My Ancestry, Stolen Land, and Reparations
As winter rolls around and I contemplate short days and long periods of time inside, one of the things that gets me into the flow state during these hibernation months is researching genealogy for myself and other people. As is my custom, I would like to offer my services to anyone who is reading this as a gift. Are you ready to find out about your ancestry? Join me on this journey of truth finding.
Ancestry research has taught me to accept the truth for what it is. The documents don’t lie, and I can’t make my family history to be anything other than my truth. I am proud of my ancestors and I’m pleased to know more about them. I see mothers and fathers and generations of hard-working people. I love finding photos. I see one tragic death after another and my heart aches. I also see generations of white people who lived and died in the United States and who built wealth and helped me to get where I am today. Much of that success was due to good decisions and hard work. But if I am honest, the research also points me to places where my white ancestors got a leg up due to the privilege of living in a country both built on land that was forcibly taken from the original inhabitants and also built on the forced labor of enslaved people. My awareness of this makes me believe we need policies to right the wrongs of our racist and colonizing systems.
The offer:
I have a lot of experience with online genealogy. I am especially good at sorting out how to connect up DNA tests to a family tree and the trees of people who match DNA. So I can help solve mysteries and grow a tree quite quickly. If you are reading this, and I have helped you in the past, two things: (1) drop a comment if I was helpful and (2) I can help you again if you are interested in deeper research. My service is a gift, and this year in return I only ask that you “pay it forward” by offering a gift of something you value to someone or an organization in need.
What I have learned in my research:
When I look at documents, they give me information that might contradict my prior understanding of my history. I remember when I was in grade school, my friends and I would talk about what fraction of each ethnicity we each were. We would speak in broad terms of “I’m a quarter this and half that.” It seemed simple. For me, our family lore had it that on one side we were Native American. So in my elementary school head, I think I must be ⅛ or 1/16 or something like that. Many years ago, when I started doing this online research, I was sure I could find out about this part of my ancestry which had fascinated me so much as a child. Finding my Native roots was also a major reason that I did my DNA. Today I realize that my goal of finding out about my Native ancestry was naive and probably racist. The truth is slowly sinking in as I sit with it and the thousands of documents pile up.
The short answer is I am overwhelmingly white European and I need to come to terms with that before I focus on any other ancestries I might have. I’m white. My DNA test revealed 0.0% Native DNA. Instead, when I look at my genealogy, I see armies of descendants of white immigrants who came to this continent. There are Germans, Welsh, Irish, and English people who came here and had big families. And then their children had big families. The population of white Europeans grew exponentially and expanded geographically very quickly to cover the whole continent. This displaced Native people and destroyed ecosystems and built wealth for families and corporations. And I am a beneficiary of that expansion.
Sitting with the truth of my genealogy research leads me directly to the conclusion that reparations are due to Indigenous people and Black people. When I look at those armies of white people who lived and died in my family tree and in the family trees of other people who I have helped, I see undoubtable evidence of hard working people. My people worked. Nothing was given to my people on a silver platter. There are farmers and miners and preachers and small business owners. On the surface it is hard for me to see how they lived a life of privilege. But as I dig deeper, I see that much of the wealth of this nation was built on exploitation of land and resources that were taken from Native people. The access to land for immigrants was a major factor in their success and their ability to raise those large families. It doesn’t matter if a person bought the land from the government, or homesteaded it, or got it as payment for military service, or acquired it second or third hand from the original white owner, all land in the U.S. goes back to duplicitous treaties which were forced on Native people. So my hard-working farmer ancestors were directly benefiting from stolen land, and therefore I benefit from that stolen land, because I would not be here without it.
On one side of my family, hard-working Germans came over from one small part of Northwest Germany and settled as a group in one small part of Central Illinois. For generations these Lutheran farmers labored on the land. The records show that I am related to hundreds of people in this area of Illinois. The original German immigrants left their country partly because there was no land available. They came within a decade of Native people being pushed out of the territory where they arrived in Illinois. The land they plowed was deep prairie soil and produced crops for many years, based on thousands of years of soil built by nature and by sustainable use by Native people. I am the direct beneficiary of both the hard work of these Germans and their access to this incredible land that was taken from Native people.
