Photo: Binghamton, NY near the author's hometown in northern Appalachia, by Christ Waits, Wikimedia
The Appalachian Mountains hide a great number of mixed-race communities. The Melungeons are the most well-known, but there are others who identify as American Indians.
I grew up in upstate New York, within the boundaries of the Appalachian Regional Commission, which is a real government region that overlaps several states. Many of the “old-stock” White families admitted to some amount of Indian ancestry. There were also several families that were related to one of the Six Nations of the Haudenosaunee (I won’t say which), played lacrosse/stickball at family gatherings, and even had a family member elected to the mayor’s office of a local non-Indian village.
The Pool Tribe lives downstream on another Susquehanna River town, Towanda, Pennsylvania. They are, according to oral and written reports, a mixture of Dutch, Oneida and/or Mohawk Indian, and possibly some rumored African. The Pool tribe consists of several intermarried families, speaking their own dialect, and who were once considered outsiders by the larger White community. For generations, many lived apart in their own settlements. Recently, they are more integrated into the larger White community, and they still have their own Facebook page.
As an adult, I also met the descendants of individual children taken from western tribes in the early 1900s and adopted into White families. These “removed” children’s descendants were now half-White and were seeking to reconnect with their Native roots.
These adopted Indian children were not in boarding schools and never returned home to their reservation. Yet even without a Native community around them, many, who I knew personally, still found Native spouses or participated in ceremonial events that were available.
The mixed-race clans of the upper Appalachian Mountains are not as well known as the Melungeons further south, and do not seem eager to advertise their presence. Yet, I was able to have relationships with these various kinds of mountain people, often bonding off a shared Native American heritage.
My family’s earliest documented roots also reach back into the Appalachian mountains of Virginia, so our shared mountain region is a familiar vibe.
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