The Missionary and the Half-Breed

I started doing some research by talking to the oldest living members of my family and then searching various on-line databases to complete my family tree. It was there I hit a brick wall. I could find information about my family back as far as 1900, but there it ended. It wasn't until my grandmother passed away that I found the trail again, or at least I thought I had. My wife and I were cataloging her belongings for a sale when I discovered Rebecca's manuscript in a leather case in great-grandpa's desk. No one in the family knew how he came by it other than he loved history and he loved old books. I read the manuscript and then attempted to verify it by talking to the elders at the many pow-wows held in South Dakota every year.

At first, they were hesitant to talk with me. There are evidently a lot of people who believe they have Native American ancestry and boast about it to anyone who will listen. Some have an intense desire to "fit in" to the Native American community. Others only desire the ability to claim that supposed heritage in order to take advantage of the equal opportunity laws to further their career. While Native Americans embrace people of true Native American heritage, they are offended by people who only profess to be.

Once I explained I was only trying to verify a manuscript, they did talk. They told me their history as passed down from generation to generation orally, the only way they could since the Sioux had no written language.

It was during these conversations I learned there was indeed a white woman who lived with the Lakota as one old man put it, "when the buffalo were as many as the blades of grass and the Lakota led a good life." He didn't know her English name. That was lost to the mists of time, but he said she was called Pasha Sa in the stories he'd been told as a boy.

I'm comfortable knowing I may have some Native American in my ancestry, but I have no intention of flaunting that as do some. Instead, I'll pass that information on to my grandchildren in the hope they will understand that there are very few people of one race left in the world and that all races, though they may have different customs and beliefs, are all parts of the community we call "humans".

Privately, I like to think that maybe, just maybe, Rebecca still lives on in my family. One of my daughters has red-hair as have a few of my ancestors down through the decades, and her attitude toward work and her confidence are very much like what Rebecca wrote about herself in her manuscript. Nobody knows where the red hair comes from as the rest of us all have brown or blonde hair, but occasionally it does pop up.

I hope Rebecca would be pleased to know that after all these years, at least a few people remember her, though I think she would probably dismiss what she did as something arranged by God to teach her a lesson about life. I hope those who read this account can learn the lesson she tried to teach with her manuscript. It is a lesson Rebecca learned by living and by living by what she learned.