This conversion of land into valuable property created an amazing amount of wealth in this country. For example, a treaty in 1837 gave the Ojibwe people the equivalent of $1.60 for the quarter section (160 acres) of land where I live currently. That land was subsequently granted in 1860 to a white man who had bought a scrip from the family of a veteran of the War of 1812. That scrip entitled the holder to government owned land. This land was valued in 1880 at $400. This is a 25,000 percent increase in value compared to what was promised (and never fully given) to the Ojibwe people in 1837. This land is currently valued at over $200,000, and I don’t even want to think about what percent increase that is compared to $1.60. This “creation” of wealth from land that was forcibly taken happened everywhere in this country, including in Illinois where my people lived. The documents don’t lie.
On some level, even if your particular ancestors were not beneficiaries of stolen land, the simple act of living in the United States means that they were complicit in and benefited by stolen land. The foundations of wealth in this part of the country were built by logging, mining, and farming, all of which needed stolen land to function. Almost all other economic activity was built on these foundations. So if my ancestor was a preacher or a butter-and-eggs merchant, those people’s wealth was dependent on stolen land in a second hand way. I look at people’s family trees and I see how wealth and property and family created a safety net. If there was a death of a parent, then family members of the deceased will show up in a census living with an uncle or grandparent. Families were and are resilient structures of support. Many of the family records I find are related to Wills and Probate records. People who were able to pass on wealth and land gave their descendants something to start with, and it all goes back to land that was originally taken with the support of the full force and power of the U.S. government.
This is why it has been so important to our collective soul for white North Americans to dehumanize (savages!) and exterminate Native people. We needed to forget the original crime in order to maintain our self image as good people. We developed stories about Native people that made it seem like they were vanishing or disappearing by some sort of natural process. It reinforces the idea of white supremacy to believe that the wealth of this country was built by hard work and people pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps. As a descendant of working class people, I can acknowledge their hard work, while also accepting the truth that wealth in this country is based on stolen land. These are not mutually exclusive. As I accept this truth, it has helped me to see that the extermination of Native people is not something that is an event that only happened in the past, but when I open my eyes, I can see that it is ongoing through every decade that I have researched and continues today.
This is why I am embarrassed by my initial reason for studying genealogy. I wanted to connect with my Native ancestry because I was interested in the romantic stories that I grew up with about Indigenous people. I thought of researching my ancestry as a possible connection to a vanishing culture and people. I had a historical interest because it seemed “cool” to be Native. Now I can see that Native people are not “vanishing.” They are here and active and resisting assimilation and extermination. I can also see that my interest in my possible Native ancestry was a sort of denial of the 99% of my ancestors who were white Europeans. I need to face the fact that I am white. To really dig into my genealogy is to be faced with the truth of how wealth was and is generated in this continent.
At this point I would be remiss if I did not speak to the other place where reparations are due. The wealth of this country is built just as much on the backs of enslaved Black people as it is on stolen land. My own DNA reveals 1% African ancestry. I have the privilege of having access to my grandmother’s DNA analysis and it reveals the source of the African DNA goes through her line. There is a near complete lack of documents related to enslaved people in the Americas. In censuses, those people were marks on a page, or at best first names only on a will. It is impossible to build family trees for people who were treated like livestock. It is often only through DNA that we find our connections.
How did I get an African ancestor who lived in the 1700’s? Although it is possible that a free Black person married a free white person, it is also probable that one of my genetic ancestors kept another of my genetic ancestors as a slave. This connects me in a direct line to people who benefited from slavery. After the Civil War, white landowners who had held people enslaved were allowed to keep their land. This land was bought and paid for using the produce of slavery. This land was and is a source of generational wealth. The continued ownership of land by former slaveholders directly led to the tradition of share-cropping in the South, which was in many cases a continuation of slavery in all but name. The continued wealth and status of white former slaveholders after the CIvil War also led directly to Jim Crow and segregation and all the legal policies that cemented and grew white wealth in the last 150 years.
