I have a new friend, at least on Facebook. We sat at the same table at a lunch, and then last Saturday night we were at the same party. I talked to her husband (who was from Salt Lake) about where we should fly fish in Utah. He suggested Provo.
She works for the Anti-Defamation League. In the interim between our meetings eleven Jewish congregants at Pittsburgh’s Tree of Life Congregation were murdered. It had been a brutal week, and maybe particularly so for her. This week’s been brutal too, with another mass shooting in California. We are a violent people.
Because of her work I suspect that more than most folk she is attuned to racial and ethnic incongruities, ranging from unintentional slights to out-and-out violence. At one point in our conversation I must have mentioned we were going to fish in Oklahoma, because I said the word Indian and I think she cringed. A few sentences later she said Native American. I took it as a gentle correction.
For most states, Virginia say, or Washington or Wisconsin or Texas, first people history is a repetitious prologue. Before X happened, there were Native Americans: Caddo, Wichita, Comanche, Cherokee, Umpqua, Powhatan, Ojibwe, Fox and Sauk, Alabama, Coushata, Seminole, Karankawa . . . Everywhere there is that iteration, speculative and archeological, and then X happened, X being when the Americans came, or the British or the French or the Spanish came, and the part of the story about the indigenous people ends.
Where did they go? For most states, after the prologue, it’s oblivion. Maybe extermination by violence and disease, or to smaller and ever more confined spaces, but someplace out of the way, someplace else. In San Antonio once, talking to a federal park ranger at a Spanish mission, he pointed across an open field to the local Hispanic neighborhoods and said that’s where I grew up and that’s where the native population is still living. He said that they, part of his ancestors, were incorporated into Spanish mission life. Early Thomas Jefferson thought the answer for the Indian conflict was for the Native Americans to become farmers and join into the new way of life. Tell that to the Cherokee. Late Thomas Jefferson pushed for removal. Mostly late Thomas Jefferson won.
In Oklahoma, A History, Messrs. Baird and Goble write that every place has its birth story, and sometimes more than one. They suggest three for Oklahoma: the forced immigration of the Five Tribes; the Oklahoma land rush; and the oil boom. Of course before the five tribes, before the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, there were already Apache, Arapaho, Comanche, Kiowa, Osage, and Wichita in Oklahoma. Even in Oklahoma there is that first people prologue.
The problem with referencing Indians, whether the term of choice is American Indian or Native American or Indian, it is always imposed. Among American indigenous people there was never an Indian. There were Yamparika Comanche, or there were Powhatan, or there were Karankawa. Any label that suggests a unified indigenous people is an exonym, and any one is as artificial as any other. Every one of the labels has its critics, but each also has its supporters. Columbus’ word wasn’t so much a misnomer as a creation, and it’s useful and ubiquitous.
For most of us there aren’t day-to-day reminders of American Indian history and culture. Unlike, say, statues of Robert E. Lee, we don’t have many monuments about that other national tragedy. Oklahoma is one we’ve got, but if I think about Oklahoma (and I don’t generally) it’s as a collection of tropes: red state, cowboys, oil, tornadoes, Dust Bowl, and Indians. Tropes are useful as shorthand for things that are more complex, but only to the limits of our own understanding. For Indian, the complex thing contained in the Oklahoma trope is the geographical summation of every betrayal, every displacement and epidemic, every conflict, but there are the Native Americans who are there now, and whose families have now been there for generations. There are people who are Oklahomans.
S.C. Gwynne writes about the Comanche as cruel and violent. He writes that they were finally confined to Oklahoma only because they came across another people equally cruel and violent: Texans. The Searchers after all is not bad history. But Texans were not uniquely violent. There was plenty enough violence to go around. Oklahoma is one of the proofs. There are now 39 recognized tribes shoehorned into Oklahoma, from the Comanche in the southwest to the Cherokee in the northeast, and every tribe’s place in Oklahoma is both a conclusion and a continuation.
Did I mention before that we are still violent?
Usually I’m pretty comfortable dealing with information, sorting through and coming out the other side with a notion of what happened. I can’t seem to do that with Oklahoma. I have only a vague notion of what happened to its first people, what happened with the forced immigration of the other tribes, the betrayal of the white land rush, and how that fits together now: those are matters for real and dedicated scholars. All I can do is look at the mess with confusion as to the details, and a bit more knowledge that among those Oklahoma tropes there is something important, and something worth remembering.
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There’s a cold front in, with a heavy north wind and daytime temperatures in the 50s. Our skiff is in the shop, and the temperature’s dropped too much too fast for bass or sunfish. The first stocking of trout in the Guadalupe isn’t until next weekend (when we’ll be in Oklahoma). We drove to Surfside Beach to check the jetty: I had wanted to try spey rods in the surf.
Didn’t happen. I have never seen either the surf or the tide so high.
On the other hand, Killens Barbecue isn’t really out of the way coming back from Surfside. And by 2:30 there was hardly any line. We did catch it at a bit of a lull though.
