Time for my Cherokee story. I live near Cherokee, and to the Cherokee people, being "pure blood" is about as important as it is to any ethnic group. So we will sometimes get Cherokee people in to our museum, to see the exhibit we have on Scots-Cherokee relations.

There was a lot of intermarriage between the Scots and the Cherokee, but sometimes they doubt me. Aside from pointing out that their most famous cheif, John Ross, was 7/8 Scottish and 1/8 Cherokee, I tell the following story.

First I ask if anyone is or knows anyone named Bushyhead. It's not an uncommon Cherokee surname, and people always raise their hands. Then I tell the story of John Stuart, a Scottish trader, who came to this area in the 1700's and married a Cherokee wife. Their children were accepted as Cherokee, because your descent in their culture is traced through your mother's line. But they inherited their Scottish father's curly red hair. So people called them Bushy-head. That stuck as the surname, and, like I said, it is still found in use today. So all those people named Bushyhead, I say, are descended from the Scottish trader John Stuart.

I used to have arguments with an old girlfriend of my brother's, who was Cherokee and claimed to be full-blood. "C'mon," I'd say, "you don't think you have any Scottish blood in you at all?" She'd emphatically tell me she was pure blood Cherokee.

Finally one day I pushed her by saying, "If you are full blood, where do you think that red tint in your hair comes from?"

Without missing a beat she told me, "A bottle."

:-) So, like I said, never make assumptions.

Matt