Within the last few days an article has appeared regarding the origins of
the so called "Melungeons". The man pictured in these articles and being discussed is
Jack Goins. This article has made the news media rounds from:
http://www.timesunion.com/news/article/DNA-study-seeks-origin-of-Appalachia-s-Melungeons-3583475.php
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/24/melungeon-dna-study-origin_n_1544489.html
http://news.yahoo.com/dna-study-seeks-origin-appalachias-melungeons-201144041.html
This article spotlights Jack Goins and his "Melungeon DNA Project".
It postulates that the "Melungeons" are African Americans. This is a
total bunk job and shear genocidal activity against the Saponi, Lumbee,
Occaneechi, Tutelo, Cherokee, Tuscarora, Haliwa and Powhatan and other Indian
peoples of Appalachia. This same tactic was used back in the days of Walter A.
Plecker, first registrar of vital statistics of Virginia. Plecker was bent on a
campaign to cover Indian ancestry by calling anyone that claimed Indian
ancestry to be African American (he used the term Negro at that time). Plecker
was a White Supremacist and a member of the Anglo Saxon Club. He wrote and helped
push for the Racial Integrity Act in Virginia.
One month ago there was an article that came out by Jack Goins, Roberta
Estes, Penny Ferguson and Janet Crain, entitled, "Melungeons, A
Multi-Ethnic Population".
http://www.jogg.info/72/files/Estes.pdf
In this article, it attempts to state that the "Melungeons" of
Newman's Ridge in Hancock County, Tennessee, are African American and White minimizing
the Indian ancestry. Estes’ DNA claims are based on faulty DNA collections from
cherry picked participants, people whose ancestors never lived on Newman's
Ridge or who were passing through the area for two or three years. Even though
there are R and X haplo-groups within the listings these articles ignore them
as aberrant and focus the reader’s attention singularly on the African E haplo-group
via Jack Goins' lines and Don Collins' lines. The majority of the E's come from
cousins of either Jack or Don.
Repeated attempts have been made over the years to inform both Jack Goins (MHS)
and Roberta Estes that haplo-group results under these DNA tests marketed for
mass consumption cannot identify ethnicity or race. The reason for this is
because the DNA tests account for only one line within a family. Each family is
made up of hundreds of lines of families that came together. The DNA testing
results are only showing a fraction of the information while the rest of the
families remain in a cloud of uncertain haplo-grouping. Also, haplo-groups
change in definition and geographic location almost annually. One year, a set
of markers that indicated E, now indicate another haplo-group altogether, or a
sub-haplo-group. Because of early admixing with Indians that began in the
1540's, and perhaps even as early as 1100 AD with Leaf Ericson's colony in
Canada, there is no sure way of determining when or where R or E haplo-groups
arose in America.
There is literally a ton of historical data and records that refute the idea
or notion that all these various Indian tribes and communities were at their
core African or European. Every government report issued since the late 1800's
to present have insisted that these "Melungeon" communities had an
Indian core. This is to say, they were and are Indian with admixtures of other
ethnicities. The cover up of Indian heritage began back in the 1700's with the
establishment of legal terms to determine taxation codes. It is obvious, to anyone
of a clear mind and sound logic, that these tax codes were needed by the
Colonies, and later states, in order to raise taxes to pay for war and to deny
treaty rights with the tribes. This race re-labeling continued until the early
part of the 1900's when the Eugenics Movement picked up and began segregation
and passing Jim Crow laws in order to exclude Indian people from making their
claims. When “The Indian Re-Organization Act of 1934” was passed, the Eugenics
Movement was at its height. By labeling Indians as Colored, Free Persons of
Color, Black, Negro, Mulatto or White, they committed genocide by paper work
erasing the Indian population in the East and throughout the United States.
When the 1940 Census came around the census takers in many places where
instructed that there were only two categories of race; White and Black. They
would base their decisions on skin color and tone.
Throughout the 1950's, 60's, 70's and into the early 80's various degrees of
race re-labeling continued to take place. The Eugenics programs came into ill
repute during the 1960's and 70's and thus tapered off gradually throughout the
country. During this time of the 1970's and 80's writers began to pop up yet
again asking questions about the so called "Melungeons" and their
mysterious ancestry. In 1989 Virginia DeMarce became prominent in the genealogy
arena. She was selected without true credentials to be a consultant in the
Office of Acknowledgment of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA). DeMarce began
writing articles about the "Melungeons" between 1989 to 1992. Her
field of expertise was Prussian History. This was what her disertation was
based on in college. She had no practical field work in ethnology or
anthropology nor of Native American Studies. Still, she was given a position
that would decide the fate of Indian tribal recognition on a federal level.
