Oklahoma Teachings: Be Care/Full With the Stories You Tell

New Tulsa flag. For more on its meaning, including tribal connections, see this link.

A couple of weeks ago, I had the privilege of attending and presenting at the 25th annual White Privilege Conference in Tulsa, Oklahoma with my dear colleague Karen Spiller. We were invited to share about the past 10 years of co-producing the 21 Day Racial Equity Habit Building Challenge for Food Solutions New England, and also be in conversation with Dr. Eddie Moore, Jr., Debby Irving and Dr. Marguerite Penick-Parks, who were the originators of the 21 Day Equity Challenge through The Privilege Institute. To say that it was a rich experience is an understatement.

Meeting in the City of Tulsa and being in the state of Oklahoma was particularly poignant, for all that they represent with respect to this country’s history – the destination of the Trail of Tears and home to 39 different Indigenous tribes because of relocation and forced removal; the site of Black Wall Street and the 1921 Massacre; birthplace of the likes of Woody Guthrie, Wilma Mankiller, Jim Thorpe, Anita Hill, and Ralph Ellison; a focal point of the Dust Bowl, and known as the buckle of the so-called “Bible Belt.”

We were truly blessed to be welcomed each day by members of one of the three tribes whose reservations intersect in the City of Tulsa – Osage, Cherokee, and Muscogee Creek. Through their welcoming words and “land acknowledgments” we learned so much more about this country’s history and also the resilience and generosity of Indigenous peoples. This included a very rich morning presentation from Wilson Pipestem, a citizen of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe, Osage headright holder, Managing Partner and co-founder of Ietan Consulting and a fierce advocate for tribal self-determination. In this and a follow-up breakout session Pipestem facilitated with his colleague Lance Kelley, of the Muscogee Creek, I found myself scribbling teachings, including this list of ten, all of which seem to fit under broader headings of “be aware of the danger of the single story” and “check your assumptions”:

• There are some 575 tribes in the US today and more than 300 reservations, along with 630 Canadian “reserves.”
• In telling the story of the Indigenous peoples within the US, we should not speak of “conquest.” Rather we should talk about accommodation, ongoing attempts at agreement building, and of course, agreements broken and terrible harms done.
• Much of the policy of the US government during the Trail of Tears era and beyond was based in a very false and harmful belief that Indigenous peoples were “inferior and would disappear eventually.”
• Related to the above, laws were set around certain allowances of land for Indigenous peoples, complete with White overseers and an expiration date, all of which emphasized the false idea of “Indigenous impermanence and incompetence.”
• During the Battle of Horseshoe Bend, Andrew Jackson had his life saved by a Cherokee named Junaluska. Later, Jackson, as President, would request the removal of Junaluska and his people from North Carolina as part of the Trail of Tears.
• A large part of Indigenous resistance lay in the ongoing refusal to accept that “the ways we were given that we know are perfect are in any way ‘wrong’.”
• The story of Little House on the Prairie could also be told as that of, “A White family that was squatting on Indigenous lands.”
• Recently the US Supreme Court reaffirmed the right of the Muskogee Creek Reservation to exist.
• Some Indigenous tribes owned African-American slaves and enslaved other Indigenous peoples.
• There exists a range of “blood quantum” requirements among tribes which determine tribal membership (from as much as one-half to as little as 1/128).

Sitting with all of this, with much gratitude, and more committed than ever to the notion of working towards “right relationship” as well as telling the fuller story of this imperfect and amazing country.

What assumptions are you sitting with?

What single stories that could benefit from a fuller telling?