Amelia Rand

"We Are Not Invisible"


Interstate 35 is an unfinished road that twists and dips and really is a southern thing. Everyone takes I-35 to go somewhere other than where they are. Construction began in the early 50's and ended somewhat in the late 60's. Interstate 35 runs all over Oklahoma and farmland in Oklahoma is still disappearing due to urban sprawl. You can see the remnants along the sides of I-35, the better-equipped plants that survived the destruction and continue to grow in patches like the spots on a giraffe. The bold colors of the Indian Paintbrush mixes with the red dirt that is somewhat unique to the Oklahoma landscape. I’ve traveled on I-35, mostly taking car trips with Mom and my brother, Thomas, down to Sulfur. Thomas and I rode along in the car for the sense of adventure and the expected family visit. Mom drove to Sulfur to remove herself from the atmosphere at home. My parents are divorced, but Thomas and I experienced the tense and argumentative environment that continued to build until Mom and Dad lived in separate spaces. My dad, still living in the old, blue house that I grew up in, hates Oklahoma. To my mother, my brother, and me, it’s home.

Oklahoma is a Choctaw word that literally translates to Red People. The license plates issued in Oklahoma have the state flag printed on them. The flag consists of a buffalo hide shield floating in a sea of light blue, surrounded by eagle feathers, and crossed in the middle with a peace pipe and an olive branch. The Oklahoma state flag and the license plates all recognize the same fact: Indians live on this land. My family is from the Oklahoma territory. We’re Choctaw, except, of course, my father. Dad is from New England, the small town of Damariscotta, Maine. Dad is Scots-Irish, far from Choctaw blood. Most of my extended family lives in Oklahoma, not far from where I grew up. Of course Norman is practically the center of Oklahoma so nothing is too far away. Mom took us to family gatherings on holidays, even dragging my father along. Oddly enough, my family celebrated Thanksgiving. Maybe the celebration was simply an excuse to eat good Indian food. My family still cooks recipes that were developed from past generations of Choctaws. The ingredients are native and still grow where houses and highways have not been built. These recipes still survived after all of the years, but the people who keep them alive are slowly disappearing like the land.

My Aunt Rosalie is one of those people. Rosalie is my grandmother’s sister, and like my grandmother has witnessed the exploitation of the Oklahoma land and its people. These women not only witnessed this abuse, they experienced it as well. In 1884, the Chilocco Indian School in Oklahoma was established. The school is located north of current-day Oklahoma City and Ponca City, near the Kansas state line. Chilocco was erected by Major James N. Haworth, the superintendent of Indian Schools at the time. Chilocco was not unique. There were several boarding schools for native children throughout the state. My relatives, including my Aunt Rosalie and Grandma, attended Chilocco School. Chilocco was an off-reservation boarding school, funded by the federal government but run by Christian missionaries. Children began at Chilocco at a young age, the school using distance as a tool in their grand plan of civilizing. The federal policymakers and the Chilocco School administrators worked together to extract the native children from their homes and separate them from their familiar cultural background. Chilocco had a mission: to transform and eventually eliminate the native culture. The children at Chilocco, like my Aunt Rosalie were spoon-fed Christian values that attempted to strip them of their language and religious beliefs. Rosalie is one of the last native Choctaw speakers. She retained the language, but my grandmother and other relatives only remember Choctaw hymns
or select words. Although the Choctaw language is almost dead, the Choctaw religion has suffered greatly.

Christianity is a pervasive and exploitive tool that continues to be used by our government. Christianity became apart of my family through the experiences with the Federal Indian Boarding Schools. There are those in my family who believe in Jesus, but only on major religious holidays, and there are those who have remained a devoted Christian after receiving a federally funded, religiously racist/sexist, brainwashed education. My Aunt Rosalie is one of the latter. As a child, I would sit in Rosalie’s living room, the television set blaring the news, and stare at the white man that hung on her wall. Rosalie had a portrait of Jesus Christ hanging on the dull, white wall of her house. I studied his eyes, his skin, and his hair, and wondered why my Aunt Rosalie trusted him as much as she did. The portrait of Jesus was a representation, a manifestation of the Christ that white culture and white Christianity wished to portray and worship. I figure Rosalie found some sort of comfort in the face that surrounded her during her boarding school days. She found some sort of comfort in her own interpretation of the imposing religion. The wrinkles in her face, the deep creases around her lips proved her resistence to resentment.

