Migrant Mother as she was known for over forty years from this photograph taken by Dorothea Lange in 1936.
An image seared into the minds of many as emblematic of the Great Depression and the particular struggles of women in caring for and feeding their children. Not that such times were in the past and forgotten thirty years later at the beginning of the War on Poverty and don’t continue to exist in destitute Native American communities.
In Migrant Mother, we could see The Grapes of Wrath and what could so easily become the plight of most of us.
Over those decades of her public anonymity, Florence Owens Thompson worked and raised her children. Those children grew up, worked, married, had children of their own, and they in turn grew up. All of them would have heard family stories. Maybe not that their mother and grandmother was the model in “Migrant Mother,” but that Florence was full blooded Cherokee.
Look at her! Can you not see that she’s Native American? Yes or No?
Florence was born before Oklahoma was a state but after the deadline for registering as a Native American had passed. So, technically and legally she wasn’t a member of the Cherokee Nation Records to establish her ethnic ancestry don’t exist. Only the words that were spoken to her and she in turn spoke to her children who believed them and spoke them to their children.
“Tom,” one of Florence’s great-great-grandsons, heard and believes those words. Who’s to say that the white man’s record keeping is right and his relatives are wrong?