PrairyErth

by William Least Heat-Moon

  Farming among them this year has been successful, and some few take considerable interest in their work. I think there is an increasing disposition with some men to do their part of the work.

  The school, which has been under the care of the Society of Friends, will be closed on the 15th. This effort to educate the Kaws has been a failure.

  Whenever the school is resumed, it should be done on such a liberal scale that the scholars may be better clothed, better fed, and better cared for in every aspect than the children at home. Then the contrast will show the superiority of civilized over savage life. Simultaneous efforts should be made to Christianize the adults, otherwise the scholars, very soon after leaving school, will return to heathenism with greater capabilities of evil. The old men of the tribe see this tendency, and remark that the young men who have been to school are the worst in the tribe.

  (Leavenworth) Daily Conservative (August, 1867):

  With our routes of travel closed, with our borders beleaguered by thousands of these merciless devils whose natures are compounded by every essential diabolism of hell . . . we present to the civilized world a picture of weakness and vacillation, deliberately sacrificing men and women, one of whose lives is worth more than the existence of all the Indians in America.

  Kaw chiefs to the Indian commissioner (1867):

  The whites came and took possession of our places and stole our plows, harnesses, and corn, and hay that we had kept here when we left for the buffalo country last fall, and [they] have broken out our windows and have carried off the doors to our houses; the houses are now full of whites. . . . What shall we do but appeal to a generous father?

  (Topeka) Daily Kansas State Record (June, 1868):

  We have not seen the dusky forms of the noble red man of the Kaw persuasion about our streets in the last two or three days. Doubtless those sweet-scented ones that were encamped near here have gone back to their reservation. When we consider how efficient they were in “gobbling up” the putrescent animal and vegetable matter about the city, we almost regret their departure.

  (Topeka) Daily Kansas State Record (August, 1868):

  We hope that Easterners will learn that Kansas citizens are not thieves, constantly striving for an Indian war for the purpose of speculation, but that the frontier settlers are constantly in the presence of great danger so long as the Indians are permitted to remain in or come into the state.

  Mahlon Stubbs, Kaw agent (1870):

  [The Kaw chiefs’ reply to the proposed new treaty moving them to Indian Territory] was in substance . . . “we want to see some of these promises fulfilled before we make anymore treaties.”

  Permit me to say that this tribe, in my opinion, has been badly dealt with in former years, that they have but little confidence in white men of any class.

  A. E. Farnham, military official (1870):

  Fifty men with wagons came on the Kansas Diminished Reserve yesterday and are selecting claims. They say five hundred more will come today. Agent Stubbs ordered them off. They refused.

  Chief Ahlegawaho (1871):

  I believe my people will soon be impoverished. This I do not want to see. This is the darkest period in our history. The whites have made attempts to buy my lands, but I have never yet asserted that I wished to sell my lands.

  Mahlon Stubbs (1872):

  The Kaw Indians are in very destitute condition [and] are now living on corn and what dead animals they can pick up, which is certainly very unwholesome and will cause sickness and death.

  They cannot become self-sufficient without means to purchase agricultural implements and stock for them to start with. They seem willing to work and a number are anxious to adopt civilized habits to some extent, but the prospect for the last eight years of having their lands sold and [with them] soon to be removed has had a discouraging effect.

  Chief Ahlegawaho (1872):

  Great Father, you treat my people like a flock of turkeys. You come into our dwelling places and scare us out. We fly over and alight on another stream, but no sooner do we get well settled than again you come along and drive us farther and farther.

  Columbus Delano, secretary of the interior, addressing Kaw chiefs (1872):

  It is the policy of the President to give to the red men a country to themselves, where you can meet and mingle together free from the interruption of the whites, and it is my duty to say to you that you must sell your lands here and select a new reservation in the Indian Territory.