We took road-trips to Sulfur, Oklahoma to visit my Aunt Rosalie more than any other relatives. Rosalie’s street had a bitter, rotting smell that invaded the car through the open windows. Mom says the town’s name is self-explanatory. Rosalie lived in an economically depressed part of town, but when we turned the corner where the Love’s gas station stood and followed the road lined with dead grass, a fading yellow, we were guaranteed Rosalie’s shining face rocking back in forth on the front porch rocking chair. The houses by Rosalie did not have white picket fences. Chain-links guarded their front lawns with the stone frogs and leaning lawn gnomes scattered about. Rosalie’s lawn was always empty. She kept her things inside the house, except for the squeaky rocking chair on the front porch and the steeping sun tea with floating lemon slices that never seemed to disappear. My Aunt Rosalie smelled of Dove soap and caramel candies when she wrapped her long arms around me to say hello. Rosalie’s skin was a brown-red color, similar to the color of Oklahoma’s distinctive dirt, surrounded by thinning gray hair that fell just below her ears. Her laugh always whistled through the thin spaces of her dentures. Her teeth were very white and very straight. Her smile didn’t quite fit her face, but it was loving and kind nonetheless. I watched my Aunt Rosalie’s mouth enough as a child that her lips and the sounds she produced are some of the most vivid memories I have of her. Rosalie told stories to fill the empty air. She never wasted time with relatives or, as she said, “her people.” While Christianity may have converted many of my relatives, including my Aunt Rosalie, the Choctaw way of story telling never left most of them. Rosalie told stories to provide entertainment, share a life lesson, to teach the younger generations about the elders and the history of Native America.

Letters written between family on the reservation and the child outside the border and inside the schools have been dug out of the stacks of disregarded papers. Some historians have taken time to organize the correspondences and discover that the strength of the Native community was strong enough to survive and preserve their culture on the hope of written words. The publications inform the literate public, but my Aunt Rosalie and the rest of my relatives remained living testaments for many proceeding generations in their families. The children inside the boarding schools did not merely survive through outside, or, from their perspective, inside communication. The children of the schools bonded quickly through tribal affiliation and previous friendships. My relatives, my grandmother, my Uncle Tony, and my
Aunt Rosalie, attended Chilocco School together and while they may not have received letters, others from their community shared their letters with my relatives and others. Written letters spoke the language of the Choctaws and other tribes like the Kiowas and the Chickasaws and the native tongue was not lost for many decades.
I remember sitting in the backseat of our big, brown Jeep, watching Mom’s hair whip across her face from the wind of the open window. My mom drives with her left foot up on long car rides, but when she drove in Oklahoma, anywhere on I-35, Mom sparked up a cigarette and pulled her left knee up to her chest and laughed above the noise of the wind and the radio. Aunt Rosalie watched my mother often back then. Rosalie read my mother’s face and found the painful story of a child one generation away from the Federal Indian Boarding School, coping with the hatred of their skin color by their parents. I watched my mother like my Aunt Rosalie watched her and began to see the warning signs. Mom was tired of the constant uphill battle. Rosalie would pray. I would do well in school. Thomas would make her laugh. Rosalie also told stories to share a message unique to our heritage. Rosalie turned in her seat and spoke to my brother and me saying, “Sissy, these children know Choctaws became known as landless Indians, don’t they? People think we don’t got houses or homes where babies grow up with warmth and love, Babies. But you know that ain’t true, honey. We were moved and marched so many times by that government they got going there, we just learned to make a home for ourselves, but don’t get attached. We know our land, we know where we are.” Rosalie put her faith into Jesus because as a child his image never changed, the school promoted one portrait of Christ: fair-skinned with Caucasian features, and this remained a constant for her. The land, Oklahoma’s red dirt, and the flat skyline were constants for Rosalie as well. Maybe that’s why she invested her time in cooking the recipes her family cooked. The recipes weren’t complicated because the style of food preparation of the Choctaws is not elaborate. Choctaws used the resources they had around them and eventually the food they received from the government food bank. My Aunt Rosalie cooked wild onions and eggs, prepared her favorite blue grape dumplings, and made the traditional pashofa dish. Pashofa translates from the Choctaw word for cracked hominy corn. Pashofa is mainly a corn dish, but the ingredients also include meat and seasonings that Choctaw found accessible to them. I can still see my Aunt Rosalie working methodically on the side of the old highway, picking wild onions and placing one inside the basket at a time. Rosalie’s tropical colored house dress ballooned and fell in the dry summer wind. She was continuing the traditions in simple, subtle ways.

