BROKEN JUSTICE: RAPES OF NATIVE AMERICAN WOMEN

Broken Justice in Indian Country

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By N. BRUCE DUTHU

Published: August 10, 2008

White River Junction, Vt.

 

August 11, 2008

Jordin Isip

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Times Topics: Indians, American

 

ONE in three American Indian women will be raped in their lifetimes, statistics gathered by the United States Department of Justice show. But the odds of the crimes against them ever being prosecuted are low, largely because of the complex jurisdictional rules that operate on Indian lands. Approximately 275 Indian tribes have their own court systems, but federal law forbids them to prosecute non-Indians. Cases involving non-Indian offenders must be referred to federal or state prosecutors, who often lack the time and resources to pursue them.

 

The situation is unfair to Indian victims of all crimes — burglary, arson, assault, etc. But the problem is greatest in the realm of sexual violence because rapes and other sexual assaults on American Indian women are overwhelmingly interracial. More than 80 percent of Indian victims identify their attacker as non-Indian. (Sexual violence against white and African-American women, in contrast, is primarily intraracial.) And American Indian women who live on tribal lands are more than twice as likely to be raped or sexually assaulted as other women in the United States, Justice Department statistics show.

 

Rapes against American Indian women are also exceedingly violent; weapons are used at rates three times that for all other reported rapes.

 

Congress should step in and clearly establish the authority of Indian tribes to investigate and prosecute all crimes occurring on Indian lands — no matter whether tribal members or nonmembers are involved.

 

Historically, Indian tribes have exercised full authority over everyone within Indian lands. A number of the early federal treaties expressly noted a tribe’s power to punish non-Indians.

 

Toward the latter part of the 19th-century, however, federal policy shifted away from tribal self-government in favor of an effort to dismantle tribal government systems. Criminal law enforcement, especially in cases involving non-Indians, increasingly came to be viewed as a federal or state matter.

 

Thirty years ago, the Supreme Court formalized the prohibition against tribes prosecuting non-Indians with its decision in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe. In this case, a Pacific Northwest tribe was attempting to try two non-Indian residents of the Port Madison Reservation for causing trouble during the annual Chief Seattle Days celebration — one for assaulting an officer and resisting arrest and the other for recklessly endangering another person and harming tribal property. The court held that the tribe, as a “domestic dependent nation,” did not possess the full measure of sovereignty enjoyed by states and the national government, especially when it came to the affairs of non-Indian citizens.

 

Then in 1990, the court extended its Oliphant ruling to cases involving tribal prosecution of Indian offenders who are not members of that tribe. Congress subsequently passed new legislation to reaffirm the power of tribes to prosecute non-member Indian offenders, but it left the Oliphant ruling intact.

 

This means that when non-Indian men commit acts of sexual violence against Indian women, federal or state prosecutors must fill the jurisdictional void. But law enforcement in sexual violence cases in Indian country is haphazard at best, recent studies show, and it rarely leads to prosecution and conviction of non-Indian offenders. The Department of Justice’s own records show that in 2006, prosecutors filed only 606 criminal cases in all of Indian country. With more than 560 federally recognized tribes, that works out to a little more than one criminal prosecution for each tribe.

 

Even if outside prosecutors had the time and resources to handle crimes on Indian land more efficiently, it would make better sense for tribal governments to have jurisdiction over all reservation-based crimes. Given their familiarity with the community, cultural norms and, in many cases, understanding of distinct tribal languages, tribal governments are in the best position to create appropriate law enforcement and health care responses — and to assure crime victims, especially victims of sexual violence, that a reported crime will be taken seriously and handled expeditiously.

 

Congress should enact legislation to overrule the Oliphant decision and reaffirm the tribes’ full criminal and civil authority over all activities on tribal lands. This law should also lift the sentencing constraints imposed in 1968 that restrict the criminal sentences that tribal courts can impose to one year in jail and a $5,000 fine. In cases of rape, state court sentences typically exceed 8 years, while federal sentences are more than 12 years. Tribes should have the latitude to impose comparable sanctions. (A bill pending in Congress would extend tribal sentencing authority to three years, with more latitude in cases of domestic violence, but its prospects of passage are uncertain.)

 

Congress recently allocated $750 million for enhancing public safety in Indian country. This money will help tribes hire and train more police, build detention facilities and augment federal investigative and prosecutorial capacity for Indian country crimes. Ideally, the grant process will be efficient enough to make sure that this money reaches the places most in need.

 

But financial aid will not be enough to stop sexual violence against Indian women. Tribal courts have grown in sophistication over the past 30 years, and they take seriously the work of administering justice. Congress must support their efforts by closing the legal gaps that allow violent criminals to roam Indian country unchecked.

 

 

N. Bruce Duthu, a professor of Native American studies at Dartmouth, is the author of “American Indians and the Law.”

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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“The court held that the tribe, as a “domestic dependent nation,” did not possess the full measure of sovereignty enjoyed by states and the national government, especially when it came to the affairs of non-Indian citizens.”

 

 

 

 

“Domestic dependent nation”, as if they are a nation of childlike, immature individuals who have no agency nor are allowed any autonomy.

 

That the federal government has plenary over all Native American tribes, allows much crime to happen to them that should not have to happen if the tribes were able to charge, try and convict any and all criminals who set foot on reservations to commit crimes.

 

But questions have to be asked.

 

Why are the overwhelming rapes against NA women on reservations interracial, when most rapes are intraracial?

 

Is it that the rapists know that the Indian police, courts and laws have their hands tied in trying to charge and convict alleged rapists of NA women? Is it that the non-NA rapists know that there are not enough police to traverse the reservations in patrolling vast stretches of area to be able to protect the citizens of the reservations. Is it because they know that they will not be charged in a NA court of law because any suspects/criminals who break the law on Native lands will not be charged, and that  federal law forbids the NA courts to prosecute non-Indians, and that all cases in felonies must be referred to federal/state prosecutors who are already back-logged with non-Indian cases that are off the reservations, thereby stymieing prosecutors efforts to pursue criminal charges against perpetrators who harm Native Americans? Is it because they know they will receive lenient next to nothing convictions?

 

or

 

. . . .is it because the rapists of NA women know that Indian women are the invisible of the invisible.

 

Is it because these rapists feel that no one cares about what happens to NA women, therefore, the defenseless NA women are someone they can harm with rape and life-threatening bodily injury? With impunity? With no threat of the fear of NA jurisprudence to apprehend them?

 

This is a travesty against the Native American women that they can be raped and there is no legal recourse for them.

 

It is shameful and abominable that the NA tribes cannot safeguard their citizens against violent crimes, due to some arbitrary laws/treaties that cause more devastation. And this more than unfair; it is an egregious atrocity in and of itself.

 

The laws need to be changed where NA police can arrest and charge, based on evidence, any non-Indian who trespasses on NA reservations to commit crimes against innocent citizens who go about their daily lives harming no one.

 

Congress should give powers to the local NA law enforcement to enforce charges against anyone who commits a crime on reservations—non-NA and NA.

 

Tribal elders/authorities especially should have legal jurisprudence (criminal and civil) over crimes (burglary, vandalism, theft, arson, elder abuse, child abuse, etc.) that occur in their community. After all, they are the ones whose community/reservation/nation which is being attacked by the criminal element. Tribal elders should also keep in mind that their citizens are their responsibility and do all they can endeavor to protect their people from the criminals who rape and harm them, whether that criminal be a white, black, yellow, brown—–or red assailant. Tribal courts should uphold the law and look out for their citizens and not ride roughshod over the law that is implemented to protect and serve all. Tribal elders cannot be corrupt in their application of the laws concerning any crime—misdemeanor or felony. They cannot be corrupt towards their own citizens—nor can they be corrupt towards those accused of committing a crime on NA reservations.

 

Tribal leaders hould be held accountable to upholding the laws that are put in place to protect their citizens. You do not want to out all power into the hands of tribal elders, any more than you would want to take it all out of their hands either. Local governance of the citizens of Native American reservations, with the eradication of separate jurisdictions (no more Native and U.S. separate entities) and the implementation of both state and federal jurisdiction over reservations and their citizens would be more equitable to me. There should be a reasonable balance that should be sought.  In no way, should all power and control be put into the tribal elders hands, anymore than it should all be put into the United States federal government’s hands, either.

 

 

Otherwise, the United States of America should take over completely the responsibility of prosecuting fully any criminal who breaks the law on Native America lands, if they will not give power to NA to police their own community and prosecute anyone who breaks the law in their community.  There is no doubt that a reduction in the state/federal government/tribal conflict over whose jusrisdiction has control over the crimes of rape, as well as an increased cooperation and coordination, and collaboration between state and tribal courts and allied agencies, wouldgreatly improve the safety, well-being, and life for many NA women who are the victims of rape, as well as those who will be the furture victims of rape.

Another thing: as far as sexual assault/rape kits are concerned—-who pays for these kits if and even when they are used? The rape victims or the local city/municipal/state police? These kits can cost upwards of $700.00-$800.00 a kit, and many NA women are to poor to afford such an expense when they are already in anguish, and are hurting and trying to recover from a brutal rape.

It is fine to allocate funds to help tribes train their police in Forensics, qualified SANES for the rape victims, build jails to contain criminals who commit crimes on NA reservations, and implement federal investigative and prosecutorial capacity for crimes committed in Indian territory. Native American reservations are sovereign nations and should be treated as such with the ability to combat crime that harms their citizens.

 

That so few people know of the hells that NA people suffer through (poor health conditions [diabetes/heart problems/hypertension] rates higher than the rest of the country; suicide rates higher than the rest of the country; subsistence living conditions; poor to inadequate access to potable water for drinking and crop irrigation; sub-standard schools; skyrocketing unemployment), renders NA as out-of-sight-out-of-mind in many people’s consciouses.

 

Funds and grants are fine.

 

But, they are empty if the NA women who live on NA reservations continue to have to run the gauntlet of vicious rapists who savage them physically, and mentally. (Be that rapist a relative or a stranger.)

 

The physical scars of rape for these innocent women may gradually fade.

 

But, the mental scars will remain with them for life.

 

Reservations have been America’s bantustans for decades, and that is one aspect that perpetuates this outsider image of Native Americans.

 

 

Native American people have become marginalised in the minds of many Americans. They are seen, yet not seen. They may no longer be suffering from U.S. Calvary genocide, but, today in the 21ST Century they are reeling from a battle of epic proportions where they are practically never mentioned or thought of in reports, documents, studies and researches on aspects which affect all of our daily lives.

 

Native Americans have to constantly continue to remind the rest of us that they are still here.

 

That they have not been annihilated off the face of the Earth.

 

That they have to remind us that they still live, bleed, hurt and cry like all of us.

 

But, most of all, Native American women need not just voices outside the reservations to speak up for them.

 

Native American women also need the voices of the men of their communities to address and combat any and all harms that enter the lives of Native American women.

IN REMEMBRANCE: 8-10-2008

BERNIE MAC, COMIC FROM TV AND FILM

 

 

By WILLIAM GRIMES

Published: August 9, 2008

 

Bernie Mac, a stand-up comic who played evil-tongued but lovable rogues in films like “Bad Santa” and “Mr. 3000” and combined menace and sentiment as a reluctant foster father on “The Bernie Mac Show” on Fox, died on Saturday in Chicago. He was 50 and lived near the city.

 

 

Mark J. Terrill/Associated Press

Bernie Mac in Universal City, Calif., in 2004.

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Times Topics: Bernie Mac

The cause was complications from pneumonia, his publicist, Danica Smith, said.

 

Mr. Mac, an angry stage presence with a line of scabrous insults, parlayed his success as a stand-up comedian onto the big screen in a string of comedies that usually cast him as wily con men like Pastor Clever in “Friday” (1995) and Gin, the store detective in “Bad Santa” (2003). He also excelled playing short-tempered misanthropes, notably in his starring role as Stan Ross, the nation’s most hated baseball player, in “Mr. 3000” (2004).

 

In 2001, the Fox network took a gamble on “The Bernie Mac Show,” an unconventional family comedy in which Mr. Mac portrayed a childless married comedian who reluctantly takes in his sister’s three youngsters when she goes into a drug-treatment program.

 

The irascible Mr. Mac made a different kind of TV dad, “more Ike Turner than Dr. Spock,” Chris Norris wrote in a 2002 profile for The New York Times Magazine. Mr. Mac’s special style of tough love — “I’m gonna bust your head till the white meat shows,” he warned his surly teenage niece — set the show apart from other family sitcoms and raised a few critical eyebrows. But audiences saw enough of the character’s soft center to find the show touching.

 

“The success of my comedy has been not being afraid to touch on subject matters or issues that everyone else is politically scared of,” Mr. Mac told The Times in 2001. “It’s a joke, believe me. I’m not trying to hurt anybody.”

 

Mr. Mac incorporated aspects of his stand-up act in the TV show, and during each episode would break the “fourth wall” and address the audience. On one show, he swiveled in his chair and said, “Now America, tell me again, why can’t I whip that girl?”

 

“The Bernie Mac Show” show ran for five seasons, and Mr. Mac received two Emmy nominations for outstanding lead actor in a comedy series, in 2002 and 2003.

 

Bernard Jeffrey McCullough was born in Chicago to a single mother who inspired him to become a comedian. He told a television interviewer in 2001 that when he was 5, he saw his mother sitting in front of the television set crying. “The Ed Sullivan Show” was playing, and Bill Cosby was on the show. When Mr. Cosby began telling a story about snakes in a bathroom, she started laughing despite herself. “When I saw her laughing, I told her that I was going to be a comedian so she’d never cry again,” Mr. Mac said.

 

His mother died of cancer when he was 16, and he was raised by his grandmother on the South Side of Chicago. His two brothers also died, one in infancy, the other of a heart attack in his 20s.

 

At the Chicago Vocational Career Academy, Mr. Mac was voted class clown by his graduating class. But already serious about his intended profession, he turned down the honor. “I said, ‘I’m funny. I’m a comedian. I’m not a clown,’ ” he later recalled. “My humor had changed from foolishness to making sense.”

 

After high school, Mr. Mac worked as a janitor, a mover and a school bus driver before finding a job at a General Motors plant. In 1976, he married his high school sweetheart, Rhonda. He is survived by his wife; a daughter, Je’Niece; and a granddaughter.

 

Desperate to become a comedian, Mr. Mac told jokes for tips on the Chicago subway and performed at comedy clubs, many of them off the beaten track. “When I started in the clubs, I had to work places where didn’t nobody else want to work,” he told The Washington Post. “I had to do clubs where street gangs were, had to do motorcycle gangs, gay balls and things of that nature.”

 

In 1983, he was laid off at G.M., and for a time his family had to move in with relatives. The same year, he contracted sarcoidosis, an immune system disorder that can attack the lungs. In 2005, he announced that the disease had gone into remission.

 

Plugging away at his comedy career, he caught the attention of Redd Foxx and Slappy White, who invited him to do off-the-cuff material in Las Vegas in 1989. A year later, Mr. Mac won the Miller Lite Comedy Search, a national contest, with profanity-laced monologues.

 

In 1990, he was invited to do two shows with Def Comedy Jam, a tour featuring young black comedians, which was filmed for HBO. Small film roles followed in “Mo’ Money” (1992), “Who’s the Man?” (1993) and “House Party 3” (1994). He also performed on the HBO variety series “Midnight Mac,” and with the Original Kings of Comedy, a tour that showcased some of the most popular contemporary black comedians. The tour, which grossed $59 million, generated several HBO specials and a film of the same name by Spike Lee.

 

Mr. Mac made the move to television reluctantly. “The people come to see you, the person they fell in love with,” he said. “But when they see you on TV, you become a whole other character, another person, and they become disappointed, and I wasn’t going to allow that to happen to me.”

 

Nevertheless, he appeared in a recurring role as Uncle Bernie on the UPN sitcom “Moesha” beginning in 1996, and in 2001, he took the plunge with “The Bernie Mac Show.”

 

Praised by the critics for its fresh, irreverent take on the family sitcom, it became one of Fox’s biggest hits.

 

The show coincided with a spate of films that made Mr. Mac, if not a box office star, a welcome comedic presence with roles in “What’s the Worst That Could Happen?” (2001), “Ocean’s Eleven” (2001) and its two sequels, and “Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle” (2003).

 

Last month, Mr. Mac, a fervent supporter of Barack Obama, dismayed the candidate at a fund-raising dinner in Chicago. Delivering a stand-up routine, he told salacious jokes and drew a reprimand from Mr. Obama, who warned him, “Bernie, you’ve got to clean up your act next time.”

 

 

 

SOURCE: The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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Whe I first heard that Bernie Mac had passed away yesterday, I could not believe it. Surely it must have been some mistake. He was only a few weeks ago performing stand-up comic routines making many people, even Obama himself, asking Bernie to tone it down on his acerbic wit that he was so famous for.

 

I cannot believe that Bernie will no longer be with us, giving us so much enjoyment the way he did on his TV show, “The Bernie Mac TV Show”.  Many times when I had a rough day, and just downright refused to smile or come down easy, I would catch one of Bernie’s episodes from his show, and no matter what I felt like, Bernie would sit right there facing the screen audience with his asides and soliloquies about life with his family (as custodian of his sister’s three children), and sooner or later, he would say something that would defrost the angst of whatever kind of bad day I had, and soon I would be laughing like so many people around the country at his family’s antics.

 

Like so many viewers, I would be squirting milk, juice, soda, or some other liquid projectile from my nose when Bernie would sit and relate to the TV audience something that the young children did that put him into a dither.

 

Bernie could do that to you.

 

No matter what kind of day you had, no matter how riled up you may have been, Bernie made you SMILE.

 

So, here’s to you Bernie. Gone too soon from us.

 

Thanks for all the laughter, joy and merriment you gave us.

 

Thanks for all the memories we will cherish.

 

Thanks for making us. . . .SMILE.

 

 

 

Smile though your heart is aching; Smile even though it’s breaking.
When there are clouds in the sky, you’ll get by.
If you smile through your fear and sorrow,
Smile and maybe tomorrow,
You’ll see the sun come shining through for you.Light up your face with gladness, hide every trace of sadness.
Although a tear may be ever so near,
That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile, If you just smile.That’s the time you must keep on trying,
Smile, what’s the use of crying?
You’ll find that life is still worthwhile if you just smile.

 

 

 

 

 

BERNIE MAC DETAILED BIOGRAPHY SITE:  http://www.whoabc.com/men/b/bernie-mac/

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ISSAC HAYES, SINGER-SONGWRITER WHO DEFINED THE ’70S

 

 

By BEN SISARIO

Published: August 10, 2008

 

 

Isaac Hayes, the singer and songwriter whose luxurious, strutting funk arrangements in songs like “Theme From ‘Shaft’ ” defined the glories and excesses of soul music in the early 1970s, died on Sunday in East Memphis, Tenn. He was 65.

 

August 10, 2008

G. Paul Burnett/The New York Times

Isaac Hayes performed at the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as an inductee in 2002.

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Times Topics: Isaac Hayes

Biography: Isaac HayesFilmography: Isaac Hayes

 

 

The Shelby County Sheriff’s Office said that Mr. Hayes’s wife, Adjowa, found him collapsed near a treadmill at his home in Cordova, an eastern suburb of Memphis, and he was pronounced dead an hour later. The cause of death was not known.

 

With his lascivious bass-baritone and dandy wardrobe, Mr. Hayes developed a musical persona that was analogous to the hyper-masculine, street-savvy characters of the so-called blaxploitation films of the era. In his theme song to Gordon Parks’s “Shaft” from 1971, the title character is summed up in a line that has become a classic of kitsch:

 

 

“Who’s a black private dick/Who’s a sex machine to yall the chicks?”

 

(Furthermore: “He’s a complicated man/But no one understands him but his woman.”)

 

 

The “Shaft” theme won an Academy Award and has become one of his best-known songs.

 

But Mr. Hayes’s career stretched far beyond soundtracks. For much of the 1960s and into the ’70s he was one of the principal songwriters and performers for Stax Records, the trailblazing Memphis R&B label, and in the 1990s he revived his career by providing the voice for the amorous and wise Chef on the cable television show “South Park.”

