Northeastern State University

Department of Languages and Literature

Essay Published

A Published Essay

 

The Hungry Ones

craving of the spirit

Only five years ago the Cherokee Arts and Crafts Show was set up on the grounds of the Tsa La Gi, Cherokee Heritage Center, during the Cherokee Holiday, held every year on Labor Day in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. Back then cars were parked on a rectangular, unfenced field that late in August would be mowed and baled (square bales), and people would walk the tree shaded winding road back east toward the museum. The summer blacktop felt slightly soft underfoot from the baking heat.

I remember one oven-like day, probably Sunday of the holiday, sitting under the oaks in a lawn chair with the potter Anna Mitchell and her husband—fanning, talking pottery, greeting friends who happened by. Anna was telling me where she had dug the clay she had used for a particular pot that I had purchased, and I was drinking a Coke that some nice former student had gotten for me from the food stand run by the women of the Indian Methodist Church in Tahlequah. Blackberry cobbler is their big item.

Anna and I were both wearing earrings made by a mutual friend who is a jewelry maker here in Tahlequah, and we would swing our heads gently to listen to the tinkle made by the artistic lightening bolts. The music sounded silver and sweet as it rode on the almost motionless, first September air of Tsa La Gi. These are powerful earrings.

Much of that is gone now I think. The Oklahoma ticks will have the roads, the trees, and the benches more to themselves this Labor Day because in the first five years or so, although some arts and crafts remain at Tsa La Gi, the Cherokee Nation Arts and Crafts Show was moved to a large treeless space near the Cherokee Nation Headquarters.

At the Nation’s Headquarters there are large striped tents to shade the people. There is much more structured parking with security guards (Cherokee Nation Marshals, I suppose). Parking for the Pow Wow at the Grounds cost a dollar last year. Change!

We are somehow cleaner, more organized. The roads are straight. The non-Indians grow in numbers, and as they generally are the ones with the money to buy the art, they must be made to feel comfortable. Perhaps they will buy some crystals too.

Two years ago I was told with great sincerity that some guy from Dallas attends the holiday each year to rediscover his roots, and the bearer of the news seriously gave me a button bearing the likeness of a Plains Indian wearing a war bonnet. This in the Cherokee capital. I am silent at such rich moments.

 

 

I do not wish to hurt these hungry people who are feeding on an image created by New York studio artists in the nineteenth century and taken up by John Ford and his most charismatic disciple John Wayne during the twentieth century.

A couple of years ago my friend Wanda and I were wandering around in that hot, green and white striped tent, visiting with friends, laughing at the buttons, examining trade goods and T-shirts when Wanda let out an expletive, in English I hasten to add, and I began to look around for the cause of her displeasure. I could see nothing. Nobody who I recognized as an enemy was near, and while, indeed, much of the art was unfortunate, none of it was really obscene.

Changing the position of my eyebrow over my own good eye slightly, I looked at Wanda, and she answered by pointing with her lip (she is Kiowa, and Kiowas seem particularly good at the old lip manipulation) at a table piled with enlarged historic photographs in shrink wrap.

“Ah” I said, and began to search for a face that looked like someone I knew. I glanced again at Wanda, and she said softly “That one’s my uncle.” On the table, propped upright against a stack, was a photograph of a group of Code Talkers from world War II. Wanda’s uncle was one of the Code Talkers. He has passed on. Now his image is obtainable at the Oklahoma Historical Society or some other archive and may be had by anyone for any purpose for a dollar or so. People need his power again.

Oh, I don’t know if I should be critical. I have a picture scanned by a computer of Harriet Jacobs pinned to my study bulletin board. The picture reminds me not to whine if I weaken. Of course, I also am descended from

men and women who were the first of the Five Southeastern tribes forced to walk to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears. My ancestors frown on whimpering as do most American ancestors, although I am convinced that many Americans do not know much about their ancestors.

Now Wanda fondly remembers her uncle’s funeral. Her youngest daughter was about three, and they journeyed to Kiowa land in southwestern Oklahoma where the sky is not cloudy all day and the Indian land is all held in trust.

At the Ft. Sill National Cemetery, of course, her uncle had a military send-off, and many people attended to honor him. Wanda’s little girl, being tired of standing up all day in her pretty frilly dress with the obligatory ruffled petticoat went to sit on a tombstone. When the military honor guards fired their rifles, Wanda Jr. fell right off that tombstone backwards, black patent Mary Jane toes skyward. As she flew over backwards, ruffles up, she gave a little yelp.

