The Metoyer family: The family is directly descended from François Metoyer (1784-1862), son of Marie Thérèze Coincoin (1742-1816?), a former enslaved woman, slave owner, and property owner, and Claude Thomas Pierre Metoyer (1744-1815), a French-born, white plantation owner and businessman. Unlike many of their contemporaries, the Metoyers claimed a history of land ownership down South. Their deep Creole, Cane River roots in Natchitoches, Louisiana encompassed plantation slavery, freedom, aristocracy and loss. Bound up in their story is all the complexity and intrigue of their African American and French European ancestry. Adding richness to this gumbo is the Native American (Cherokee) heritage of the Mississippi-based African American family that married into the Metoyer clan. Between the Civil War, Reconstruction, and Jim Crow, the Metoyers lost their empire amidst a ruling culture that could not tolerate wealth in non-white hands. Third-generation Omaha native Ray Metoyer summed up his people’s lost inheritance this way: “Their land was taken from them. That’s the story of many African Americans who thought the South had something for them.”
