"That's What They Used to Say": Reflections on American Indian Oral Traditions
272
"That's What They Used to Say": Reflections on American Indian Oral Traditions
272Hardcover(New Edition)
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Overview
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806157757 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 10/12/2017 |
| Edition description: | New Edition |
| Pages: | 272 |
| Sales rank: | 943,826 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.40(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Power of the Spoken Word
The whites are already nearly a match for us all united, and too strong for any one tribe alone to resist; so that unless we support one another with our collective and united forces; unless every tribe unanimously combines to give check to the ambition and avarice of the whites, they will soon conquer us apart and disunited, and we will be driven from our Native country and scattered as autumnal leaves before the wind. But have we not courage enough remaining to defend our country and maintain our ancient independence? Will we calmly suffer the white intruders and tyrants to enslave us? Shall it be said of our race that we knew not how to extricate ourselves from the three most dreadful calamities — folly, inactivity and cowardice? ... Then listen to the voice of duty, of honor, of nature and of your endangered country. Let us form one body, one heart, and defend to the last warrior our country, our liberty, and the graves of our fathers.
A story being told is a body of spiritual energy transporting traditional knowledge and information that passes back and forth between the generations of grandchildren, parents, and grandparents. Stories have multiple purposes of passing along information, presenting values and virtues, reminding us who we are, and giving glimpses into the future. Stories consist of words of power used like the paints of an artist who renders a picture in our minds that resonates with our inner being. When told effectively, stories transcend time; traditional knowledge becomes a part of each new listener and thus a part of the next generation. Tecumseh's 1811 speech to the Choctaws and Chickasaws exemplifies energy released through eloquence and emotions. This energy is akin to that existing in the planting of a seed. The Choctaws and Chickasaws had already planted their corn in their Mississippi homelands, and the following weeks of spring rain would yield crops to be celebrated. The people welcomed the new year with the Green Corn Dance during midsummer, a celebratory affair of social good times and the medicine power that comes from herbs, plants, and the metaphysical world. This was a festival opportunity to share traditional stories and knowledge with adults revisiting the past and the young learning about their people.
I learned to appreciate both the power of storytelling and the way Tecumseh utilized that power from my own family. My Shawnee grandmother, Rachel Dirt Wakolee, proudly claimed being related to Tecumseh. She said from timeto time that we were related to Tecumseh. Her claim had little effect on me in my youth, but as I grew older and learned more about the great war leader, I gained much respect for him. Grandmother Rachel had married my grandfather Glade Wakolee, who was Sac and Fox, and they lived in Shawnee, Oklahoma, but mostly out in the country on Moccasin Trail, north of town. My mother, Virginia Lee Wakolee, was the first child to survive because her two older siblings had died from pneumonia when they were babies. In this way, my mother was the eldest child, and so am I.
On a cold January night, I was born in Shawnee, Oklahoma, at 12:20 A.M. Several miles down the road lay the town of Tecumseh, so close that old Highways 18 and 177 connect them. During humid Oklahoma summers, we had no air conditioning; we lived at 1420 East Walnut Street in a small three-room gray rent house in town. Those were the days in the early 1950s of the Korean War when you were lucky to have even a fan. We did not. So we kept the windows opened most of the time and hoped for rain. And it did come, but so did humidity. Hot, damp uncomfortable days, but you just learned to live with them. A few years later, we moved out in the country. I was about five or six. My brother Ron was a couple of years younger, though he looked like he was five or six too because he was always big and husky for his age. A few times, our parents took us in the evenings to the south edge of Shawnee toward Tecumseh on Beard Street where we all got snow cones. This was a big thing because we got to come to town and I remember staring at the snow cone stand and the people lined up. My brother liked grape and I always wanted strawberry. One weekend, a carnival camped next to the Canadian River that separated Shawnee from Tecumseh and my parents took us to ride some of the rides and eat cotton candy. I was filled with excitement; everything looked so big with bright colors, especially at night. At the time, I had no idea that I would grow up and write about Tecumseh like this. The future yields surprising results sometimes. What is personally important is that I feel connected to Tecumseh because of my grandmother Rachel. She always said he was a great leader and we were part Shawnee. Grandmother said Tecumseh was also a great speaker, but she never explained why. "All Shawnees know him," she would say. "He was a great leader, that's what they used to say," she said with tremendous pride and a smile, nodding her head to affirm her comment. Her brown eyes twinkled like she was holding back a surprise.
The Shawnees and Mvskoke Creeks and Seminoles share many beliefs. The Mvskoke Creek–Seminole Way focuses on the Green Corn Ceremony, paying homage to the four elemental powers — fire, water, earth, and wind — andincludes dancing from late at night to dawn, a part of Nature's cycle. Some people might call this worshipping Nature, but this Way of Life guided our lives. Several times, my parents took us kids to stomp dances at Little Axe, a Shawnee dance ground, located east of Norman, Oklahoma. The Creeks and Seminoles shared some of their songs with the Shawnees, and Tecumseh's people reciprocated, offering their hospitality. During Green Corn, you never went hungry because people shared their food. This ceremony also enabled my mother to visit some of our kinfolks on her side.
