Can learning about our own ancestors help white people in undoing white supremacy and colonization? Or could it possibly be a distraction from the real work? When did our ancestors become “white” instead of German or Ukrainian or French or Irish? How did it happen? If our ancestors owned land, when and how did that happen, especially in relationship to the stealing of land from Indigenous peoples?
We were talking about these questions in my Maine-Wabanaki REACH group last night. It has been helpful to join in a small group with other white folks committed to the process of ending racism and colonization. We ponder the difficult questions together, in the context of the wider work of Maine-Wabanaki REACH which is in conversation and solidarity with Wabanaki people.
It seemed to us that understanding our families’ histories in the context of colonization, can help us to better understand colonization, and to make it visceral and real for us. It is not just recounting the stories we may have heard in our families, or read about in research, but juxtaposing those stories with the history of colonization, land theft, and slavery, in the particular locations in which they lived.
I have already done a lot of exploring of the matrilineal side of my family. Last night, after the meeting, I wondered how this might have played out on the other side of my family–my patrilineal ancestry. My dad’s ancestors came to this country from Germany. But more specifically, his great-grandfather and great-grandmother arrived in Illinois as children in 1851 and 1854 from East Friesland. East Friesland was actually a somewhat isolated culture on the North Sea with its own community and language, in some ways more closely related to Holland and old English than German.
Thousands of East Frisians came to the midwest during the middle of the 19th century, drawn by the promise of cheap fertile land and a long-standing love of freedom. Most of them worked for a few years, then were able to buy land, and become successful farmers, from what I can gather. In America, they formed closely knit communities centered around their church, their family and their language. But over the course of three generations, the young people had assimilated into the surrounding communities, and no longer spoke their parents’ language.
By the time the East Frisians arrived in Illinois, it had already been colonized for several generations. But the name gives a clue. On the Illinois State Museum website, I read about the Illinois peoples losing their lands.
In 1803, the Kaskaskia tribe signed a treaty giving up its land claims in the present State of Illinois in exchange for two small reservations on the Kaskaskia and Big Muddy rivers. The Peoria, in turn, ceded their Illinois claims in a separate treaty signed in 1818. Finally, in 1832, two years after President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, the Kaskaskia and Peoria tribes agreed to merge and moved west to a reservation in Kansas.
So I wonder if the German immigrants even knew about the history of the land they were so excited about farming? More research surely to do about all that.
In the course of this research, I may have coincidentally solved a mystery that had recently emerged in my DNA reports. According to my DNA analysis, 15.3% of my ancestors came from the British Isles. But from my genealogy research, I thought that number should be just 3% (my Scottish ancestry). I didn’t think I had any other British or Irish ancestry. So what was that other 12%? Was there some family secret I hadn’t heard about? Well, I learned online that East Frisian DNA is indistinguishable from that of the British Isles. So rather than a secret in the family tree, I think this 12% might be my great-grandfather Henry Johnson (also known as Heinrich Jansen), who was 100% East Frisian.
And when did they become white? Well, I’ve got to stop for today, but I’ll come back to it. In the meantime, a 1920 census with Henry Johnson listed–see between the blurred out parts. And the “W” next to his name.