Much like the ancient Hebrews, many families today have origin stories, though some are a bit suspect. Even with the possibility of exponential growth across generations, it seems unlikely that everybody in New England is descended from the 102 passengers and 30 crew members who invaded North America on the Mayflower. In the United Church of Christ, we can rightly claim to be the theological descendants of those Pilgrims, but few of us can claim biological descent.
In my native region, the big claim is to be a FFV, which stands for “First Families of Virginia,” though what it means by “first” is problematic, for the category does not include indigenous peoples, who really were first, or the majority of white invaders who didn’t have time for that upper-class nonsense. “First Families of Virginia” really just means that subset of the invaders who imagined themselves to be inconvenienced English nobility, to be better than others, with pedigrees, real or not, to prove it.
My own family has engaged in this sort of myth-making. Some of the claims are legitimate. The first family member arrived in Virginia in 1620, a year after the first African abductees were enslaved in Virginia, technically qualifying us, and those slaves, as FFVs. Though I suspect the branch that claims to be descended from a German knight who served Frederick Barbarossa may be stretching things a bit. A toothless German serf waist-deep in mud seems far more likely.
One of the more common ancestral claims among white-identified people in the US is that we are all “part Indian.” Indian here does not mean from South Asia, but instead refers to those indigenous people displaced by that European invasion, nearly destroyed by the initial unintentional genocide of disease and the subsequent intentional genocide of settler greed.
Now, race is a fiction, with no scientific basis, albeit a powerful one, and humans have relationships and produce children across imagined lines of race and tribe all the time, so many so-called white Americans probably do have non-white blood, again accepting the absurdity of those categories. But much like the Mayflower Pilgrims, we can’t all have a Cherokee great-great grandmother.
Still, because many descendants of America’s First Peoples have a sort of “dual citizenship,” and because some tribes have leveraged their liminal legal status for profit, tribal rolls have become contested territory in recent years, with people stripped of their tribal identity because they do not have enough tribal “blood,” or, in one iteration, any at all.
This last category includes some of the “Black Creeks” and similar groups as reported by Caleb Gayle in “We Refuse to Forget: A True Story of Black Creeks, American Identity, and Power,” reviewed by Philip Deloria in the July 25th issue of “The New Yorker.” While I knew that there was a Venn diagram of sorts around Black identity and Native American identity, especially among East Coast tribes, the review of Gayle’s work was eye-opening.
I did not realize the scale of Native American ownership of slaves of African descent before the Civil War. None of the artistic renderings I have seen of the “Trail of Tears” have portrayed the slaves forced West with their Native American owners, though that actually happened. I did not realize that several major tribes had signed treaties with the Confederacy, opening the door for the United States to renegotiate new and punitive treaties after the war. These included an important 1866 treaty recently cited by the U.S. Supreme Court in McGirt vs. Oklahoma, a treaty that, among other things, required the tribes to accept as citizens the people they had previously enslaved.
Efforts by tribes like the Muskogee to strip groups descended from those slaves, like the “Black Creeks,” of their citizenship is not only racist, it also creates an untenable legal situation, tribes claiming tribal sovereignty as cover to violate the treaties that created that very tribal sovereignty.
And all of this assumes that race is real, that there are impermeable lines around tribal affiliation, that no one ever marries or reproduces outside of their defined group. And let’s not even start on the “one drop” fallacy, where one drop of so-called “black blood” makes you black. It would make apartheid-era Afrikaners proud.
Today’s scripture reading, from Hosea, is from the same period as Amos and the J source of Genesis, the years of the Divided Kingdom. Our excerpt speaks of God’s love for Israel, the northern kingdom, and promises that after the coming destruction at the hands of Assyria, for the writing was on the wall by this point, that God would restore them to their homes.
