Serene Jones is a well-regarded theologian: professor at Yale for 17 years, president of Union Theological Seminary for the last 12. She is considered “liberal” in her theology, a characterization which I find less than illuminating. Certainly she questions whether the resurrection of Jesus actually took place. That sounds like a less-than-conservative religious stance. She also treats racism as a sin, which seems to be a politically liberal view, but not theologically, considering Paul’s teachings in the Epistle to the Galatians and the statement in Genesis that we are created in the image of God. And her clear preference for the thinking of John Calvin marks a theological conservatism.
In her 2019 memoir, Call It Grace, Jones returns to a story she has told before, about her racist grandfather, Judge Dick Jones, and about the 1911 lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson in her family’s hometown of Okemah, Oklahoma. She is horrified by the possibility - perhaps probability - that her family members participated and by the certainty that they at least knew who did…and did nothing about it. But she also makes the claim, all-too-common among white Oklahomans, of Cherokee ancestry. And I find it deeply disturbing.
Over the last year or so the whole country has been alerted to another Oklahoma-born Ivy League professor’s claim of Cherokee ancestry. President Trump made fun of Senator Elizabeth Warren for it; she doubled down with a DNA test while disclaiming tribal membership. If you insist on seeing issues like this through a partisan lens, that’s what you know. If you listen to Native voices you will have heard anger about her “pretendianism.” Oklahoma is rife with this because of the history of white people stealing Indigenous identity in order to steal tribal land. Angie Debo’s 1936 And Still the Waters Run is the classic account of the multiple forms this swindle took. David Grann’s 2017 Killers of the Flower Moon details the murders of whole families of Osages by white men who married in for their allotments.
Professor Jones’s story is more specific than Senator Warren’s vague story of a Cherokee ancestor. She identifies a great-grandfather - Judge Jones’s father, Redman Jones - as Cherokee. She even tells us in her memoir that Redman Jones was forced to change his race to white at statehood because Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws made it illegal for him to own land as a Cherokee.
Except Native land ownership in Oklahoma was not illegal.
Except Oklahoma’s Jim Crow laws applied to Black people but not to Natives.
Except Okemah was located in the Creek Nation, not the Cherokee Nation.
Except it doesn’t take a professional genealogist to find reasons to doubt this story.
The Dawes Allotment Rolls were a comprehensive effort to identify every Native in Indian Territory (eastern Oklahoma) before statehood and to issue each of them a parcel of land in order to break up collective ownership by the tribes. This is not the place for a discussion of the reasons for this policy, for the restrictions the legislation placed on immediate sale by the owners, or for the ways unscrupulous lawyers and speculators found to subvert those restrictions. It is enough to say that those rolls provide an early 20th Century census for the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole tribes so that people seeking membership today can show their relationship to those people as evidence. The Dawes Rolls are readily available online.
It takes a few seconds to discover that there was no Redman Jones in the Dawes Rolls.
Old US Census records are also readily available online. It takes a few seconds to discover that there was a Redman B. Jones living on Fourth Street in Okemah, Oklahoma at the time of the 1910 census. He was - as Professor Serene Jones says - identified as a white man, with a wife and four children. So is her story correct? Was Redman passing as white? Had his ancestors been forced out of the old Cherokee lands in the southeast on the Trail of Tears?
According to the census, Redman was born in Tennessee, as were his parents. So was his wife Dollie and her parents. So were three of his four children, all except the youngest, the two-year old, who was born in Oklahoma. I find this suggestive, not probative. It suggests that Redman Jones moved to Oklahoma right around the time of statehood and was not a member of a Cherokee family who had been living there since the 1830’s. But it leaves me room for doubt. Perhaps he reported all this to a census worker in order to buttress his claim of whiteness.
It takes a few more minutes to track Redman back to Coffee, Tennessee in the 1880 census, four years old and still white, with two white parents. Here his name is spelled Redmon, so is it the same person? Or is this just an easily-explainable coincidence? Well, if it is the latter then it is more than one coincidence. Back in Tennessee in 1880, four year-old Redmon’s father is named Carroll. In Oklahoma in 1910 Redman’s eight year-old son is also named Carroll. Toddler Redmon’s infant brother is named Alvah. Grown-up Redman has a son named… do I need to spell this out? Okay, his six year-old is also name Alvah.
All of us have family stories. And sometimes our oral history is more accurate than written records. I have spent too much time looking for people in archives who have clearly gone out of their way to make themselves invisible to the authorities. I know people who have trouble proving their identity because at the time of their birth nobody in authority thought it worth documenting. Grown men who played professional baseball with my father-in-law (who would be either 105 or 103 now if he were still with us, the records are unclear) reminisced with him about specific stories of their travels and games. But I find no evidence of him in the archives. I suspect he played under an alias because he was underage when he dropped out of college to play professionally. (14? 16?)
But Professor Jones’s story about her great-grandfather is no invisible in the archives. It is contradicted by them, which is a whole other story. Moreover, it fits a pattern of identity theft that was all too common. I do not blame her for believing what she was told as a child. We all do that. I don’t even blame her for carrying this story into adulthood. I do have some problems, though.
When Professor Jones left Yale for Union Theological Seminary in 2008 the Yale Daily News described her as a member of the Cherokee tribe and said this left Yale with only one Native faculty member to represent and counsel Native students. This is disturbing. It suggests that it wasn’t just her ancestors engaged in identity theft.
The public discussion of Senator Warren’s claims of Cherokee identity dates back at least to the 2012 Senate race when her opponent, Scott Brown, denounced (and mocked) her for it. Just as Yale listed Serene Jones as a Native member of their faculty, Elizabeth Warren was listed as a Native member of the Harvard faculty. By February of 2019, the difference between family story and tribal membership had reached a sufficient volume that Senator Warren issued a public apology for claiming to be Cherokee. She apologized earlier (although privately) to the Cherokee Nation. So why is Dr. Jones still making similar claims six months later in a summer 2019 Chautauqua interview with Krista Tippett that aired on the NPR show On Being in early December? Serene Jones is a theologian, not a historian of Native America. But one might imagine that the very high profile discussions of the very similar case of Elizabeth Warren would at least have triggered some curiosity. Well, that’s what I would imagine.
Moreover, as I noted above, Professor Jones has a lot to say about race, and about personal responsibility. She is curious about her ancestors’ part in the lynching of Laura and L.D. Nelson. Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native identity? Why the incuriosity about the theft of Native land? Okemah, Oklahoma was founded in 1902 on the tribal allotments of Mahala and Nocus Fixico, members of the Muskogee Creek Nation. According to federal law, the absolute earliest date on which that land could have been transferred was 1906! (Had you ever wondered why white Oklahomans call themselves “sooners”?) The Fixicos were eventually awarded $50 per acre, but by the Department of the Interior, not by the town of Okemah.
I will just add that the lynching of the Nelson’s was memorialized by the creation of a souvenir picture postcard which was sold in the town of Okemah for years. I will add that the townspeople’s memory of that incident was of their fear that there would be violent retaliation by their Black neighbors. I will add that the word “townspeople” doesn’t require the modifier “white” because Okemah was a sundown town from the time of its founding. I will add that it was the county seat and that Black residents of the county had business in the courts and so a segregated hotel was built to accommodate them, but that it was dynamited in 1907 by - of course - “some persons, who have never been identified, under the cover of darkness.” Some things don’t change.
