OKLAHOMA CITY, Oklahoma — I cheered the day the owners of the Major League franchise in Cleveland announced they were breaking ties with its nickname and the cartoonish image of “Chief Wahoo.”
You don’t replace an image, however insensitive, without some folks accusing you of throwing away history. But real history isn’t in figures like Chief Wahoo any more than it’s in Uncle Ben or Aunt Jemima.
It’s easy to overlook that fact, just as it’s easy to overlook that Native Americans lived on these lands 20,000 years before whites settled it.
I discovered this when I visited the First Americans Museum last week. I arrived with a friend, a white man who’d come here to research Native Americans for a project he’s been working on.
He’s close to drawing a more contemporary picture of them and of the struggles they’ve faced in America. He’ll also aim a spotlight on what their circumstances look like today.
From what I’ve learned, the millennium seems far better than the past for various tribes who’ve called Oklahoma home. My friend, who has so much information crammed in his head, has shared with me what he’s learned, as he’s pushed forward with his ambitious project.
Except for a handful of historians, my friend knows more about how the past 50 years have treated Native Americans than perhaps anybody else alive. He doesn’t try to flaunt his knowledge, though.
I say he should.
He’s spent almost 20 years studying and learning about tribes in Oklahoma and Florida, and his version of what life has been for them is nothing akin to images of Native Americans that fictional cowboys in “The Lone Ranger,” “Lonesome Dove” or “Rawhide” presented TV viewers.
As I explored the museum, I felt a bit like I did when I went to Belle Meade Plantation, Auschwitz-Birkenau and Robben Island, and saw man’s evil at its worst in these places.
Yet, those horrors are behind us, spruced up to make them seem as if they almost didn’t occur. Nothing about the experiences of Native Americans looked so handsome. Their struggles in this country continue.
The present doesn’t erase the past, and First American Museum focuses on that past, a tangible reflection of a different time in this country, a time when buffalo roamed the prairies, when waters in rivers, streams and lakes ran deep blue, and when the lands across this continent belonged to Native Americans.
They don’t see herds of buffalo on the prairies; they don’t see waters colored in blue; and they don’t own most of those lands that surround them. They’ve been forced into a life their ancestors wouldn’t recognize, because with it has come efforts to strip Native Americans of their heritage.
Two centuries too late, the U.S. government issued an apology to Native Americans, but it didn’t promise to give back the territory it stole. I suppose those are the fruits of subjugating a people.
In years ahead, I hope my friend’s project makes people more aware of the official depredations to Native Americans. Maybe that’s asking it to do too much. I’m certain those who look into this history will see the kind of genocide that’s made the United States a lesser place to live.
For how can America be much of a place when it’s done so much harm to its native sons and daughters?
Justice B. Hill grew up and still lives in the Glenville neighborhood. He wrote and edited for several newspapers in his more than 25 years in daily journalism before settling into teaching at Ohio University. He quit May 15, 2019, to write and globetrot. He’s doing both.
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Publish date : 2024-10-03 22:30:00
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