Native Americans And Jews: A Kinship Of Shared Suffering -- Indians Who Are `Members Of The Tribe'

Jewish Indians? That's right, Jewish Indians.

We're not talking the lost tribes of Israel, though across a broad swath of American history that is precisely who such thinkers as Cotton Mather, William Penn and Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, thought the Indians were.

But we are talking members of a tribe who, through conversion or intermarriage, are also "members of the tribe."

There are people who are both Native American and Jewish. Beneath their unlikely commingling, there lies a deeper and more hallowed connection. It is a kinship borne of each glimpsing the brink of their own extinction.

But their stories also tell of the endless permutations of American diversity and what is gained and given in the crossing.

In their very uniqueness, Jewish Indians are exemplars of the extraordinary richness of an American multiculturalism that is so often muddied up by lumping people into categories that serve more to obscure than explain.

Painter Richard Glazer Danay grew up Caughnawaga Mohawk and Jewish on Coney Island.

"I'm a Shmohawk," says Danay, who counts among his uncles Nathan Glazer, co-author of "Beyond the Melting Pot," and Joe Glazer, a labor folk singer. Glazer says growing up Jewish meant it was not a question of whether to go to college but where.

Today Danay serves on the federal Indian Arts and Crafts Board and teaches Native-American studies at the University of California at Long Beach.

Then there are Mayera and Jessica Abeita, ages 16 and 14, of Albuquerque, N.M., who have been bat mitzvahed at their mother's synagogue, with some Indian flourishes, and have done traditional dances at their Laguna father's pueblo.

"They know where they come from on both sides," says their father, Gus, who would like them to marry within the pueblo but is not counting on it.

There is Jeffree Itrich, also of Albuquerque, whose Cherokee grandma, Bennye Lee Parrott, was working the cigar counter at the train station in Tyler, Texas, just after World War I, when a Jewish tire merchant from a very Orthodox New York family, struck by her beauty, told her to go home, pack her bags and come away with him. She did, and they stayed married until his death in 1953. (She died recently in a California nursing home.)

Itrich was previously married to Joel Brooks, former director of the Albuquerque Jewish Federation, whose first wife was also a Jewish Indian, who had converted to woo an earlier Jewish boyfriend.

"Here I am a boy from Brooklyn; I went to an Orthodox Yeshiva; I've been married twice, and both turned out to be part Cherokee," says Brooks, whose hobby is studying "exotic Jewish communities" around the world.

The intermingling of Indian and Jew began in the 1800s, when a few Jewish merchants married women from the Indian tribes with which they traded. The most notable case was that of a German Jew named Solomon Bibo who in 1885 married an Acoma Indian woman in New Mexico and ultimately went on to govern the pueblo, the only white man to do so.

In his last novel, "The People," left unfinished when he died, Bernard Malamud wrote of a Jewish peddler who becomes an Indian chief but cannot lead his adopted people to a place of safety and happiness.

The last scene had the Jewish chief and his tribe on a train being transported, like Jews to the camps, to a "miserable" new reservation in Missouri. "A place of death," says the Indian named Last Days.

Malamud's final words: "The moaning of the Indians began as the freight cars were moving along the tracks."

Suzan Shown Harjo, a Cheyenne poet, writer and activist in Washington, D.C., knows this to be more than bleak metaphor.

"Indians, like the Jews, are survivors who have lived lives on the run, who have not had time over many generations to grieve or mourn or even bury their dead, and who have been the victims of the most hideous kinds of politics and personal attacks," says Harjo, a former head of the National Congress of American Indians.

Harjo knows first hand. She is the widow of Frank Harjo, a Jewish Indian whose parents were united in a Malamudian veil of tears.

Frank Harjo's mother, Frances Licht, escaped the horror of the Warsaw ghetto for freedom in New York City, where she met Duke Harjo, a Muskogee Indian who was in the Navy. They married and moved back to the misery of the Muskogee reservation in Oklahoma.

"They moved to Oklahoma, where the two most hated groups of the day were Indians and Jews," says Harjo. In the space of a few years, Frances Licht had gone from one benighted ghetto to an even stranger one a world away.

"It's just awesome to contemplate," says Harjo, though she adds, "She probably partnered up with Duke Harjo because they had a lot in common, more than they knew."

A son, Frank, was born, but the marriage lasted only a year. Frances and Duke went their separate ways, and Frank, left on the reservation, was raised by aunts in Muskogee.

More than a decade later, Frances returned to claim her son, arriving one afternoon and leaving that very night with him, back to New York. There he was bar mitzvahed, went to school and watched his mother die a slow and terrible death from Berger's disease, a circulatory condition which led doctors to amputate her legs, a little at a time.

After her death, Frank learned from a stranger in Times Square that his father, whom he closely resembled but who his mother had said was dead, was alive and dying of cirrhosis of the liver in Baltimore. Frank found him and spent the last year of his father's life tending, and getting to know, his father.

Suzan met Frank a short time later. They married and had a son they named Duke, for his grandfather. A decade ago, at age 35, Frank Harjo died, like his mother, of Berger's disease. Most of their close friends were Jews or Indians. Trees were planted in Israel in Frank Harjo's name. A Jewish couple helped Suzan raise young Duke.

Despite the sometimes harrowing tales, there is something intrinsically funny about the mere juxtaposition of Jewish and Indian.

"It has a kind of Mel Brooks, who'd-have-thunk-it quality," says Mel Marks. Marks is the author of the self-published "Jews Among the Indians: Tales of Adventure and Conflict in the Old West," which has become a minor hit in the Jewish book-club circuit.

"I don't believe there's anyone out there who's pure anything anymore," says Greg Isaacs, a Jew and Taos Pueblo Indian. "Anyone who says they are is just not thinking clearly."