I have come here because of the long and very strong Tsalagi tradition in my RL family. My great great grandmother was an escapee from The Trail Of Tears. In the spring of 1839, after crossing The Mississippi, she like many others, slipped away from the federal troops and escaped into the then largely Native American state of Iowa. She was taken in by either The Sauk or The Fox people and later married a French trader named, Caliouette and moved to Illinois where they founded the family which was to be my mother's.

We know that she was a local herbal healer and assume therefore that she must have been of the Aniwadi Clan. Her daughter, my great grandmother, went on to become the Kankakee County nurse and people came from all over the county for her care. If they were of The Aniwadi, then I would be as well as membership is matrilinial.

I know little more about her other than the fact that she never spoke a word of English until she died. My great grandmother and my grandmother were both raised speaking French at home and English at Catholic school in Manteno, Illinois where English was considered a second language.

For many years I kept the two things which she brought with her from Iowa, an iron cooking pot and an iron meat cleaver. Alas, the cooking pot over the years rusted away to dust, but I still have the cleaverwith it's handle made of twisted fibers which I have never been able to identify. When my brother and I were small boys the family used to scare us by telling us the pot was what our great great grandmother used for cooking dogs. Too gross for words.