Wanda and her aunt looked at each other and had to cover their mouths in received Indian fashion. Fortunately there was so much noise—what with the wind and the gunshots—that nobody could hear them laughing—I am talking whooping and choking here—and everybody assumed the tears were for the uncle, which they were. Wanda says he would have laughed harder than she did.

That was Wanda’s closing memory until the day at the Arts and Crafts Show.

For my part, I was offended by the picture of the Code Talkers for a different reason. The photographs were all from World War II, and the Code Talker photographs were all Plains Indians. Choctaws were the first Code Talkers. They talked in World War II, but does anyone but us remember them. Noooooo! The Navajos and the Comanches get all the press. Clearly the Choctaws don’t talk romantically enough.

The Code Talkers. My, these white Americans are hungry. About three years ago, or maybe five or six years ago, I forget, I gave a paper at some national conference.

The truth is that a friend of mine arranged this episode in my life and even drove me north from Oklahoma. I was glad of the change.

As I was recovering from a back injury, I spent most of the trip lying flat in the back of my friend’s van so I had only the vaguest idea of our geographical location. We drove for fourteen hours. Well, my friend drove for fourteen hours. The conference people were very kind, with more Indian facts at their disposal than most—really lovely some of the facts. A goodly number, well a few, of the scholars were Indians of various tribal persuasions.

Then I presented my paper and happened to mention the appropriation of things Indian by New Agers. As an example I pointed to an educational video that I had seen about the men’s movement in Texas. Isn’t it interesting that they had to have a movement? At this event a whole bunch of men (most of them white as far as I could tell) beat drums and ceremonialized in a space that seems to have been marked in various places by ersatz Sun Dance symbols. After noting this odd Sun Dance example, I said something to the effect that in attending sweat lodges one was dealing with some very powerful things.

As if fairy dust had descended from the ceiling a number of faces assumed a mystical expression and heads began to nod knowledgeably.

I saw this and went on to point out that one went into an enclosed space from which it is necessary to extricate oneself with care so as not to fall head first into the fire pit, and that one did not want to be in this small, hot, enclosed space with hot rocks that, if chosen by someone not up to speed in these matters, might explode. I believe that I used some technical and spiritual expression like, “If you put water on the wrong kind of rocks they blow up.”

The crowd seemed nonplused. A babel of voices flew at me, all seeming to say “Whadda ya mean? How could such an unpleasant reality be a part of anything so mystical?” A young Indian man in the room came to my aid. He kindly explained that what I was talking about was that non-Indians wanted to assume executive positions in the ceremonies. “Yes,” I said gratefully, “what he said.”

We were asked (as in “What is the meaning of life, Grasshopper?”) if we thought it was all right for non-Indians (which is a code word for White people) to attend sweat lodges. “Sure, if that is what they need to do,” I said, “but then I speak only for myself. I don’t know what other Indians think about it. I am mixed-blood anyway,” I went on, “and probably the part that is Indian isn’t very cosmic.”

It does seem to me though that people should be nourished by their cultures, but I suppose that if their cultures are bankrupt in the old human ledger book, they must attempt a loan. Still, there is much hunger. And such appropriation.

Remember that wonderful Remington painting Hungry Moon? Well. Many American people live in Hungry Moon. In several native languages the word used for the white Europeans is a word or words that indicates a being who takes everything, someone who steals — will try even to steal your spirit.

A non-Indian, someone I know and wish well, told me that she was considering attending church. All of her reasons had to do with the standing in the community of the members, their wealth, their membership on various boards, the neighborhoods in which they lived—the amount of personal prestige in their private wallets.

Rome appropriated too. After attending the empty public rituals the citizens took their toga-clad selves to their individual mystery cults where they could nourish their spirits. Romans also hungered. They took trophies. They collected the art of their conquered, including spiritual art.

Now I must say that sweat lodge is indeed a place to “see the elephant” as the early western European immigrants might say. I have groveled on the skin of the earth and been grateful for her coolness just as I have perceived the softness of the living rock.

Then, too, once several years ago Wanda crawled out of the sweat right ahead of me, and I followed her example by throwing myself face down into a pile of snow. I distinctly heard her muttering, “Jesus, Jesus.” Maybe she was communing.

I do know that she was just a mite ticked because of sharing the sweat with some young teeny bopper types who had traveled from Tulsa to Tahlequah to have their crystals recharged.

“They don’t respect our ways,” might be her indictment. My reply, if I were called upon to supply one, would be, “Yes, but they got real hot.”

What do Indians have that mainstream culture lacks, I sometimes wonder? Or does it have to do with lacking? Maybe it has to do with control. Why do they want to get so religiously hot when their culture does not require that or even offer it?