Books began to pour off the presses on the “Melungeons". Brent Kennedy
published a book entitled, "Melungeons: The Resurrection of A Proud
People", in 1994. His assertion was that "Melungeons" were
Turks, but at least he focused on some of the Indian data concerning these
communities. Thereafter books came out about every year or two postulating that
they had solved the "mystery of the Melungeons". Some of these books
said the “Melungeons” were Arabs, Gypsies, Jews, Phoenicians, Berbers, Spaniards,
Portuguese, and some even said they were aliens from outer space. In some
earlier writings in the 50's and 60's they were called "Children of
Perdition" and "Children of the Devil". Then in the 1995 to 1997
time frame Paul Heinegg came onto the scene with his publication, “Free African
Americans Of Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Maryland And
Delaware". In this travesty of a book he contends that all the Indian
communities in these states were originally African American and that Mulatto
always means African and White. Basically, the same thing that Walter Plecker and
the Eugenics Boards had pushed for in the 1930's and 40's.
Jack Goins, in his first book, "Melungeons: And Other Pioneer
Families", agreed that the "Melungeons" were indeed Indians that
had mixed just as the historical reports accounted and witnessed. By 2006/8
this began to change. Jack Goins had his DNA tested and to his shock it came
back E haplo-group. It has been said the E haplo-group is a Sub-Saharan
haplo-group. Once this news sank in he then began claiming that all the
"Melungeons" were Africans. Jack
Goins with the help of Roberta Estes then began to seek out unwitting and
unsuspecting descendants of "Melungeons" to add to their test group.
If the results were not E haplo-group then they would toss them to the side.
The main test subjects with E haplo-group were relatives of Jack Goins or Don
Collins. By padding the results with E haplo-group from Jack or Don's lines
they would assure an African result in order to hide Indian ancestry.
Genocide: ...any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in
whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
A. Killing members of the group
B.
causing serious bodily or
mental harm to members of the
group
C. deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to
bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part
D. imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group
E. forcibly transferring children of the group to another group
Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide,
Article II
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genocide
"...the ECHR also noted that a minority took a broader view and
did not consider biological-physical destruction was necessary as the intent to
destroy a national, racial, religious or ethnical group was enough to qualify
as genocide."
"The judges continue in paragraph 12, "The determination of
when the targeted part is substantial enough to meet this requirement may
involve a number of considerations. The numeric size of the targeted part of
the group is the necessary and important starting point, though not in all
cases the ending point of the inquiry. The number of individuals targeted
should be evaluated not only in absolute terms, but also in relation to the
overall size of the entire group. In addition to the numeric size of the
targeted portion, its prominence within the group can be a useful
consideration. If a specific part of the group is emblematic of the overall
group, or is essential to its survival, that may support a finding that the
part qualifies as substantial within the meaning of Article 4 [of the
Tribunal's Statute]."
http://www.preventgenocide.org/genocide/officialtext.htm
Article III: The following acts shall be punishable:
A. Genocide
B.
Conspiracy to commit genocide
C. Direct and public incitement to commit genocide
D. Attempt to commit genocide
E.
Complicity in genocide
An
ethnic group is a set of individuals whose identity is
defined by common cultural traditions, language or heritage.