Tecumseh's mother was Mvskoke Creek, so a personal connection bonded the Mvskokes and Shawnees in his family, but in general the two peoples joined often as allies. In his journeys, Tecumseh traveled south with a delegation of warriors from various tribes to visit the Mvskokes in their home area, which became known as Alabama. He delivered a fervent speech to the Mvskokes at one of their biggest towns, Tuckabatchee, trying to persuade them to join him in war against the United States. Both Shawnees and Mvskokes fought for their homelands with other Native groups during the nearly four years of the War of 1812, including the Mvskoke Creek War of 1813 to 1814.
Much of Tecumseh's reputation derived from his passion and the cause to which he devoted his life. No doubt Tecumseh was gifted with oratory, and he was an impressive, stout-looking warrior. I was raised with the Seminole–Mvskoke Creek philosophy that if you were good you might receive a gift in life. This would be a gift that you had to respect or it would be taken away from you by the power that had given it to you. In the speech above, Tecumseh was endowed with the gift of oratory — the power of the spoken word. He fully deployed its power, uttering each word in such a way that it conveyed a spiritual power that could influence others.
Shawnee people believed that Tecumseh possessed great medicine power. His younger brother, Tenskwatawa, or "Open Door," did possess such power, especially demonstrated when Governor William Henry Harrison challenged Tenskwatawa to make the Sun disappear. An eclipse occurred on June 16, 1806, earning Tenskwatawa his English name, the Shawnee Prophet. On the other hand, Tecumseh's personal medicine power manifested itself through his oratory and it is likely that he held an eagle feather or some personalized item that he used while urging crowds to join his campaign with the British and other Indian nations against the Americans. The eagle is the greatest animal that flies, and it is revered among practically all Indian cultures. Whatever thesource of Tecumseh's power, there can be no doubt that his gift for oratory enabled him to invest his utterances and stories with meaning and conviction that resonated with his listeners and inspired them to action. History is full of Native leaders like Tecumseh, and often they possessed the spiritual power of the spoken word.
Spoken Word versus Written Word
Traditional Native people and mainstream Americans view history in different ways, especially when their worldviews differ greatly. Based on the tradition of relying on the spoken word, Indian oral history conflicts with the Western training of most American historians. The academic historian works primarily with documented evidence for understanding history. But the differences in historical approaches do not stop here. Professional Western-trained historians define history as events of change over time. In their definition of history, Native people prefer "experience" instead of "history," so that an event is recalled as an experience in a story. The vast difference between the two perspectives comes down to how to understand the past and how to recall it. Furthermore, what is reality? And how is it defined? The linear thinker, like most people in the mainstream, is convinced that history is a measurement of change over time and that each new event becomes a part of the collective past in chronological order. But how is historical meaning important to both groups?
Tecumseh's words to the Chickasaws and Choctaws resonated with an emotional energy of Native patriotism of which Shawnees are proud. Native people can also recall an experience by using words in great detail because of the emotions, vivid colors, interesting smells, familiar sounds, and the people and beings involved. When retold, the experience comes alive again. Storytelling recreates the experience by evoking the emotions of the listeners, transcending the bounds of past, present, and future. Time is not restrictive in a story where the storyteller uses words like a weaver uses threads to construct a tapestry that recreates the richness of a lived experience.
Words become pieces of a puzzle coaxed together to reproduce a picture or mental image of a personal experience. For example, words in the Mvskoke-Seminole language describe the experience of something that has happened or a person or people doing things. The speaker uses intentional words and uses them in such a way to paint a mental image of what he or she reimagines. Forthe Mvskoke-Seminole speaker, learning the linear way becomes an uphill task because the cultural logic is different. My father struggled with this through his adult years. He completed the fourth grade and his older brother, Telmond, had a grammar school education. Their sisters had about the same amount of education because English was not necessary in a Mvskoke Creek–Seminole farming household. My father became a young man when it was still most important to belong to our traditional community. My mother, who was Shawnee and Sac and Fox, joined the Mvskoke Creek–Seminole community when she married my father.
Many years later, when we moved to Muskogee, Oklahoma, my father became a Baptist minister, the fire-and-brimstone apostle type who believed intensely in the Bible. We lived in a pink rent house on the corner of Callahan Street and North L. On weekends in my teen years, I would come home late, trying to make it in before midnight, which was a house rule for all of us children as we became teenagers. My dad would wait up for us. Friday and Saturday nights in Muskogee were big nights to hang out with friends. I had a black used 1965 Ford Mustang and approached the house from the side street, North L, next to our side of the railroad tracks. Almost a half a block away, I would turn off my headlights and the engine to coast into the driveway. It did not help in that I had replaced the twin exhaust system with two Cherry Bomb mufflers to give my car a loud, rumbling sound that I thought was cool. The only problem was that I clamped the mufflers on because I could not afford to have them welded on, and sometimes one of them would fall off. If I made it past my sleeping dad, later he would wake up and sometimes go outside in the dark and feel the hood of my car to see if it was still warm. This way he could guess about what time I came home.
