I often wonder what my life would have been

The dream I had last night about Grandpa Dave was so real.

It was a pleasant dream. Grandpa was teaching me how to work faster. “Just drop the two grains of corn. They will come up whether they are close together or a few inches apart.”

We were working where he had made a field that had been only rocks, stumps and bushes. In his lifetime he had done so much hard work. I wish could write a book about the way he influenced my long life.

He would often tell me that his grandmother, Cherokee Rose, had changed her name to Margaret Fink and married a German stonemason named David Songer. She spent all her life in Tennessee where she was born. Because she was married to a white man she didn’t have to go on The Trail of Tears.

My mother’s people left Tennessee voluntarily but did not continue their journey on to the reservation as all Native Americans were supposed to do. They came to Shannon County in southern Missouri to live among the Native Indians that had always been here.

They were treated well and took council vows that they would never admit their true heritage. Andrew Jackson gathered the rest of the Cherokees and sent them out of their homeland to the reservation.

Years later when the census takers found them they all had white people’s names. They had lied about where they were born to avoid going to the reservation.

Grandma Bounds singled me out of her grandchildren and taught me all of her wisdom, but because of her council vows could not tell me why. Not until recently have I learned why she taught me rather than my two older cousins.

She knew that my mother and father were both one-eighth Cherokee so I was also one-eighth. I was the oldest daughter of the oldest daughter. She wanted to be certain that I was taught the things a medicine woman should know.

I often wonder what it would have been like to live freely as they had before Native Americans were forced to move to the reservation. I would have been the Medicine Woman for our people. What a shame, but I can proudly say, I am now a member of the Elder Council of the Western Cherokees of Missouri and Arkansas!