Straining
Credulity
Eugenics, when most people hear
or read this word they think of Nazi Germany and the Holocaust. They think of
race purity and white supremacy. Its basic tenants found outward and grotesque
expression within that degenerate and evil atmosphere of hate. Few people know
or understand this pseudo science and its origins. “
EUGENICS is the
science which deals with all influences that improve the inborn qualities of a
race; also with those that develop them to the utmost advantage.” (1)
Sir Francis Galton has been dubbed the
“Father of Eugenics”. In his 1865 article “Hereditary Talent and Character” and
his 1869 book “
Hereditary Genius”, Sir
Francis
Galton invented the
ideas and practices of Eugenics based on his cousin Charles Darwin’s theories
of evolution in Darwin’s book “Origin of Species.” Galton believed that certain
mechanisms of natural selection were potentially threatened and spoiled by
human activity. “He reasoned that, since many human societies sought to protect
the underprivileged and weak, those societies were at odds with the natural
selection responsible for extinction of the weakest; and only by changing these
social policies could society be saved from a "reversion towards
mediocrity", a phrase he first coined in statistics and which later
changed to the now common "regression towards the mean.”(2) In Galton’s
introductory opening to his book “Hereditary Genuis,” he wrote, “ I propose to
show in this book that a man's natural abilities are derived by inheritance,
under exactly the same limitations as are the form and physical features of the
whole organic world. Consequently, as it is easy, not withstanding those
limitations, to obtain by careful selection a permanent breed of dogs or horses
gifted with peculiar powers of running, or of doing anything else, so it would
be quite practicable to produce a highly-gifted race of men by judicious
marriages during several consecutive generations.”(3) Galton first coined the
term Eugenics in his 1883 book entitled “Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its
Development.”(4) The goal of this discourse was to implement social policies
that created people with desirable qualities and virtues as envisioned by the
elite upper class. (In America, racist eugenics ideas were in use before
Galton.)
The group of people that would
grab a hold of these ideas included
Charles
B. Davenport, Albert E. Wiggam, Sir Julian S. Huxley, George B. Shaw, Bertrand
Russell, Arthur H. Estabrook and Walter A. Plecker. Of these, for the
purpose of this article, the first and last two men would become important in
understanding the influence and direct actions taken by the Eugenics program in
the United States and the subsequent present day actions by award winning
researchers of Melungeon/Mixed Blood/Tri-Racial/ Native American heritage.
Charles
B. Davenport was an
American scientist. He was responsible for the implementation of the ideas of
eugenics not only in America but around the world. He was involved in the
sterilization programs of the United States and had a strong influence on Nazi
Germany’s Holocaust.(5) Davenport received his funding from the Carnegie
Institution of Washington to direct and found the Biological Experiment Station
at Cold Spring Harbor in 1904 and the Eugenics Records Office in 1910. In 1925
Davenport became the founder and first president of the International
Federation of Eugenics Organizations.(6) Other prominent figures in this circle
of evil were Ernst Ruden, Alfred Ploetz, Harry Laughlin, Havelock Ellis, Irving
Fischer, Eugen Fischer, Madison Grant, Lucien Howe and Margaret Sanger of
Planned Parenthood.
Arthur
H. Estabrook, “Dr. Arthur Howard Estabrook was born on May 9, 1885, to
Arthur Francis and Susan Rebecca (Breck) in Leicester, Massachusetts. Estabrook
earned the A.B. degree in 1905 and the A.M. in 1906 from Clark College in
Worcester, Massachusetts. He was a fellow and assistant in zoology at Clark in
1906-1907. Estabrook received his Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in 1910 and was a
student at the School of Philanthropy in New York in 1914. Estabrook married
Jessie McCubbin on October 25, 1911, and married Anne Ruth Medcalf on July 8,
1931, after his first wife's death. He worked in the Eugenics Record Office of
Carnegie Institution of Washington (1910-1929) and served as a special
investigator for the Indiana State Commission on Mental Defectives (1916-1918).
Estabrook traveled to Virginia on behalf of the Eugenics Record Office to study
the issues and people involved in the Virginia sterilization case of Carrie
Buck. Estabrook served in the U.S. Army in 1918-1920 as a Captain in the
Sanitary Corps. He began working for the American Society for the Control of
Cancer in 1929 and served as president of the Eugenics Research Association in
1925-1926.”(7) Estabrook began publishing his work in 1912. His article “The
Jukes in 1915”, was published in Paper No. 25 Of The Station For Experimental
Evolution At Cold Spring Harbor, Carnegie Institution, 1916, Washington, D.C. This
article was a reanalyzing of the work that Richard Dugdale had written about in
his 1877 study entitled “The Jukes: A Study in Crime, pauperism, Disease, and
Heredity.” Estabrook argued that heredity created the undesirables as opposed
to Dugdale’s argument that environment was the key factor. Estabrook conceived
the plan of action that such undesirable families were to be thwarted and
restricted from reproducing since, by his estimations, environmental changes
would have no affect to change genetic propensity for criminality. “He was only one of many who used the Jukes family to
prove the uselessness and wastefulness of social improvement and to advocate
for heredity-controlling legislation, eugenic segregations, and
sterilization.”(8) Estabrook and Davenport together published a study in 1912
entitled, “The Nam Family: A Study in Cacogenics.” This was only one of several
studies and publications sponsored and paid for by John D. Rockefeller, Andrew
Carnegie and E.H. Harriman. In 1926
Estabrook published “Mongrel Virginians: The Win Tribe”, along with Ivan
Eugene McDougle,Carnegie
Institution of Washington. Dept. of Genetics, The
Williams & Wilkins Company, 1926. {Ivan E. McDougle was an investigator: "The Investigators," Ivan E. McDougle and
assistants (Gwendolyn Watson, Martha Lobingier, Eleanor Harned), in Amherst
County, Virginia}.
