Nah-chay

They asked me what my tribe was
and I said well it's just a little one
and you wouldn't have heard of it
anyway it's officially extinct most of three centuries.
We're the Natchez, N A T C H E Z or zed.
I call it like a French word because it is.
Meet the local legitimacy.
 

A couple centuries ago we got tied in with the Scottish royal line
helping document our credentials.
You know us as the Mound Builders.
We ran the confederation known as the Five Civilized Tribes.
This is the South. We're talking about the same land here.
Our dynasty has been genetically continuous
since before the conquistadores were beaten here.
We're talking about my family here.
Meet the local legitimacy.
 

It amused us to make a shield of the white man's law.
We call it the West Florida Papers.
It's legally unassailable.
The United States has no business in our land
and never did have any.
We want them out now please.
The use of the first person plural is deliberate.
Meet the local legitimacy.
 

The Five Civilized Tribes is a large genetic affinity group.
I consider you all my kin:
Muskogee/Creek
Seminole
Cherokee
Chickasaw
Choctaw
and I would like to mention particularly the Houma,
Tunica/Biloxi and the Alabama/Coushatta tribes.
I am from the Natchez.
You wouldn't have heard of us lately.
We're the royal lineage.
Meet the local legitimacy.
 

We're matrilineal.
Our inheritance patterns are exactly the same as the Inca of Peru.
That's not a coincidence as it happens.
That's us too.
Those Scots I was speaking of?
That's the Stewarts, with all those famous kings and queens,
but more specifically before that, the clan Dunochaidh.
The Duncan skewered by Lady Macbeth is our forebear.
Our dynasty got Scotland back a little after that.
Meet the local legitimacy.
 

What do you want, an emblazoned escutcheon?
You want quartered arms?
We have a shield and heraldry.
Azur, on a pale rayonee' d'or, a lion rampant gules.
A lion in heraldry is an animal showing male organs.
Without those, it's a catamount.
People are picky about details.
When a caltrop is your arm, folks tend to tread carefully around you.
That's why we arranged legal matters so carefully.
We're talking about the same land here.
Meet the local legitimacy.
 

My hero Thomas Paine, in 'The Rights of Man',
thoroughly demolished personified statehood, as a sanctified institution.
Symbolism, though, is integral to affairs of state.
The United States must now wrestle with the Constitution of republican West Florida,
caught red-handed concealing it.
Strange how these things work out.
My people might well assert personal loyalty to me,
rather than try to patch a slavery Constitution.
It just works out that way sometimes.
Meet the local legitimacy.
We're all Indians here.

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Whither?

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