Talk:Basil F. Heath

Page move
, I see Montanabw moved this to the subject's real name:. I think this was the right move and I'm curious why the article creator, Scanlan, moved it back with what looks to me like a misleading edit summary:. Montanabw is not a bot, and even if the article subject was a chief, which I highly doubt, we don't use honorifics in page names. - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 16:12, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

Was he actually Mohawk, or English?
See the talk at WP:Indigenous. The only sources for this are not Native; they are human intereset stories by non-Native outlets and I don't get the impression they fact-checked this. - Co rb ie V    ☊ ☼ 16:12, 13 May 2016 (UTC)

External links modified
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 * Added archive http://web.archive.org/web/20110716163735/http://southtownstar.suntimes.com/news/3524587-521/german-germany-indian-wife-american.html to http://southtownstar.suntimes.com/news/3524587-521/german-germany-indian-wife-american.html
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Was he a pretendian?
The main source for this whole article is a local obituary which does not give the impression of fact checking anything. Someone needs to dig back through more stories. I get the impression that if he was in some way Mohawk, he clearly made unsupported claims about his position and status in the Mohawk organization. However I also have not seen anything that clearly shows he was a Mohawk. One belongs to an organization because of acceptance of other people, not individual claims to such. I am neither Cherokee nor Wampanoag, despite family stories that imply some of my ancestors may have been one or the other. In the Cherokee case at least the information points suspiciously back to Virginia, and as such if it is not just total fabrication I am more likely to have African ancestry of some type than Cherokee, maybe :Melungeon" ancestry, meaning I may have ancestors who were "Atlantic Creole" migrants to Virginia who were classed as indentured servants and granted their freedom, and quite likely married women of British or Irish origin. In turn these one of more initial "Atlantic Creole" ancestors in theory most likely claimed to be the children of a Portuguese father and a Yoruba, Tema or some other ethnic mother, and were born in Lagos, or what is today Guinea-Bissau, or somewhere else in what was then called Guinea, the Ivory Coast, the Slave Coast, the Gold Coast, the general area of the Bight of Biafra or Bight of Benin, or maybe even in Angola. This is a lot of speculation, but when the birth of my last clearly defined ancestor in the 1780s is not even clearly known by state, figuring out what later family stories meant, and how they reflect on the 16 or so ancestors of that person who would have come to Virginia in the 1620s or 1630s or maybe 1640s, requires informed speculation but is still boiling down to speculation. My main point is that ethnic identify is not something people can invent for themselves, it has to reflect the accepted understanding of a group, so unless we can find a grounded in Mohawk thought source that accepts that Heath was a Mohawk we need to show more healthy skepticism towards this claim.John Pack Lambert (talk) 15:37, 19 November 2021 (UTC)

No evidence that he was--or that he wasn't
The article says: "Although he claimed to be of Mohawk ancestry, after his death, his wife stated that Heath's parents were actually Andrew Cleve and Amelia (née De Amorim) Heath." It seems that the phrasing dates from an eight year old edit. The way it's put implies that there's some sort of contradiction--that his parents' names (and his own birth name) debunk his own Mohawk claims. But they do nothing of the kind. Jay Silverheels was born Harold Jay Smith, but there seems to be little doubt that he was genuinely Iroquois, of Seneca, Cayuga, and Mohawk descent. The source quoted about Heath's wife's statement also says he was born on an Iroquois reservation--as was Silverheels/Smith. Of course that proves nothing, just as Heath's European birth name proves nothing. I intend, when I have a time to look at the source carefully, to rewrite the statement to something like it was before those edits, to avoid offering a synthesis suggesting a conclusion with little support. I also figure on mentioning his place of birth; the source is as good for that as it is for his parents' names. Uporządnicki (talk) 12:56, 23 June 2022 (UTC)