crawford, was one-eighth Indian. \u201cIt was Cherokee blood,\u201d said Boraker, who lives in St. Albans, England, and publishes a family newsletter that includes the Crawford line. \u201cThere was no documentation, but it was what we knew, what we were told.\u201d<\/p>\n
Warren\u2019s brother David, eight years her senior, calls the public controversy over the subject \u201ca bunch of baloney.\u201d He remembers relatives cautioning him when he played cowboys and Indians as a child. \u201cMy aunts said, \u2018Be careful shooting the Indians because some of them are your relatives.\u2019 \u201d But most shied away from the subject of the family\u2019s heritage, Herring added, because \u201cit wasn\u2019t something you were proud of.\u201d
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\nAt the Northwest Classen High School in Oklahoma City that Warren attended, many students had been told stories about their Native American relatives just as Warren said she had . Garrick Bailey, professor of anthropology at the University of Tulsa, who attended school in Oklahoma City in the 1950s, estimates that as many as 50 percent of the students at Classen possibly had Native American blood, based on an informal census taken at his own school.<\/p>\n
Bob Hammack was one of them. A member of the class of 1966 along with Warren, Hammack said he is one-16th Cherokee and his wife is one-16th Apache.<\/p>\n
His Cherokee grandmother never enrolled, he said, \u201cbecause she and others were afraid if they gave their name they would be shot.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A local newspaper is quoting Scott Brown: Brown insisted the Native American issue is not critical to his reelection strategy. \u201cNo, no, no, but it\u2019s certainly an issue,\u201d he said. \u201cThe ad that we\u2019ve run is a fair ad. It\u2019s accurate. It\u2019s reflective of what you all have said for months now, that she needs […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[166],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-12526","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-stevegsposts","7":"czr-hentry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12526","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12526"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12526\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12528,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12526\/revisions\/12528"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12526"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12526"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ssgreenberg.name\/PoliticsBlog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12526"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}