Itʻs summer and Indian stories are in the making everywhere.
The days are long and languid and the nights are warm and full of singing, full
of story potential. Everybody’s singing stomp dance, powwow, church, and
humming popular songs with ear buds in their ears. And it’s not just two-legged
humans but all the other humans: birds, frogs, insects and too many mosquitoes.
One of these days Iʻd like to start collecting some of those
contemporary “old” Indian stories. Many of them have their beginnings in the
summer, but are usually told on long winter nights. One category of these stories
that youʻll never find in the publishing world is painting stories. Like many
of you, (some of you behaved, like my sister Margaret) I lived through those
wild Indian parties and 49ʻs as a high school student at the Institute of
American Indian Arts and a student at the University of New Mexico. I see them
now as part of a test, a kind of coming of age. Some of us made it through,
barely, some of our friends…didnʻt…and others are still stuck there trying to
catch the thrill of the first high. Some good stories came out of the journey
because we needed them to make it.
Laughter is the grease that slides us through difficulty, even tragedy.
Painting was a tradition at those parties. The first person
to pass out was the canvas. We young women would dig through our purses and backpacks
and pull out fingernail polish, tape, glue, cotton balls and any other items
that might be decorative. (I hear superglue later made an appearance.) Oh, and
scissors if the painting posse was being especially devious. And then the
victim was…decorated on the face, arms, and sometimes…other…places. Imagine
waking up and looking in the mirror. One of the best painting stories was told
to me by an Umatilla man who has many, many contemporary “old” stories. He told
of waking up to the sun on his face, naked on a roof without a ladder, his body
painted…everywhere.
And then thereʻs the classic kind, like the story my cousin
George Coser, Jr. told us the other day as we drove downtown Tulsa on the way
to the Oklahoma Jazz Hall of Fame. “There used to be a church over there. They
used to serve food for the homeless,” he said as he pointed to a parking lot.
Then he told of a friend of his driving over to pick him and a buddy up to take
them out to lunch. They were excited and as they headed to Tulsa imagining all
their favorite eating places there. His friend pulled up to the church and next
thing he knew they were standing in line for their free lunch! Now thatʻs a
real Indian story!
Then there are the other kinds of stories that feed the soul
of our tribal culture in a different way. Those are the stories we heard at the
Thlopthloccco Tribal Town meeting out near Okemah, attended by ceremonial
grounds and other cultural leaders a few weeks ago. These were the deep
philosophical stories of the roots of meaning for our people, with the
overhanging question of how are we going to continue as a Mvskoke people, when
many of the children do not know their clans or arenʻt brought into the
function of the clans? There is
never one answer but many answers, many stories. Another important story we
heard was by the Mvskoke Food Sovereignty Initiative, about the restoration of
and reculturing of plants that have traveled with us and nurtured us through
our human stories.
Mvto, mvto to all the culture bearers, those who choose to remember
in a time of forgetting. Mvto to the spirits of all the stories that carry us
to laughter, to deeper understanding of our predicament, our place here on this
Earth.
