Race and Ethnicity: Native American - Starting with R

John Rollin Ridge was a Cherokee/Puritan novelist, poet, essayist, and newspaper editor who is recognized as the first Native American novelist for his 1854 work The Life and Adventures of Joaquin Muríeta: The Celebrated California Bandit. John Rollin Ridge was born on March 19, 1827, in New Echota, Georgia. He was the grandson of Cherokee Chief Major Ridge and son of John Ridge, both wealthy slaveholding landowners and prominent tribal leaders in New Echota. His mother, Sarah Bird Northrup Ridge, descended from Puritans who landed in Boston in 1637. He often used the pen name Yellow Bird, an English translation of his Cherokee name Cheesquatalawny. Major Ridge, John Ridge, and John Rollin Ridge’s cousins Elias Boudinot and Stand Watie signed …

The “Robes of Splendor” are a pair of mid-eighteenth-century animal-hide robes believed to have been painted by a Quapaw artist and given to French colonists. The Three Villages Robe is believed to depict the French settlement at Arkansas Post and a battle scene between two groups of Native Americans, while the Buffalo Dancers Robe includes what appears to be a Quapaw ceremony. Originally in the Musee de l’Homme in Paris, France, they were later moved to the Musee du quai Branly-Jacques Chirac, also in Paris. The Three Villages Robe, according to the authors of Arkansas Made, “depicts several scenes that include a representation of the eighteenth-century Quapaw villages that were situated on the lower Arkansas River and a European-style settlement …

Rock art is a term archaeologists use to describe images on rock surfaces created both prehistorically and historically. Arkansas has one of the richest concentrations of rock art in eastern North America, primarily in the Ozark and Ouachita mountain areas of the state, with a concentration in the central Arkansas River Valley. Rock art has also been discovered along the Mississippi River escarpment toward the eastern part of the state. Most rock art is found in bluff shelters, but it also occurs on exposed boulders, bedrock outcrops, and in caves. Along with the other archaeological resources in the state, rock art is important to understanding the lives of Native Americans living within the region during the pre-colonial era. Rock art …

Elizabeth “Quatie” Ross was the first wife of Cherokee chief John Ross. In local folklore, she is best known for giving her blanket to a sick child while traveling through Arkansas on the Trail of Tears, after which she died of pneumonia. Despite almost no evidence to support it, the legend of Quatie Ross has endured since the 1890s. Today, frequent visitors leave rocks, coins, and other gifts on her gravestone at Mount Holly Cemetery in Little Rock (Pulaski County). Elizabeth Brown was born in the Old Cherokee Nation in modern-day Georgia in 1791 to Thomas Brown and Elizabeth Martin. Not much is known about her childhood. She married and had a child with a man named Robert Henley; after …

The Rufus Buck Gang was a group of young men from the Indian Territory who went on a criminal rampage in the summer of 1895; all five were hanged on July 1, 1896, in Fort Smith (Sebastian County), the only people executed for rape from Judge Isaac C. Parker’s court. Rufus Buck was a Native American of the Yuchi tribe who was angry about the white people who were moving into the Indian Territory. He assembled a gang of petty criminals, all very young, to “make a record that would sweep all of the other gangs of the territory into insignificance.” The others were Lewis Davis, also Yuchi; Sam Sampson and Maomi July, both Creek (Muscogee); and Luckey Davis, who …