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Officials at the BIA, however, found that Sherman "has not been documented conclusively to have Indian ancestry." Beyond that, the agency said, the claim that Quiet Hawk's group had descended from a single individual barred it from federal recognition, "which requires ancestry as a tribe, not simply Indian ancestry."
The BIA says it found no records identifying Sherman as an Indian earlier than an 1870 Census cited by the Quiet Hawk group. "In 1850 and 1860, he was identified as non-Indian" by federal census takers, the BIA said. "On some records, such as those of his marriage and the births of some of his children," the BIA said, "he was specifically identified as non-Indian." There was "no documentation" of Sherman's parents, and his personal journal "made no reference to his being Indian or associating with Indians." In addition, the agency said, "considerable documentation" uncovered by BIA researchers indicated that Sherman "did not live in tribal relations during his lifetime and was closely associated with demonstrably a non-Indian Sherman family."
Quiet Hawk and many of his followers appear more African American than Native American, and he and others, including the Connecticut N.A.A.C.P., have suggested that racial prejudice has played a role in opposition to his efforts. Quiet Hawk's mother was black, but even before he was born, many members of the tribe had intermarried with African Americans, in a pattern that historians say is not unusual among northeastern tribes, dating back to the era when they sheltered runaway slaves.
The woman who drafted the first two BIA rulings says they were decided on the merits of the evidence. "I am proud of being an Indian, and it bothers me when non-Indians, for whatever reason, try to be recognized as a tribe," said Kay Davis, a Chippewa Indian no longer with the agency. "It wasn't even a close call. We had no documentation, other than from a few secondary sources, that they were Indian." Davis added that "I think these people really believed" they were a tribe. "I really wanted to find positively for them, but I couldn't."
Davis says that when she worked on the petition of Quiet Hawk's Paugussetts, she received three threatening phone calls. "You'd better find right!" a male voice would say before hanging up. One night an unknown man followed her home; twice the doors to her residence were jimmied, although nothing was taken, she says. One night before going home, Davis says she noticed that two Paugussett files were missing from her cabinet. Then one day, according to Davis, after a tense meeting with members of the Quiet Hawk group, Davis and a woman colleague were victims of an apparent booby trap in a BIA restroom, where a can of Mace had been rigged to a paper-towel dispenser. "We went out of the bathroom coughing," Davis says. "I think it was a scare tactic." No perpetrators were ever identified by government agents who investigated the incidents, Davis says. Quiet Hawk says he "greatly resents" any suggestion that his group had any role in harassing Davis, calling the idea "absurd."