https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/first/m/malcomson-drop.html
This was what David Cornsilk saw as a little boy, and it made an impression on him. He grew up in the countryside surrounded by full-blood Cherokees and feeling their particular prejudice against white people (and against blacks and half-breeds). His white mother, who was more or less rescued by his father from an abusive relationship with a white man, had decided to live as a Cherokee. “Her family are backwoods folks from Arkansas. We were not accepted into her family because we were half-breed Indians. So we were treated differently by them. I’m sure if we had been half-breed blacks they would have never even accepted that we existed. So my prejudices come from that side. It took me a long time to even—I’d never been around black people other than just the few who live up there and one or two other kids who’d come to my school.” “Up there” refers to a hill overlooking Tahlequah. a place local whites and Cherokees call Nigger Hill. The black people who live up there today are still collectively known as “the freedmen” and are descendants of slaves brought west by their Cherokee owners from the tribal homelands in North Carolina, Georgia, northern Alabama, Tennessee, and parts of other states. Most of these ancestors came during the forced removal in the 1830s along what was called the Trail of Tears.
