Prior to the war he had been active in Cherokee political affairs. He was one of the signers of the contested treaty that relocated the Cherokee from Georgia to the Indian Territories. This led to a lot of conflict within the Cherokee Nation, with several of his brothers and friends being assassinated in the fighting.
Watie was a slave holder, and when the Civil War broke out, he raised a regiment of troops to support the Confederacy. He fought well at the battle of Pea Ridge, although the Union troops prevailed. He also later captured supplies which led him to eventually be promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. When Lee surrendered, he held out as long as possible before he laid down his arms.
After the war he increasingly stepped away from Cherokee Tribal politics and retired to his destroyed plantation to farm for the rest of his life.
These photos are from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. They are very much a product of their time. If you looked at portraits of English ladies and gentlemen of the same era you would see the same type of posing, with a stern expression on their faces and dressed in their finery.
Photos served a different purpose in those days than they do today. Pictures are common today. Every phone has a camera, innumerable photos can be taken effortlessly, and so candid events are captured. In those earlier times photography was sufficiently complex and exotic that sitting for a portrait was the event. Today you might photograph your lunch to post to Instagram, in those earlier days the act of being photographed was not so frivolous. It was a rare record of you and your family and so it must be treated as a matter of some significance.
In this video Quang Tran, a popular YouTuber cooks his version of a Navajo meal. He's Canadian, and his parents are Vietnamese, so he got his recipes from the internet. In his comment section, which is blessedly free of cultural appropriation nonsense, the Native Americans appreciate him highlighting their cuisine, and they seem to think he did a good job of it (although they all say his tacos are too crunchy).
At one time I wondered why there weren't more Amerindian restaurants, but then it occurred to me that Mexican food was largely indigenous cuisine, so I guess there are a lot of them. With that in mind, one of the commenters, Phillip Begay, said, "I eat it every day blue cornmeal mush mutton stew coffee. Potato with spam on hot tortillas." While I was surprised at Spam being added to their cuisine, a little later commenter L M added, "This is more contemporary native Americans food. The result of tribes being pushed to subpar reservations and given rations. It’s sorta like our “soul food” being different from African cuisine." There's no denying, the Indian's got boned with the reservation system.
Half of the video is Tran making the meal, and the other half is him eating it. As he eats, he gets tangled up in the proper term for Indians: he calls them American Indians, but quickly corrects to Native Americans (a linguistic contrivance I find to be clumsy -- I much prefer Amerindian if you need to clarify that they're not subcontinent Indians). He then uses the Canadian Aboriginal, with Indigenous and First Nation no doubt floating around in the background.
Speaking of naming, the tribal names themselves are not what they appear. Apparently, most tribal names came from their neighboring tribes. Most tribes called themselves the 'people' and other tribes the 'enemy'. So, when explorers would ask who lived next to them, they would get that tribe's name for the other tribe. From Original Tribal Names of Native North American People we discover that the Navajo actually called themselves Dine'e (The People) and it was the Pueblos who called them the Navajo (planted fields). Still, in this day all of the Navajo in the thread identified themselves as Navajo.
Regardless, the meal looks good, although I'm not too sure about that blue corn mush.
This artwork is the European explorers' impressions of the indigenous population of the Americas. These images, and those after the jump, are from the John Carter Brown digitized collection. There are many more at the link, including a large number of black and white etchings.
