by Low, Denise;
Now we sip coffee as Obermeyer, the visiting cultural director of the Oklahoma Delawares, continues with the day’s program. He researches both written records and spoken stories. As a community anthropologist, he understands how crisp paper with official seals can seem definitive yet create false authorities. Oral tradition can be unreliable factually, especially when the original Delaware displacements occurred centuries ago, or they can support archaeological information. History is an imperfect construction, but it is essential to community identity.
1. Great-Grandfather Frank Bruner Senior with fish. Author’s collection.
2. Delaware migrations. Mid-Atlantic: Precontact to 1737(?); Bowler, Wisconsin: 1822, Mohican Nation, Stockbridge-Munsee Band; Anadarko, Oklahoma: 1859, Delaware Nation; Bartlesville, Oklahoma: 1868, Delaware Tribe of Indians. Map created by the author.
First, the lecturer describes how the Algonquian language unites the Delaware bands with other groups such as the Powhatans of Virginia, Crees of Canada, and Ojibwa bands of northern states. Delawares were great traders and traveled on waterways and land trails. Today’s highways in their homeland often follow original Indigenous routes.
Obermeyer next presents what historians know about Delawares on the East Coast at the time of the Dutch. He explains how the earliest Delawares never had a central location because they dispersed among waterways in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania. As he speaks, I think of my great-grandparents’ small house a few miles east of our meeting. A picture remains of my great-grandfather holding a bass from Jersey Creek. Rivers change names, sometimes only slightly, but always a river is nearby.
Next Obermeyer explains the liabilities of the independent but scattered organization of the Delawares. They never fit into European colonists’ patterns of governance. The Walking Purchase, a treaty of 1737, excluded dozens of Delaware groups. The Delaware tribe came into existence only in the late eighteenth century in Ohio, under pressure from the United States Department of War. The United States forced creation of a governing body that resembled European models for negotiations. These treaties were primarily real estate transactions enacted by a few people. All the branches of Delawares cannot be reduced to a single group, under one leader, so these treaties disenfranchised Delaware communities.
The speaker’s slide changes to a migration map. Arrows flow from New Jersey westward through Ohio, where my grandfather’s maternal relatives lived for a century, from the 1780s to the 1870s. Obermeyer says, “Everywhere Delawares lived during their removals, some stayed behind, like in Kansas City.” His articulation of this unwieldy history helps me feel more confident about my own research. The arrow continues into Indiana, then splits: one fork goes north, and the other turns south to Missouri, Kansas, and at last Oklahoma.
Obermeyer’s final map shows Kansas City watersheds with superimposed Delaware, Shawnee, and Wyandot reservations. “Do not be misled by these distinct boundaries,” he says. “These were refugee camps for many remnant groups: Peorias, Miamis, and Christian Chippewas—a band allied with Munsee Delawares. Some Delawares on the rolls were European-descended spouses. African Americans were community members as well.” We look around the room and see diversity. Kansas Delawares resemble my family, hues of the human rainbow.
Next he describes religious diversity, from adherents of the Delaware traditional religion to Methodists. On the early 1860s map families cluster in like-minded communities, with some exceptions. I wait, but that is the last map, and the Kansas story seems to have stopped midstream. Obermeyer explains that very little documentation remains for the Kansas Delaware community. “My next project,” he says, “is to trace exact locations of Delaware homesteads in this area from removal into the twentieth century and see if religion, history, or other connections exist.”
He moves to a discussion of the Civil War era. “Most factions, whether they practiced Indigenous traditions or Christian, united to oppose slavery,” says Obermeyer. He explains how Delaware men fought for the Union, as Indian Home Guard troops. The end of the Civil War, however, did not bring rewards. Instead, their neighbors envied their lands and seized them. Obermeyer does not need to detail how the beleaguered Delawares agreed to sell Kansas tracts and move to Oklahoma. This group understands that story all too well.