 

Isaac Hayes was born Aug. 20, 1942, in a tin shack in rural Covington, Tenn., to a mother who died early and a father who left home. He was largely raised by his grandparents, and worked in cotton fields while going to school. He began playing in local bands, and by early 1964, when he was 21, he was working as a backup musician for Stax. His first session was with Otis Redding.

 

Soon he began writing songs with David Porter, and their music — like “Soul Man” and Hold On, I’m Comin’” for Sam and Dave, and “B-A-B-Y” for Carla Thomas — came to embody the Stax aesthetic. It was tight, catchy pop, but full of sweat and grit, a proudly unpolished Southern alternative to Motown.

 

By the late 1960s Mr. Hayes was stepping out as a solo artist, and his reputation grew as much for his music as for his dress. The cover of his 1969 album, “Hot Buttered Soul,” pictured him in customary style: shaved head, dark shades, gold chains, bare chest. The album was similarly eccentric, consisting of just four songs, including lengthy, elaborate versions of Burt Bacharach and Hal David’s “Walk on By” and Jimmy Webb’s “By the Time I Get to Phoenix.” It also included spoken segments that he called raps, and the album became one of his biggest hits, reaching No. 8.

 

When he was approached to create the score to “Shaft,” one of the first all-black films by a major studio, Mr. Hayes said he also wanted the lead role. The part went to Richard Roundtree, but Mr. Hayes recorded the music anyway. It was done in four days with several members of the Bar-Kays, one of the house bands at Stax.

 

With a cymbal pattern borrowed from Mr. Redding’s “Try a Little Tenderness,” which Mr. Hayes had arranged, the song layered funk guitars, horns, woodwinds and strings, prefiguring disco. It became a No. 1 hit.

 

In 1971 he followed up the “Shaft” soundtrack with “Black Moses,” a double album that was another ambitious expansion of the vocabulary of soul music. In its original issue, the cover folded out to reveal a portrait of Mr. Hayes in crucifix form.

 

In the mid-’70s Mr. Hayes’s finances collapsed and his music turned explicitly to disco, a career dead end. Through the 1970s and into the ’90s he acted in several films, including “Escape From New York” in 1981 and “I’m Gonna Git You Sucka” in 1988. His music from this era sold poorly, but his career revived in 1997 when he began playing Chef on “South Park.” A Scientologist, he quit the show in 2006, saying that he had been offended by an episode that ridiculed Tom Cruise and other prominent Scientologists.

 

He had health problems in recent years but had continued to tour and work occasionally in film (he had a role in “Soul Men,” a comedy set for release in November and starring Samuel L. Jackson and Bernie Mac, the comedian who died Saturday).

 

In an interview on Sunday, Mr. Porter, Mr. Hayes’s fellow songwriter, said that his friend was “recuperating from a stroke,” but added that “in the middle of all that he was still trying to have fun” and had even returned to his birthplace in Covington to go fishing.

 

In addition to his wife, Mr. Hayes is survived by their son, Nana; and 11 other children from three previous marriages..

 

 

 

John M. Hubbell contributed reporting from Memphis.

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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We are losing them left, and right. Now we have lost Issac Hayes, author of the “Theme From Shaft”, (for which he won an Academy Award as “Best Soundtrack”), and the album classic, “Hot, Buttered Soul” (my favourite Issac Hayes album of all time.)

 

Issac had been a singer/composer for a long time, but, it was his album, “Hot Buttered Soul”, that put him on the map in the world of R&B, Soul and Disco.

 

Issac will be missed, and though many young people of today know him as the character “Chef” from the cable TV series, “South Park”, Issac deserves to be remembered for his classy, soulful music that still stands the test of time.

I especially loved Issac in his role as the “Duke of New York, A #1”, in the film, “Escape From New York”. He was the baddest of the bad guys in that role.

Thanks Issac for all the lovely memories you leave us with.

 

 

RELATED LINKS:

 

ISSAC HAYES OFFICIAL SITE:  http://www.isaachayes.com/

 

HOUSTON CHRONICLE:  http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/front/5935110.html

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LEE YOUNG, JAZZ MAN AND PRODUCER

 

 

 

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: August 9, 2008

 

Lee Young, who emerged from a family with musical roots deep in New Orleans jazz, drummed for greats like Ellington and Basie, became a pioneering black man in music’s executive suites — and survived his musician brother, Lester, by a half century — died on July 31 at his home in Los Angeles. He was 94.

 

 

 

 

 

August 10, 2008

Lee Young Family Collection

The jazz drummer Lee Young in Los Angeles about 1941.

 

 

The death was confirmed by his grandson Wren Brown.

 

In contrast to his brother, whose debilitating battle with alcohol and personal demons is almost as well known to jazz fans as his saxophone solos, Lee Young, a teetotaler, lived a long life of accomplishment in both performance and the music business.

 

His recollections, from touring in a carnival act as a child with Lester and their sister, Irma, in the 1920s; to playing drums and cutting his first records with Fats Waller in the 1930s; to helping forge a vibrant jazz scene in Los Angeles in the 1940s, were recorded by the oral history program of the University of California, Los Angeles.

 

His experiences included teaching Mickey Rooney to play drums for a movie and becoming the first black — and for several years the only one — to be a regular studio musician in Hollywood. He played drums and conducted for Nat King Cole.

 

Mr. Young played on literally thousands of records, said Phil Schaap, the jazz historian.

 

As a record producer, Mr. Young developed a reputation for knowing in advance what would sell, and discovered Steely Dan, the jazz fusion-rock band.

 

Mr. Schaap called Mr. Young “a most significant figure in jazz who directly connected us to the music’s early glories: the birth of jazz in New Orleans, the jazz age, the swing era and bebop.” Mr. Schaap also said that Mr. Young, who led an integrated band when that was unusual, was “a hero in the fight for integration.”

 

Leonidas Raymond Young was born in New Orleans on March 7, 1914, to parents who were both musicians and teachers. His father had learned to play instruments including the violin, trombone and bass as he traveled the deep South at the time jazz was sprouting in New Orleans.

 

Mr. Young’s father was a stern taskmaster, drilling music into his children by putting notes on a blackboard before they even started school. He made them into a novelty dancing act for traveling carnivals until they learned to play instruments. Lee, the youngest, had visited more than 30 states by the time he was 8.

 

Lee was different from Lester as a youth. Lester would practice his saxophone for hours; Lee would rather sneak off to play ball. Lester begged off some of the vaudeville gigs, particularly longer stays in cities like Minneapolis and Phoenix.

 

The family finally settled in Los Angeles, where Lee and his sister entertained at the dance marathons that were the rage during the Depression. By this time, Lee was performing most often as a drummer, having switched from the trombone; Lester had decided to specialize in saxophone instead of drums.

 

Lee attended high schools in Los Angeles. He began playing with Mutt Carey, a trumpeter and bandleader who had gotten his start in New Orleans, and also toured with Ethel Waters. He made his first records at 23 as Fats Waller’s drummer. He played with Lionel Hampton and others, and started his own orchestra, actually a smaller combo. His brother joined the band in 1941, and its stature grew exponentially. They toured for the U.S.O., broadcast with Billie Holiday and were a hit in New York.

 

LA Weekly said in 2004 that Mr. Young for years was the only black staff musician at a major studio. Mr. Schaap wrote that Mr. Young got his job by turning down a chance to be Stan Kenton’s drummer at a time when Kenton led the nation’s hottest band.

 

In 1953 Mr. Young became Nat King Cole’s drummer and conductor, Mr. Schaap said. From this pinnacle of the music world, he had new insights into the business side of music, and decided to join it. He produced for Vee-Jay, Motown and ABC/Dunhill Records.

 

Around 1937, Mr. Young met a teenager named Norman Granz on a tennis court and began playing against him regularly. Granz was enthralled when Mr. Young introduced him to jazz and went on to create Jazz at the Philharmonic, the all-star touring group that took the music out of smoky bars to jam in the concert halls; Mr. Young and his brother can be heard on some of the recorded jam sessions.

 

Lester Young died in 1959; Irma died in 1993. Lee Young is survived by his wife of 55 years, the former Louise Franklin Young; his daughter, Rosalind Brown of Los Angeles; his son, Lee Jr., of Los Angeles; his half-sister, Vivian Johnson of Louisiana; six grandchildren; and nine great-grandchildren.

 

Mr. Young was interviewed for a book, “Central Avenue Sounds: Jazz in Los Angeles” (1999) and said that when the music industry was segregated, white musicians were paid for seven nights of work, even though they were given one day off, while blacks had to work all seven days for their pay.

 

“I just loved to play so much, I went to different clubs and told the guys that if they wanted a night off, I would play in their place,” Mr. Young said. “So I got a chance to play all kinds of music, because I used to let these guys off.”

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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KAREN PASQUALETTO, WHO LIVED BOLDLY WHILE FIGHTING CANCER

 

 

By DENISE GRADY

Published: August 5, 2008

 

“I have plans, and cancer is interfering with my plans!” Karen Pasqualetto said by e-mail a few months ago.

 

 

 

 

August 5, 2008

Todd Heisler/The New York Times

DRIVEN Karen Pasqualetto and her daughter, Isabel. She lived to see Isabel turn 2.

 

Related

Six Killers | Cancer: Cancer Patients, Lost in a Maze of Uneven Care (July 29, 2007)

Times Topics: Six Killers: A Series

Health Guide: Cancer »

 

Ms. Pasqualetto was the subject of an article in The New York Times last year about the uneven quality of cancer treatment in the United States, and patients’ battles with conflicting medical advice, tight-fisted insurers and rugged courses of therapy. Uncommonly candid, seemingly incapable of whining, she fearlessly exposed both her toughness and her vulnerability in a way that made her an ideal interview subject and an irresistibly engaging human being.

 

Her situation was beyond grim. In July 2006, about a week after giving birth to her first child, she was found to have colon cancer that had already spread to her liver. A doctor said she had six months to live.

 

Ms. Pasqualetto refused to give up. A self-described Type A go-getter, at 35 she had already had one successful career, in technology start-ups, and had moved on to another, helping to found a Catholic school in Seattle and becoming a teacher there.

 

Now, she was even more driven: she could not bear the thought of leaving her daughter, Isabel, without a mother. So she unleashed her determination on the disease. She fired the first doctor, sought second and third opinions, and chose an oncologist who said he thought treatment could buy her more time. Eleven months later, after 22 rounds of chemotherapy, she watched Isabel take her first steps.

 

In June 2007, she took a bold step, one that her oncologist did not endorse. She flew to Baltimore for a grueling eight-hour operation at Johns Hopkins, in which surgeons removed 70 percent of her liver and a footlong segment of her intestine.

 

Though she knew there were no guarantees, Ms. Pasqualetto began to let herself think and dream a bit about the future.

 

But her reprieve was short-lived. By December, cancer had reappeared in her liver, and she went back on chemotherapy. The treatment was arduous and exhausting, but she still managed to travel to Washington in March, to speak to an advisory panel of the Food and Drug Administration about her experience with drugs used to treat anemia in cancer patients. She reminded the panel that even small improvements in quality of life mattered to patients who were terminally ill and eager to make the most of whatever time they had left.

In May, she said by e-mail, “We have been having as much of a normal life as colon cancer allows.” She added, “We have the support of family and friends and most of the time that is enough.”

 

She continued to make plans to show Isabel to the world, and the world to Isabel.

She wrote: “I always try to live my life, rather than be immersed in desperation.”

 

In mid-May, she learned that the cancer had spread to her lungs. She contemplated an experimental drug that had never been tested in humans before, and ultimately decided against it.

 

On July 12, she celebrated Isabel’s second birthday.

 

Ms. Pasqualetto, 37, died at home shortly after midnight on July 28, with family and friends by her side. She leaves Isabel; her husband, Chris Hartinger; her parents, John and Ruth; her sister, Jill; her brother, John; and her former students and countless friends and admirers who took heart from her grit and tenacity, and her will to live.

 

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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ANTHONY J. RUSSO, PENTAGON PRESS FIGURE

 

 

 

United Press International

Anthony J. Russo at a rally at the University of Florida in 1973.

 

•  

By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Published: August 8, 2008

 

Anthony J. Russo, a shaggy-haired, countercultural, unemployed policy wonk when he teamed up with Daniel Ellsberg, a more button-downed antiwar figure, to leak the voluminous, top-secret government history of the Vietnam War called the Pentagon Papers, died Wednesday in Suffolk, Va. He was 71.

 

Mr. Ellsberg announced the death on a Web site, antiwar.com. Mr. Russo suffered from heart trouble.

 

Mr. Russo chafed at being called the “Xerox aide” because of his role in finding a copying machine and working long nights to reproduce the 7,000-page study. In fact, it was Mr. Russo’s words — after weeks of conversations — that had definitively started the enterprise: “Let’s do it!” he said, according to Mr. Ellsberg’s book “Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers.”

 

The two started copying the next night in a Hollywood, Calif., advertising agency that was above a flower shop and was owned by Mr. Russo’s girlfriend. It had an inauspicious beginning; they mistakenly left on a burglar alarm and were interrupted by a policeman. He paced about, gave no sign of suspicions and left.

 

In June 1967, Robert S. McNamara, the defense secretary, set up the Vietnam Study Task Force, ultimately employing 36 analysts and historians, to prepare a classified history of the Vietnam War from 1945 to 1967. Its 47 volumes revealed conversations at the highest levels of government that sometimes directly contradicted official statements, including the timing and the scale of the United States’ troop buildup.

 

It was classified “Top Secret — Sensitive.” David Rudenstine wrote in “The Day the Presses Stopped: A History of the Pentagon Papers Case” (1996) that “sensitive” was not part of the official classification system. It was a signal the contents could cause embarrassment.

 

Mr. Ellsberg first offered the papers to several senators and Henry A. Kissinger, the national security adviser. He found no takers. He then offered them to newspapers.

 

The New York Times decided to publish the materials and was followed by other newspapers. The Times won a landmark case when the Supreme Court ruled that the government had not met the heavy burden of proof required to stop publication of something in advance.

 

But in the later trial of Mr. Ellsberg and Mr. Russo in Federal District Court, on charges of violating conspiracy, theft and espionage laws, other important issues were raised but not decided. One was whether the Espionage Act of 1917 prohibits publication of secret material, or whether it must be passed to an enemy to be a violation.

 

The men were cleared even though their case never reached a jury, because Judge William M. Byrne Jr. dismissed the case in May 1973 after several bizarre twists. These included the judge’s learning that the office of Dr. Ellsberg’s psychiatrist had been burglarized and that the Federal Bureau of Investigation had lost records of perhaps illegally taped telephone conversations, as well as the fact that during the trial, the judge himself was approached about becoming director of the F.B.I.

 

From Mr. Russo’s perspective, the ordeal — even the beatings he claimed to have endured after being imprisoned for refusing to testify to a grand jury — was worth it. “The case has messed up my life,” he said in an interview with The Times in January 1972, “but what difference does that make?”

 

Mr. Russo was born in Suffolk on Oct. 14, 1936, and grew up in a middle-class family. He earned a degree in aeronautical engineering at Virginia Tech in 1960, then worked for NASA, helping to design the space capsule. He next earned two master’s degrees at Princeton, one in aeronautical engineering and one in public affairs.

 

He went to work for the RAND Corporation, which sent him to Vietnam to work on a study that involved interrogating Vietcong prisoners, whom he admired for the strength of their convictions. He broke out in tears in court when telling of a prisoner’s reciting poetry to him.

After returning to work at RAND in California, Mr. Russo experimented with the counterculture, riding motorcycles and writing poetry, according to Peter Schrag in “Test of Loyalty: Daniel Ellsberg and the Rituals of Secret Government” (1974).

 

Tom Wells, in his “Wild Man: The Life and Times of Daniel Ellsberg” (2001), said that Mr. Ellsberg — who had worked on preparing the Pentagon Papers as an analyst and moved to RAND in 1968 — told Mr. Russo he wanted to meet “some hippies,” particularly women. Mr. Russo took him to a commune.

 

Mr. Russo became Mr. Ellsberg’s closest male friend at RAND, Mr. Wells wrote; their conversations increasingly turned to the 2 of the 15 copies of the Pentagon Papers that had been deposited at RAND.

 

Mr. Russo pushed Mr. Ellsberg to use his more influential position to make the contents public. At first, Mr. Russo told Mr. Wells, Mr. Ellsberg “rolled his eyes at the ceiling.”

 

But Mr. Ellsberg increasingly concentrated on how to release the study and how much of it to release. He eventually decided to hold back four of the volumes, covering 1964 to 1968, to avoid criticism that he had harmed the peace negotiations.

 

Mr. Ellsberg said in his obituary of Mr. Russo that he had thought Mr. Russo would not be in danger of prosecution. But it turned out Mr. Russo, too, was indicted. Both admitted doing everything charged in taking the documents to be copied and releasing them to newspapers, but contended that this did not constitute a violation of the law.

 

Mr. Russo had earlier refused to testify before a grand jury and was imprisoned until he agreed to do so, but he never had to testify. In a news conference after the final trial, he recalled that it was “in the bowels of that courthouse I was beaten up by guards.” Prison officials denied this.

 

Mr. Russo was married and divorced twice and had no children. He worked for the Los Angeles County Probation Department for many years.

 

He told The Times that the Pentagon Papers case had transformed him into a “committed, full-time radical.” He always credited the Black Panthers with being his strongest supporters.

 

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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LOU TEICHER, OF FERRANTE AND TEICHER, POPULAR PIANO DUO OF THE ’60S

 

 

By BRUCE WEBER

Published: August 6, 2008

 

Lou Teicher, half of the piano duo Ferrante & Teicher, whose florid and sentimental versions of movie themes and love songs made them gods of easy listening and earned them wide popularity beginning in the 1960s, died on Sunday in Highlands, N.C. He was 83 and lived in Sarasota, Fla.

 

 

 

 

 

August 6, 2008

Scott W. Smith Collection

Lou Teicher, at right, with Arthur Ferrante in 1964. Their florid arrangements made them reigning princes of easy listening.

Related

Ferrante and Teicher’s Exodus [YouTube]

 

 

The cause was heart failure, said Scott W. Smith, Ferrante & Teicher’s manager.

 

A classically trained pianist who was something of a prodigy, Mr. Teicher was a musician of extraordinary dexterity, the speed and clarity of his and his partner’s playing being among their crowd-pleasing qualities. The two met as children at the Juilliard School of Music, and their friendship became a professional team in the mid-1940s. Eventually, with their hit recordings of the themes from the films “The Apartment” and “Exodus,” and “Tonight,” from “West Side Story,” among others, they became known as “the movie theme team.” And for their appearances onstage or on television in matching flashy outfits and at the keyboards of imposing instruments, they were called “the grand twins of the twin grands.”

 

Louis Milton Teicher was born in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., on Aug. 24, 1924. By the time he was 6, his family was living in New York City, and young Lou was enrolled at Juilliard. His future partner, Arthur Ferrante, then 9, was already there. Mr. Teicher graduated in 1940 and received an advanced degree in 1943. Both he and Mr. Ferrante joined the faculty. They began performing together in 1947, initially as a purely classical duo.

 

Eventually, of course, they became famous for a kind of virtuosic kitsch: grandiose, emotional playing, embellished with glissandi, spectacular arpeggios and a back-and-forth communication that often made it seem as if the pianos themselves were conversing.

“Although we were two individuals, at the twin pianos our brains worked as one,” Mr. Ferrante, now 86, said in a statement after Mr. Teicher’s death.

 

Playing alone or with orchestras, with a wide repertory of pop tunes, show music, movie themes and modernized classical scores, the two men performed more than 5,200 concerts; made more than 200 television appearances; entertained Presidents John F. Kennedy, Richard M. Nixon and Ronald Reagan; and from 1951 to 2001 recorded about 150 albums, the last dozen or so for their own recording company, somewhat paradoxically called Avant-Garde Records.

 

Actually, in the early days of their partnership, they did have experimental tendencies.

 

Influenced by John Cage, they made several recordings with “prepared pianos,” that is, pianos with objects like cardboard wedges, rubber stops and sandpaper inserted among the strings to create a variety of unexpected sounds. This was in the 1950s, when, in addition to making what they called their gimmick recordings, they were playing 100 or so concert dates a year. At the time, they appeared in small community halls where the programming was strictly classical and they performed two-piano arrangements of works by composers from Bach to Rachmaninoff.