Tradition and family were two topics that my Aunt Rosalie never strayed too far from. Rosalie loved her sons who barely made it out of high school and her nieces who are anywhere from a professor to a beautician. She loved her people. Along with her portrait of Jesus, my Aunt Rosalie’s walls were lined with framed photographs of her family. She loved the memories captured in each smile and each face. Thomas and I were the whitest faces on those walls, but we were blood. Her walls told stories with the people that decorated them. Some of the stories were sad and a source of frustration for the family. The Indian Boarding Schools did not simply leave a mark on the generations that attended the school. The Boarding Schools continue to impact the welfare and people of our culture today. Several members of my extended family turned to alcohol and drank themselves into medical complications. Schools like Chilocco operated under Christian values that attempted to assimilate and acculturate native peoples. The schools operated under the same mode as the treaties and land allotment acts: civilize and refine. Native people were not seen as human beings. They were treated and regarded as untrained and uncivilized families whose language and traditions appeared inferior and heathen. The generations that grew up in the boarding schools with the source of hatred teaching them and disciplining them were taught to hate who they were. My grandmother is a product of these lessons learned in Chilocco School. She despises the dark tones of her skin and striking features of her face. My mother learned to examine her body the same way. The hatred for the Native body continues to be learned today. The Federal Indian Boarding Schools were a tool that the government employed to break the ties of tribal life and completely transform Indians into the white, Christian culture of the time. The treaties prove the object of the government and the ways in which the government attempted to attain it. Hatred for the Native body was blatantly promoted and funded by the United States government, the white legislators and administrators could never fully remove the native from the Indian.
My relationship to the boarding schools is not direct, but part of my own identity has been influenced by the boarding schools and by my family’s direct connection to them. I grew up learning about the injustices that Native peoples have suffered over the centuries, but I haven’t ever applied that suffering to myself. I have witnessed the lasting effects of the boarding schools and mistreatment of Native people through the alcoholism that has plagued my family and the persisting stereotypes in our society today. I don’t think it is my responsibility, or even
my right, to take on the suffering of the Choctaw people, but my internal conflict is where my role as an indirect product of the boarding schools lies.

My grandmother’s face, the wrinkles that run like directionless rivers are evidence of persevering strength that many of my family members possess. Many of my male relatives entered the armed services after the boarding schools. Their education was not sufficient for further schooling. They fought for a country that attempted to strip them of their identity, and believed in the causes they fought for. My uncles and cousins wore the skin of Native Americans, boarding school survivors, and military servicemen. I feel the disconnect from my family and their strength. I am merely two generations away from the Federal Indian Boarding School days and I am attending a well-known and celebrated liberal arts college. I am living an opportunity that did not exist for most of my family. I have memories from my childhood of standing on my Uncle Tony’s feet, a man who has been interviewed by historians for his personal narrative as a Choctaw, as we slow danced around the room. His strong arms negotiated the turns and spins, the dips and twirls of my small body. I was a child of Uncle Tony. At his funeral, after battling stomach cancer, I stared at his sunken face and deflated body. He lost his strength after nearly a century of struggle. People traveled from homes far away to say their goodbyes to Tony. The family had their time to say their final words to Tony before the funeral. I leaned over the casket, my hands holding the wooden edge, and whispered to my uncle, “I hope you can dance whenever you want now. Just remember, though, I’m the best dance partner.” My mom found comfort in knowing his struggle was over. Uncle Tony’s struggle was over, but the family still struggled in places and people. The boarding schools produced broken people, and those broken people produced broken families. I witnessed our generations of broken people. I opened my eyes and opened my ears and learned the history of our family. My relationship to the identities of native peoples may not be how Indian I look, but I know the history of my people, a Choctaw family in Oklahoma. I have listened to Aunt Rosalie, and watched my grandma’s struggle, and I know their stories and that history.
The boarding schools were colonialism starting at the source of a people. Our family’s cycle of broken people continues because most of us are afraid to look at it. Most of us are afraid to understand or acknowledge the painful history of our people. Most of us are afraid to realize we still live in a country that refuses to recognize our painful history. My Aunt Rosalie accepted Jesus, the white Christ that Christians thought would civilize Natives. My grandma suppressed her past with alcohol and self-hatred. My mother grew up in a chaotic and irresponsible atmosphere. Mom has found a spiritually peaceful and emotionally grounded way of life, and after 51 years she has found her own way to look at it. My mom studies the past of Native America as a whole and has found a way to apply that history to our family. She’s looking at the it of our family and has begun the long process of acceptance and reconciliation with the past. I know her journey because I’ve listened, I’ve watched her, and I admire her. Mom has maintained the relationships to our close relatives. Mom has stayed connected to Oklahoma, Choctaw land. Through my mother I stay connected to our family. I look at it, all of it. I look at the complexities of our family and attempt to understand them. I break the cycle of broken people, following my mother in her courageous journey of examination.
My identity is not how native I look. Every day people discover their “Indian heritage” through their blood relation to some famous chief or a Cherokee princess. A new trend is blood testing for a measurement of how native a person is. These people may find their identity on a piece of paper or a blood test, but I look to my family. I have the wrinkles of my grandma’s face, the whistle of my Aunt Rosalie’s dentures, and the wide feet and strong hands of my Uncle Tony as evidence of my identity. I have the old churches, the familiar foods, and the emptied boarding schools as proof of my history. My identity is in the days of hot summer air and fresh picked onions. My identity is in the steeping sun tea and in the red dirt of Oklahoma. My identity is my mother’s journey and my Uncle Tony’s peace. My identity is not separate from my family. My identity is apart of them all.