Suffering for one thing, I speculate. Indians have a reason to feel bad whereas middle class white Americans feel bad for no really good reason unless one counts emptiness of heart.

Indians got all the neat clothes too. Leather, feathers, beads, and oh the jewelry is to die for. Much of this neat stuff is a mixture, I point out, of materials, Native American and European.

Suffering, according to most of the books, leads to depth, adds complexity to an already interesting character, and lends just a dash of significance because long ago God or something cosmic made it happen. America’s landscape painters even say it, so it must be true. To suffer for no real or perhaps immediately discernible reason must be pretty demoralizing.

So these sufferers, to show their understanding of suffering and in their willingness to suffer guilt write novels and essays touching on the tragic and mystical nature of Native Americans. Occasionally such works are turned into movies such as After the Fall, and suffering is somehow manifested by the young actor Brad Pitt and his unshaven face.

Often the authors picture themselves standing pensively gazing at some ruin, mound, pot, battlefield, cemetery, memorial (or all of the above) wondering about these mysterious and mystical people (who usually live right down the road in trailers or I-RID houses). Often such writers delicately touch on the evils of alcohol about which they feel bad but helpless. One suspects that after the pensive gaze they climb into their Jeep Cherokees and drive off to have a good dinner accompanied by a French wine, perhaps a well chilled Chardonnay. Certainly that would be my personal choice after a hot day suffering at the ruins.

And how about this guilt, as in “How ‘bout dem Bulls?” The great guilt that so many sensitive white people feel and write about and image and piss and moan about. Well.

Now, let’s see, to have killed a people so very spiritual, to have victimized a people so close to Mother Earth, and so mystically bonded to the universe. Well, well, well. Aren’t those conquering people powerful? And aren’t these descendants of Gloriana Triumphant significant? I bet that they’ll never have to die like the rest of us peons.

Consider their trophies. Do they feel the power of the beaded dresses hung on their walls? Hummmmm. To possess that dress, or coup stick, or pictograph, or whatever object once belonging to people so spiritually connected to the universe makes the conquerors mighty significant doesn’t it?

I have noticed that they don’t really do anything practical about the mess that is now a permanent part of America’s tapestry either. They do not give much back. They are too busy. They are too invested in denial. They are too hungry. Their emptiness is too great. Their shame is too heavy. They are too much in need of spiritual nourishment to do anything practical to feed the mother. Besides it would take time and effort. Talk is easier.

The cup passes. And Indians drink from the cup too. I know Indian people who, having in many ways lost their source of spiritual nourishment, see these powerful conquerors nuzzling at easy spigots for Mother’s milk, and they nuzzle too.

If we are not careful, we will all be hungry. And if Indians were once tuned to spiritual stations on the universal band, they might want to remember that there is a lot of static now, a lot of distraction from the signal so to speak.

So what are we to do? That’s the trick of it, isn’t it. So what is one to do?

Hunger can be solved by planting a tomato, by cooking your own food, by caring for your own children, by building or modifying your own place. By singing your own songs, by feeding your own people, by suffering your own pains, and by dying your own death. As Americans are such mixed bloods, just discovering our own should be a significant journey.

The trick of it all, though, is that for an American, one’s own includes one’s own history, and that is the history of America. We must seek truth beyond what we are willing to know. We must serve America.

That, is hard. To live close to the earth requires one to live close to the earth which most people do not want to do. I understand that. Living in a real way is inconvenient. We pack, relocate, throw our garbage out and move on. We travel, see the sights—spiritual sightseeing along with spiritual fast food—and then return to more comfortable places for the mind and for the body.

Surely that is why so much spiritual emptiness appears as a foundation for America’s landscape. Spiritual hunger provides the base for the suburban trees and houses. The places where people take their being. Think landfill piled with plastic trash sacks which possibly leads to the conclusion that sometimes naked garbage is good after all. It turns into soil. Our American past contains a good bit of garbage that we need to recognize and compost so that we can nurture ourselves.

Wanda would laugh at me about now. Perhaps she would say there I go being optimistic again. And all good Choctaws know where that got Pushmataha. But I also suspect that Wanda would rather attend the Cherokee Arts and Craft Show under the trees at the Tsa La Gi, eat wild blackberry cobbler, and remember her Code Talker uncle as she knew him and as she buried him with tears and laughter in life within family, rather than as a shrink-wrapped photograph for sale to people hungry and forever ravenous.

—Tahlequah, Oklahoma

Spring 1998 /palo alto review