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She identified as a Cherokee because her grandparents(from Oklahoma) told her that's what they were; that it turned out not to be true is unsurprising. There are a lot of white people in Oklahoma who call themselves Cherokee, and sometimes they have Cherokee ancestry and sometimes they don't. Either way, you can't visually distinguish Cherokee Indians from regular white southerners; my grandpa believed that this was because the Cherokee's eager adoption of civilization caused their skin to lighten, but other elders have told me that they have weak genes and a Cherokee woman was provided a dowry by the government at some vaguely defined point. Basically, though, Cherokees are the US equivalent of, like, Argentines. It's not implausible that a random white-looking person from the appropriate part of the country be Cherokee, and this is common knowledge for a certain generation.
Was he a Mormon, by any chance? Back when they considered dark sin to be a curse from God, the LDS church officially taught that Native Americans’ skin would lighten if they became Mormon. I haven’t heard of any similar beliefs outside of that group.
No, he belonged to the church of Christ, scientist. He didn’t go to doctors and believed that personal physical health and appearance were downstream of attitude and closeness to God. To him, study, virtue, and prayer made a person healthy, strong, wise, successful, and physically perfect. He was a true believer in that stuff.
I don’t know how far off base he was from official Christian Scientist teaching. But it seems like a connection that someone of a certain age could easily make from dogmatized faith healing.
Christian Scientists make more sense when you look at the state of medicine in the 19th century when it was founded.
Bedrest and avoiding any concoction doctors tried to sell you wasn't a bad idea.
Things changed obviously. But heroin was being sold as a cough suppressant up until 1910. Penicillin was first mass produced for the invasion of Normandy in 1944.
Effective medicine is fairly recent.
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