Mankiller, page 18
Change came in 1893. Congress established a government panel to investigate the reorganization of Indian Territory and the absorption of the Five Tribes into the United States. President Cleveland, back for a second term after Benjamin Harrison had served his four years, named Henry Dawes, recently retired from the Senate, to head a group of bureaucrats. They became known as the Dawes Commission, and their influence and shameful legacy continue to echo through the twentieth century. Members of the commission spent several years in Indian Territory, negotiating with the leaders of the Five Tribes to convince them to accept allotments and terminate our tribal governments.
To understand the significance of the Dawes Commission, one must first understand associated events. In 1893, the same congressional act that provided for the Dawes Commission ratified the sale of the 6.5 million acres which made up the Cherokee Outlet, a band of rich grasslands just below the Kansas line. Popularly known as the Cherokee Strip, the outlet had been ceded to the United States by the Cherokees at the close of the Civil War to be used as a home for other Native Americans. However, now that the federal government had purchased the outlet, it was to be opened to white settlers for homesteading.
Until 1883, when the Cherokee Strip Live Stock Association was chartered under Kansas law, our tribal government had collected grazing fees from individual cattlemen. The association’s contract with our tribe, worked out in 1883, called for a yearly usage fee of $100,000. That lease expired in 1888, and later that year, a new five-year lease was worked out with the association, doubling the fee. But then the federal government stepped in and, yielding to pressure to open the outlet to settlers, declared the lease null and void. The cattlemen were ordered to remove their stock and find rangeland elsewhere.
The Cherokee people finally settled for the government’s offer of only $1.29 per acre, although in 1961, after many years of tedious litigation, we were awarded an additional $14.7 million for our outlet property. The money was too little and came too late. Nothing could atone for the theft. In 1893, Congress quickly approved the original sale agreement, and it was approved by our National Council. All that was needed was for the signal for the land opening to be given.
That came on September 16, 1893. The opening of the Cherokee Outlet was the largest land run in American history. More than one hundred thousand land-crazed settlers raced for the forty thousand claims waiting to be staked.
Tired of the Five Tribes’ resistance to allotment, Congress empowered the Dawes Commission to assign allotments to our people without approval from tribal leaders. In 1898, Congress delivered the final blow to the tribally held Cherokee Nation through passage of the Curtis Act. Drafted by Charles Curtis—a conservative Kansas congressman of Kaw descent who later became vice-president under Herbert Hoover—this legislation effectively ended tribal rule. The Curtis Act not only abolished tribal laws and courts, but made native people subject to federal courts. It also provided for the survey of townsites; the extension of voting rights to hundreds of thousands of nonnative people, although denying native people the right to vote; and the establishment of free public schools for the white children in Indian Territory.
Still, the great Cherokee Nation refused to cooperate. Many Cherokees, including some members of the Keetoowah Society, remained opposed to allotments and the organization of Indian Territory into a federal state. But after two agreements failed, a third was approved by the Cherokees on August 7, 1902, during a special election. Senator Dawes’s allotment scheme was at last going to be imposed on the Cherokees and on the others of the Five Tribes. Under this agreement, all members of the Cherokee Nation were duly enrolled by the Dawes Commission. They were given allotments of 110 acres each of average land from the tribal domain.
The last chief of the Cherokees before statehood, William Charles Rogers, was elected in 1903. Under provisions of the agreement made between the United States and the Cherokee Nation at Muskogee in 1902, that was to be the last election held in the Cherokee Nation. Rogers, however, was retained as principal chief of the Cherokees until his death in 1917. The federal government allowed this so that Rogers, as the properly authorized representative of the Cherokee Nation, could sign the deeds transferring the title of community lands to individual allottees.
In the fleeting years before statehood, some citizens of the Five Tribes tried to form an independent state, to be named Sequoyah for the Cherokee who had developed our syllabary. In 1905, a convention was held to consider a constitution for the Indian “State of Sequoyah,” but the document was rejected when the delegates sent it to Congress.
Instead, in 1906, Congress passed the Oklahoma Enabling Act, permitting the people of Oklahoma Territory and Indian Territory to come together for the purpose of drafting a constitution. A constitutional convention was convened in Guthrie, the capital of Oklahoma Territory. Members of the convention drew up a reform constitution, containing many ideas that were intended to “return democracy to the people,” although few native people were involved with the convention. The document was sent to Washington for congressional approval.
Finally, on November 16, 1907, President Theodore Roosevelt issued a proclamation declaring Oklahoma the forty-sixth state of the Union. Officials in Washington telegraphed the news to Guthrie. Throughout the new state, there was much celebration—fancy parties, down-home barbecues, whiskey toasts, and prayer services.
But not everyone was caught up in the revelry. I feel sure that Cherokee families gathered in countless rural homes to talk about the illegitimate birth of Oklahoma. Perhaps they discussed the federal government’s long-forgotten promise that in exchange for the loss of our ancestral homeland, we would be left alone in Indian Territory. Statehood day was a sad day for the Cherokee Nation. Some people even erroneously assumed that the Cherokee Nation had ceased to exist.
