In Search of Native American Gingers
A Family Tells the Story of a Nation's Origins
In my search for Native Americans with red hair, I began an epic road trip from Arkansas and arrived first in Oklahoma City. There I met a lovely family whose story I want to share. They are dad Justan Floyd, his teenage daughter Finley, his partner Amy Watkins (who I regret not photographing, even if she isn't Ginger) and their toddler Jasper. For each portrait, I record a short interview with the subject to get a sense of who they are and where they are from. This interview went deep quickly, and the family's story told part of their nation's history. Very quickly I saw connections to my own home too. My other big project, Fabricated Land, charts how much of Scotland’s identity and culture is defined by the clearance of people from the landscape. This short interview touches on the way different local events interconnect to shape global history. Lastly, congratulations to Justan and Amy who marry this very week and also have another child on the way!
JUSTAN: There are way more cultures here in Oklahoma than most people realize. We have a very heavy Asian influence. The next largest Asian district to San Francisco is in Oklahoma. We have a large Spanish and Mexican population here too. There’s German and Czech and everybody from around the world who came when they gave land away with a global ad campaign. And then of course almost every Native nation is here. They moved them here through all the trails of sorrow and tears and death: most of them ended up in this part. Oklahoma City was never a reserve. It was never given to a nation. So this was the main land-run area.
The connection we made that really brought that to light was that the potato famine and the Trail of Tears were happening at the same time. They were leaving Ireland, Scotland, or being cleared off the land there, and then they ended up getting land here and clearing people off the land. Dispossession leading to dispossession.
Who was the first Ginger? Everyone’s so intertwined that you can’t worry. It’s hard to trace it, you know. More often than not they’re marrying, and not the Killers of the Flower Moon kind of marrying. Not always.
AMY: During the potato famine, the Muskogee sent money to help the Irish. And it’s not being nations, but being people.
There is so much meaning and connection to the land, and that’s really important to me. I’ve realized now that I have an intellectual understanding of that, that it’s always been important to me. I was really blessed to grow up near the Leapfort River, in Oak Grove, and on 40 acres, where we were barefoot, and that’s rare now.
My family lived in a clan, essentially, in Hickory Grounds, and there were a lot of lands hundreds of miles away where they went. And, you know, my tribe has protected that, at least the best they can. I’m displaced, really; my family’s been displaced from the tribe. The federal government forced the tribes to allot all of their lands and they gave each citizen of the tribe 160 acres, and then anything left over they gave to others. So that’s how they took the land, legally.
I haven’t figured out exactly what happened, but the land that was theirs became the city of Shamrock, which is one of the biggest oil towns in Oklahoma, and we don’t have it anymore. And my great-grandmother [and her peers], they all died in the nursing home, a town away, very poor, so they didn’t receive anything.
I’m searching out land records just to find out what happened, because nobody knows. My grandpa’s alive, but he doesn’t talk about it. He isn’t going to talk about it. That’s sort of the wound across the nation. The elders are not very likely to talk about it, and some of them are, but most of them aren’t. And the elders still alive today actually don’t know very much about that time period because their elders were not talking about it.
I see an opportunity to savor what we can, you know, to preserve and then create a new identity for them. To me, it’s a much better way of moving into the future than through the society we see forming around us.
I think the benefit for Jasper is that he’s got this family that’ll look after him, but now he has a greater community that he can also learn from, delve into and just be a part of something that’s a little bit bigger than he is, which is nice.
Jasper means a treasure-bringer. His hair is the same shade as the stone. But it’s funny, because as it grows in, it’s almost translucent. And then once it matures, it turns red.
I think that Justan’s parents are gingers in the same shade. His mother is a Craig from Ireland.
JUSTAN: Mom’s family came out of Ireland, and then my dad's side, we’ve actually traced back to Wales.
AMY: Part of what we’re doing is supporting one of the education departments to create a Muskogee art curriculum, and we’re videoing all the elders and artists and anyone in the community who can to be a part of that curriculum, so that it’s there for him and for others like him.
JUSTAN: I’m a cinematographer by training. Part of my goal is, hopefully, to create a foundation here, as it doesn’t have a big entertainment industry. I’ve always been trying to find and support that community. My brother and I started the film festival. It still goes on. There’s enough people and it’s just taken a lot longer, a lot longer for people to get eyes on it than I thought it would.
And we’re in conversations now with tribes to set up a content engine that is all native-driven, and a digital platform, a delivery system. There’s stories to tell, many stories there. So many stories to tell. They’re being told right now, but the money is going to LA and New York.
I graduated with just shy of 400 people, and I think there were two other redheads in my class. I don’t think my brother got as teased. I’ve got two older brothers. One of them is a Ginger, but it’s a light blond kind of a ginger. I think he escaped some of the the teasing in grade school.
FINLEY: I get teased. People telling me to dance. Gingers have no soul, so they’re like, “Dance Ginger!” That happened yesterday. And then people I don’t know in the hall just randomly come up to me and they’re like, “Ginger!”
Also, no one knows my name in middle school. They just call me Ginger. I don’t think people are trying to upset me, it’s more of a tease. It’s mainly my musical theater class, and we’re all pretty close.
JUSTAN: It’s strange, because I’ve seen more Gingers lately. Or maybe I’m just spotting them, but I do feel like there’s a higher concentration of Gingers here than I’ve seen in other places.