And if the biblical test of prophecy is that it comes true, this is no prophecy, for the people of the northern kingdom were not restored to their homes and nation in any way that we would understand it. The Assyrian model of conquest involved genocide and ethnic cleansing. Those you didn’t kill, you drove out. To be sure, pockets of Hebrew-descended people remained, but by and large, the region was resettled by the colonizer. Which might sound a lot like how we treated the First Peoples of this continent, who are not, despite The Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith’s claims, those very same Ten Lost Tribes of Israel.
This is the moment when the Jewish Diaspora begins, with the Assyrian destruction of the Northern Kingdom. Some of the Hebrews from Israel made it to the south, where they assimilated with the Hebrews of the Southern Kingdom, called Judah. It is here that the Hebrew religion starts to take on a familiar shape, begins to move towards an ethical monotheism. It us Judah, later Judea under the Romans, that gives a name to the people. Of course, Judah would fall as well, the elite carried off to Babylon, another outflow into the Diaspora, another cataclysm to reshape both theology and their sense of identity.
The Hebrew people would only experience one brief period of independence, a few decades after the Maccabean rebellion in 167 B.C.E. And that, too, was a fight about identity. Judah had been a puppet state since the Persians defeated the Babylonians and sent the Exiles home with funds to rebuild the Temple and the city. The foreign rulers had changed over time, especially after Alexander the Great died prematurely. Greek was the language of commerce, and urban residents were pretty cosmopolitan. The hicks in the sticks hated all of this modern thinking, the sense of being part of a bigger world, so they started a civil war, and managed to create a pretty backward theocracy. It was corrupt, and did not last long. Soon the Hebrews were in even worse shape, under the brutal thumb of Rome.
If this all sounds sickeningly like our current state of affairs in America, that’s because it is sickeningly like our current state of affairs in America.
But here’s the thing: even after the Maccabean moment, under the Roman occupation, there were many ways to be a follower of the Hebrew religion, the ancient equivalent of what we might call denominations today. What we now know as the Jewish Diaspora was spread throughout the empire, from Gaul to Persia. People didn’t fit into one category, and that was okay.
Paul, the Greek name for the man we also know as Saul of Tarsus, was a Hebrew religionist who began following the reform preached by Jesus, a Jew from Galilee, not Judah. Paul himself was a Roman citizen and wasn’t even from Judea. Tarsus is in Asia Minor, what we call Turkey today. The region and Paul were thoroughly Hellenized, just as during the age of the Maccabees, meaning they were under the cultural influence of the Greeks. And while we’re at it, Paul was from the tribe of Benjamin, named Saul after the warlord who fell to David in a coup d’etat. You know, the same tribe almost completely wiped out in the Book of Judges for the sin of inhospitality. Paul was not one thing. He did not fit into one category.
An Israelite from the northern kingdom could flee to Judah, where she and her descendants might eventually come to be thought of as Jews, following one of the many evolving sects within the Hebrew religious matrix. They might be part of the second deportation, when Judah fell and many were forcefully relocated to Babylon. Maybe parts of their family came back and fought over what it means to be a Jew, or maybe they remained in Babylon or anywhere else in the Diaspora. Maybe there was a child born in the large Jewish community in Alexandria who heard about the reformer from Galilee.
Identity is, and always has been, fluid. It can provide us with a helpful sense of place, or it can be a prison. It can be the absurdity of “one drop” rules and the battle over tribal rolls, or it can be inclusive, like the opt-in Jesus offered to those who would live the kingdom life with a loving creative God. For good or for bad, it is always evolving, sometimes in toxic ways, like the expulsion of the Black Creeks, sometimes in healthy ways, like the many churches that have named and honored the LGBTQ+ followers of Christ who have always been there.
God did not restore the Kingdom of Israel after the defeat at the hands of the Assyrians. But the God who spoke a word of love for those people loved them everywhere they went, as Samaritans and as Jews, as followers on the Way of Jesus and as followers of the rabbis, as First Peoples of the North American continent and as descendants of African abductees enslaved in America. As you. And as me. Your identity is ultimately child of a living God, who speaks miracle this day and the next. The rest, as Einstein might have said, is just details. Amen.