  Beside Coming Morning

  In Oklahoma, Kay County, fifteen miles south of the Kansas line and twelve northeast of Ponca City, on a hilltop, in the distance the dammed and inundated valley of the Arkansas River turned to a reservoir called Kaw Lake: I am sitting in a maintenance shed with a grandson of an old Kansa chief in a broad shaft of sunlight sloping through the open door; it warms us in the cool wind. He is seventy-six, wears a slender mustache trimmed in the mode of the thirties: it and his wire-frame spectacles and billed cap make him appear less Kansa than he is, but his large, distinctive earlobes reveal the ancestry. From time to time he removes the hat to stroke his palm over his thinning hair; his hands are big, darkened as if oxidized, except for weathered-in networks of white like dried-up saline creeks; the fingernails are thick and broken. For twenty-eight years he was an oil field pipeline worker, although he once attended business college. In a paper sack is his lunch: a can of Vienna sausage, two slices of white bread, an apple, an orange; during the time we talk, he does not eat because he forgets about food and the passing hours. His words are soft with a slight rasp at the edges as if they were old frayed cotton, and his pronunciation is that of southwest hill country. He’s six feet tall, big-boned without being burly, has had a little heart trouble, lives several miles away in Newkirk, no phone, drives a Lincoln Continental. His name is Jesse Mehojah, Jr.

  A few yards north of the shed stands the old Kaw council house and south of it the dance ground, a big circle of buffalo grass with a high view of the former reservation east across the river. Yesterday I came to the dance ground with Johnnie Ray McCauley, once a pipeline welder, now a recovering alcoholic and the new substance-abuse counselor for the Kaw tribe. Polite and kindly, he too has had heart problems; at fifty-six, he’s the youngest of the half-dozen full-blood Kansa remaining and the only one who still sings and dances, although he does not know any of the old Kaw songs: when the Wind People dance here, they bring in distant relations, the Poncas, to sing and drum. Johnnie has learned two Ponca songs, the Calling Song that opens a dance and invokes the Great Unknown to join the circle, and the Finishing Song that closes a dance and asks for blessing. He wants to keep alive the traditions that remain, in part because he now sees them as a shield to help fend off the alcoholism: in singing and dancing he finds strength and self-esteem. Yesterday, Johnnie said to me, I’d like to sing them for you, and he did, and I listened and watched the strong, uplifted face I’d seen before in the Kansa portraits by George Catlin. The songs were a gift, a moment, at last, to enter the heart of the Ones-of-the-Wind.

  Johnnie McCauley is a nephew of Jesse Mehojah, the most recognized of the full-bloods. I’ve read about Jesse and know something of his history, but he doesn’t realize it even when I help with a detail of biography or history that allows him to pull up a string of others as if I’d put a minnow on his hook so that he could haul in something bigger. Today, people pronounce his name Meh-hoo-jee, but he says the correct way is Mikk-ho-jay: you must catch the first syllable in your throat. The name means Gray Blanket, but he doesn’t remember its significance. Among the old Kaws, his father was simply Mikkhojay, but, to accommodate white understanding, he added the first name of Jesse—two syllables. The father was born in the Neosho Valley near Council Grove, Kansas, on the Diminished Reserve; in 1873, when he was just four, he came with his family and five hundred other Kaws on the forced migration of 150 miles to Indian Territory, a foot journey of seventeen days. Jesse can’t remember his father ever talking about the walk or the tim
e in Kansas, but he has been up to the old reservation once, in 1925 when he was twelve, to see the Monument to the Unknown Indian dedicated. Those memories are now dim.

  In the Smithsonian Institution archives, there is a cracked, glass-plate photograph of a traditional Kaw bark house, a remarkable structure the people learned to build generations ago, even before the departure from the Ohio River Valley: the house is large and circular, its five-foot-high walls surmounted by a somewhat flattened conical roof. In the picture, on each side of the single doorway stand a man and a woman, Nopahwiah and Pahkahshutsa, Jesse’s grandparents, and in this house built near the Arkansas River soon after the exodus from Kansas, his mother was born. Nopahwiah, a descendant of White Plume, was chief of the Kahola Band, the group that lived along the northern edge of Chase County, Kansas; this branch of the tribe held out longest against the cultural erosion that worked apace once the Kaw reached Indian Territory and settled on the east bank of the Arkansas River where it enters Oklahoma. Jesse considers Nopahwiah the last blood, or hereditary, chief of the tribe.