PART III
BALANCE
CHAPTER 9
REVOLUTION
Once while all the warriors of a certain Cherokee town were off on a hunt or attending a dance in another settlement, an old man who had been left behind was chopping wood on the side of a ridge.
Suddenly a party of enemy warriors from some other tribe came upon him. The old man threw his hatchet at the nearest one, and then he turned and ran for the house to get his gun and defend the village as best as he could. When he came out of the house with the gun, he was surprised to find a large body of strange warriors driving back the enemy. There was no time for questions, and taking his place with the others, the old man fought hard until the enemy was pressed back up the creek. Finally, they broke and retreated across the mountain.
When it was all over and there was time to breathe again, the old man turned to thank his new friends, but found that he was all alone. They had disappeared as though the mountain had swallowed them. Then he knew that they were the Nuñnehi, the Immortals, who had come to help their friends the Cherokees.
* * *
June 1963. It was less than fifty-six years since Oklahoma had become a state, and precisely ninety-eight years since Cherokee General Stand Watie had surrendered his Confederate force.
June 1963. It had been 120 years since Chief John Ross had summoned a Native United Nations Treaty Conference. Four thousand people representing several Indian nations had responded to his invitation and camped at Tahlequah for a month of deliberations about United States–Native American relations and other issues.
June 1963. Like so many other months throughout the sixties, the weeks were filled with transition and change. During those thirty days, a Buddhist monk set himself ablaze to protest South Vietnamese government persecution, nearly two years before the United States committed itself in a major war in Vietnam. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., was working on his “I Have a Dream” speech for the upcoming march on Washington in August.
In the United States, June 1963 was a month of civil disorder and violence. Defiant Governor George Wallace temporarily halted his fight to stop two black students from enrolling at the University of Alabama when President John Kennedy dispatched National Guardsmen to the Birmingham campus. Only a few days later, in Jackson, Mississippi, a sniper killed black civil-rights leader Medgar Evers in front of his home, sparking riots throughout the South. The voices of Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin—all active in the civil-rights movement—cried out for freedom.
During that month, the U.S. Supreme Court banned the reading of the Lord’s Prayer and the Bible in public schools; a young American boxer still using the name Cassius Clay won a big fight in London; and a crowd of enthusiastic West Berliners turned out to hear JFK tell them, “Ich bin ein Berliner.”
June 1963. In San Francisco, I was fully aware of many of the truly momentous world and national events that were transpiring, but I also had other things on my mind. Mainly, I was just happy that at long last, June of 1963 had finally arrived. For me, there was one event that month that outweighed all the others—my high school days were over. That meant no more associating with people I did not like, people who did not like me.
I was ready to get going and take my place in the world. I moved in with my sister Frances. That gave me some measure of independence. I was, at least, kind of living on my own. I had a great deal of personal freedom. I went right out and got a real day job. There were never any plans for me to go to college. That thought never even entered my head. People in my family did not go to college. They went to work. And certainly none of the other people around me—friends and neighbors and kids I knew from the Indian Center—went on to college.
So I took a job with a finance company. I did clerical chores, telephone work. It was very basic—a nine-to-five routine job. I was only seventeen years old and did not have a care in the world. Seventeen is a romantic age. Childhood may be over, but full adulthood has not yet arrived. It is a limbo time.
All I knew was that I was seventeen, and at long last, I felt as if I was making my way in the world. I was actually earning some money, maybe not much, but certainly more than I had had before. I was poor, but I felt good. Besides, I was starting to fall in love, or at least I thought I might be in love.
His full name was Hector Hugo Olaya de Bardi. I called him by his middle name. He was always just Hugo. Hugo Olaya.
Hugo was a native of Ecuador, and he was four years older than I was. Carmen Roybal, one of our neighbors years before in the Potrero Hill District, was the one who introduced us. Carmen took me to a Latino dance in the city. It was springtime. In came Hugo with a dashing soccer wound on his head. His team had just won a big victory, and so there was much ado. That is how I met him.
I liked him immediately, but it was not love at first sight. He was charming and handsome. He was the classic Latin in every respect—very dark, very macho, with a definite touch of class. He was sophisticated, and he handled himself very well. But to say that I loved him from the start would not be true.
Hugo’s father was a physician who had come to the United States to start a new life. He left his wife and children behind in Ecuador. He had a daughter and three sons, counting Hugo, who was the oldest. His father said he would send for them later, after he was established in this country. That never happened. He settled here, but he never sent for his family. As far as I could ever determine, he never applied for a medical license either. Truthfully, I never knew exactly what Hugo’s father did. I thought of him as sort of a playboy type. Although he deserted Hugo’s mother, he still visited his children and kept up with them.
Hugo’s mother was from an old-time Italian family that had settled in Ecuador. They were very “old money”—a refined, aristocratic family. That was how Hugo was raised, in that kind of upper-class atmosphere. The family owned several businesses—a construction firm, a pharmacy, a shirt shop, and other enterprises. There are many Indians living in Ecuador, but there definitely was not a drop of Indian blood flowing in Hugo’s veins. That was quite clear.