Even if I did not have an ancestor who enslaved people, I would still be a beneficiary of ancestral wealth created by slavery. The economies of the North and South were inextricably linked. The mills in the North depended on cheap cotton grown using the labor of enslaved people (and later sharecroppers). There were many other products that contributed to the wealth of this country that were produced using enslaved labor, including tobacco, sugar, lumber, grain, and more. Any increase in the general wealth of the country improved the economic circumstances for every free person in the country.
In my case, on one side, an immigrant came to New Orleans and established herself and her family economically by relying on the wealth and connections of her brothers, who had immigrated to New Orleans before the Civil War. When I was visiting New Orleans, I visited a famous cemetery and actually found the family gravesite. It was one of the biggest there, and that denotes wealth. My research found that the family wealth was built by manufacturing and selling candy, liquor, beer, and fireworks. That wealth would not have concentrated in New Orleans without the labor of enslaved Black people and later sharecroppers in the MIssissippi delta and the deep South.
Amnesia about the sources of ancestral wealth for white people is something of a national pastime. We indulge in stories of why Black people might be poor, rather than looking at the truth. white people like myself have viewed Black people as lazy, sexually irresponsible, and predisposed to drug use. We do the same about Native people. These stories are necessary to mask the truth that white people built wealth and continue to build wealth on the backs of Black people and on land stolen from Indigenous people. It is hard to overestimate the value of ancestral wealth in the history of white people in the United States. Wealth led to power, which led to more wealth. white men who owned land were the first people who could vote in this country. When white men voted, they voted time and time again to consolidate their own wealth and power. Wealth begets and protects wealth. I have recently received an inheritance, which is one way that wealth is passed on. That inheritance was made possible because my family member went to college and got a good job and saved money. Getting to college and getting into college was definitely made easier because my family member was white. So education builds wealth, and education has historically been easier to attain by white people.
I do not want to diminish the role hard work has played in the success of my ancestors. In my research, I see trials and tribulations that led to emigration to North America and later within North America. I see the effects of a Civil War scarring generations, and then later the Great Depression causing hunger and suffering. In particular I am touched in my research when I see the death certificates and see the age at death or the cause of death. These are people who sometimes lived very hard lives and had unimaginable tragedies. But I can also see the benefits of families who were looking out for each other. I can see chain migration, where one person came over and then sent for more people after they had secured a foothold in the new country. I can see farms and businesses and families that grew over time and prospered. And I can see that at least some of that prosperity is due to the history of stolen Indigenous land and exploitation of the labor of Black people.
I have a niggling feeling of doubt whenever I look at my relationship to stolen land and racism. I start to question whether I have just flipped the story, and now I view white people as bad. To me, white people like myself used to be the good guys. My ancestors fought on the side of the North in the Civil War. The stories I grew up with told me that there were relatively few Native people and they were not using the land well. The good white people came with farming and steel, and we were able to make the land productive and build cities and bring civilization to the continent. Now I see how flawed that story was, but I don’t really want to flip it entirely and say that white people are bad. In the end, I think I see that it is more complicated than the simplistic good and bad dichotomy. For example, I have started to see that people are not racists, but rather they do racist actions or enact racist policies. I can be racist one minute and anti-racist the next. I can also recognize that people are capable of enacting settler actions at times and anti-settler actions at other times. Anti-racism and decolonization are both not “either/or” things. They are “both/and” processes. Part of that process is coming to terms with the truth about who I am, and ancestry research is one way to discover that.
It is time for reparations and giving land back. I know that government policies created systems that led us to the point where we are now. Recognizing our history is key to seeing the present day for what it is. It is scary to think what it might mean to really make up for the racist and settler actions and policies that dominated and continue to dominate. But that is just fear. We can do this. I choose to imagine a vibrant future. I think culture is already getting there and the policies will come soon if enough people insist. When I think about the vibrant future, I think about a celebration of the unique people and cultures that make up the mosaic that is this continent. I see a celebration of food and music and dance and creativity. I think that white people like myself have never truly been able to be home here on the continent, and the future I see is a sort of homecoming. For everyone.