 

Mr. Teicher is survived by his wife, Betty; three children, Richard, of Linden, N.J., Susan, of Urbana Ill., and David, of Westport, Conn.; and four grandchildren.

 

It was in 1959 that the producer Don Costa moved from ABC Records to United Artists, taking Ferrante and Teicher with him. There the two capitalized on the record company’s affiliation with a movie company; Mr. Costa was being sent the scores from United Artists films, and when he received the theme from “The Apartment,” he brought it to the two pianists; it became their first big hit.

 

“All of a sudden,” said Mr. Smith, their manager, “they’d show up at some small theater, or a church or wherever they were supposed to play, and people would be lined up outside the doors to get in, and they’d be saying, ‘Are you going to play ‘The Apartment’?’ ” Mr. Smith added: “And they’d say, ‘No, we’re going to play Bach and Tchaikovsky.’ And the people would say, ‘But we came to hear ‘The Apartment!’ Literally overnight, they had to come up with a whole new two-hour program. They said, ‘People think we’re pop stars!’ ”

 

 

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

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DAN “THE MAN” SEGURA, BELOVED TEJANO DJ

By Joey Guerra Copyright 2008 Houston Chronicle

July 30, 2008

Dan “The Man” Segura, a popular Tejano radio personality and musician, died Monday of a heart attack. He turned 58 less than two weeks ago.

 

Segura lived in Rosenberg and was a DJ on Puro Tejano 980 AM, the only station dedicated to the genre in Houston.

 

Segura was born in Flatonia and spent more than four decades in the music business, including stints with regional bands Gary and the Epics and Los Kasinos.

 

“We were hardcore Tejanos,” said James Torres, a former Epics guitarist who met Segura as a teenager. The pair also spent five years together at a radio station in Rosenberg.

 

Torres talked to Segura on Sunday night and said he was “tired but up in spirits.”

 

Radio colleague Abby Chavarrilla worked with Segura for many years at defunct Houston station KQQK and remembers him as a “funny, funny guy.”

 

“When I think of Dan, I smile,” Chavarrilla said. “He always had a really positive attitude on everything. He was always taking every situation and making light of it.

 

“He was my friend.”

 

Visitation is from 8 a.m. till noon Friday at the Chapel of Davis-Greenlawn Funeral Home in Rosenberg. Graveside services will be held at 4 p.m. Saturday at Greenlawn Memorial Park in Rosenberg.

 

 

 

joey.guerra@chron.com

 

 

SOURCE:  The Houston Chronicle:  http://www.chron.com

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ERIC DOWLING, GREAT ESCAPE VETERAN

ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUGUST 7, 2008

 

AP

This is an undated family handout photo of ‘Great Escape’ war hero Eric Dowling made available Wednesday.

 

 

 

LONDON — Eric Dowling, nicknamed “Digger” for helping excavate tunnels used in the breakout from a World War II German prison camp that became known as the “Great Escape,” has died. He was 92.

 

Dowling played a key role in planning the 1944 escape by 76 prisoners from Stalag Luft III prison near Sagan in eastern Germany — now Zagan, Poland. He forged documents, made maps and helped dig three tunnels code-named Tom, Dick and Harry.

 

The daring breakout was one of the most celebrated incidents of the war and inspired the 1963 film The Great Escape starring Steve McQueen and Richard Attenborough.

 

All but three of the escapees were recaptured, and 50 of them were shot on the orders of Adolf Hitler to deter future attempts.

 

Over almost a year, prisoners surreptitiously dug the tunnels 30 feet underground, shored up with bedboards and wired with stolen electrical wire. Tom was discovered by guards and Dick was abandoned, but the 300-foot-long tunnel Harry was eventually completed.

 

Dowling was not among the more than 200 prisoners chosen by lottery to make the escape attempt on the cold and moonless night of March 24. By the time German guards discovered the breakout, 76 men had crawled free.

 

Son Peter Dowling said his father died at a nursing home near Bristol in southwest England on July 21, a day before his 93rd birthday. He said his father was not a fan of the movie.

 

“He wasn’t the greatest admirer of Americans and it didn’t go down too easily that one of them should be playing the starring role,” Dowling said. “Parts of it he acknowledged were quite realistic but then he felt it turned into something that was completely untrue.”

 

In particular, Eric Dowling felt the scene in which McQueen races to freedom on a stolen motorcycle, “was well over the top.”

 

“A lot of the reality of digging tunnels was left out too,” his son said.

 

Many of the film’s characters were composites of real people. Peter Dowling said the one that most resembled his father was a flight lieutenant nicknamed “The Forger,” played by Donald Pleasance.

 

Born in southwest England in 1915, Flight Lt. Eric Dowling flew 29 missions as a navigator with the Royal Air Force’s Bomber Command. He was shot down in April 1942 and sent to the prison camp for Allied airmen.

 

After the war Dowling served as an RAF air-accident investigator and later worked for British Aerospace on the supersonic Concorde jet.

 

Dowling’s wife, Agnes Marie, died in 1997. He is survived by his son and a daughter.

 

 

 

SOURCE:  The Houston Chronicle:  http://www.chron.com

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ERIK DARLING, CO-DOUNDER OF “THE WEAVERS”, MUSICIAN BEST KNOWN FOR WALK RIGHT IN

 

 

ESTES THOMPSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS

AUGUST 7, 2008

 

 

RALEIGH, N.C. — Erik Darling, the reedy-voiced guitarist and banjo player who deftly stepped in when Pete Seeger left the pioneering folk-music group the Weavers, has died after battling lymphoma. He was 74.

 

He died Sunday in Chapel Hill, not far from Raleigh.

 

Darling was perhaps best known for his hit Walk Right In and for his arrangement of the iconic Southern true-crime ballad Tom Dooley, which inspired the Kingston Trio’s recording of the song that topped the charts in 1958. He was a member of the Tarriers, known for its version of The Banana Boat Song (Day-O) — the signature tune of Harry Belafonte.

 

Darling also replaced Seeger in the Weavers in the late 1950s, a few years after the band was blacklisted for its political views.

 

“He was immensely talented,” said Fred Hellerman, an original member of the group. “When he came into the Weavers to replace Pete Seeger, which was a pretty tall order, he not only did that, but he brought so much of his own talents to bear that it was overwhelming. It really was.”

 

Hellerman said Darling moved to Chapel Hill a couple of years ago to be near Willard Svanoe, a fellow member of the Rooftop Singers, the band with which he recorded “Walk Right In,” a No. 1 hit for Vanguard Records in 1963.

 

In an e-mail posted on Darling’s Web site, Svanoe said Darling died early Sunday.

 

The Weavers first burst on the scene in 1948 in Greenwich Village and had their first national hit in 1950 with Goodnight Irene. But during the red scare of the 1950s, their politics came under scrutiny and the group was brought in to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities.

 

They soon found themselves blacklisted, and disbanded in 1953. It wasn’t until a Christmas 1955 concert at Carnegie Hall that they re-emerged to rejoin the national folk-music revival they’d helped launch.

 

“He was an absolutely logical person to be brought in” after Seeger’s departure, Hellerman said. “Of the next generation of Weavers, I mean he was so outstanding that it was hard then or even now to imagine who else we could have brought in other than Erik.”

 

Hellerman said he didn’t learn until many years later that Darling was uncomfortable with his band mates’ leftist leanings.

 

Hellerman said they last spoke about a year ago, but he had received a package from Darling in the mail a couple of weeks ago. It was a copy of Darling’s recently published memoir, I’d Give My Life — A Journey by Folk Music. Hellerman said he couldn’t put it down.

 

Hellerman said he had been meaning to write to Darling and tell him how much he enjoyed the book.

 

“My big regret is that I didn’t get to do it,” he said. “I did have the chance, but I didn’t take advantage of it.”

 

 

 

SOURCE:  The Houston Chronicle:  http://www.chron.com

THE DESCENT OF MEN

THE DESCENT OF MEN

•  

By MAURICE ISSERMAN

Published: August 9, 2008

Clinton, N.Y.

 

 

 

 

 

August 10, 2008

Jacob Macgraw-Mickelson

 

 

WILCO VAN ROOIJEN, a Dutch mountain climber, managed to survive the debacle this week that took the lives of 11 others in Pakistan on K2, the world’s second-highest peak.

 

Describing the chaotic events that ensued when a pinnacle of ice collapsed and swept away fixed ropes that climbers from several expeditions high on the mountain had counted on to aid their descent from the summit, Mr. van Rooijen lamented: “Everybody was fighting for himself, and I still do not understand why everybody were leaving each other.”

 

Himalayan mountaineering is an inherently dangerous pastime, and climbers are always at risk from the unexpected. But mountaineering has become more dangerous in recent decades as the traditional expeditionary culture of the early- and mid-20th century, which had emphasized mutual responsibility and common endeavor, gave way to an ethos stressing individualism and self-preservation.

 

The contrast between the two eras is vividly illustrated by the experience of an earlier expedition that ran into peril on K2. Fifty-five years ago this month, Dr. Charles S. Houston, America’s premier Himalayan mountaineer, led a team of seven Americans and one British climber attempting a first ascent on K2. They made steady progress up the mountain, and by Aug. 1 all eight climbers had reached a campsite at 25,300 feet. From there, given good weather, they expected to reach the 28,251 foot summit in two days.

 

Instead, they were pinned down by a blizzard in their high camp for the next week. And one member of the team, Art Gilkey, who was on his first Himalayan venture, was struck down by a case of thrombophlebitis, a clotting in the veins, in his left leg. It left him unable to walk and in danger of death if a blood clot were to reach his lungs. Houston and the others knew that there was little chance that they could carry an incapacitated man 9,000 feet down treacherous slopes to the safety of base camp. But they did not for a minute consider leaving their teammate behind.

 

On Aug. 10, they started down the mountain. Gilkey was sedated with morphine, wrapped in a sleeping bag, and alternately towed and lowered by his comrades. The climbers descended in roped pairs and, when they could, held their partners on “belay” — that is, one climber would keep a tight, protective hold on the rope as the other made his way down the slope. Encumbered as they were, and with the storm raging, it took them six hours to descend a few hundred feet from their camp.

 

At around 3 p.m., the eight men were arrayed across the slope to the west of one of their previous campsites, Camp VII, their destination for the day. Gilkey in his sleeping bag was belayed from above by Pete Schoening, a climber from Seattle. The other climbers, roped in pairs, stood nearby.

 

Suddenly, one of them lost his footing, and as he fell he pulled his partner off his feet. They became entangled in the ropes of the other climbers, until practically the whole party was slipping downwards toward a precipice. Schoening remained on his feet, but his rope was entangled with the others. If he had fallen, it would have been the end for them all as they would have tumbled thousands of feet to their deaths on the Godwin-Austen Glacier below. If there had been no surviving witnesses, the 1953 American K2 expedition could have entered mountaineering lore as one of those enduring puzzles to be endlessly debated in the climbing journals, like the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine on Everest in 1924.

 

But at that moment of impending doom, Schoening saved them all. In his effort to belay Gilkey down a rock cliff, Schoening had jammed his ice ax into the snow behind a small boulder, wrapping the rope once around the ax and then around his waist. When he saw the others fall, he instantly put all his weight onto the ax. The nylon rope stretched and tightened on him — but it held, and Schoening held.

 

Several of the climbers, including Dr. Houston, were injured. They could go no farther that day. They would have to work their way over to Camp VII and set up the two tents they were carrying to get shelter for the night if they were to survive, and they could not do it with Gilkey in tow. For the moment, they left him anchored to the slope with ropes and ice axs, about 150 feet west of the campsite. Another climber, Bob Craig, explained to Gilkey, who was sedated but conscious, that they were leaving him for a short time but would return.

 

“Yes, I’ll be fine,” Gilkey told Mr. Craig, “I’m O.K.”

 

They got their tents up. In the distance, they heard through the howling wind what sounded like a shout from Gilkey. Then there was silence. In a few minutes, three of the climbers returned to check on their injured teammate. To their horror, they saw that the gulley was now empty. Gilkey was 27 years old when he disappeared; he had completed his doctoral thesis in geology at Columbia University on the day he departed for K2. In the years that followed, the others would wonder whether he had been swept away by an avalanche, or caused his own death, somehow releasing the ropes that held him in place in an act of self-sacrifice that allowed the rest of them to live.

 

It took the survivors five more days to fight their way off the mountain. Finally on Aug. 15, they reached base camp. They built a 10-foot high cairn as a memorial for Gilkey on a rocky point near the confluence of the Savoia and Godwin-Austen Glaciers. It stands there to this day.

 

The K2 expedition became legend among mountaineers, its members honored for the gallantry of their conduct under extreme conditions. As Nicholas Clinch, a rising American climber, would write a few years later, the “finest moment in the history of American mountaineering was the Homeric retreat of Dr. Houston’s party of K2 in 1953.”

 

Houston himself summed up the highest ideals of expeditionary culture when he wrote of his K2 comrades: “We entered the mountains as strangers, but we left as brothers.” Today in contrast, as was evident last week on K2, climbers enter the mountains as strangers and tend to leave the same way.

 

 

 

 

Maurice Isserman, a professor of history at Hamilton College, is the co-author of the forthcoming “Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering From the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes”.

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com

 

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RELATED LINK:

 

“SOPHIA DANNENBERG: STANDING ON THE ROOFTOPS OF THE WORLD”: 

 

https://kathmanduk2.wordpress.com/2008/04/23/sophia-danenberg-standing-on-the-rooftops-of-the-world/

SAVE THE DATE: THE 2ND HAPPILY NATURAL HIP-HOP SUMMIT, AUGUST 31, 2008

 

 

“Nobody’s free until everybody’s free.“ Fannie Lou Hamer   “There is little place in the political scheme of things for an independent, creative personality, for a fighter. Anyone who takes that role must pay a price.” Shirley Chisolm   “The most potent weapon in the hands of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed. “ Steven Biko   VISIT HTTP://happilynaturalday.com FMI Make a Donation Today

ORIGINAL PECHANGA, THE CREEK FREEDMEN/WOMEN AND JOHN CORNSILK

For those of my readers who wish to know more of what other black men and women citizens are experiencing in some Native American tribes across America, please click onto the following blogs/links:

*Original Pechanga has a wealth of information on how her people have been horribly mistreated by the Pechanga tribe on issues of abuse of their own people concerning the employment at Pechanga casinos, abuse of casino employees, and how the Pechanga tribe has violated the civil rights of many of its members, which she documents on her blog. Please check out her blog here: 

http://originalpechanga.blogspot.com

 

*Eli Grayson’s blog discusses an even less known group of black Freedmen/Women——the Black Creek Freedmen/Women (The Black Creek). This site discusses the injustices that the Black Creek Freedmen/Women have suffered at the hands of their fellow Creek tribal members. They discuss their ancestors, their stories, and their fight to be recognized as legitimate citizens of the Creek Nation. Their site can be reached here:

http://www.thecreekfreedmen.com/index.html

 

*And yet another excellent site to learn of what is happening in relation to the Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women expulsion from the CN, (as well as the Pechanga and other tribes) is the fabulous site by John “The Elder” Cornsilk, a conscientious Cherokee man who champions the cause of the Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women,  as well as keeps his readers abreast of new developments on the rogue/illegal government of Chief Chad Smith. John Cornsilks’s site can be reached here:

http://www.network54.com/Forum/237458/

 

These racial expulsions—–these ethnic cleansings against Black Indians must cease, but, they will continue if people are unaware or uninformed as to the many untold injustices that the descendants of the former slaves of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes are experiencing in the 21ST Century.

The Freedmen/Women have put so much into the culture, history and society of the so-called Five Civilized Tribes.

It is high time that the so-called Five Tribes start living up to their name.

Civilized behaviour does not include nor mean the ruthless and vitriolic mistreatment of your own people.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The following is a link to the petition to Sen. Barack Obama to reconsider his stand on non Congressional intervention in the disenrollment of 2,800 Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women, requesting that he support the Congressional Bills (HR 2824 and HR 2786 [NAHASDA]) (and the Congressional Black Caucus) backing the Freedmen/Women Treaty rights of1866, and that he revise his position on the plight of the Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women.  Here is the link to the petition:  

http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/2/18/1765574/HonorableObama.pdf

E-mail Sen.Obama (Michael_Strautmanis@obama.senate.gov

OR  http://obama.senate.gov/contact/index.php

OR call Sen. Obama:  (202)-224-2854;

OR Fax Sen. Obama:  (202)-228-4260

DARFUR WITHERS AS SUDAN SELLS A FOOD BONANZA

By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN

Published: August 9, 2008

 

 

ED DAMER, Sudan — Even as it receives a billion pounds of free food from international donors, Sudan is growing and selling vast quantities of its own crops to other countries, capitalizing on high global food prices at a time when millions of people in its war-riddled region of Darfur barely have enough to eat.

 

 

August 10, 2008

Joao Silva for The New York Times

A camp for displaced people on the outskirts of Khartoum. Similar camps have been set up in the Darfur region, where United Nations and Western aid feeds more than three million people.

 

 

Multimedia

Video :  http://video.on.nytimes.com/?fr_story=60e9ccc0d87ed22417a3a853f8eed1f59e295273

Exploiting High Prices (2)

Related

The Food Chain

Blind Eyes

Articles in this series are examining the growing demands on, and changes in, the world’s production of food.

Previous Articles in the Series »

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

August 10, 2008

Joao Silva for The New York Times

Farmers plowed a field last month before planting sorghum in Gezira, south of Khartoum, Sudan. Although Sudan receives food aid, it exports many of its crops.

 

 

 

Here in the bone-dry desert, where desiccated donkey carcasses line the road, huge green fields suddenly materialize. Beans. Wheat. Sorghum. Melons. Peanuts. Pumpkins. Eggplant. It is all grown here, part of an ambitious government plan for Sudanese self-sufficiency, creating giant mechanized farms that rise out of the sand like mirages.

 

But how much of this bonanza is getting back to the hungry Sudanese, like the 2.5 million driven into camps in Darfur? And why is a country that exports so many of its own crops receiving more free food than anywhere else in the world, especially when the Sudanese government is blamed for creating the crisis in the first place?

 

African countries that rely on donated food usually cannot produce enough on their own. Somalia, Ethiopia, Niger and Zimbabwe are all recent examples of how war, natural disasters or gross mismanagement can cut deep into food production, pushing millions of people to the brink of starvation.

 

But here in Sudan, there seem to be plenty of calories to go around. The country is already growing wheat for Saudi Arabia, sorghum for camels in the United Arab Emirates and vine-ripened tomatoes for the Jordanian Army. Now the government is plowing $5 billion into new agribusiness projects, many of them to produce food for export.

 

Take sorghum, a staple of the Sudanese diet, typically eaten in flat, spongy bread. Last year, the United States government, as part of its response to the emergency in Darfur, shipped in 283,000 tons of sorghum, at high cost, from as far away as Houston. Oddly enough, that is about the same amount that Sudan exported, according to United Nations officials. This year, Sudanese companies, including many that are linked to the government in Khartoum, are on track to ship out twice that amount, even as the United Nations is being forced to cut rations to Darfur.

 

Eric Reeves, a professor at Smith College and an outspoken activist who has written frequently on the Darfur crisis, called this anomaly “one of the least reported and most scandalous features of the Khartoum regime’s domestic policies.” It was emblematic, he said, of the Sudanese government’s strategy to manipulate “national wealth and power to further enrich itself and its cronies, while the marginalized regions of the country suffer from terrible poverty.”

 

Aid groups gave up long ago on the Sudanese government helping the people of Darfur. After all, the nation’s president, Omar Hassan al-Bashir, has been accused of masterminding genocide in Darfur. United Nations officials have said that if they do not bring food into the region, the government surely will not.

 

That leaves the United Nations and Western aid groups feeding more than three million Darfurians. But the lifeline is fraying. Security is deteriorating. Aid trucks are getting hijacked nearly every day and deliveries are being made less and less frequently. The result: less food and soaring malnutrition rates, particularly among children.

 

On top of this is the broader problem of trying to find affordable grains on the world market when prices are higher than they have been in decades. United Nations officials in Sudan say that the fact that they have to import some of the same commodities that Sudan not only produces but exports is a source of constant frustration.