My father would often stay up reading the Bible, resting in a lounge chair with a floor lamp over his shoulder illuminating the pages. One of his favorite passages was Ecclesiastes 3:2 and 4: "A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance." Then he would ask, "Did you have a good time?" If I missed curfew on a Saturday night, he would remind me about going to church in the morning and not getting up late was always about hearing the spoken word.
Sometimes, my dad would fall asleep, the footrest extended as he reclined with his Bible on his chest. If I came in too late, I looked to see if the light was on. I hoped that he would be asleep with the lamp turned off so that I could sneak to my bedroom. Sometimes he would be waiting in the dark and would wait to hear the doorknob click, and just when I thought I was safe, I would hear a voice coming from the dark, "Do you know what time it is?" I would reply, "I think it's just before midnight." And he would say, "You better check again." If I made it past my dad without waking him up, my younger brother, Ron, might wake up and say that he needed a dollar to buy something, so it was like paying a toll for him not to tell what time I actually came home.
On the nights that I made the midnight curfew I said goodnight to my dad as I walked past him to my bedroom as he continued to read his Bible, reviewing the passages he would use in his preaching on the following morning. He would wear his glasses and use his right index finger, underscoring each word as he pronounced it softly in a whisper. "For the Son of man is come to seek and to save that which was lost," which he highlighted in yellow and underlined in blue ink in Luke, chapter 10. He liked the New Testament and preferred it over the Old. A few years later, I realized my father was teaching himself how to read words that were unfamiliar to him. I asked him one day about teaching himself to read English and he replied, "You can do anything if you put your mind to it."
On an unexpected November day in 1986, my father handed me the same Bible that I saw him read on those Friday and Saturday nights. He said, "I want you to have this." And as I held it in my hands, it felt like it weighed as heavy as the Ark of the Covenant. Inside the cover in faded blue ink: "To our Beloved Son, Donald L. Fixico, Our Love and Blessing Always." The book is black with a white-laced border around its edges. Pencil marks, inked underlining, and yellow highlighted passages mark contemplative moments and prayers throughout with Scotch tape holding together well-worn pages. Now more than thirty years later, this gift is sacred to me.
This well-traveled Bible was the one my father preached from for many years, from the pulpit, at weddings or funerals, while standing in church, in rain, snow or cold. Many called him Brother John. Younger relatives called him Uncle John. To us kids, he was Pops. He would often return home from an afternoon winter funeral. Sometimes it was a long drive for him; sometimes I would go with him, or my mom, or one of my siblings. But most of the time, he went alone. He would be tired. We would ask, "How did it go?" He would answer with a few details, saying someone had to lead the services and comfortthe family. This is what he thought needed to be done: to take care of people, especially in their times of grief.
One winter afternoon, I drove with my dad to a funeral he had to officiate. He coughed so badly that I said he needed to see a doctor. So I took him to the hospital and a doctor said he needed to stay a couple of days. When I arrived home, the family members asked where was Pops and I said I took him to the hospital because he had pneumonia; they thought I was joking and expected him to walk through the door. So they waited; I watched Gilligan's Island on television. They went outside to look for him, came back in, and said, "You weren't kidding." Years later we laughed about the incident, how everyone thought my dad and I were playing a trick on them when he was actually in the hospital with walking pneumonia.
Stories bond families together. The hospital story was one of many that came up at the dining table years later when we would gather at Christmas or when I would come home on visits several times a year and my brothers would come over from their homes in the Tulsa area. We recalled and retold stories following breakfast until it was time for lunch. Sitting at the oval dining table, we laughed until we cried, bringing the past back to life. We imitated people's voices, using the same words they used in telling stories and using colors to vividly describe things and places; we were not just recounting anecdotes, but using an entire way of thinking like old-timers or how Indian people do certain things.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from ""That's What They Used to Say""
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Copyright © 2017 University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, Publishing Division of the University.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations $ ix
Acknowledgments $ xi
Introduction $ 3
1 Power of the Spoken Word $ 13
2 Creation Myths of the Earth and People $ 45
3 Legends of Warriors $ 65
4 Indian Oratory $ 91
5 Ghost Stories and Little People $ 111
6 Moccasin Trail $ 134
7 Indian Humor $ 153
8 Prophecies and Visions $ 177
Conclusion $ 203
Notes $ 213
Bibliography $ 225
Index $ 243