Estabrook’s compiled studies, notes and publications can be accessed at http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/apap069.htm#history. His
racist work is voluminous to say the least, and his involvement in the
suppression of Native American and African American mixed bloods is evident.
Walter A. Plecker was a
doctor and public health advocate. Plecker moved to Hampton,VA in 1892 and
became the public health officer in 1902. He helped to found and served as the
first registrar for Virginia’s Bureau of Vital Statistics beginning in 1912 and
held that office until 1946. He was a white supremacist and an avid purveyor of
eugenics belonging to his local chapter of the white supremacist group the
Anglo-Saxon Clubs of America founded in 1922 by John Powell at the College of
William and Mary. Plecker felt that the Native American population in Virginia
had become “mongrelized” from intermarriage with African Americans. Plecker’s
writings are legion, however in "The New Virginia Law To Preserve Racial Integrity", Virginia Health Bulletin, v. 16, extra no. 2, March 1924,
he began a campaign to disenfranchise Native American Indians in Virginia. Continued ranting from Plecker can be
seen in, "Virginia's Attempt to Adjust the Color Problem", The American Journal of Public Health, 15 (February 1925), pages
111–115. The following statement
is obtained regarding the Pamunkey and Mattaponi, “Their example has
been an incentive for the non-reservation Indian people, who, around the time
of the Civil War, began to resurface as identified enclaves. In the early
1900s, these enclaves reorganized into tribes. The move by Indian descendants
to form tribes was seen as a threat by some people who wanted to keep the white
race "pure." Led by Dr. Walter A. Plecker, a group called the
Anglo-Saxon Club of America prevailed upon the General Assembly to pass the
Racial Integrity Law in 1924. According to this law, in matters of births,
marriages, and deaths, the Virginia Bureau of Vital Statistics recognized only
two races—white and black. U.S. Census figures in 1930 showed 779 Native
Americans living in Virginia; by 1940, the figure dropped to 198. In effect,
people of Indian descent did not exist. Since the Indians were not accepted
into white churches and schools, they opened their own. However, Indian schools
in Virginia did not go beyond seventh grade until the late 1950s.”(9) In order
to understand more fully these campaigns against Indain mixed bloods in
Virginia we must go back to 1843. Many of the purveyors of the idea that any
African blood negated or ended treaties with Indian tribes began in earnest
with the Thomas W.S. Gregory Petition of January 1843, “…it alleges that they
allowed free Negroes to live on the reservation and marry their people “until
their Indian character has vanished,” and therefore their two reservations
should be sold and the people dispersed. No evidence is presented and no
details are provided to prove these allegations. Instead, most of the petition
is about the white signers’ belief about free non-whites in general: the
supposedly bad character of all such people (the “badness” being described at
length), the threat they presented to a slave-owning community, and
the“necessity” of removing all of them from Virginia. The petition is expressly
aimed at removing from the state the “anomalous institution” of a legally
constituted free non-white community. Calling the Pamunkeys “Mulattoes” and
asserting that they were no longer the kind of Indians for whom the colonial
government had established the reservations was a way of doing it legally.”(10)
During this 1940 to 1943 time
period Frank G. Speck was in the process of field study and aiding the Virginia
tribes in their efforts to gain recognition. When the efforts began to cover-up
Indain heritage Speck advised the Indians to gather affidavits from their white
neighbors. Plecker countered by banning Specks books from Virginia’s libraries.