 

“Sudan could be self-sufficient,” said Kenro Oshidari, the director of the United Nations World Food Program in Sudan. “It does have the potential to be the breadbasket of Africa.”

Sudanese officials say that is precisely their goal, and they deny that Sudanese agribusiness is being built at the expense of their own people. They reject accusations that they are neglecting far-flung areas like Darfur, much less waging a war of hunger and deprivation against them.

 

Instead, Sudanese officials say they are simply trying to build up their economy. They say they know what it is like to be vilified, having been squeezed by American sanctions for more than a decade. And it could get worse, with Mr. Bashir facing genocide charges at the International Criminal Court in connection with the massacres in Darfur.

 

“Sanctions are never far from our mind,” said Al-Amin Dafa Allah, chairman of the National Assembly’s agricultural committee. “We’re trying to minimize our reliance on the outside.”

In fact, part of the reason relief agencies bring their own food into Sudan stems from the American policy of giving crops, not money, as foreign aid.

 

Many European countries, by contrast, just give the World Food Program cash, which can be used to buy food locally. Last year, the program bought 117,000 tons of Sudanese sorghum. United Nations officials said they would like to buy more, but they had had run-ins with Sudanese suppliers who could make more money with exports.

 

“We don’t get discounts,” said Emilia Casella, a spokeswoman for the World Food Program.

Sudanese officials say they want to sell more crops to the United Nations, but lost in this discussion about buying and selling food is whether the Sudanese government should be donating food to its own needy people.

 

For now, Sudanese officials seem more interested in doing business with their new partners in the Middle East. Sudan is the largest country in Africa, nearly one million square miles. It has 208 million acres of arable land, with less than a quarter being cultivated. The Sudanese government is striking deals left and right with Arab countries just across the Red Sea: the Arab countries bring the money, the soil scientists and the $200,000 tractors. Sudan supplies the land.

 

“Our country is small and dry and mountainous,” said Man Shuqwara, the Jordanian director of a Jordanian-run farm in northern Sudan that grows wheat, beans, potatoes, onions, tomatoes, oranges and bananas. “By logic we would come to Sudan.”

 

The same logic is attracting big money from Saudi Arabia. About an hour’s drive north of the Jordanian farm, near the town of Ed Damer, is a huge new $200 million project to grow wheat in what now looks like a 10-mile-wide sandbox. Some of the wheat will stay in Sudan; some will be shipped to Saudi Arabia. A fleet of new John Deere tractors is already lined up for harvest time. A worker on the farm whispered that the tractors had been sneaked into Sudan through Saudi Arabia because of the American trade sanctions.

 

Sudan’s overall economic strategy is to diversify from oil, which it began exporting in 1999, and to focus more closely on the traditional engine of the country’s economy — agriculture. More than 80 percent of the work force is engaged in raising animals or farming of one sort or another.

 

“Our sesame oil is the best in the world,” said Mr. Al-Amin, the agriculture committee chairman. “And it’s organic!”

 

But make no mistake about it: much of Sudan is still a blazing hot, cruelly barren landscape, with specterlike figures in impossibly white gowns tramping through the dust.

But at certain nodes, especially along the Nile River, this country is as green and lush as Florida. It boasts three crucial ingredients for growing things: land, labor and, most important, water.

 

The Nile and its tributaries flow more than 2,000 miles across Sudan, bringing the silt-rich, chocolaty water right to the fields. The British colonial government was the first to capitalize on this in a big way, building a dam in 1925 on the Blue Nile, one of the two main sources of the Nile River, and a network of canals. Today, that project, called the Gezira Scheme, has thousands of miles of canals irrigating nearly 2.5 million acres of farms. The genius is that it is all done by gravity, which means water flows from the dam through capillaries of canals to seedlings in the field, all without using a watt of electricity.

 

“We have water 24-7,” said Siddig Eissa Ahmed, the director of the Gezira Scheme, which is government-run, like much of Sudanese agribusiness.

 

The dark side of all this development is displacement. The conflict in Darfur, in western Sudan, is largely about grazing rights and watering holes — and the government’s brutal counterinsurgency policies in response to an armed rebellion. So far, the most ambitious agricultural projects have avoided the area altogether, and instead are concentrated in the central and northern parts of the country.

 

Even so, development in Sudan often means uprooting other rural subsistence farmers for large-scale commercial projects, said Alex de Waal, a Sudan scholar at the Social Science Research Council in New York.

 

“Smallholder food production goes down, commercial food production goes up, and food relief serves as a subsidy to this transformation, keeping the displaced alive,” he said.

The Sudanese government is widely blamed for running many of the displaced people in Darfur off their farms, making them reliant on handouts. Still, the government has been slow to feed them.

 

The last time the government gave the World Food Program any food for Darfur was in 2006. It was 22,000 tons of Sudanese-grown sorghum. It was a fraction of what the people needed, United Nations officials said, and some of the grain was rancid and infested with weevils.

 

 

 

SOURCE:  The New York Times:  http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/10/world/africa/10sudan.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&hp

FROM THE ARCHIVES: EXPLORING THE LEGACY AND FUTURE OF BLACK/INDIAN RELATIONS

EXPLORING THE LEGACY AND FUTURE OF BLACK/INDIAN RELATIONS

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

WILMA MANKILLER,

      

MODERATOR,

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

with

Dr. Willard R. Johnson, Dr. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. , Dr. Patrick Minges, Ms. Deborah Tucker, Dr. David Wilkins

Transcription rendered by Dr. Willard R. Johnson — Published 2001 by

The Kansas Institute of African American and Native American Family History

      

with support from

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Freedom Forum

For information about the KIAANAFH see end of this document

to go to the KIAANAFH website, copy the following URL into your browser http://web.

mit. edu/wjohnson/www/kiaanafh/KIAANAFH_PORTAL_PAGE. html

Ms. Wilma Mankiller

former Principal Chief,

The Cherokee Nation

Dr. Willard R. Johnson

Professor emeritus of Political Science,

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Dr. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr.

Professor of History

and Director of the American Native Press Archives,

The University of Arkansas at Little Rock

Dr. Patrick Minges

Director of Publications,

Human Rights Watch Inc.

Ms. Deborah Tucker

Director of Community Outreach and Cultural Activities,

Adamany Undergraduate Library

Wayne State University

Dr. David Wilkins

Associate Professor of Indian Studies,

University of Minnesota

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Director of Publications,

Human Rights Watch Inc.

Ms. Deborah Tucker

Director of Community Outreach and Cultural Activities,

Adamany Undergraduate Library

Wayne State University

Dr. David Wilkins

Associate Professor of Indian Studies,

University of Minnesota

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ms. Deborah Tucker

Director of Community Outreach and Cultural Activities,

Adamany Undergraduate Library

Wayne State University

Dr. David Wilkins

Associate Professor of Indian Studies,

University of Minnesota

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Director of Community Outreach and Cultural Activities,

Adamany Undergraduate Library

Wayne State University

Dr. David Wilkins

Associate Professor of Indian Studies,

University of Minnesota

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Dr. David Wilkins

Associate Professor of Indian Studies,

University of Minnesota

 

      

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Associate Professor of Indian Studies,

University of Minnesota

 

      

   

 

 

57

 

 

 

 

 

th Annual Session, National Congress of American Indians

Afternoon Concurrent Breakout Session November 14

EXPLORING THE LEGACY AND FUTURE OF BLACK/INDIAN RELATIONS

Moderator Wilma Mankiller:

with Dr. Willard R. Johnson, Dr. Daniel F. Littlefield Jr. ,

Dr. Patrick Minges, Ms Deborah Tucker, Dr. David Wilkins

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Chief Wilma Mankiller

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I became interested in the relationships and the

connections between Native American and African American people many years ago. I had been reading a book called Things Fall Apart by Achebe. Before that, I was like everybody else who learned from the national news about the struggle against Apartheid in Africa. I knew there were a lot of political organizations, but I really didn’t put it together until I read Achebe’s story about an individual family, an individual community, and the destruction of the people. The situation was strikingly similar to what has

happened to Native People in this country.

 

 

It is almost as if the colonizers had “a little black book” that they used to colonize the people, as they went around the world. They took away the leaders, destroyed their medicines,

destroyed their governmental system, sent the kids away to distant school and, in the case of Africa, to French and other European schools, and in our case, to government boarding schools, the native boarding school.

 

That piqued my interest and I have been interested in these issues since that time. I later found that there were many connections in this country between African Americans and Native Americans, some positive and, some not so positive. In some of the large southeastern tribes, the mixed-blood population were slave holders, and there was and continues to be what I would

describe as almost a class system, in the southeastern tribes. And by and large the full blood people were absolutely opposed to holding of human beings in bondage. And so we have that history.

 

On the other hand, we have a history of a great deal of intermarriage; we have a history of our people joining abolitionists in their struggle. It is a complicated history. It is important for us to talk about that a little bit today and think about it.

 

 

Why is that important? Why is it important to Indian country? One of the reasons it is important is that, as we in tribal governments continue to be under siege, it is critical to build coalitions with African Americans to advance our issues and theirs. Sometimes our issues are not the same as

theirs. In the seventies and the late sixties I had a great deal of trouble explaining to my friends who were working in the Civil Rights Movement that while the civil rights movement tried to help people gain entry into the system, we were fighting for the right to have our own system. And so sometimes we need to understand our different issues here, and talk to one another about those issues so that we can support their civil right issues and they can support our issues to retain our separate tribal government and

our traditional way of life. Coalitions are important.

 

 

The other reason it is important is because there are a couple of

issues in Indian Country now, where things that happened to African American people happened to all of us. For example, in the case of the Pequots, with the Benedict book, and the fact that the Pequot Nation [is being challenged in] the federal recognition process–- is about racism, not just about questioning their ancestry. Society tends to accept tribal people when mixed

with white people, without any problem whatsoever. If you meet someone who says I am half white and half Yakama, or half white and half Oneida, or whatever, people tend to accept those people.

 

 

But, if you find someone who says I am half black and half Oneida, Yakama, or Cherokee, people have more difficulty with that. That is the reality of the time that we live in. And, I believe, watching this issue from afar, that is what is driving the issue of the Pequots — part of it is greed, just plain old greed, in envy of their financial success — and part of it is racism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  ************************************************

 

 

 

 

 

At least once, or twice, last year, I meant to post this article, but, I am glad I held off on posting it until now. There is a serious need for dialogue between Black Americans and Native Americans. Much that was positive, has occurred that was once a bond between both black and red; much that has been negative, and a thorn of contention and animosity as well, has occurred.

The lost knowledge, both good and bad, between the Red and the Black needs to be addressed.

The lost history, buried beneath the bitter waters, must be acknowledged and confronted.

To read the rest of the article click here:   http://anpa.ualr.edu/other_resources/ncai_transcript.pdf

THE FREEDMEN/WOMEN AND THE CHEROKEE NATION: CONCLUSION

The approximately 2,800 Freedmen/Women who were disenrolled from the Cherokee Nation in March of 2007, are still waiting for the outcome of the debate as to whether or not they will be re-instated back into the Cherokee Nation as citizens.

Last month, Senator Barack Obama made the following statements on his position towards the Freedmen/Women – CN issue. His comments in effect were:

“U.S. Sen. and Democratic presidential front-runner Barack Obama has come out against any congressional interference “at this point” in the ongoing controversy over Cherokee Nation citizenship for descendants of former slaves.

“Tribal sovereignty must mean that the place to resolve intertribal disputes is the tribe itself,” the Illinois lawmaker said in a statement provided Saturday by his Senate office.”

And Sen. Obama, how is this stance any different from past politicians who made statements that where the rights of black Americans of the South were concerned, that we should leave it all up to the states? By leaving outcomes up to the Southern states, many black Americans lost their lives, livihood, property, and enfranchisement. Why should the Cherokee Nation be any different from the racist, segregationist American South where the black Cherokee Freedmen/Women are concerned? Why do you fear calling the Cherokee nation out on its mistreatment of its own citizens?

(The following is a link to the petition to Sen. Barack Obama to reconsider his stand on non Congressional intervention in the disenrollment of 2,800 Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women, requesting that he support the Congressional Bills (HR 2824 and HR 2786 [NAHASDA]) (and the Congressional Black Caucus) backing the Freedmen/Women Treaty rights of 1866, and that he revise his position on the plight of the Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women.  Here is the link to the petition:   http://www.fileden.com/files/2008/2/18/1765574/HonorableObama.pdf

E-mail Sen.Obama (Michael_Strautmanis@obama.senate.gov

OR  http://obama.senate.gov/contact/index.php

OR call Sen. Obama:  (202)-224-2854;

OR Fax Sen. Obama:  (202)-228-4260

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The issue of slavery in the Cherokee Nation angers and enrages many Cherokees of today, just as the issue of American slavery angers many whites, of today.

American race-based slavery was introduced to the Cherokee Nation sometime around the late 1790s-1800s. Once the CN saw that race-based slavery could benefit the CN (just as much as it benefited the United States of America), the numbers of Cherokee slavers began to increase.

Many people state that slavery under the Cherokee slavers was more benign than white-run American slavery. There was practically very little difference between the two.

Many people love to give a sugary-coated, saccharine-sweet romanticized view of enslavement under the Cherokee slaveowners, but, in fact, many of them were no different from the most brutal of white slavers:

“The establishment of  black slavery in  the Cherokee Nation, as in  the United States, was an evolutionary process. Antoine Bonnefoy, a French voyageur, became a  Cherokee captive in 1741 and was subsequently adopted into  the tribe. His journal describes these events in detail. On November 15, 1741,  the Bonnefoy party of eight men was ambushed by a war party of approximately eighty Cherokees. Three of  the men were killed, and  the other five, including Bonnefoy and a seriously wounded Negro, were captured. Each of  the captives immediately became a slave of a  Cherokee warrior. They were bound and slave collars were placed around their necks. During  the journey back to  the Cherokee village,  the Negro’s wounds became worse, and he was set free. “He could not be adopted into  the family of a Cherokee and his wounds probably kept him from being considered desirable as a slave.” Not knowing what to do or where to go, the Negro followed the party for two days. On the  third day,  the Cherokees “gave him over to the young people, who killed him and took his scalp.” ⁽¹⁾

As the institution of black slavery grew in size and importance, the Cherokees adopted a comprehensive slave code comparable in many respects to the control laws of the southern states. The laws were designed to preserve the slave mentality, protect against insurrection, control or expel free blacks, prevent miscegenation, and control virtually all personal and group activities of slaves. The Cherokees may have exhibited the strongest color prejudice of any Indians. As early as 1793, Little Turkey declared that Spaniards were not “real white people.” Moreover, free blacks were always viewed with suspicion and distrust. They suffered social and legal discrimination. In the early 1840s all free blacks, except those manumitted by Cherokee masters, were ordered to leave the Nation. ⁽¹⁾

The Cherokees were exhibiting a strong color consciousness by this date. They were regularly purchasing, selling and using  black slaves.  ⁽¹⁾

1.  Journal of Antoine Bonnefoy, in Williams, Early Travels, p. 152. (excerpted from, “Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians”, by R. Halliburton, Greenwood Press, 1977, pgs. 12 – 18, Chapter 1: The Origins of Black Slavery in Cherokee Country)

The Cherokees continued to obtain additional black slaves by purchase and capture. The capture of black people had become not only profitable but an acceptable form ofrevenge. When Colonel Evan Shelby undertook his Chicamauga Expedition in 1799 and proceeded to destroy the Indian towns in that region, the Cherokees sought revenge. Chief Bench, determined to avenge his humiliation, boasted:

“I am going back next summer and pay old Shelby a visit and take all his Negroes.” ⁽²⁾

Another missionary commented on black slavery in the Cherokee Nation by saying:

“This institution was derived from the whites. It has all the general characteristics of Negro slavery in the Southern portion of our union. In such a state of society as we find among these Indians, there must of necessity be some modifications of the system; but in all its essential features, it remains unchanged.”  ⁽²⁾

2. Whipple, Relations of the American Board, pg. 88 (excerpted from, “Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokke Indians”, pg. 21, Chapter 1: The Origins of Black Slavery in Cherokee Country.)

“They were the first
party to emigrate under the “Schermerhorn treaty.” Ridge was accom-
panied by eighteen slaves. After arriving in the West, he settled on the
north side of Honey Creek and put his blacks to work clearing land.
Ridge’s son John sent his slaves West but kept three with him–a woman
to cook, a man to drive the carriage, and a governess for the children.
Upon arrival at Honey Creek he built “a good double log house” and put
his slaves to clearing, fencing, and breaking land. He owned twenty-four
blacks at that time.

“Believing that total removal was inevitable, the John Martin and George
Washington Adair families left Georgia for the West in 1837. They traveled
in covered wagons and took their livestock and black slaves with them.
These families had black nurses for the children, maids for the kitchen
and household chores, and many field hands. Adair settled on Saline
Creek near the present town of Salina, and Martin made his home on
Grand River near the present Locust Grove, two miles south of the Adair
family. 27 About 2,000 Cherokees, mostly members of the Ridge faction,
migrated under the terms of the Treaty of New Echota.

“By this time there were about 8,000 people in the West and more than
1,000 farms had been established. Missionaries’ correspondence indicates
that it was an EXCEPTIONAL CASE to find a family of Cherokees WITHOUT AT LEAST ONE SLAVE to do the more arduous work. ”

(Caps mine, for emphasis.)

SOURCE: “Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians”, by R. Halliburton, Jr., Greenwood Press, 1977. Chapter 4: “The Last Decade in the East”, page 59.

As slavery became more like white-run American-based slavery (degradation and inhumane brutality) the perception of black people as humans in the eyes of the Cherokee became less, and eventually enslaved black men and women became mere animals to be worked for their free labor —–chattel—-and ultimately black people began to become inferior as fellow human beings who should receive the same regard for their humanity that the Cherokee showed each other:

“The advent of  slavery on a larger scale had been accompanied by unique problems concerning the conduct and legal status of slaves. This condition was partially alleviated by the enactment of a series of slave codes. Since the Cherokees were in the process of accepting the white man’s civilization, it is not surprising that they also adopted his slave codes. The first of these acts was apparently passed in 1819 as the result of a runaway black’s trading a stolen horse to a Cherokee The act read:

New Town,  Cherokee Nation, November 1st, 1819. In Committee The National Committee have taken up the case submitted to them by the Council relating to the exchange of horses between Otter Lifter and a runaway negro man, belonging to Wm. Thompson. The horse delivered to Otter Lifter by said negro man was proven away from him, and the question submitted to the Committee was, whether or not, the master of the negro man, Wm Thompson, should be accountable to the Otter Lifter for the horse so proved away from him on account of the transgression of his said negro man;  the Committee therefore have decided that Wm. Thompson ought not to be accountable for  the contract entered into with his runaway negro man by any person contrary to his approbation, and, Resolved by the Committee, that no contract or bargain entered into with any slave or slaves, without the approbation of their masters shall be binding on them.”