During the break several people ask about my family’s experience in New Jersey and Ohio. When did my family come west? Who are my relatives?
“New Jersey family names include Bruner and Beaver, and Ohio names are Bear, Root, Weaver, Mowrer, and Wolf,” I say, “with some Munsee Delaware connections.” Several people nod. Wolf is a common Munsee name. Weaver is among the surnames of the Lenape group’s official rolls. I continue: “The Bears lived near the Cuyahoga War Trail in Ohio, now Highway 30, and later they changed the spelling to Bair because of German census takers. By then Wayne County was a mix of Chippewa, Mohican, and Delaware groups.” I realize, after Obermeyer’s talk, how this mingling of tribal communities, refugee camps really, was also common in Ohio. I resume my family history: “A Delaware encampment remained on the Bair land until the Civil War. A family cemetery with fieldstones for markers is still there.”
A listener says: “So, your people must have come west just after the Kansas lands were sold. Somehow they found Delawares in Kansas City. They must have stayed in touch.”
“Yes, no letters remain, so probably they learned by word of mouth,” I answer. “The family first lived in central Kansas, where they homesteaded, with some other Native families, and then Kansas City when that region became dangerous.”
We are interrupted as children enter the room. They have learned how to count in the Lenape dialect of Delaware and are ready to recite for us. As they say numbers, I remember we called my grandmother by an Algonquian term but with an English ending, Kok-ie. That was the last word that survived in our family, “little grandmother.”
Over coffee refills I ask Chief Zeigler, a mother of teenagers, if she knows anything about my Bruner grandparents. “They found refuge in Kansas City,” I say.
“Bruner? No,” she says slowly. “Bruner is not a name in the tribal archives.”
“Probably not,” I agree. “They were here after the government made the rolls.”
I ask another member who lives in Wichita if his family might remember the Bruners or Bairs but no luck. I am a generation older than most of the people in the room. Their great-grandparents may have known my grandfather as a neighbor, but that was long ago. A new discovery, however, is that Kansas City Delawares are, like me, unraveling history as they live it. Their program includes the capable scholar Obermeyer. I put the date of their next meeting on my calendar.
As a newcomer to this gathering, I hesitate to bring up more personal topics, such as the aftermath of trauma replaying through generations. I mourn the recent loss of a niece to addiction, and I suspect my family is not the only one experiencing tragedies.
As the meeting draws to a close, I appreciate how Kansas Delawares continue tribal organization, even without official recognition. Their history is certain, and absence from a government list does not alter it. Individually and as a group, they value their identity. Each, like separate clouds, floats the same direction, and I travel my own trail among them, on a parallel course. It has taken years for me to understand this destiny, culled from memories of my grandfather’s life, my mother’s, and those of other relatives. Years ago I began my quest in a Haskell classroom, and I continue to learn more each day.
*
I knock on the door of a condominium in Laguna Niguel, California, and my oldest sister, Mary, answers. It is 1991. Underfoot are two dogs with furiously wagging tails, not very wolflike at all. They step aside and let me enter.
Mary is in her midfifties and a matriarch with three grown children. I make a fourth—she is my second mother. When I was born, Mary was thirteen and took charge of me. I adored her. Despite our early ties, though, she has become almost a stranger. She left home when I was ten, one of t
he great tragedies of my early life. We have, nonetheless, a deep attachment. We talk intimately on the telephone almost every week. Now business brings me to Southern California—I will be in residence at Occidental College, guest of Yuki poet William Oandasan. I have not seen Mary in ten years, so this is a chance to reconnect.
3. Mary Frances (Dotson) Marchetti, granddaughter of Frank Bruner Junior. Family photograph taken in Hawaii, 1970s. Author’s collection.
My sister leads me through the living room and straight toward the kitchen. As I follow, I notice her dark hair has only a few streaks of gray. She wears it long and straight, with bangs. She is under five feet tall but large in presence. We do not embrace—that was not in our family repertoire of gestures—but we feel immediate rapport. She seats me at her table, pours two glasses of good red wine, and we talk. For two days straight we leave that table only to sleep.