Hugo was a schoolboy when he left his family’s home in the large Pacific coast city of Guayaquil, and moved to the United States to pursue his academic studies. He had other relatives besides his father living in this country, including some in the Bay area. When I met Hugo, he was attending San Francisco State College, studying business and accounting. I found him to be quite bright, but again, I was not swept off my feet. He was interesting and pleasant—the basic nice guy.
In a way, Hugo reminded me of my old boyfriend, Ray Billy, the last person I had really been interested in—the fellow who had left me for a beauty queen. Like Ray, Hugo also was someone who had been around. He was worldly and, to a real ghetto kid like me, that was very impressive. I was a teenager, dating an exotic South American who was going to college and driving his own car. He was dashing and different and good-looking.
Hugo took me to a variety of places, where we did and saw things that were all brand-new to me. After I spent the day working at the finance company, it was so much fun to go out to a restaurant or club with Hugo. He introduced me to different types of music and cultures. It was a whirlwind summer, and through it all we maintained what I can best describe as a kind of partying relationship. You might call it one continuous spree. And what better city to be in for this than San Francisco? There was so much in the Bay area I had never been able to experience before meeting Hugo. Now, with Hugo as my guide, all of that had changed.
It was pure fun—very pure. I never allowed our physical relationship to go too far. That was very important to me. We dated quite a lot during the summer of 1963. All the while, Hugo constantly pressed me for some kind of commitment. He told me he wanted to marry me. I kept putting him off, but finally, I decided I would take him up on his offer. It was a rather sudden decision. It happened one night in October. As usual, we were out on the town. At the time, I was having some sort of problem—I cannot even recall exactly what it was—and I thought that perhaps if I married Hugo, all my problems would disappear. I accepted his proposal.
I went to my parents to tell them what Hugo and I were going to do. I wanted to get their permission. I was still only seventeen, a month from my eighteenth birthday. My father was not too pleased about the prospects of my marriage. He was never overly fond of Hugo. Dad had liked Ray Billy, and wished that he were the one I was going to marry. My mother liked Hugo a little bit more than my father did. She thought Hugo was OK. Neither of my parents said very much about my young age. After all, my mother had been only fifteen years old when she went against her family’s wishes and ran off to marry my father. Hugo’s family did not object to our plans to marry.
When we went to get our wedding rings, I realized I did not even know for sure what Hugo’s last name was. He had such a long name, and it was all in Spanish. I thought maybe it was Bardi. So there I was with the man I was about to marry, picking out wedding bands and having to ask him to explain his name.
Hugo’s father bought the rings for us, and we took off. We went to Reno to get married. That was my very first airplane experience. We were all by ourselves. No one from our families attended, not my parents, not any of my brothers or sisters. It was just Hugo and I. I wore a dressy cream-colored suit. We went to one of those wedding chapels that Nevada is so famous for, with a justice of the peace. We were wed on November 13, 1963. It was a Wednesday afternoon. I became Wilma Olaya. I was five days shy of turning eighteen.
As soon as the brief ceremony was over, we got on an airplane and returned to the Bay area. From there, we left on our honeymoon. Hugo’s father had presented us with one thousand dollars to be used for a wedding trip. We decided to go to Chicago. We took the bus. All the time we traveled across country, I started to really consider what I had just “gone and done.” I had behaved impulsively on many occasions in the past, but my sudden marriage to Hugo had to top the list. All I could do was plunge ahead and make the best of it.
That was my first visit to Chicago, so it was exciting when we drove into the city. We were still in Chicago on Friday, November 22, when the startling news flashed around the world that President Kennedy had been shot and killed that afternoon in Dallas. One of the most tragic events in American history occurred during my honeymoon. In a way, I was experiencing my own loss of innocence and, on a much larger scale, so was the rest of the nation.
This electrifying young man of compassionate vision and open mind, who inspired my generation and understood the human potential, was snatched away from us in an instant of madness. The promise of John Kennedy’s presidency had seemed to me almost unlimited. The Dillon Myer era of Indian policy was vanishing. It was a very hopeful time. Kennedy’s death marked a very personal disillusionment for me. I remember that church bells tolled throughout the city and across the countryside. Like everyone else, we sat transfixed before the television, watching in disbelief the horrifying and sad occurrences of those bleak November days. It was a somber time. It was a time to cry. It was a time to remember.
When we forget great contributors to our American history—when we neglect the heroic pasts of the American Indian—we thereby weaken our own heritage. We need to remember the contributions our forefathers found here and from which they borrowed liberally.
John F. Kennedy, 1961
America wept tonight, not alone for its dead young President, but for itself.… Somehow the worst prevailed over the best.… Some strain of madness and violence had destroyed the highest symbol of law and order.
James Reston, 1963
When we returned to San Francisco, I was still very bewildered by what had taken place in Dallas. The senseless death of John Kennedy would haunt me for a long time. It would stay with many of us.