  Mehojah is the next youngest of seven children; when he was born in 1913, his parents lived in a two-story frame house on reservation land his father farmed. Actually, the reserve by then no longer existed, the allotment of 1902 having taken the land from the tribe and parceled it out to individual Kaws, the best acreage going mostly to the growing number of mixed-bloods. His parents attended regular church services, worked their land, and looked to the future of their children: they had become Thomas Jefferson’s Christian-farmers.

  One day when Jesse and his younger brother and parents were in their buggy on the way to the nearby white settlement of Kaw City, his father suffered a paralytic stroke. He lived on for some years, but the family had to move into Washungah, the reservation village laid out in 1902, as part of the allotment. Washungah was a mile upstream and across the river on the east side from the white town. When the Army Corps of Engineers flooded the bottomland in the early 1970s, Kaw City moved up onto the bluff, and its population is now about three hundred. As for Washungah, only the council house and some graves made it out. When Kaws today talk of cultural erosion, it has an additional, literal meaning.

  Jesse is speaking: We always ate well when I was a boy. Dad and Mama knew how to preserve food, can it up. Dad would butcher an animal, and the womenfolks went out and sliced the beef into long slivers and put it over a fire and cooked it, then they hung it up on lines to cure. We call it jerky now. It was real good eating. Mama would make up hominy and boil it with the jerky, maybe add some potatoes or beans. We were efficient in preserving food. We hunted for the table—rabbits, squirrels, coons. In the summer, the river would get low and we could walk along with a pitchfork and gig channel catfish, and up on Beaver Creek we’d catch mudcats and flatheads and perch. We used to take water from the creeks and springs, in big stoneware pitchers, and pass them around the table, and each of us would honor Wakonda by drinking from the sacred water. It was pure then.

  As he talks he turns his thumbs slowly. Through the open door, the wind carries a peculiar wavering voice as if from some creature dying, and when I ask what bird makes that strange, pitiful song, he says, Isn’t a bird—it’s wind hung up in the fence wire.

  He says, Mama and Dad spoke English but not very good. She never did teach us two younger boys to speak Indian, although my older brothers and sisters spoke it. Mama wasn’t ashamed—she was just looking at what was ahead of us, thinking of our welfare. She wanted us to learn office work and how to speak correct English, but Mama and Dad spoke Indian at home, prayed in Indian, but I and my little brother talked to them in English. I understood Indian—and I still do. When I hear Osages talking, I know what they’re saying, but I can’t join in. I remember hello: HOO-way. He sits quietly, thinking. I can’t seem to remember other words now. A person lets things get away from him. Sometimes I wish I’d gone ahead and learned it. My older brothers used to speak it in the oil fields when we were all pipeliners.

  Again he reckons, then: As far as I know, only old Elmer Clark can still speak Kaw. He’s a half-breed, grew up around the Osage over east here. They speak slower than the Kaw. But the last full-bloods, none of us can speak it.

  He turns his thumbs, listens to the wind in the fence. Now, Kansas—that’s not the proper pronunciation—it’s KOHN-zay. My parents always called themselves Kohnzay. I don’t know where this Kaw come in, but that’s what we are today, officially, the Kaw Tribe of Oklahoma.

  Were it not for Jesse Mehojah, there would probably not be today a Kaw tribe of any kind. When the federal government, encouraged by Vice President Charles Curtis and other Kaw mixed-bloods, forced the 1902 allotment onto the people, the tribe ceased to exist as a legal entity and most of the Kansa records went off to the Oklahoma Historical Society as if old papers from some family come to the end of its line. Eighth-blood Curtis, once a real estate developer (and like Jesse a descendant of White Plume), never lived in Indian Territory, although he saw to it that he and his sixteenth-blood children got nice parcels of tribal land at the expense of poor full-bloods.

  After 1902, our land went like wildfire—to whites—and we ended up with nothing. The Osages, next to us, sold off a lot of their land but they kept the mineral rights, and that’s how they became such a wealthy tribe. But we let it all get away. If I’d been chieftain then, I would’ve never approved of allotment because you’re depriving your people. If you’re a chief, then you don’t think singularly. That’s just born in my system.