Subsequently, the National Committee and Council passed the following act on October 28, 1820:

“That any person or persons whatsoever, who shall trade with any negro slave without permission from  the proper owner of such slaves, and  the property so traded for be proven to have

been stolen,  the purchaser shall be held and bound to the legal proprietor for  the same, or the value there of; and be it further Resolved, That any person who shall permit their negro or negroes to purchase spirituous liquors and vend the same, the master or owner of such negro or negroes shall forfeit and pay a fine of fifteen dollars for every such offense, to be collected by the Marshalls within their respective Districts for the National use; and should any negro be found vending spirituous liquors without permission from their respective owners, such negro or negroes, so offending, shall receive fifteen cobbs or paddles for every such offense, from  the hands of  the patrolers of  the settlement or neighborhoodn which  the offense was committed, and every settlement or neighborhood shall be privileged to organize a patroling company. ⁽³⁾

Miscegenation and intermarriage had been repugnant to the Indians from their earliest contacts with Negroes. The first known marriage of a Cherokee to a Negro was that of Chief Shoe Boot. Shoe Boot was a friend of Andrew Jackson and had been instrumental in winning the Battle of Horseshoe

Bend. After his white wife left him, he married her black servant, Lucy, who was his property. Lucy bore him two children. The chief petitioned  the Council for free status for his children who were his black slave property according to common law. The request was granted, but  the Council warned Shoe Boot that interracial marriages between Cherokees and blacks were not socially acceptable. The Council made its position unequivocally clear with  the passage of the following act on November 11, 1824:

That intermarriages between negro slaves and Indians, or whites, shall not be lawful, and any person or persons, permitting and approbating his, her or their negro slaves, to intermarry with Indians or whites, he, she or they, so offending, shall pay a fine of fifty dollars, one half for the benefit of the Cherokee Nation; and

Be it further resolved, That any male Indian or white man marrying a negro woman slave, he or they shall be punished with fifty-nine stripes on the bare back, and any Indian or white woman, marrying a negro man slave, shall be punished with twenty-five stripes on her or their bare back. ⁽³⁾

Legislation against miscegenation demonstrates the real position of blacks. The Cherokees may have displayed  the strongest color prejudice of all American Indians.  It has been stated that the Cherokees once had a death penalty for marrying a Negro. (³⁾ Even the   Spaniards were not considered “white” by some. In 1793 Little Turkey, a prominent chief, declared that the Spaniards were not “real white people, and what few I have seen of them looked like mulattoes, and I would never have anything to say to them.” ⁽³⁾ The Cherokees were adamant in their determination not to become racially identified with a subject people whom they regarded–as did their white neighbors–as their servants and inferiors. Some miscegenation did occur, just as it did in the white South, but a Cherokee Negro was always regarded as a Negro. ⁽³⁾

The sale of stolen feed and livestock by black slaves continued to prove troublesome and the following act ( November 11, 1824) was expected to solve the problem:

“The Cherokees did not experience the inner conflict between the practice of slavery and conscience that permeated much of the United States. They never felt the need to justify slavery and never expressed the opinion that slavery was in the best interest of the black. Neither did they give voice to the “positive benefits” of Christianizing and civilizing their slaves. Slavery was justified solely on the basis of the benefits that accrued to masters. Yet, unlike the white community, there appears to be little or no feeling of guilt among the Cherokees today.

During the early part of the nineteenth century, the Cherokee Nation was considered a separate and independent government. The jurisdiction of the United States was not considered to extend over the Cherokee Nation. Therefore, fugitives began to seek sanctuary there. Runaway black slaves and some free blacks sought refuge within the Nation. They were not welcome, and the General Council attempted to remedy the situation with the following act ( November 11, 1824):

Resolved. . . That all free negroes coming into the Cherokee Nation under any pretense whatsoever, shall be viewed and treated in every respect, as intruders, and shall not be allowed to reside in the Cherokee Nation without a permit from the National Committee and Council. ⁽³⁾

Two days later the following augmenting act was declared law:

Resolved. . . That no citizen or citizens of the Cherokee Nation shall receive in their employment, any citizen or citizens of the United States, without first obtaining a permit agreeably to law, for the person or persons so employed; and any person or persons violating this resolution, upon conviction before any of the District Courts, shall pay a fine for every offense at the discretion of the Court, not exceding ten dollars; and the person employed to be removed. ⁽³⁾

Cruelties against enslaved black people escalated:

“Black slaves in the West were sometimes the recipients of harsh and brutal treatment. The following letter from the Cherokee agent in Arkansas to the secretaty of war graphically illustrates such conditions.

Reuben Lewis To The Secretary of War Cherokee Agency Arkansas August 15th 1819

. . . A circumstance happened sometime since in this Nation, and which I am told is not the only one of the kind which has happened among the Cherokees, which in my opinion calls upon the humanity of our Government to put an end to. A Negro Man belonging to a Cherokee woman had fallen under the displeasure of her husband, (from what cause I have not been able to ascertain sirtainly,) the Negroes Mistress desired her husband to kill him, which he d’clined, she then desired him to tye the Negroe, which he did, she then with an axe nocked him in the head; cut it off, and threw the body into the River. There is no Law or custom among the Cherokees to protect the lives of that poor unfortunate part of the human Species, and as among Savages particularly, passion often gets the ascendency of reason, they hold there lives by a feble tenure, calling imperiously for protection. . . .

R. Lewis

TheHonbl The Secretary Cherokee Agt at Arkansas of War”.   ⁽³⁾

Chapter 3, Maturity and Westward Movement, pgs. 32-49.

 

Labour for enslaved black people differed no better under Cherokee slavery any more than slavery under white slave masters:

“The work performed by Cherokee slaves varied little from that done by slaves in the southern states. Agriculture consumed the time and energy of most slaves. Blacks cleared and improved land, split rails, built fences, plowed ground, planted, cultivated, and harvested crops of cotton, corn, and other commodities. They also tended livestock, milked, and provided domestic service by cooking meals, waiting tables, cleaning, washing, gardening, and grooming horses. Female slaves sometimes served as “mammies” and taught their mistresses the operation of the card and spinning wheel. Some slaves were highly skilled artisans, including wheelwrights, blacksmiths, midwives, millwrights, millers, carpenters, tanners, cobblers, physicians, and masons. These were a small minority, however. Domestic manufacture was frequently an important slave activity. Beginning with raw materials, blacks produced tools, cotton and woolen cloth, knitted stockings, gloves, and scarves. Some industrial slavery existed, with slaves operating several salt works, mills, and tanneries. Old slaves were given the customary titles “Uncle” and “Aunt.” (4)

“Slavery in the Nation was different in one respect–Cherokee slaves did not always enjoy the holidays and laying-by time that slaves in the United States did:

“The slaves’ quarters usually consisted of windowless log huts with dirt floors. A stone fireplace supplied warmth and heat for cooking. Slaves usually did their own cooking from rations periodically issued by the master or overseer.” (4)

The teaching of enslaved black people to write was forbidden in the Cherokee Nation. Some white missionary teachers who entered the Cherokee Nation to teach enslaved blacks soon found out that their aims and lofty goals were definitely not wanted nor welcomed by the Cherokee slavers. The Cherokee National Council made its intent unequivically clear on October 24, 1848, by enacting the following law:

“Be it enacted by the National Council, That an Act passed October 22d, 1841, prohibiting the teaching of Negroes to read and write, be amended so that if any white person, not a citizen of the Cherokee Nation, should be guilty of a violation of this act, it shall be the duty of the Sheriff of the District where such violation should take place, to notify the Chief of the same, and it shall be the duty of the Chief to notify the agent, and demand a removal of such person or persons from the limits of the Cherokee Nation.”  ⁽⁴⁾

Some Cherokee slaveholders grew fat and rich off the forced chattel slavery of their enslaved black human property:

“Principal Chief John Ross settled at Park Hill when he arrived in the West. He erected a house, which he called “Rose Cottage,” about two miles from the mission station. In 1840, John Howard Payne (the composer of “Home Sweet Home”) visited Ross at Park Hill for several months. Payne related that there were numerous black slaves at Rose Cottage at that time. One black cleaned Payne’s boots every Saturday and earned the sobriquet “my man Saturday.” ⁽⁴⁾ As Ross’s economic circumstances improved, the modest house was replaced by a magnificent mansion. The furniture was reportedly valued at $10,000. The house was furnished with rosewood and mahogany, silver plate, and imported china. The mansion, situated on a hillside and surrounded by native oaks and elms, was approached by a half-mile-long driveway bordered with exotic roses. Rose Cottage could accomodate forty guests in comfort. The ample interior included guest rooms, family rooms, a library, and a parlor. The spacious grounds surrounding the house were enhanced by shrubbery and flowers. The orchards (the apple orchard contained a thousand trees) and vegetable garden supplied the family table, which usually included guests, and a retinue of house and field servants.”  (4)

And another, John Martin:

“John Martin, who served as treasurer and the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of the Cherokee Nation, reportedly owned 100 black slaves. ⁽³⁾ Martin had two wives and maintained separate residences for them. He owned an “elegant” home known for its marble mantels and hand-carved stairways. One of his plantations was on the Federal Road near the Coosawattee River. ^“

Cherokee slavers ran advertisements for the recovery of their “human property”:

“Andrew R. Nave, a Cherokee slave dealer of the 1850s,  received a letter from James Moosley of Van Buren, Arkansas, asking that he have handbills printed to advertise a reward for a runaway. The letter follows in its entirety.

Van Buren June 13th

D Sir

I had a negro man to leave me on the 10th instant Which I bought off of Picket Benge and we suppose has gone near the Creek Agency where I understand he was raised May I ask the favor of you to have a number of hand bills struck 30, offering a reward of fifty dollars for his apprehension

delivery to me or to Wallase Ward % of [in care of] Buren. Any expense you may incur in the matter shall be promptly refunded he is 21 or 22 years of age a dark mulatto full face five feet 10 or 11 inches high would weigh 165 or 70 pounds speaks the Creek and Cherokee Languages but little English his name John was sold some 10 months since by a man named Williams to a Mr. Task of the nation by Task to Benge.

By attending to the above request you will confer an obligation upon me which shall be resiprocated when ever an opportunity offers.

Fearing this may not find you at home I have written to Johnson Foreman on the same subject.

Your friend James Moosley.

Distribute the hand-bills through this and the Creek nations. ⁽⁴⁾

The brutality that Cherokee slavers showed their slaves who stood up in  defense of themselves was especially egregious and sickening:

“They [ Avery Vann family] were kind to their slaves and gave orders that they were not to be whipped or abused. John Naw, a son-in-law, disregarded these orders and tried to whip an old slave named Uncle Joe, who cut John Naw in two with a bowieknife. Naw died and Uncle Joe was mobbed by a gang of men and beheaded and his head stuck on a pole.” (4)

Chapter 4:  The Last Decade in the East, pgs. 50-60.

The original Cherokee Constitution contained language relating to the issue of slavery, which contained the following sections directly relating to black slavery.

“Article III, Section 4: No person shall be elegible to a seat in the General Council, but a free Cherokee male citizen, who shall have attained to the age of twenty-five years. The descendants of Cherokee men by all free women, except the

African race, whose parents may have been living together as man and wife, according to the customs and laws of this Nation, shall be entitled to all the rights and privileges of this Nation, as well as the posterity of Cherokee women by all free men. No person who is of Negro or Mulatto parentage, either by the father or mother side, shall be eligible to hold any office of profit, honor or trust under this Government.

Article III, Section 7: All free male citizens, (excepting negroes and descendants of white and Indian men by negro women who may have been set free,) who shall have attained to the age of eighteen years, shall be equally entitled to a vote at all public elections.

“Article III, Section 5. No person shall be eligible to a seat in the National Council but a free Cherokee male citizen who shall have attained to the age of twenty-five years.

The descendants of Cherokee men by all free women except the African race, whose parents may have been living together as man and wife, according to the customs and laws of this Nation, shall be entitled to all the rights and privileges of this Nation, as well as the posterity of Cherokee women by all free men. No person who is of negro or mulatto parentage, either by the father or mother’s side, shall be eligible to hold any office of profit, honor, or trust under this Government.

Article III, Section 7. In all elections by the people, the electors shall vote viva voce.

All free male citizens, who shall have attained to the age of eighteen years shall be equally entitled to vote at all public elections. ⁽⁵⁾

The first three laws enacted under the Tahlequah Constitution concerned black slavery. The first law was entitled: “An Act for the Punishment of Criminal Offenses.” Section 3 stipulated:

Be it further enacted, That upon trial and conviction of any person charged with the offense of having committed a rape on any female, he shall be punished with one hundred lashes on the bare back; and upon the conviction of any negro for the aforesaid offense against any free female, not of negro blood, he shall suffer death by hanging. ⁽⁵⁾

The second measure was entitled: “An Act for the Punishment of Thefts and Other Crimes.” Section 2 read:

Be it further enacted, That if any person shall enslave, or sell, or dispose of in any manner, any free person, for the purpose of enslaving the same, such person so offending shall, upon conviction thereof, be punished with corporeal infliction, as provided in the section above, and compelled to make ample remuneration by such compensation as the court may determine.

The third law was entitled, “An Act to Prevent Amalgamation with Colored Persons.”

Be it enacted by the National Council, That intermarriage shall not be lawful between a free male or female citizen with any slave or person of color not entitled to the rights of citizenship under the laws of this Nation, and the same is hereby prohibited, under the penalty of such corporeal punishment as the courts may deem it necessary and proper to inflict, and which shall not exceed fifty stripes for every such offense;–but any colored male who may be convicted under this act shall receive one hundred lashes.

Chapter 5:  The New Nation in the West, pgs. 61-79.

Those are the original statutes of the Cherokee Nation’s Constitution, when slavery was prevalent in the CN. Here, in 1975, the language changes, and any reference to slavery has been removed from the original Constitution:

“Section 1. All members of the Cherokee Nation must be citizens as proven by references to the Dawes Commission Rolls, including the Delaware Cherokees of Article II of the Delaware Agreement dated the 8th day of May, 1867, and the Shawnee Cherokees as of Article III of the Shawnee Agreement dated the 9th day of June, 1869, and/or their descendants.

Section 2. There shall be established a Cherokee Register, to be kept by the Registrar, for the inclusion of any Cherokee for membership purposes I the Cherokee Nation who presents the necessary evidence of eligibility for registration.

(a) A Registration Committee shall be established. It shall be the duty of the Registration Committee to consider the qualifications and to determine the eligibility of those applying to have their names entered in the Cherokee Register. The Registration Committee shall consist of a Registrar and two (2) assistants. All members shall be appointed by the Principal Chief, and confirmed by the Council.

(b) There shall be a number assigned to every name, which is approved and entered into the Cherokee Register. This number shall be preceded by the three words, “Cherokee Registry Number”.

(c) The decisions of the Registration Committee shall be subject to review by the Tribunal created by Article VII.

Section 3. Registration as used in this article refers to the process of enrolling as a member of the Cherokee Nation and is not the same as registration for voting purposes.

History
Approved for Referendum by the Commissioner, Morris Thompson on September 5, 1975, Seconded by the Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation, Ross O. Swimmer, on October 2, 1975, approved by Referendum on June 26, 1976.

Cross References
Courts and procedures generally, Title 20, Cherokee Nation Code Annotated. Election generally, Title 26, Cherokee Nation Code Annotated. Right to belong to recognized clans or organizations, Article XIV of the Cherokee Constitution. Treaties and agreements, Appendix I, 1986 Cherokee Nation Code Annotated. “

LINKS:

http://www.cherokeebyblood.com/constitution.htm#member

http://www.cherokee.org/Docs/TribalGovernment/Executive/CCC/2003_CN_CONSTITUTION.pdf

http://thorpe.ou.edu/constitution/cherokee/index.html

On the issue of how the former enslaved black people under Cherokee slavers was to be decided, the November 28, 1866 amendments to Article lll of the Constitution were approved and adopted by a convention of the Cherokee people at Tahlequah.

Section 5 was amended to read:

All native born Cherokees, all Indians, and whites legally members of the Nation by adoption, and all freedmen who have been liberated by voluntary act of their former owners or by law, as well as free colored persons who were in the country at the commencement of the rebellion, and are now residents therein, or who may return within six months from the 19th day of July, 1866, and their descendants, who reside within the limits of the Cherokee Nation, shall be taken, and deemed to be, CITIZENS of the Cherokee Nation.”

(Chapter 9:  The Civil War, “Red Over Black”, pg. 135.)

Related link: http://www.commonlaw.com/Cherokee.html

(Selected Laws of the Cherokee Constitution).

Notice to Cherokee Freedman for enrollment. (Muskogee Times-Democratic Phoenix Newspaper)

*See also, the Cherokee Constitution of 1839.

And just as many, many enslaved black people resisted and fought against white enslavement, so too, did many, many black people fight against and resist Cherokee enslavement:

“Cherokee slaves frequently reacted to their status by running away, exhibiting defiance, stealing, and malingering. Runaway slaves, who frequently headed back East, were sometimes hunted with dogs. In order to identify their property, some Cherokee masters branded their slaves. Many slaves had no last names, others took their masters’ names. Some never knew their parents; others were sired by their masters or members of their master’s family. Black women were sometimes sold for refusing to become pregnant. Some masters sought obedience by regularly taking one or more of their slaves to witness hangings. Black women were usually expected to do the same work as men. They were lashed and ran away just as the men did. Some slaves became drivers and overseers. Mothers were sometimes sold away from their children. A few slaves purchased their freedom.”

The Cherokee Nation was no stranger to slave rebellion. Just as white-run America came to fear more Nat Turner, Denmark Vesey and Gabriel Prosser slave rebellions, so to, did the Cherokee Nation come to fear rebellionas as well. Most notably, the Black Slave Revolt of 1842. In 1842 there was a major black slave uprising in the Cherokee Nation. (⁵⁾ (Link: http://www.lwfaah.net/burton/slave_rv.htm )

“Some two hundred or more slaves belonging to Joseph Vann, Lewis Ross, and other Cherokees in the Canadian District (that section of the Nation lying between the Canadian and Arkansas Rivers) were joined in the revolt by slaves from the Creek Nation. Webbers Falls was the center of the plot, but slaves from a wide area along the lower valleys of the Grand and Verdigris rivers appear to have been involved. One of Benjamin Franklin Landrum’s slaves reportedly composed and sang a song entitled “I’ll Tell You, Marsa Ben, Yo Niggers Gwine to Leave Yo,” just previous to the escape. ^{(5 )}The uprising apparently began about 4:00 A.M. when blacks locked their overseers in their cabins while they slept. The slaves then took horses, guns and other weapons, food, and supplies, and fled. They were reportedly headed west for Mexican territory where they thought there was a settlement of free blacks along the Rio Grande. The slaves had supposedly heard that somewhere in the Rio Grande Valley there was a free town, a place of refuge from which runaway slaves could not be reclaimed. ⁽⁵⁾

Fifty-five years later a Fort Smith, Arkansas, newspaper described the slave rebellion as follows:

“The people of Webber’s Falls, Cherokee Nation, awoke one Spring morning in the year of 1842 to find themselves abandoned by their slaves. Not a negro could be found on any of the farms in the bottom or in the surrounding neighborhood. At that time there were several hundred of them there or thereabouts. Joe Vann alone had brought out from Tennessee, two years before, more than two hundred of them and settled on the rich alluvial lands of that section of the nation. The owners were for a time in a state of consternation. Men rode about the adjacent country to ascertain what had become of the runaways. In a short time it became apparent that they had abandoned their owners and when the trail was found the conclusion arrived at was that they were seeking to escape

from bondage by making a desperate effort to reach New Mexico.”

Chapter 5:  The New Nation in the West, pgs. 61-79 (“Red Over Black”).

The “Trail of Tears” was not just traversed by the Cherokee only. As the Cherokee endured the forced march, so too did their slaves they took with them. But, no one wants to hear of the enslaved black people who also died while walking the Trail of Tears with their slave masters:

“The Treaty of New Echota, ceding all Cherokee lands east of the Missis-
sippi River, had been signed in December 1835. It gave the Cherokees
approximately six million acres in present-day northeastern Oklahoma
and allowed two years for the removal. The bulk of the Eastern Indians
did not migrate until 1838 and 1839, however. The hardships suffered
during that migration are well known. Principal Chief John Ross’s wife,
Quatie, died at Little Rock, Arkansas, during the journey. The Cherokees
refer to the trek as Nuna-da-ut-sun’y, “The Trail Where They Cried,”
which is commonly known as the Trail of Tears. It is not commonly
known that MANY BLACK SLAVES ALSO TRAMPED THAT TRAIL and that 125 to
175 of them perished during the journey. ”

(Caps mine, for emphasis.)

SOURCE:

“Red Over Black: Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians”, by R. Halliburton, Jr., Greenwood Press, 1977. Chapter 5: “The New Nation in the West”, page 61.

The threat of sexual abuse from Cherokee slave masters was a horror that enslaved black women faced, just as much as they did under white slave masters. For an enslaved black woman could not have any control over her body or any children she gave birth to whether the father was the Cherokee slave master, his son, his other male relatives, or any male Cherokee who came to the plantation. And Cherokee slave masters sexually debased and impregnated their enslaved black women as much did white slave masters. And as they impregnated black women to create more profit for themselves, so too did they sell their own Cherokee/Black offspring to obtain more material wealth.

