05/03/2023
Summary of Allison Hedgecoke’s Native Claims
Below are excerpts from the book Rock, Ghost, Willow, Deer (American Indian Lives).
These excerpts show her claims, the Huron and Cherokee side are allegedly from her father's side, and the Muscogee side is from her mother.
Chap 1: Of Seeds
Claimed nations
"Before me and around me were warriors, fighters, hunters, fishers, gatherers, growers, traders, midwives, runners, avid horse people, weavers, seamstresses, artists, craftspeople, musicians, storytellers, singers, linguists, dreamers, philosophers; they were Huron, Tsa la gi (Cherokee), Muscogee, French-Canadian, Portuguese, English, Alsache-Lorraine, Irish, Welsh; and there was the insane. I understood all of this by the age of three.
"At the kitchen table, we learned about our universe, our world, ourselves, about being Cherokee, Real People, relatives of deer, and carriers of an Eternal Flame. We heards stories of our beautiful home in North Carolina and how this home full of gorgeous mountains, hills, valleys, rivers, and streams also spread throughout what is now Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Virginia, and other surrounding areas in the southeastern United States." (page 3)
"We were taught about being Huron and Metis, Ojibway, the other side of my father's Native heritage." (page 5)
Natives on father's side... Huron, Metis, Ojibway, Cherokee
"When I was a tiny child, my father would sit me up at the hardwood kitchen table near my older sister, Pumpkin, and give us seed and pony beads to string." (page 1)
"While we were busy working on the beadwork, my father would tell us about our ancestors and relatives, about their joys, struggles, and great and terrible survivals." (page 3).
"My father told stories of deer, otter, bear, and birds; of corn, squash, beans, and berries; of ball games and Little People; of sky vault and the world beneath the water." (page 3)
"My father went on to tell us about the immense abilities of the linguists among our direct Huron ancestors and the mingling of French traders and trappers who saw our grandmothers and fell in love. We learned of secret dreamers and storytellers in our grandma's family. (page 5)
"Pumpkin and I heard how our Hiuron relations traveled with their French-Canadian men south for many years, following the great wars of the north, where Englishmen and Americans took scalps and skins off of bodies of captive Indian people and cured them for leggings and decorations of the frontiersmen. (page 5)
"Our Huron/French-Canadian grandmas and grandpas traded and traveled by canoe and by foot, smoking to***co to chase away hunger, finally ending up in Indian Territory as well. (page 5)
'
Our grandmother, Maria Louise, eventually met and married Grandpa Vaughan in a place so many miles from the original Eastern Woodlands homelands of both sides of the family. (page 5)
"He [my father] sang children's songs for us, in Indian, that she had sung to him when he was little. Granny continued to help and heal even after she was gone. Once my father dreamed of her pointing toward me as I lay in my crib, her hair long and unbraided. He told us that he awoke suddenly with a feeling of electricity running through him and suddenly found himself in our room. I had suffered as asthma attack and had become still. Even though I wasn't breathing, he had woken up in time for him and my mother to bring me back to life." (page 5).
Natives on Mother's side: Muscogee
"At the kitchen table, my sister and I also became aware of my mother's family. Our maternal grandpa, Herbert, was mixed-blood himself. His Portugueses grandfather (an Enos) had been shanghaied in the Mediterranean by Spaniards and narrowly escaped a life of slavery by jumping boat near New York City. This Portuguese grandpa married in with people (Muscogee and possibly another nation) also traveling in Missouri, and together they migrated back and forth into Canada, their offspring eventually marrying and settling from Minnesota to Alberta, at the base of the Rockies." (page 7)
"My father explained that our maternal grandmother, Sabina (nicknamed Sybil), felt it important to abrogate her husband's lineage in order to flaunt her supposed all-English heritage. She had arrived here as a girl around 1912.
"Dad explained that Grandmother Sabina's ancestors were from the same people who had colonized a great part of the hemisphere." (page 7).
History of surname:
"My birth certificate reads "Hedge Coke," as two words, and that is how I spell my last name. My sister's certificate reads "Hedgecoke" as one word. It varies throughout my family. My father says the name was closer to Crow (male), or Bird in the Bush, or Bush Crow originally, and we think of it in that way still." (page 2)
Native identity:
"My father raised us to believe being Indian was what made us who we are and what shaped us. We were proud of our ancestors.
No matter if we were mixed-blood we were from people who lived with purpose, with humbleness and personal integrity; and proud we were from truly independent people who had not compromised." (page 7).
"We believed there was no real separation between our lives and those of our ancestors. We knew we would always belong to the wet, green, Eastern Woodlands. We also knew we were travelers, nomadic peoples resulting from and adapting to changes of life upon the earth." (page 8).
"Our family stayed with many relaties, but because we always knew our true place, through Cherokee blood in North Carolina, through Huron blood in Canada, we began to think of ourselves as rocks in a stream of strangler moss. Unflinching.