  When Jesse graduated from Kaw City High School in the thirties and went off to the oil fields, his town of Washungah, its streets named after mixed-bloods, still had a mission school, agency building, council house, and a round house where he danced in traditional costume. In the late sixties when he began losing feeling in his fingers, Jesse discovered he suffered from pernicious anemia (an irony for a red man who was about to become embroiled in issues of blood quanturns), and he retired from pipeline labor and returned to home ground to find tribal buildings falling apart or gone and his people broken into factions, generally along blood-quantum lines; the ruinous tension between full- and mixed-bloods left the full Kaws dispirited and struggling to hold to old ways and communal values, while the people of lesser blood pursued aggressive and successful individualism. The problems of the Neosho Valley had not simply reappeared—they had at last overwhelmed the tribe. The great American melting pot was bubbling hard, and mixed-bloods so controlled things that full-bloods were no longer represented in what little remained of tribal organization. The rape of the Kaw realm, after almost two centuries of Caucasians, was nearly complete.

  That’s when ancestral ghosts began stirring things and awakening the living. With water backing up behind the dam a few miles downriver, the Corps of Engineers started moving graves in the old cemetery at Washungah to high ground twelve miles away, but the removal and careless methods of doing it angered the seventeen remaining full-bloods.

  Two other things also roused them: the last intact historic Kaw structure was about to go under, and, even though their bylaws specified that council members had to be at least one-quarter Kaw, the tribe was under the control of a sixteenth-blood who was doing little for the people while pursuing a claim against the federal government for damages resulting from the 1825 treaty, money that could be collected not by the tribe but only by individuals. Jesse and a few others organized the Kaw Protective Association to watch over the interests of the Indians, those who fit one federal definition of that time of a Native American—a blood quantum of twenty-five percent or more. The awakened tribe persuaded the Corps to turn over a few acres of surplus land on the western side of the river and move there, block by block, the stone council house and rebuild it. With that evident symbol and the support of the full-bloods, the new group in 1973, exactly one century after the last removal, brought suit in federal court against the breed, people, or mixed-bloods, for the right to direct the tribe. In a summary judgment, the court d
ecided in favor of the plaintiffs; led by the full-bloods, a new tribal council appeared with Jesse as chairman. Even though they once again had legally qualified and energetic native leaders who put tribal welfare first, the assets of the Kaw consisted only of the cemetery and small council house: their original 100,137 acres of Indian Territory were gone.

  They set up an office and sent representatives to Washington, where they discovered seventeen thousand dollars of Kaw money, a sum intended for tribal operations. With this as a base, they went after grants to build low-income housing at Newkirk, a few miles west of the old reservation. Establishing health care facilities and providing employment for Kaws were steps more difficult until the opening of a bingo hall at Newkirk. Now, among their several enterprises and eleven hundred new acres (none of it on the original reserve), the hall is their largest source of income. Except for the spiritual aspects, what the bison once was to the Kansa, bingo is today.

  We didn’t know anything about tribal government or laws or investments, but we said we’re going to learn—learn good—and we dedicated ourselves. People told us, “I didn’t know there was any Kaws left.”

  Today, in the contemporary tribal office at Kaw City, the enrollment ledger shows 1,550 members, coincidentally a population close to the historical number of Kansa before the ravages of the Council Grove years. It appears that Jesse, the next to last full-blood ever to lead the tribe (his younger brother served as chairman a few years afterward), has helped his people restore themselves, a success foretold in his Kaw first name, Hohm-beh-scah, Coming Morning, an image that seems to extend Gray Blanket. He and the new council made significant accomplishments—landmark achievements in some ways for Native Americans—so much so that it seems fair to raise the question implicit in the growing tribal roll: what is a Kaw? Jean-Paul Sartre said that a Jew is one so considered by others; at least to the Bureau of Indian Affairs today, that is also a Kaw. The survival of the Wind People at last looks secure.