As for the change in the language of the Cherokee Constitution, it comes off as trying to erase the history of the enslavement of back people by Cherokee slavers. All the excising of the original wording of the Cherokee Constitution, all the Farenheit 451 treatment of the Cherokee history enslavement of black people cannot be buried. No matter how hard you try, you cannot burn away the past.

That the CN did nothing in the way of abolitionists against slavery, that the CN condoned and legally sanctioned slavery in its own Constitution showed how the Cherokee had no problems with the institution of slavery, save for the efforts of the Keetowah Society. The Keetowah Society (a small group of pro- Union Cherokees), vehemently fought against slavery. The Civil War polarized the Cherokee Nation, just as it did white-run America at that time. Just as there were whites who were pro- and anti-slavery, so too were there Cherokee who were pro- and anti-slavery amongst the Cherokee. The Union opponents of Slavery were the Keetowahs who bitterly opposed slavery; on the other hand, there were the “Knights of the Golden Circle” (sometimes called the “Knaves of the Godless Communion”) led by Chief Stand Watie, a large slave holder from Honey Creek, who were so pro-slavery that they eventually sided with the Confederate States of America. The Cherokee (many of them half-white, and slave holders)  who stood on the side of the pro-slavery American South, with Chief Watie,  overruled the Cherokee (full-bloods, and the Ketoowah) who were against any enslavement of another human being, and joined the CN with the CSA in secession.

Enslaved black people under the Cherokee slavemasters during the Civil War were no different than black people enslaved under white slavers. They comported themselves admirably towards their Cherokee masters, even when those masters were away fighting in the Civil War to maintain their rapacious livelihood of human bondage against black people.

During the War, there were black slaves who remained faithful to their Cherokee masters, even though they had no promise of freedom. Many enslaved black people who neither harmed, nor deserted their Cherokee masters all throughout the Civil War:

“Many black slaves remained in the Nation and continued to be faithful to their absentee masters; sometimes they were the sole occupants of plantations. Mrs. Ella Coody Robinson related: “Mother took us children and went to New Hampshire when father died during the war as she had been educated there and we stayed several months. When she returned home she found the home affairs in good order, the faithful negroes staying at their posts of duty. ⁽⁴⁾ Lydia Keys Taylor explained: “My father fought with the Confederacy during the Civil War. He left a negro slave to take care of the plantation near Tahlequah. After the war, on returning to the plantation, he found the house burned, cattle gone, but the slave was still there.” ⁽⁴⁾ Major Joseph Lynch Martin, known by many as “Greenbriar Joe,” owned a large plantation at Pensacola, Florida, and operated three cattle ranches at Ketchum and Greenbriar in the Cherokee Nation. More than 300 black slaves labored on these properties. When the war began, Martin placed his black slave driver, Nelson, in charge of his ranches and gathered a regiment of men for the Confederate army, outfitting it at his own expense. He participated in the battle of Cabin Creek, which was fought on his Pensacola ranch. During the war, Nelson made two trips to Florida to oversee his master’s affairs there. ⁽⁴⁾

The sanctioning of slavery in much of Cherokee society and the Cherokee Nation’s Constitution was in effect the sanctioning of the acceptance of black people as inferior to Cherokee and that enslaved black people had no rights under slavery that a Cherokee was bound to respect.

No amount of re-writing the Cherokee Constitution will change the fact that there were Cherokee slavers who beat and mistreated the enslaved black people who toiled under their yoke of bondage, and that through rape of enslaved black women, and forced impregnation, Cherokee slavers passed their blood on into the enslaved black people among them—-black people who would eventually become the Freedmen/Women that live in the CN today.

A slave master is a THIEF, and no amount of a so-called “kind master” will ever absolve any human being of owning another one.

For what is a slavemaster, if not a thief?

A thief who steals the labor of an enslaved woman, man and child. A thief who robs another human being of their dignity. A thief who forces unwanted sex, and motherhood on a group of women who cannot say, “No’, because as slaves they have no rights to be protected by laws that recognize their humanity as members of the human race, and as women. A slaveholder is a thief who steals body, spirit, labor, and lives of those whom they enslave and degrade.

That is what the Cherokee slaveholders were:  thieves, parasites and abominations who were not fit to walk among the living.

The Cherokee Nation needs to acknowledge its wrong in enslaving black people. The Cherokee Nation needs to accept that it did wrong when it legally sanctioned the enslavement of black people with laws written into its Constitution to illegally steal the labour, lives, and bodies of enslaved black men, women and children. The Cherokee Nation must accept that it is the right of the Freedmen/Women to decide whether or not the Freedmen/Women can forgive the Cherokee Nation for condoning the sins. . . .and crimes. . . .against the humanity of enslaved black people.

The voices of the enslaved black men and women who lived under slavery in the CN have been silenced for far too long.  They too have their right to be remembered and never forgotten. They too shall be heard as they tell of what life was like for them under slavery in the Cherokee Nation, when black people were not human but instead were things, objects, commodities to be traded, bought and sold.

**********************************************************************************************

Very little personal information about Cherokee black slaves was ever recorded and most of that has since been lost or destroyed. There are a few extant sources, however. The following interviews conducted during the 1930s, during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s administration with the Works Progress Administration audio recordings of former slaves, gives voice to the many, many women and men who lived under chattel bondage in a hypocitical country that prided itself on being the freest nation on Earth for all of its citizens. Other sources of voices from the past of formerly enslaved black men and women can be found among the Foreman Papers (named after Grant Foreman who worked on these genealogical documentations under FDR’s WPA. The papers contain one hundred and twelve volumes of historical memoirs containing accounts of enslaved black women and men under the Five Civilized tribes, who lived before, and after, the Civil War), in their own words; the Indian – Pioneer History Project for Oklahoma, conducted by William Gross; the WPA Oklahoma Slave Narratives; and the Ex-Slaves File of the Oklahoma Historical Society, which are the best examples. The following  reminiscenses were recorded some seventy years after emancipation.

PHYLLIS PETITE

AGE 83

FORT GIBSON, OKLA.

I was born in Rusk County, Texas, on a plantation about eight miles east of Belleview. There wasn’t no town where I was born, but they had a church.

My mammy and pappy belonged to a part Cherokee named W. P. Thompson when I was born. He had kinfolks in the Cherokee Nation, and we all moved up here to a place on Fourteen-Mile Creek close to where Hulbert now is, ‘way before I was big enough to remember anything. Then, so I been told, old master Thompson sell my pappy and mammy and one of my baby brothers and me back to one of his neighbors in Texas name of John Harnage.

Mammy’s name was Letitia Thompson and pappy’s was Riley Thompson. My little brother was named Johnson Thompson, but I had another brother

sold to a Vann and he always call hisself Harry Vann. His Cherokee master lived on the Arkansas River close to Webbers Falls and I never did know him until we was both grown. My only sister was Patsy and she was borned after slavery and died at Wagoner, Oklahoma.

I can just remember when Master John Harnage took us to Texas. We went in a covered wagon with oxen and camped out all along the way. Mammy done the cooking in big wash kettles and pappy done the driving of the oxen. I would set in a wagon and listen to him pop his whip and holler.

Master John took us to his plantation and it was a big one, too. You could look from the field up to the Big House and any grown body in the yard look like a little body, it was so far away.

We negroes lived in quarters not far from the Big House and ours was a single log house with a stick and dirt chimney. We cooked over the hot coals in the fireplace.

I just played around until I was about six years old I reckon, and then they put me up at the Big House with my mammy to work. She done all the cording and spinning and weaving, and I done a whole lot of sweeping and minding the baby. The baby was only about six months old I reckon. I used to stand by the cradle and rock it all day, and when I quit I would go to sleep right by the cradle sometimes before mammy would come and get me.

The Big House had great big rooms in front, and they was fixed up nice, too. I remember when old Mistress Harnage tried me out sweeping up the front rooms. They had two or three great big pictures of some old people hanging on the wall. They was full blood Indians it look like, and I was sure scared of them pictures! I would go here and there and every which-a-way, and anywheres I go them big pictures always looking straight at me and watching me sweep! I kept my eyes right on them so I could run if they moved, and old Mistress take me back to the kitchen and say I can’t sweep because I miss all the dirt.

We always have good eating, like turnip greens cooked in a kettle with hog skins and crackling grease, and skinned corn, and rabbit or possum stew. I liked big fish tolerable well too, but I was afraid of the bones in the little ones.

That skinned corn aint like the boiled hominy we have today. To make it you boil some wood ashes, or have some drip lye from the hopper to put in the hot water. Let the corn boil in the lye water until the skin drops off and the eyes drop out and then wash that corn in fresh water about

a dozen times, or just keep carrying water from the spring until you are wore out, like I did. Then you put the corn in a crock and set it in the spring, and you got good skinned corn as long as it last, all ready to warm up a little batch at a time.

Master had a big, long log kitchen setting away from the house, and we set a big table for the family first, and when they was gone we negroes at the house eat at that table too, but we don’t use the china dishes.

The negro cook was Tilda Chisholm. She and my mammy didn’t do no outwork. Aunt Tilda sure could make them corn-dodgers. Us children would catch her eating her dinner first out of the kettles and when we say something she say: ‘Go on child, I jest tasting that dinner.’

In the summer we had cotton homespun clothes, and in winter it had wool mixed in. They was dyed with copperas and wild indigo.

My brother, Johnson Thompson, would get up behind old Master Harnage on his horse and go with him to hunt squirrels so they would go ’round on Master’s side so’s he could shoot them. Master’s old mare was named ‘Old Willow’, and she knowed when to stop and stand real still so he could shoot.

His children was just all over the place! He had two houses full of them! I only remember Bell, Ida, Maley, Mary and Will, but they was plenty more I don’t remember.

That old horn blowed ‘way before daylight, and all the field negroes had to be out in the row by the time of sun up. House negroes got up too, because old Master always up to see everybody get out to work.

Old Master Harnage bought and sold slaves most all the time, and some of the new negroes always acted up and needed a licking. The worst ones got beat up good, too! They didn’t have no jail to put slaves in because when the Masters got done licking them they didn’t need no jail.

My husband was George Petite. He tell me his mammy was sold away from him when he was a little boy. He looked down a long lane after her just as long as he could see her, and cried after her. He went down to the big road and set down by his mammy’s barefooted tracks in the sand and set there until it got dark, and then he come on back to the quarters.

I just saw one slave try to get away right in hand. They caught him with bloodhounds and brung him back in. The hounds had nearly tore him up, and he was sick a long time. I don’t remember his name, but he wasn’t one of the old regular negroes.

In Texas we had a church where we could go. I think it was a white church and they just let the negroes have it when they got a preacher

sometimes. My mammy took me sometimes, and she loved to sing them salvation songs.

We used to carry news from one plantation to the other I reckon, ’cause mammy would tell about things going on some other plantation and I know she never been there.

Christmas morning we always got some brown sugar candy or some molasses to pull, and we children was up bright and early to get that ‘lasses pull. I tell you! And in the winter we played skeeting on the ice when the water frose over. No, I don’t mean skating. That’s when you got iron skates, and we didn’t have them things. We just got a running start and jump on the ice and skeet as far as we could go, and then run some more.

I nearly busted my head open, and brother Johnson said: ‘Try it again,’ but after that I was scared to skeet any more.

Mammy say we was down in Texas to get away from the War, but I didn’t see any war and any soldiers. But one day old Master stay after he eat breakfast and when us negroes come in to eat he say: ‘After today I ain’t your master any more. You all as free as I am.’ We just stand look and don’t know what to say about it.

After while pappy got a wagon and some oxen to drive for a white man who was coming to the Cherokee Nation because he had folks here. His name was Dave Mounts and he had a boy named John.

We come with them and stopped at Fort Gibson where my own grand mammy was cooking for the soldiers at the garrison. Her name was Phyllis Brewer and I was named after her. She had a good Cherokee master. My mammy was born on his place.

We stayed with her about a week and then we moved out on Four Mile Creek to live. She died on Fourteen-Mile Creek about a year later.

When we first went to Four Mile Creek I seen negro women chopping wood and ask them who they work for and I found out they didn’t know they was free yet.

After a while my pappy and mammy both died, and I was took care of by my aunt Elsie Vann. She took my brother Johnson too, but I don’t know who took Harry Vann.

I was married to George Petite, and I had on a white underdress and black high-top shoes, and a large cream colored hat, and on top of all I had a blue wool dress with tassels all around the bottom of it. That dress was for me to eat the terrible supper in. That what we called the wedding

supper because we eat too much of it. Just dances all night, too! I was at Mandy Foster’s house in Fort Gibson, and the preacher was Reverend Barrows. I had that dress a long time, but it is gone now. I still got the little sun bonnet I wore to church in Texas.

We had six children, but all are dead but George, Tish, and Annie now. Yes, they tell me Abraham Lincoln set me free, and I love to look at his picture on the wall in the school house at Four Mile branch where they have church. My grand mammy kind of help start that church, and I think everybody ought to belong to some church.

I want to say again my Master Harnage was Indian, but he was a good man and mighty good to us slaves, and you can see I am more than six feet high and they say I weighs over a hundred and sixty, even if my hair is snow white.

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CHARLOTTE JOHNSON WHITE

AGE 88 FORT GIBSON, OKLAHOMA

Near as I ever know, I was born in the year of 1850, away back in the hills east of Tahlequah; the Cherokee folks called it the Flint District and old master Ben Johnson lived somewheres about ten miles east of the big Indian town, Tahlequah. Never did know just where his farm was, and when the new towns of the country spring up it make it that much harder for me to figure out just where he lived and where at I was born.

Don’t know much about own folks either, ‘ceptin’ that my mother’s name was Elasey Johnson and my pappy’s name was Banjo Lastley, who one time lived ’round where Lenapah now is. There was one brother name of Turner Whitmire Johnson, and a half sister name of Jennie Miller

Lastley, who is still living down in Muskogee, but brother Turner been dead most 40 year ago I guess. Pappy was belonging to another master, that’s how come my folks’ name was different, but I kept the old Johnson name, even though the old master was the meanest kind of a man.

His wife, Mistress Anna, died when one of the children was born; maybe that’s why he was so mean, just worried all the time. The master lived in a double log house, with a double fireplace in the middle of two rooms, and I was one of the girls who stayed in the house to take care of the children. How many children they had I never remember and I don’t remember the names, but they was all pretty mean, like the master and the overseer that drive the folks who work in the field.

The cabin where I live with my mother was a two-room log house having two doors that open right into the yard. There was no gallery on the slave cabins and no windows, so the corners of the rooms get dark early and sometime I get pretty scared before mother got in from the fields in the evening. She be gone all the day and always leave me a big baked sweet potato on the board above the fireplace and then I eat about noon for my dinner.

That was before I got big enough to work in the master’s house and take care of the children. She always work in the fields; she was sick all the time, but that didn’t keep her out of the fields or the garden work. Sometimes she be so sick she could barely get out of the old wood bunk when the morning work call sound on the farm.

One day my mother couldn’t get up and the old master come around to see about it, and he yelled, ‘Get out of here and get yourself in the fields.’ She tried to go but was too sick to work. She got to the door alright; couldn’t hurry fast enough for the old master though, so he pushed her in a little ditch that was by the cabin and whipped her back with the lash, then he reached down and rolled her over so’s he could beat her face and neck. She didn’t live long after that and I guess the whippings helped to kill her, but she better off dead than just living for the whip.

Time I was twelve year old I was tendin’ the master’s children like what they tell me to do, and then one day somehow I drop one of them right by where the old master was burning some brush in the yard. ‘What you do that for?’ he yelled, and while I was stopping to pick up the baby he grabbed me and shoved me into the fire! I went into that fire head first, but I never know how I got out. See this old scarred face? That’s

what I got from the fire, and inside my lips is burned off, and my back is scarred with lashings that’ll be with me when I meet my Jesus!

Them things help me remember about the slave days and how once when I got sick of being treated mean by everybody after mother died, I slipped off in the woods to get away and wandered ’round ’till I come to a place folks said was Scullyville. On the way I eat berries and chew bark from the trees, and one feed I got from some colored people on the way.

But the old master track me down and there I is back at the old farm for more whippings. Then I was give away to my Aunt Easter Johnson, but she Was a mean woman–mean to everybody. She had a boy six year old. That boy got to crying one day and she grabbed up a big club and beat her own child to death. Then she laughed about it! Like she was crazy, I guess. And the only thing was done to her was a locking up in the chicken house, ending up with a salt and pepper whipping.

All the slaves wore cotton clothes in the summer, wool jackets in the winter and brass-toed shoes made from the hide of some old cow that wasn’t no good milker anymore. I lost the first pair of shoes they give me and had to go barefoot all the winter. Out in a thicket I had seen a rabbit so I started after it, but took my shoes and set them down so’s I could sneak up without making noise. Then I miss the rabbit and go back for the shoes but they was nowhere I could find them. When Master Johnson find out the shoes was lost I got another whipping.

I hear about the slaves being free when maybe a hundred soldiers come to the house. They was a pretty sight settin’ on the horses, and the men had on blue uniforms with little caps. ‘All the slaves is free’ one of the men said, and after that I just told everybody, ‘I is a free Negro now and I ain’t goin’ to work for nobody!’

A long time after the war is over and everybody is free of the masters, I get down to Muldrow, Okla., and that’s where I join the church. For 58 year I belong to the colored Baptists and I learn that everybody ought to be good while they is living so’s they will have a better restin’ place when they die.

In 1891, I met a good man, Randolph White, and we got married. I still got some of the pieces or scraps of my weddin’ dress, a cotton dress it was, with lots of colors printed on it–with colors like the Indians use to wear.

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SARAH WILSON

AGE 87 FORT GIBSON, OKLA.

I was a Cherokee slave and now I am a Cherokee freedwoman, and besides that I am a quarter Cherokee my own self. And this is the way it is.

I was born in 1850 along the Arkansas river about half way between Fort Smith and old Fort Coffee and the Skullyville boat landing on the river. The farm place was on the north side of the river on the old wagon road what run from Fort Smith out to Fort Gibson, and that old road was like you couldn’t hardly call a road when I first remember seeing it. The ox teams bog down to they bellies in some places, and the wagon wheel mighty nigh bust on the big rocks in some places.

I remember seeing soldiers coming along that old road lots of times, and freighting wagons, and wagons what we all know carry whiskey, and that was breaking the law, too! Them soldiers catch the man with the whiskey they sure put him up for a long time, less’n he put some silver in they hands. That’s what my Uncle Nick say. That Uncle Nick a mean Negro, and he ought to know about that.

Like I tell you, I am a quarter Cherokee. My mammy was named Adeline and she belong to old Master Ben Johnson. Old Master Ben bring my grandmammy out to that Sequoyah district way back when they call it Arkansas, mammy tell me, and God only know who my mammy’s pa is, but mine was Old Master Ben’s boy, Ned Johnson.

Old Master Ben come from Tennessee when he was still a young man, and he bring a whole passel of slaves and my mammy say they all was kin to one another, all the slaves I mean. He was a white man that married a Cherokee woman, and he was a devil on this earth. I don’t want to talk about him none.

White folks was mean to us like the devil, and so I just let them pass. When I say my brothers and sisters I mean my half brothers and sisters, you know, but maybe some of them was my whole kin anyways, I don’t know. They was Lottie that was sold off to a Starr because she wouldn’t have a baby, and Ed, Dave, Ben, Jim and Ned.

My name is Sarah now but it was Annie until I was eight years old. My old Mistress’name was Annie and she name me that, and Mammy was

afraid to change it until old Mistress died, then she change it. She hate old Mistress and that name too.

Lottie’s name was Annie, too, but Mammy changed it in her own mind but she was afraid to say it out loud, a-feared she would get a whipping. When sister was sold off Mammy tell her to call herself Annie when she was leaving but call herself Lottie when she get over to the Starrs. And she done it too. I seen her after that and she was called Lottie all right.

The Negroes lived all huddled up in a bunch in little one-room log cabins with stick and mud chimneys. We lived in one, and it had beds for us children like shelves in the wall. Mammy used to help us up into them.

