Too Melted In The Pot

My late father’s name is Henry Forbis Bonner. The unusual middle name comes from his great great grandfather, Forbis LeFlore.

 

Forbis LeFlore’s brother was Greenwood LeFlore, who was chief of the Choctaws.

Ethnically, Greenwood was of Choctaw and French descent. Although he was raised as a Choctaw, he was a formally educated “mixed breed” who spoke English and French, in addition to his indigenous language.

It was Greenwood who signed the treaty that sent the Choctaws on the famous “Trail of Tears” to Indian Territory, in what much later became the state of Oklahoma. The Choctaws were the first tribe to travel (and die) on the Trail of Tears, as part of President Andrew Jackson’s policy of ethnic cleansing, known officially as “Indian Removal.” The Indian Removal Act of 1830 deported about 100,000 Native Americans from the United States. (They were deported across borders that had been constructed around them by the European colonialists; they did not themselves have borders. At the time, U.S. citizenship was reserved exclusively for "white" people of European descent. Unlike the large population of Mexican and Chinese laborers in the U.S., who were ineligible for citizenship based on their race, the indigenous population was ineligible because they were not considered to be human.)

Greenwood (a "non-human" who was fluent in three human languages), was an advocate of “removal” on pragmatic grounds; he thought it was the only alternative to extermination (the word used by President Jackson’s predecessor,  John Quincy Adams). So he negotiated what he thought was the best deal possible, because at least it granted the Choctaws some minor concessions, which the U.S. government reneged on anyway.

Still, many Choctaws resented Greenwood’s capitulation to the government. There were so many death threats against him that he stayed behind in Mississippi for the remainder of his life.

“But Greenwood LeFlore was not the only Choctaw who remained,” writes Patricia Galloway in her groundbreaking book, Choctaw Genesis. “Hundreds of others, not so powerful or lucky, clung grimly to scraps of their homeland as the backwoods of east-central Mississippi were infiltrated by white settlers in the nineteenth century, to emerge in the twentieth as the reconstituted Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians more than seven thousand strong, still speaking Choctaw, still not melted in the pot.”

Greenwood, however, went on to live the American Dream, and beyond. As was typical of a chief, he was richer than his fellow Choctaws. But as a former chief and member of white society, he became much wealthier—owning a great plantation, complete with a luxurious mansion and hundreds of black slaves. The city of Greenwood, Mississippi is named after him.*

His brother Forbis traveled the Trail of Tears to what is now Oklahoma, where his descendants either remained part of Choctaw culture, or, like my father Henry Forbis, became “melted in the pot” by the colonial-settler society as it methodically digested the continent.

My father was 1/16th Choctaw, as measured by blood “quantum”—the pseudoscientific method the U.S. government invented to determine Indian ancestry. He was proud of his Choctaw heritage, but did not consider it a significant part of his identity. He thought of himself primarily as just an average American, and felt lucky to spend forty years working for the same Fortune 500 corporation.

Although I am eligible to join the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, I have never applied for membership because, like my father, I have never been part of Choctaw culture. I am too melted in the pot.

—David Bonner

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*Information on Greenwood LeFlore is from James Taylor Carson, “Greenwood LeFlore: Southern Creole, Choctaw Chief,” The Journal of Mississippi History (Winter 2003).  


Appendix: My paternal grandmother’s obituary.