Cynthia Ann Parker: The Anglo-American Who Became A Comanche

Cynthia Ann Parker: The Anglo-American who became a Comanche Cynthia Ann Parker, christened Naduah by her captors, was an Anglo-American woman who was captured on May 19, 1836, by an army of Comanche raiders, one of America’s native Indian tribes. Captured at the tender age of about ten years, she was adapted by a Tenowish Comanche couple who raised her as their own child, which helped her to forget her original home (History.com 2018). She quickly adapted into the Comanche culture and was assimilated into the tribe like any other native. At seventeen she married a Comanche chieftain and warrior, giving birth to two boys and one girl. However, her biological parents never gave up looking for her, and twenty four years later, scouts reported seeing her in a Comanche territory. A rescuer mission was organized by a group of Texas Rangers, which resulted in her successful recapture and return into her biological family. However, Parker did not feel at home among her natives; she felt a stranger because she had grown up in a different culture that had welcomed and treated her as its own. She had become a bona fide Comanche citizen,

Essentially, Parker was denouncing her native people, saying that she was no longer one of them. This must have been viewed as an insult for an Anglo-American woman to denounce her own civilized society in favor of a barbaric uncivilized native tribe. It is also interesting that the government went as far as bribing her with thousands of acres of land and an annual payment of $100 for five years in an attempt to make renounce her Comanche identity (History.com 2018). Parker’s tragic end a few years after being recaptured- she died of influenza after a self-imposed starvation- further shows that the Anglo-Americans were trying to force a reluctant White Indian to accept a civilization she did not identify