The last two months I have lived in Tulsa, helping out my mother. I left
Tulsa when I was a teenager. I fled a difficult home to go to high school at
the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, which was then a
Bureau of Indian Affairs high school with an emphasis in arts. There was also a
two-year postgraduate program. I remember three other Creek students there:
Sandy and Phyllis Fife, and Richard Ray Whitman. That school literally saved my
life, as it did for many of the students who attended. It affirmed my identity
as a native person, as an artist, and it gave me a refuge from an abusive
situation at home. I left Oklahoma in a trail of pain.
I
have returned frequently to Oklahoma over the years, to keep a connection with
my family and my tribe. I kept a close relationship with my father, a Creek
man, who lived his last years in Texas near the Gulf waters. We both loved the water. When the
abusive stepparent died in the early nineties, only then could I return to my
mother’s house. Before then, I saw
my mother at work, or elsewhere.
We human beings are faced with
all kinds of tests in this world. We don’t always understand them. There are
some things that take an eternity to understand. There has never been any doubt
as to my mother’s love, and I have to believe that the love of the Creator (who
is not invested in any religious affiliation) remains steadfast and center to
any path, to any endeavor begun with the intent to bring kindness to the world,
though sometimes it may seem otherwise.
I considered the path of our
people and the test of our path as I gathered with many others in the tribe for
the 26th Annual Council Oak Ceremony on a warm, fall day in Tulsa.
We stood together at the place the Locvpokv people from our nation arrived
after our forced removal from our Alabama homelands. The Locvpokv people placed
ashes from their original fires at the base of an oak tree on the hill where we
now stood, many years and generations later, near the Arkansas River. I felt
the connection between us like the beautiful and mysterious light from the
fire, threading us together. I drank in every word spoken, felt every little
breeze, and particle of sun. I listened to the poetry in the speech by our
Chief of Staff, Edwin Marshall, the wise threading of history in the words of
Ted Isham, our Cultural Preservation Manager, and took to heart the words of
the many other speakers.
We may not understand the why of the
injustice of the bloodshed, the forced move far away from our beloved lands,
but we are in a story that winds through eternity. And we are still standing
together.
I needed the people that
afternoon. I was fresh with grief from my mother’s passing from this world.
I felt the memory of the
people as it lives in our bones. I renewed my promise to carry my part of the
story home the best way possible.
This is home. This is what
home means.