We converse about parents, divorces (two each), children, siblings, and grandparents. Talk turns to Grandfather Bruner.
“Pop being an Indian made him quite inferior in the pecking order.” Our family name for Grandfather is Pop. Mary is describing our mother’s uneasy footing with her wealthy father-in-law, who did not accept his daughter-in-law or her parents. To Mary the reason is obvious.
“He was Indian?” I ask.
“I always assumed he was.”
This resonates a long moment, like the stories of the Wyandot student. “No one told me, exactly,” I say. I am in my forties, and finally the family origins are clear. To hear her definitive assertion is the first time this comes into focus.
“Our mother tried to advance herself. Indians had trouble getting good jobs and were poor. Marriage into a wealthy family was a way out of poverty.”
I remember our mother’s obsessive drive to get an education and her pride in her job as a medical stenographer. She insisted that all of us children, especially the girls, train to make a living. Never did she tell me to look for a wealthy husband and learn how to cook. She was a tiger mother before the term was invented.
“What do we know about Pop’s Indian family?” I ask. “What tribe?”
“No one knows anything more. He looked Indian; he was Indian.” She makes a face. “He was so slow when he talked. I don’t think he was very smart.”
I am shocked but say nothing. All members of our family have good intelligence, including all my Bruner cousins. I cannot imagine Pop was not a bright man. I played gin rummy with him, and I knew he was a keen strategizer.
“He and Grandmother Cokie were very nice,” my sister adds, seeing the look on my face. “Slow. He was slow.”
Out of respect I do not challenge my older sister’s harsh evaluation.
Now I understand Mary’s dismissal of her Indian grandfather in several ways. Some stereotyped thinking was part of the family culture, especially on my father’s side. This would not be the first time I heard family members speak negatively about their bloodlines. I also wonder if Mary avoided her own painful past by minimizing her ties. She had felt like a prisoner in our parents’ house—indeed, she was household labor and worked endlessly at cleaning, cooking, and child care. The Kansas of her childhood was a place of drudgery. The Southern California of the 1960s, when she arrived with a teaching degree, teemed with glitzy movie stars. She knew some of them. Ozzie and Harriet’s grandchildren played with her children on the beach. John Wayne shopped at her grocery store. When I was a teenager, I visited and had seen these figures, and I was impressed. Another reason she considered Grandfather “slow” might be the prairielands dialect. My sister corrected my slow-paced accent, my first awareness of my regional difference as a liability. Also, some Native conversational patterns have a slower speaking pace, with pauses for listeners to create visualizations. When speaking more slowly, storytellers can modulate tones for emphasis. Diné (Navajo) poet Luci Tapahonso describes this in her book Blue Horses Rush In. The different rhetorical style can seem tedious to impatient outsiders. Now, years later, as I reflect on Mary’s dismissal of our grandfather, these possibilities seem plausible.
During a pause in our conversation, Mary lets the dogs outside to break up the uneasy mood. They clatter to the patio door and lunge through it. When she returns to the table, she shifts to brighter conversation, deftly avoiding conflict. The look on my face is enough to signal disagreement.
“Grandmother Cokie was so much fun. She was full of energy.” Mary describes more about this Irish German grandmother who drove a car and made expeditions to see Wichita psychics in the 1930s. Her marriage was, at that time, affectionate. Mary describes Grandfather’s joking with Grandmother, something I never guessed. “They laughed together all the time,” she says. “He teased her, and she loved it. They were in their fifties then, not old.”
“Wasn’t he an alcoholic?” I ask. That is the family lore I know, and my second marriage had been rocky because of substance abuse. I have spent some time learning codependency programs for relatives of alcoholics.
