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- The names "Ben Ishmael Tribe," and "Tribe of Ishmael", were applied to poor, Upland Southern residents of Indianapolis, Indiana during the late 19th century because of their supposed association with the Ishmael family. Records of the Ishmael family show that it originally hailed from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and that its patriarch, Benjamin Ishmael, served in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. The Ishmaels, known locally for abstaining from the wage labor economy in Indianapolis, received attention from eugenics advocates starting in 1877 with the Reverend , and his assistant James Frank Wright. Following McCulloch’s published report in 1888 regarding the Tribe of Ishmael, eugenicists such as Charles Estabrook and Harry Laughlin used the family to argue for sterilization laws called the Indiana Plan. The family name was also invoked during Congressional hearings that led to the passage of the Immigration Act of 1924. After mostly slipping out of national consciousness for much of the 20th century, the history of the Ishmael tribe was radically reinvented by Hugo Prosper Leaming in an essay called The Ben Ishmael Tribe: A Fugitive “Nation" of the Old Northwest. Leaming argued that the family was not simply a poor white Christian family, but actually a Muslim tri-racial sect of indigenous peoples Europeans and enslaved Africans. Much of Leaming’s narrative was refuted by the extensively researched 2009 book Inventing America’s Worst Family: Eugenics, Islam and the Fall and Rise of the Tribe of Ishmael by Nathaniel Deutsch, a professor of Literature and History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. (en)
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| rdfs:comment
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- The names "Ben Ishmael Tribe," and "Tribe of Ishmael", were applied to poor, Upland Southern residents of Indianapolis, Indiana during the late 19th century because of their supposed association with the Ishmael family. Records of the Ishmael family show that it originally hailed from Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, and that its patriarch, Benjamin Ishmael, served in the American Continental Army during the Revolutionary War. (en)
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