Unfortunately this was an embarrassment to Speck as a professional and Speck
left the field studies of Virginia and the Indians therein. Fortunately there
were others that had stepped in previously to the 1940’s and subsequent to that
decade. Supporters such as James Mooney, John Swanton, Steven Weeks, Swan
Burnett, Hamilton McMillan and others would be the first line of defense for
the beleaguered tribes of the East.
Supporting such actions and
biased conclusions of the eugenics mongers, you will find the following
researchers and writers that either supported, or cited as reference, these
eugenicists; William H. Gilbert, Jr., Edward T. Price, Calvin Beale and Thomas
J. Harte.
William
Harlen Gilbert, Jr. in
1946 published, “Memorandum Concerning the Characteristics of the Larger
Mixed-Blood Racial Islands of the Eastern United States” in a periodical called
Social Forces. This article has been utilized on a regular basis from then till
now.
Edward
T. Price, in 1950,
submitted his doctoral dissertation entitled “Mixed-Blood Populations of
Eastern United States as to origins, Localizations, and Persistence” at the
University of California. In April of 1951 he published an article called “The
Melungeons: A Mixed-Blood Strain of the Southern Appalachians” in the
Geographical Review published by American Geographical Society. In June of 1953
he published, “A Geographic Analysis of White-Negro-Indian Racial Mixtures in
Eastern United States” in the Annals of the Association of
American Geographers.
Calvin L. Beale, in December of 1957, published “American Tri-racial Isolets: Their Status and Pertinence to
Genetic Research” in the Eugenics Quarterly. In June of 1972 he published “An
Overview of the Phenomenon of Mixed Racial Isolates in the United States” in
the American Anthropologists in co-operation with the American Anthropological
Association.
Thomas
J. Harte, in March of
1959, published “Trends in Mate Selection in a Tri-Racial Isolate” in Social
Forces, a periodical produced by the University of North Carolina.
During
the time between 1940 and 1975, these men and their faulty biased work would
impact the Native American mixed blood community through erasure in the records
both statistical and academic. Lies compounded upon lies which were based on
biased blatant racism and white elitist supremacy.
Citations
(1)The
American Journal of Sociology, Volume X; July, 1904; Number 1,”Eugenics: Its
Definition, Scope, and Aims”, by Sir Francis Galton.
(2)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics,
accessed August 14th, 2011
(3)
Sir Francis Galton, “Hereditary
Genius”, chapter 1
(4)Edward
J. Larson, “Evolution”, 2004, pg. 179; and Sir Francis
Galton,“Inquiries into Human Faculty and Its Development”, 1883, pg 17, {see
footnote 1}.
(5)Edwin Black, “War Against the Weak:
Eugenics and America's Campaign to Create a Master Race”, pg. 293
(6)Edwin
Black, War Against the Weak: Eugenics and America’s Campaign to Create a Master
Race”, pg. 40, 47 and 240
(7)“Who's Who in America”,
1935-1936 edition, Marquis; and http://library.albany.edu/speccoll/findaids/apap069.htm#history, accessed August 14th, 2011.
(8) http://mulibraries.missouri.edu/specialcollections/exhibits/eugenics/estabrook_jukes.htm,
accessed August 14th, 2011
(9)
http://www.dhr.virginia.gov/arch_NET/timeline/modern_indian.htm,
accessed August 14th, 2011
(10) Helen C. Rountree, “Pocahontas’s People:
The Powhatan Indians of Virginia Through Four Centuries”, pg. 194, see notes
61-64. {(61) Legislative Petitions,
King William County, January 20, 1843. (62)Legislative Petitions, King William
County, November 26, 1842, and January 12, 1843.(63)This assertion is refuted
by firsthand observations of Gatschet, Mooney, and Pollard in the late
nineteenth century (see below).(64)The “Pamunkeys” in the petition are actually
the Pamunkeys and the “Mattaponis,” since both reservation tracts are
mentioned. Apparently the counter petitions were written on behalf of the
residents of both reservations tracts, whose administrative title was “Pamunkey.”}
Why DNA Testing Doesn’t Work On Identifiying Indians (“Melungeons”)
Genetic
Testing
DNA THEFT: RECOGNIZING THE CRIME OF NONCONSENSUAL GENETIC
COLLECTION AND TESTING
By ELIZABETH E. JOH
http://www.bu.edu/law/central/jd/organizations/journals/bulr/documents/JOH.pdf