“No, his drinking was later in his life,” she explains. “He worked for the Santa Fe railroad, in the rail yards. That was dangerous work. He didn’t sit around drinking all day.” She pauses. “You had the worst of it all. You never knew our parents or grandparents when they had better days. You were the youngest, and all you knew were the hard times.” Mary hears scratching at the door and lets the dogs back in. They resettle at her feet.
“I was so spoiled,” my sister says. I look at the satisfied dogs there beside my sister. Some traditions continue. “All the grandparents doted on me, the first grandchild on both sides. Mama called her mother each morning to report on my sleep.” She goes on to explain how the Bruner grandparents came for early dinner every day, to help feed her. Her face darkens. “Then the other grandparents would arrive in their big car. They insisted on stopping the meal and taking me out for ice cream.” She is silent a moment and then laughs. “What child would sit at the table and finish cold peas when she could go to the ice cream store?”
“What a mess,” I say. “Divided authority figures.”
“Yes, exactly.” According to Mary, the wealthy grandfather dictated everyone’s schedule. He had already eaten, so it was time for his dessert. No one crossed him. Grandfather Dotson employed our father, so the son had no choice but to obey. In small towns those on top have powers beyond economic clout.
“In those days,” Mary continues, “Grandfather Dotson was a successful businessman. The Bruner grandparents stayed in the background. They never joined the expeditions for ice cream. They were not part of holiday meals in the Dotsons’ fancy house either.” She pauses a moment before saying “I don’t think they liked their new in-laws at all.”
This conversation gives me insights into my mother’s predicaments in her early marriage. She was a strong-willed woman, yet she had to defer to her father-in-law. Her father, a brown-skinned Native person without wealth, had no leverage in the blending of families. “Finally,” Mary says, “Cokie and Pop just didn’t come by anymore.” Grandfather must have understood himself as a liability, as he withdrew from family tensions.
Here is the moment, many years ago, when our family narrative of disruption was set. The alienation of our Native grandparent began early in our parents’ marriage and continued to the end. As my sister explains this dynamic to me, the implications begin to unfold. We turn to other topics, to the future. Yet we both understand how we have inherited an inner unsettledness, rooted in this old dynamic.
Finally, after Mary and I have talked about everything, including politics, both of her daughters come to visit. We walk down the street to the beautiful ocean and watch cerise streaks across Catalina Island as the sun sets. The moon rises over coastal ranges to the east. We enjoy moments of enchantment as the day ends. As painful as our conversation has been, it also has started some healing. The natural beauty around us works its magic.
This visit with my sister Mary took place about ten years before her older daughter was killed during
a drug-related murder at Lake Elsinore. It was the last time I ever saw my niece. It also was before the devastating trial of the murderer. The judge requested a statement from Mary over one terrible winter holiday. Not long afterward she began drinking excessively to assuage her grief. Mary and I talked regularly on the phone during this tragedy, and I visited twice more before she died. The last time she begged me to leave Kansas (and my family) and move in with her, to be her daughter again. Of course, I could not. Guilt is a useless emotion, but I feel it. Without her mothering I would be a different person, a much less happy person. No one was there for her as family power struggles unfolded.
Mary knew our Delaware grandfather the best and had the least to say about him. Her life pattern, ironically, was not unlike his. Like him, she never found a settled place in the work world. Like him, she lost two of her four children. As a result, she struggled with grief and alcohol abuse. Both died too young of cancer.
Mary understood her Native grandfather’s awkward role in a small Kansas town where his children could find acceptance but he could not. She knew he loved his wife to the end. Mary’s stories lead me to believe he loved his grandchildren, even though I saw him so seldom.
*
After Mary died, I became poet laureate of Kansas, with duties from 2006 to 2009. I began driving extensively throughout the large state, a rectangle of two hundred by four hundred miles. In this grasslands vista the sky can fill a full circle. Two time frames, past and present, comingle. In remote places I explored where my grandfather once lived. After dozens of trips west into the plains, I came to identify Grandfather with the land itself. The sun rises on the rough-etched outline of his form; it sinks into the western horizon with blazes of his fiery breath.