Grandmammy was mighty old and mistress was old too. Grandmammy set on the Master’s porch and minded the baby mostly. I think it was Young Master’s. He was married to a Cherokee girl. They was several of the boys but only one girl, Nicie. The old Master’s boys were Aaron, John, Ned, Cy and Nathan. They lived in a double log house made out of square hewed logs, and with a double fireplace out of rock where they warmed theirselves on one side and cooked on the other. They had a long front porch where they set most of the time in the summer, and slept on it too.

There was over a hundred acres in the Master’s farm, and it was all bottom land too, and maybe you think he let them slaves off easy! Work from daylight to dark! They all hated him and the overseer too, and before slavery ended my grandmammy was dead and old Mistress was dead and old Master was might feeble and Uncle Nick had run away to the North soldiers and they never got him back. He run away once before, about ten years before I was born, Mammy say, but the Cherokees went over in the Creek Nation and got him back that time.

The way he made the Negroes work so hard, old Master must have been trying to get rich. When they wouldn’t stand for a whipping he would sell them.

I saw him sell a old woman and her son. Must have been my aunt. She was always pestering around trying to get something for herself, and one day she was cleaning the yard he seen her pick up something and put it inside her apron. He flew at her and cussed her, and started like he was going to hit her but she just stood right up to him and never budged, and when he come close she just screamed out loud and run at him with her fingers stuck out straight and jabbed him in the belly. He had a big soft belly, too, and it hurt him. He seen she wasn’t going to be afraid, and he

set out to sell her. He went off on his horse to get some men to come and bid on her and her boy, and all us children was mighty scared about it.

They would have hangings at Fort Smith courthouse, and old Master would take a slave there sometimes to see the hangings, and that slave would come back and tell us all scary stories about the hanging.

One time he whipped a whole bunch of the men on account of a fight in the quarters, and then he took them all to Fort Smith to see a hanging. He tied them all in the wagon, and when they had seen the hanging he asked them if they was scared of them dead men hanging up there. They all said yes, of course, but my old uncle Nick was a bad Negro and he said, ‘No, I aint a-feared of them nor nothing else in this world’, and old Master jumped on him while he was tied and beat him with a rope, and then when they got home he tied old Nick to a’tree and took his shirt off and poured the cat-o-nine tails to him until he fainted away and fell over like^* he was dead.

I never forget seeing all that blood all over my uncle, and if I could hate that old Indian any more I guess I would, but I hated him all I could already I reckon.

Old Master wasn’t the only hellion neither. Old Mistress just as bad, and she took most of her wrath out hitting us children all the time. She was afraid of the grown Negroes. Afraid of what they might do while old Master was away, but she beat us children all the time.

She would call me, ‘Come here Annie!’ and I wouldn’t know what to do. If I went when she called ‘Annie’ my mammy would beat me for answering to that name, and if I didn’t go old Mistress would beat me for that. That made me hate both of them, and I got the devil in me and I wouldn’t come to either one. My grandmammy minded the Master’s yard, and she set on the front porch all the time, and when I was called I would run to her and she wouldn’t let anybody touch me.

When I was eight years old Mistress died, and Grandmammy told me why old Mistress picked on me so. She told me about me being half Mister Ned’s blood. Then I knowed why Mister Ned would say, ‘Let her along, she got big big blood in her’, and then laugh.

Young Mister Ned was a devil, too. When his mammy died he went out and ‘blanket married.’ I mean he brung in a half white and half Indian woman and just lived with her.

The slaves would get rations every Monday morning to do them all week. The overseer would weigh and measure according to how many in

the family, and if you run out you just starve till you get some more. We all know the overseer steal some of it for his own self but we can’t do anything, so we get it from the old Master some other way.

One day I was carrying water from the spring and I run up on Grandmammy and Uncle Nick skinning a cow. ‘What you-all doing?’, I say, and they say keep my mouth shut or they kill me. They was stealing from the Master to piece out down at the quarters with. Old Master had so many cows he never did count the difference.

I guess I wasn’t any worse than any the rest of the Negroes, but I was bad to tell little lies. I carry scars on my legs to this day where Old Master whip me for lying, with a raw hide quirt he carry all the time for his horse. When I lie to him he just jump down off’n his horse and whip me good right there.

In slavery days we all ate sweet potatoes all the time. When they didn’t measure out enough of the tame kind we would go out in the woods and get the wild kind. They growed along the river sand between where we lived and Wilson’s Rock, out west of our place.

Then we had boiled sheep and goat, mostly goat, and milk and wild greens and corn pone. I think the goat meat was the best, but I ain had no teeth for forty years now, and a chunk of meat hurts my stomach. So I just eats grits mostly. Besides hoeing in the field, chopping sprouts, shearing sheep, carrying water, cutting firewood, picking cotton and sewing I was the one they picked to work Mistress’ little garden where she raised things from seed they got in Fort Smith. Green peas and beans and radishes and things like that. If we raised a good garden she give me a little of it, and if we had a poor one I got a little anyhow even when she didn’t give it.

For clothes we had homespun cotton all the year round, but in winter we had a sheep skin jacket with the wool left on the inside. Sometimes sheep skin shoes with the wool on the inside and sometimes real cow leather shoes with wood peggings for winter, but always barefooted in summer, all the men and women too.

Lord, I never earned a dime of money in slave days for myself but plenty for the old Master. He would send us out to work the neighbors field and he got paid for it, but we never did see any money.

I remember the first money I ever did see. It was a little while after we was free, and I found a greenback in the road at Fort Gibson and I didn’t know what it was. Mammy said it was money and grabbed for it,

but I was still a hell cat and I run with it. I went to the little sutler store and laid it down and pointed to a pitcher I been wanting. The man took the money and give me the pitcher, but I don’t know to this day how much money it was and how much was the pitcher, but I still got that pitcher put away. It’s all blue and white stripedy.

Most of the work I done off the plantation was sewing. I learned from my Granny and I loved to sew. That was about the only thing I was industrious in. When I was just a little bitsy girl I found a steel needle in the yard that belong to old Mistress. My mammy took it and I cried. She put it in her dress and started for the field. I cried so old Mistress found out why and made Mammy give me the needle for my own.

We had some neighbor Indians named Starr, and Mrs. Starr used me sometimes to sew. She had nine boys and one girl, and she would sew up all they clothes at once to do for a year. She would cut out the cloth for about a week, and then send the word around to all the neighbors, and old Mistress would send me because she couldn’t see good to sew. They would have stacks of drawers, shirts, pants and some dresses all cut out to sew up.

I was the only Negro that would set there and sew in that bunch of women, and they always talked to me nice and when they eat I get part of it too, out in the kitchen.

One Negro girl, Eula Davis, had a mistress sent her too, one time, but she wouldn’t sew. She didn’t like me because she said I was too white and she played off to spite the white people. She got sent home, too.

When old Mistress die I done all the sewing for the family almost. I could sew good enough to go out before I was eight years old, and when I got to be about ten I was better than any other girl on the place for sewing.

I can still quilt without my glasses, and I have sewed all night long many a time while I was watching young Master’s baby after old Mistress died.

They was over a hundred acres in the plantation, and I don’t know how many slaves, but before the War ended lots of the men had run away. Uncle Nick went to the North and never come home, and Grandmammy died about that time.

We was way down across the Red River in Texas at that time, close to Shawneetown of the Choctaw Nation but just across the river on the other side in Texas bottoms. Old Master took us there in covered wagons when

the Yankee soldiers got too close by in the first part of the War. He hired the slaves out to Texas people because he didn’t make any crops down there, and we all lived in kind of

camps. That’s how some of the men and my uncle Nick got to slip off to the north that way.

Old Master just rent and rave all the time we was in Texas. That’s the first time I ever saw a doctor. Before that when a slave sick the old woman give them herbs, but down there one day old Master whip a Negro girl and she fall in the fire, and he had a doctor come out to fix her up where she was burnt. I remember Granny giving me clabber milk when I was sick, and when I was grown I found out it had had medicine in it.

Before freedom we didn’t have no church, but slipped around to the other cabins and had a little singing sometimes. Couldn’t have anybody show us the letters either, and you better not let them catch you pick up a book even to look at the pictures, for it was against a Cherokee law to have a Negro read and write or to teach a Negro.

Some Negroes believed in buckeyes and charms but I never did. Old Master had some good boys, named Aaron, John, Ned, Cy and Nat and they told me the charms was no good. Their sister Nicie told me too, and said when I was sick just come and tell her.

They didn’t tell us anything about Christmas and New Year though, and all we done was work.

When the War was ended we was still in Texas, and when old Master got a letter from Fort Smith telling him the slaves was free he couldn’t read, and young Miss read it to him. He went wild and jumped on her and beat the devil out of her. Said she was lying to him. It near about killed him to let us loose, but he cooled down after awhile and said he would help us all get back home if we wanted to come.

Mammy told him she could bear her own expenses. I remember I didn’t know what ‘expenses’ was, and I thought it was something I was going to have to help carry all the way back.

It was a long time after he knew we was free before he told us. He tried to keep us, I reckon, but had to let us go. He died pretty soon after he told us, and some said his heart just broke and some said some Negroes poisoned him. I didn’t know which.

Anyways we had to straggle back the best way we could, and me and mammy just got along one way and another till we got to a ferry over the Red River and into Arkansas. Then we got some rides and walked some until we got to Fort Smith.

They was a lot of Negro camps there and we stayed awhile and then started out to Fort Gibson because we heard they was giving rations out there.

Mammy knew we was Cherokee anyway, I guess.

That trip was hell on earth. Nobody let us ride and it took us nearly two weeks to walk all that ways, and we nearly starved all the time. We was skin and bones and feet all bloody when we got to the Fort.

We come here to Four Mile Branch to where the Negroes was all setting down, and pretty soon Mammy died.

I married Oliver Wilson on January second, 1878. He used to belong to Mr. DeWitt Wilson of Tahlequah, and I think the old people used to live down at Wilson Rock because my husband used to know all about that place and the place where I was borned. Old Mister DeWitt Wilson give me a pear tree the next year after I was married, and it is still out in my yard and bears every year.

I was married in a white and black checkedy calico apron that I washed for Mr. Tim Walker’s mother Lizzie all day for, over close to Ft. Gibson, and I was sure a happy woman when I married that day.

Him and me both got our land on our Cherokee freedman blood and I have lived to bury my husband and see two great grandchildren so far.

I bless God about Abraham Lincoln. I remember when my mammy sold pictures of him in Fort Smith for a Jew. If he give me my freedom I know he is in Heaven now.

I heard a lot about Jefferson Davis in my life. During the War we hear the Negroes singing the soldier song about hang Jeff Davis to a apple tree, and old Master tell about the time we know Jeff Davis. Old Master say Jeff Davis was just a dragoon soldier out of Fort Gibson when he bring his family out here from Tennessee, and while they was on the road from Fort Smith to where they settled young Jeff Davis and some more dragoon soldiers rid up and talked to him a long time. He say my grandmammy had a bundle on her head, and Jeff Davis say, ‘Where you going Aunty?’ and she was tired and mad and she said, ‘I don’t know, to Hell I reckon’, and all the white soldiers laughed at her and made her that much mader.

I joined the Four Mile Branch church in 1879 and Sam Solomon was a Creek Negro and the first preacher I ever heard preach. Everybody ought to be in the church and ready for that better home on the other side.

All the old slaves I know are dead excepting two, and I will be going pretty soon I reckon, but I’m glad to lived to see the day the Negroes get the right treatment if they work good and behave themselves right.

They don’t have to have no pass to walk abroad no more, and they can all read and write now, but it’s a tarnation shame some of them go and read the wrong kind of things anyways.

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CHANEY RICHARDSON

AGE 90

FORT GIBSON, OKLA.

I was born in the old Caney settlement southeast of Tahlequah on the banks of Caney Creek. Off to the north we could see the big old ridge of Sugar Mountain when the sun shine on him first thing in the morning when we all getting up.

I didn’t know nothing else but some kind of war until I was a grown woman, because when I first can remember my old Master, Charley Rogers, was always on the lookout for somebody or other he was lined up against in the big feud.

My master and all the rest of the folks was Cherokees, and they’d been killing each other off in the feud ever since long before I was borned, and jest because old Master have a big farm and three-four families of Negroes them other Cherokees keep on pestering his stuff all the time. Us children was always afeared to go any place less’n some of the grown folks was along.

We didn’t know what we was a-feared of, but we heard the Master and Mistress talking ’bout ‘another Party killing’ and we stuck close to the place.

Old Mistress’ name was Nancy Rogers, but I was a orphan after I was a big girl and I called her ‘Aunt’ and ‘Mama’ like I did when I was little. You see my own mammy was the house woman and I was raised in the house, and I heard the little children call old mistress ‘mama’ and so I did too. She never did make me stop.

My pappy and mammy and us children lived in a one-room log cabin close to the creek bank and just a little piece from old Master’s house.

My pappy’s name was Joe Tucker and my mammy’s name was Ruth Tucker. They belonged to a man named Tucker before I was born and he sold them to Master Charley Rogers and he just let them go on by the same name if they wanted to, because last name didn’t mean nothing to a slave anyways. The folks jest called my pappy ‘ Charley Rogers’ boy Joe.’

I already had two sisters, Mary and Mandy, when I was born, and putty soon I had a baby brother, Louis. Mammy worked at the Big House and took me along every day. When I was a little bigger I would help hold the hank when she done the spinning and old Mistress done a lot of the weaving and some knitting. She jest set by the window and knit most all of the time.

When we weave the cloth we had a big loom out on the gallery, and Miss Nancy tell us how to do it.

Mammy eat at our own cabin, and we had lots of game meat and fish the boys get in the Caney Creek. Mammy bring down deer meat and wild turkey sometimes, that the Indian boys git on Sugar Mountain.

Then we had corn bread, dried bean bread and green stuff out’n Master’s patch. Mammy make the bean bread when we git short of corn meal and nobody going to the mill right away. She take and bile the beans and mash them up in some meal and that make it go a long ways.

The slaves didn’t have no garden ’cause they work in old Master’s garden and make enough for everybody to have some anyway.

When I was about 10 years old that feud got so bad the Indians was always talking about getting their horses and cattle killed and their slaves harmed. I was too little to know how bad it was until one morning my own mammy went off somewhere down the road to git some stuff to dye cloth and she didn’t come back.

Lots of the young Indian bucks on both sides of the feud would ride around the woods at night, and old Master got powerful oneasy about my mammy and had all the neighbors and slaves out looking for her, but nobody find her.

It was about a week later that two Indian men rid up and ast old master wasn’t his gal Ruth gone. He says yes, and they take one of the slaves along with a wagon to show where they seen her.

They find her in some bushes where she’d been getting bark to set the dyes, and she been dead all the time. Somebody done hit her in the head with a club and shot her through and through with a bullet too. She was so swole up they couldn’t lift her up and jest had to make a deep hole right along side of her and roll her in it she was so bad mortified.

Old Master nearly go crazy he was so mad, and the young Cherokee men ride the woods every night for about a month, but they never catch on to who done it.

because I never see my sisters and brother for a long time after the Civil War, and for me, I have to go live with a new mistress that was a Cherokee neighbor. Her name was Hannah Ross, and she raised me until I was grown.

I was her home girl, and she and me did a lot of spinning and weaving too. I helped the cook and carried water and milked. I carried the water in a home-made pegging set on my head. Them peggings was kind of buckets made out of staves set around a bottom and didn’t have no handle.

I can remember weaving with Miss Hannah Ross. She would weave a strip of white and one of yellow and one of brown to make it pretty. She had a reel that would pop every time it got to half skein so she would know to stop and fill it up again. We used copperas and some kind of bark she bought at the store to dye with. It was cotton clothes winter and summer for the slaves, too, I’ll tell you.

When the Civil War come along we seen lots of white soldiers in them brown butternut

suits all over the place, and about all the Indian men was in it too. Old master Charley Rogers’ boy Charley went along too. Then pretty soon–it seem like about a year–a lot of the Cherokee men come back home and say they not going back to the War with that General Cooper and some of them go off the Federal side because the captain go to the Federal side too.

Somebody come along and tell me my own pappy have to go in the war and I think they say he on the Copper side, and then after while Miss Hannah tell me he git kilt over in Arkansas.

I was so grieved all the time I don’t remember much what went on, but I know pretty soon my Cherokee folks had all the stuff they had et up by the soldiers and they was jest a few wagons and mules left.

All the slaves was piled in together and some of the grown ones walking, and they took us way down across the big river and kept us in the bottoms a long time until the War was over.

We lived in a kind of a camp, but I was too little to know where they got the grub to feed us with. Most all the Negro men was off somewhere in the War.

Then one day they had to bust up the camp and some Federal soldiers go with us and we all start back home. We git to a place where all the houses is burned down and I ask what is that place. Miss Hannah say: ‘Skullyville, child. That’s where they had part of the War.’

All the slaves was set out when we git to Fort Gibson, and the soldiers say we all free now. They give us grub and clothes to the Negroes at that place. It wasn’t no town but a fort place and a patch of big trees.

I think old Master sell the children or give them out to somebody then,

because I never see my sisters and brother for a long time after the Civil War, and for me, I have to go live with a new mistress that was a Cherokee neighbor. Her name was Hannah Ross, and she raised me until I was grown.

I was her home girl, and she and me did a lot of spinning and weaving too. I helped the cook and carried water and milked. I carried the water in a home-made pegging set on my head. Them peggings was kind of buckets made out of staves set around a bottom and didn’t have no handle.

I can remember weaving with Miss Hannah Ross. She would weave a strip of white and one of yellow and one of brown to make it pretty. She had a reel that would pop every time it got to half skein so she would know to stop and fill it up again. We used copperas and some kind of bark she bought at the store to dye with. It was cotton clothes winter and summer for the slaves, too, I’ll tell you.

When the Civil War come along we seen lots of white soldiers in them brown butternut suits all over the place, and about all the Indian men was in it too. Old master Charley Rogers’ boy Charley went along too. Then pretty soon–it seem like about a year–a lot of the Cherokee men come back home and say they not going back to the War with that General Cooper and some of them go off the Federal side because the captain go to the Federal side too.

Somebody come along and tell me my own pappy have to go in the war and I think they say he on the Copper side, and then after while Miss Hannah tell me he git kilt over in Arkansas.

I was so grieved all the time I don’t remember much what went on, but I know pretty soon my Cherokee folks had all the stuff they had et up by the soldiers and they was jest a few wagons and mules left.

All the slaves was piled in together and some of the grown ones walking, and they took us way down across the big river and kept us in the bottoms a long time until the War was over.

We lived in a kind of a camp, but I was too little to know where they got the grub to feed us with. Most all the Negro men was off somewhere in the War.

Then one day they had to bust up the camp and some Federal soldiers go with us and we all start back home. We git to a place where all the houses is burned down and I ask what is that place. Miss Hannah say: ‘Skullyville, child. That’s where they had part of the War.’

All the slaves was set out when we git to Fort Gibson, and the soldiers say we all free now.

They give us grub and clothes to the Negroes at that place. It wasn’t no town but a fort place and a patch of big trees.

Miss Hannah take me to her place and I work there until I was grown. I didn’t git any money that I seen, but I got a good place to stay.

Pretty soon I married Ran Lovely and we lived in a double log house here at Fort Gibson.

Then my second husband was Henry Richardson, but he’s been dead for years, too. We had six children, but they all dead but one.

I didn’t want slavery to be over with, mostly because we had the War I reckon. All that trouble made me the loss of my mammy and pappy, and I was always treated good when I was a slave.

When it was over I had rather be at home like I was.

None of the Cherokees ever whipped us, and my mistress give me some mighty fine rules to live by to git along in the world, too.

The Cherokees didn’t have no jail for Negroes and no jail for themselves either. If a man done a crime he come back to take his punishment without being locked up.

None of the Negroes ran away when I was a child that I know of. We all had plenty to eat. The Negroes didn’t have no school and so I can’t read and write, but they did have a school after the War, I hear. But we had a church made out of a brush arbor and we would sing good songs in Cherokee sometimes.

I always got Sunday off to play, and at night I could go git a piece of sugar or something to eat before I went to bed and Mistress didn’t care.

We played bread-and-butter and the boys played hide the switch. The one found the switch got to whip the one he wanted to.

When I got sick they give me some kind of tea from weeds, and if I et too many roasting ears and swole up they biled gourds and give me the liquor off’n them to make me throw up.

I’ve been a good church-goer all my life until I git too feeble, and I still understand and talk Cherokee language and love to hear songs and parts of the Bible in it because it make me think about the time I was a little girl before my mammy and pappy leave me.

From the book, “Red Over Black:  Black Slavery Among the Cherokee Indians”, by Rudia Halliburton, Jr., Greenwood Press. 1977.

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NED THOMPSOM

Ned Thompsom was interviewed in Henryetta, Oklahoma, by W.P.A. field worker Grace Kelley in August 1937. Source: Oklahoma Historical Society, Indian Pioneer History, Vol. 90

Grandfather was an Alabama slave. His master had a lot of boys who were named Tom, so as Grandfather took care of the cows all the time when he was a boy, they started to calling him “Cow Tom” when they wanted him. Each boy called according to his work to keep them all from answering. That named stayed with Grandfather all his life. When the agreement was made to sell the land in Alabama for land here, he was forced to follow his master, to see if the land was suitable to trade. That trip was made two years prior to immigration.

There were no towns, but they crossed the Arkansas River southwest of Fort Smith on horseback, then went southwest of Fort Smith on horseback, then went southeast of Checotah, due northwest to North Fork, and then south. As they were going northwest, they passed a high hill, and saw some birds flying towards them. He thought there must be water up there, and the birds had been there to drink, but others said it was too high a hill to have water on top of it. They went to see, and found a spring that had been chopped out before 1832. It is thought that some Mexicans had chopped out the spring, as they came through going south, as they explored clear to Fort Sill. Grandfather then returned to Alabama, and sent his wife and children with the immigration, but he stayed and fought in the Florida War. That was similar to the Green Peach War, as it was just between Indians. When the Indians emigrated they brought their Negroes, just as they did their property or stock. They ate and were clothed, just as the Indians saw fit to furnish them. When Grandmother came, her boat sank, and only a few of her people lived. Grandfather was an interpreter in 1832, and up to 1866.

The only Negroes who had to work hard were the ones who belonged to the half-breeds. As the Indian didn’t do work, he didn’t expect this slaves to do much. Two acres was a big farm, and the Indians would have from eight to ten Negroes to attend it, which was plentiful. The Negroes had little log huts with dirt floors, around their owner’s house. Most of the Indians wouldn’t sell their Negroes, so they had a great many, as the Negroes usually had big families. The men who owned slaves were:  Dave Barnett, Ben Marshall, Lee Hawkins, D.N. McIntosh, Watt Grayson, C.W. Stidman, Sooka Colonel, and Yargee.

Everybody got their goods by ox wagon from Fort Smith. So, when some of these large slave owners were without money and needed supplies, two or three of them would take a load of Negroes to Fort Smith, and sell them to buy the supplies they needed. Some of the slave owners took the Negroes to Paris, Texas, to sell.

I was a child and can’t remember all about it, but we were going to Fort Gibson, and the Civil War had just started. We went through a battlefield where there were many dead persons. Some were white, and some were Indians. It was six or seven miles east of High Spring. There was a house close, and there were some who were living in the house; but, the wounded were in there on beds. One of my sisters had bad dreams, and cried all night because of what she had seen. The dead were in the cornrows.

It was on that same trip that we heard that we would pass Honey Spring. We children were anxious to come to it, for we loved honey. When we got there, there was only water in the spring, and we were disappointed.

When the War came to a close, the commission met at Fort Smith, and the Indians had to adopt tne Negroes into the Creek Nation. The Indians first said that since the government had taken the Negroes from the Indians, now the government could take care of them. But finally the Treaty of 1866 was signed.

[Editor’s note: The following section talks about the Green Peach War.]

Samuel Checote was the chief. Isparhechar didn’t like the Creek Constitution, and rebelled against the Indian government, and the Creek tribe was divided. My people and I were on Checote’s side. The people who lived out here by the Rock Store were on Isparhechar’s side.

One scrimmage took place on a flat rock west of Okemah, where seven or eight men were killed, who belonged to both sides. My cousin, Joe Barnett, who was a Light Horsemen captain, and Sam Scott, an Indian, were killed by Isparhechar’s men.

I was shot in the shoulder, on both sides of the neck. We were going west, and forty or fifty of them were coming east. We didn’t see each other until we were real close. At ten o’clock in the morning, Isparhechar’s people had passed the Sac and Fox line, and the Indian agent and the chief of the Sac and Fox stopped us. Then we came back, and the government sent soldiers, Colonel Bates and others, who captured the Isparhechar men and took them to Fort Gibson. After they had signed a peace contract, the soldiers escorted them back to their own homes. Sam Checote didn’t go out, but gave orders trying to subdue them and make them obey the Creek law. Pleasant Porter was the manager at that time; he was chief after statehood.

The old Indians had quite a town [High Spring Council] on the mountain due north of Hichita. My uncle was a blacksmith there. That town was all burned down during the Civil War.

This old trail [Old Trail of 1872] went between Fort Scott, Kansas, and Fort Sill, Indian territory. General Custer and General Grayson passed through on it in 1872. I was a young man then. It crossed the Arkansas River north of the place where Muskogee is, passed through Okmulgee, and between that stump and this porch. There were no towns then, though. To go to that house, go north two miles from the Rock Store, which is two miles north and One east of the Okfuskee and Okmulgee County line. Turn to Highway 75, turn west one mile, south to the second house, turn west about a block or a quarter of a mile. This house is Katy Rentie’s old home. The Government Trail in the Civil War went from Muskogee to Hoffman, crossed at Grayson, came to the Rock Store and went on somewhere close to Spring Hill or Pharoah.

I was a strong young man when they tore the old log house down and rebuilt the new rock Council House [at Okmulgee]. I had a wagon and team, and helped with the hauling. After the log house was torn down, it had to be hauled away. All the lumber was hauled from Muskogee, mostly by ox teams. The rocks were native stone from south of Okmulgee. I remember Bill, George, and Mr. Fryer, and Frank Wilson, Mr. McDermott, who owned the store near Okemah, did the stonework. C.W. Turner was the man at Muskogee who sold the building material.

[Editor’s note:  In the following paragraphs, Thompson dicusses punishments in the Creek Nation at Muskogee.] The price of the article wasn’t considered in those days. It was as bad to steal a lead pencil as a cow or horse. If you stole a pen or a horse, the penalty was fifty lashes for the first offense, a hundred for the second offense, and death if you were caught stealing for the third time. If you stole some stock, and a person saw you driving them away, he came to you and told you where they were, when he saw them, and, if he knew you, he told who was driving them, or described you as well as possible. Everyone helped to keep stealing down. Then you had a trial, and you had to prove that you didn’t steal them, if you were innocent. If you proved that some person had told a falsehood on you, just to get you punished, this person got the punishment that you would have  gotten, so there wasn’t much perjury. One time I followed some stock from sixty miles east of here clear to the Texas border, where I found them, and brought them back.

The Indians not the government, broke the treaties. (Emphasis mine). Now, I haven’t anything against the Indians, but they are always saying that the government broke all their treaties. They never say how they broke them all themselves. The government wouldn’t allow anyone to live in the Indian’s country without the Indian’s consent. He charged $1.00 a month for that consent. Then, the Indians allowed the non-citizens, both black and white, to marry their daughters (no word mentioned on whether black or white females could marry the sons- my emphasis).—and to raise half-breed children. The Indian had no control over these non-citizens.

If they committed a crime, the government had the expense of finding, convicting, and punishing them. When the country was getting full, they asked the government’s protection. It was too expensive for the state of Arkansas. It was just bleeding that state to death; and, when the legislature tried to find where all the money was going, it was to the Indian Territory. When they tried to tax the Indians to pay these expenses, they found that it couldn’t be done. Each of the Five Civilized Nations sent men to meet with the Committee of Interior, Charles Curtis and Henry Dawes were two of the men, but they met the committee separately. They found that the Indians had broken every treaty, including the one about fighting each other.

In the treaty which the Indians are always quoting, about the land being theirs as long as the grass grows and the water flows east, there is a clause that says that no state nor dominion shall have the right to control nor govern the land of the Indians. It didn’t say one thing about the Congress having the right to change or make laws governing the land. So in 1896, the law was passed to divide the land among the Indians. To do this, there had to be a roll of each and every Indian. I helped make the roll of the Creeks when I was about forty-eight years old. At the meeting at Eufaula, to sectionize the country, Willie Sapulpa asked, “Does you mean to give land to the Negro?” They said “Yes, you took them into your tribe as one of the Creek Nation in the Treaty of 1866.” Willie Sapulpa said, “I not do it.” General Porter made a speech, and said that there wasn’t anything else they could do. That, as they had broken every treaty, they had not one leg to stand on. So the Negro got his land, not because he had Indian blood in him, but because after the Civil War he had been adopted into the Nation. (See here, my emphasis.)

The government schools were to teach the Indian the ways of the white man. They were supposed to use English in talking, as well as in reading and writing. When the government found that the money was being wasted, as the Creek language was being used in the schools, they stopped them. Principals of the schools were:  William Robertson, Wetumka Mission; Luke McIntosh, Eufaula; Willie Sapulpa, Sapulpa; and Johnson Tiger, Okmulgee Mission.

There were some bears in the mountains. They were between a red color and brown. There were Mexican cougars, too. In the bottoms, the forest was so that thick you couldn’t see, and twelve o’clock noon was as dark as midnight. The grass was so high at this time of year, you had to keep the stock “belled” that you would want to use, for you couldn’t see it. The grass was as high as this gelding, and a man riding on a horse would get wet with dew to his waist. Acorns would be three inches deep in the forests, and that was what the hogs lived on. Big fish were plentiful.

(From “Black Indian Slave Narratives”, by Patrick Minges, John F. Blair, Publisher, 2004, pgs. 135-141.)

RELATED LINKS:

Bibliography

MANUSCRIPTS

CHEROKEE COLLECTION, NORTHEASTERN OKLAHOMA STATE UNIVERSITY

Cherokee Documents, Vol. 27, “Missions 1849-1873”

John Ross Letters

Miscellaneous Letters

Miscellaneous Letters and Manuscripts Relating to Cherokee History

Andrew Nave Letters

Business Accounts

Business Letters and Accounts

Civil War

Social Correspondence

GEORGIA STATE DEPARTMENT OF ARCHIVES

Cherokee Letters

GILCREASE INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN HISTORY AND ART, TULSA,
OKLAHOMA

Cherokee Documents

Diary of Hannah Hicks

Foreman Papers

Hicks Papers

Hitchcock Papers

John Drew. Papers

John Ross Papers

Worcester-Robertson Papers

HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY

American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions Archives

NATIONAL ARCHIVES, WASHINGTON, D.C.

Arbuckle to Fulton, June 26, 1839, Record Group 393, Records of the United States Continental Commands, 1821- 1920, 2d Military Department, Letters Sent, November 1834-June 1841.

Smith to Dearborn, 1805, Record Group 393, Records of the United States Army Continental Commands, 1821- 1920, Secretary of War Files, Indian Division, No. 484, 1805.

OKLAHOMA HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Ex-Slaves File

Foreman Collection

Foreman Papers

John Drew Papers

TENNESSEE STATE LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES

Cherokee Collection

UNIVERSITY OF TULSA LIBRARY

Alice Robertson Collection

WESTERN HISTORY COLLECTIONS, UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA LIBRARY

Cherokee Nation Collection

Documents Relating to the Five Civilized Tribes

John Ross Manuscripts and Papers

CHEROKEE NATIONAL DOCUMENTS

Constitution and Laws of the Cherokee Nation. St. Louis, 1875.

Constitution of the Knights of the Golden Circle.

Eastern Cherokee Census of 1835.

Laws of the Cherokee Nation: Adopted by the Council at Various Periods. Tahlequah, 1852.

SOURCE: “Red Over Black”, pgs. 195-196.

Born in slavery: Slave narratives from the Federal Writer’s project, 1936-1938
Historical collections for the National Digital Library, Library of the Congress. Includes narratives of slaves that lived with the 5 Civilized Indian Tribes

The Freedmen: Sample Documents:  http://www.oursharedroots.com/freedmen/sampdocs/sampg.html

RELATED REFERENCES:

1.

The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography: Part One (Set) (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies) by George P. Rawick (Hardcover – Oct 20, 1972)

[This was originally a 17-volume set, which has since been expanded to a 41-volume effort, that includes Set 2.]

2.

The American Slave: A Composite Autobiography, Supplement, Series 2: Set Vol. (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies) by George P. Rawick (Hardcover – Jan 2, 1980)

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The Cherokee Nation will have to one day accept and acknowledge the humanity of the Black Cherokee Freedmen/Women.

The strength of a nation depends on how it treats the least considered of its people, and the CN has shown that racism knows no bounds. The weakness of a nation is one that callously disregards the humanity of an entire portion of its population all for the sake of racist beliefs.

The following are Cherokee Nation citizens.

Their diversity shows that color should not preclude their acceptance and acknowledgement as citizens of the Cherokee Nation.

The Cherokee tribal council rejects Marilyn Vann even though she has ancestors who walked the Trail of Tears.

The Cherokee tribal council rejects Freedmen Leslie Ross even though he is the great-great-great-grandson of a chief.

Anissia Vo has spent four years trying to make good on her grandfather�s dying wish: that his family be recognized as Creek.

Ron Graham has government documents showing his great-great-grandmother was a full-blooded Creek.

FROM THE ARCHIVES: GRADATIONS OF COERCION: THE PLIGHT OF WOMEN OF COLOR AND THEIR INFORMED CONSENT IN THE STERILIZATION DEBATE

 

MONDANA NIKOUKARI

     

I. INTRODUCTION

 

 

 

 

 

 

     

   

 

“Se me acabó la canción,” literally, “my song is finished” is a phrase used by some Mexican women after sterilization. 

 

 

 

 

 

This phrase embodies the predicament women of color find themselves in when faced with the question of sterilization in the United States. The connotations of this single expression are very telling of the social, political, religious and economic forces that affect not only women’s views about procreation but also the way in which reproductive decisions are intimately linked with their social identity. In our age of hyper-technology and development, our aroused sense of social justice and political correctness tend to lead us to overlook the intricacies of human reproduction in the name of efficiency, control over economic markets and a “forge ahead, ask questions later” mentality. Mainstream society also reflects a positivist view that as a world power, the United States’ domestic and international policies achieve more “good” than harm in the name of progress. This selfassurance is very prevalent on the home-front, especially relating to issues of population control and genetic research. Suspicion and cynicism about issues popularized by the eugenics movement of the early 20th century seem like an aberration. Today, mainstream society’s antipathy for such “antiquated” ideas is prominent. Most people would agree that coerced sterilization is a dark page in our history, and that there is no room for such insidious policies in a democratic union.  

Nonetheless, the reality is that the debate over population control and reproductive rights continues to flourish in many arenas of social policy especially in the context of public welfare and reform. For example, as this paper later suggests long term forms of birth control have been marketed to low-income families as a way to keep procreation in check, which deprives women the flexibility and integrity to determine their own reproductive priorities.

This above example suggests that, although “coerced sterilization” in its grossly offensive conventional form may have seen its day, a much more insidious pattern of social engineering has come to replace it. I will refer to this model as de facto sterilization. The key in defining de facto sterilization is to investigate the gradations between coerced and voluntary sterilization and to reach an understanding of the ways in which this line is shifted within a continuum.

 

This paper further argues that the reproductive fate of poor women of color has been tied all

too closely with this movement, and has not only created, but bolstered racial stereotypes that legitimize de facto sterilization.

 

 

The main area of analysis will focus on how and why de facto forms of sterilization have developed and become ingrained in the fabric of society. This will be accomplished by exploring the various social,\ political and economic forces that have propelled family planning policies to favor sterilization and how these policies have targetedwomen of color.

 

 

 

 

In addition, this paper will seek to understand how women of color perceive their reproductive and healthcare rights and choices and how they have responded to notions of de facto sterilization. This analysis will present a historiography of the eugenics movement in the United States as a backdrop for how theories of sterilization and population control evolved in the later decades of this millennium. This discussion will focus on the eugenics movement’s intention to sterilize “fringe” groups including the mentally ill,

physically disabled, the poor and those convicted of crimes. This history will set a framework for how people of color have been traditionally included in this latter group based on the “impurity of their race” and thus have suffered scientific racism.

This history will also survey the early legislation on sterilization and government population control priorities. This section will discuss recent legislative and governmental responses to sterilization as a way to enhance an understanding of the roots of eugenic thinking and aid in bridging the discussion to how sterilization policies and guidelines are addressed by state and federal law today.

 

 

 

 

 

Since this is an expansive area including such topics as contraception, family planning and population control, the analysis will specifically focus on the treatment of low-income women of color in the sterilization and family planning debate. This discussion will describe

 

the various forms of de facto sterilization and the contexts in which they occur. Since the controversy around sterilization has traditionallyfocused on issues of medical consent, this paper will explore the notion of informed consent and the various legal cases that have developed specifically around the sterilization of women. A discussion of the attitudes and reasoning of the courts in deciding these cases will also be a telling documentation of the legal treatment of this subject matter.

    

THE IMPACT OF THE EARLY EUGENICS MOVEMENT

 

 

 According to social historians, early eugenic thinking in the United States was imported directly from Europe to help explain, justify and solve the social problems that were becoming prevalent in the nation’s cities. Literally, the term eugenics means “wellborn.”This flawed “pseudo-science” understood that social problems in America’s society were due to “the misbehavior of degenerate persons, individuals whose biological origins predisposed or even predestined them to lives of crime, poverty, and prostitution.”    

 

 

Sir Francis Galton, an English scientist, popularized this idea through his notion of selective breeding of plants and animals which he later adapted to deal with the improvement of human “stock.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 This mindset came about during an era where concepts of mental illness and disability were far from understood and justifications for racial inequality were being developed.

Another impetus was the effort to find ways to reduce the financial burden of public spending as the country experienced a general increase in the birth rate and an influx of immigrants.     

Early social scientists struggled to make a name for themselves by developing theories to explain such phenomena and influence social reform. Judging by the immense number of elaborate studies rendered on race and the connection between genetic heredity and intellect it is not surprising that by the 1920’s a large influential body of research had developed indicating the variability of intellect in humans based on color

and the heritability of deviance.

 

This racist research made it easier to label certain segments of society as inferior and to invoke sterilization programs to deal with them. The general presumption was that if certain  The general presumption was that if certain cross sections of society were prohibited from procreating, crime, alcoholism, prostitution and feeble-mindedness would come to a halt, reducing a large part of the domestic economic burden. The mood of the times expressed a view that increasing propagation would not only endanger people’s standard of living but also put a heavy burden on the welfare system. The early eugenic movement relied on grass rootsnapproaches in educating the masses by getting their attention through engaging formats. One such method was to use city vagrants to walk around crowded areas in the city wearing placards that expressed the ideals of its authors. The cards read:

 

 

“I am a burden to myself and the state. Should I be allowed to propagate? I have n opportunity to educate or feed my children. They may become criminals. Would the prisons

and asylums be filled if my kind had no children? I cannot read this sign.

 

By what right have I children?”

 

 

Read the rest of the article here:

 

SITE LINK:   http://www.law.uconn.edu/journals/cpilj/contents/archives/vol1/nikoukari.pdf

 

 Chief Justice Holmes renders his decision in Buck vs. Bell:   http://www.houseofrussell.com/legalhistory/alh/docs/buckvbell.html

 

 “None Without Hope:  Buck vs. Bell At 75”:  http://karmak.org/archive/2004/06/buckvbell.html

Relf vs. Weinberger:  http://www.altlaw.org/v1/cases/418867

“Relf vs. Weinberger: Sterilization Abuse:  http://www.splcenter.org/legal/docket/files.jsp?cdrID=59&sortID=4

“And Then There were None”:  http://www.religion-online.org/showarticle.asp?title=1133

Madrigal vs. Quilligan: Acknowledging the Real Heroes in Reproductive Rights Case:  http://www.first5la.org/articles/evies-desk-acknowledging-the-real-heroes-in-reproductive-rights-case 

 

 

 

 

  

 

 

 

 

 

HAPPY BIRTHDAY, SENATOR BARACK OBAMA!