But what survives? Six full-bloods (all males and only one under seventy), five three-quarter bloods, seventy-three half-bloods, about two hundred quarter-bloods, and a few others with odd quantums above twenty-five percent: that is to say, four fifths of the tribe are less than one-quarter Kaw. Some members who come into the office to conduct business are blue-eyed blonds, others have quantums as low as 1/128. According to a full-Kaw: Stick a needle in then finger and that drop of blood you’ll squeeze out is all the Kaw they got.
To appear on the roll, a person need only prove descent from a 1902 allottee: a single Kansa ancestor qualifies you, provided you are not also on some other tribal roll. A half-Kaw and half-Osage, say, must decide where to put his allegiance. For years, the roll was so loosely maintained people went to it and simply added their names. Now, without the benefits Jesse and other councilmen and chairpersons (the current one is a woman, only the second) helped establish, just how many of these members would bother to maintain their enrollment no one knows, although recently it has been more difficult to get a good turnout for the annual meeting. Worse, how many of these no-bloods (as quarter-and-aboves sometimes call them) could tell you who White Plume was or what happened up at Council Grove or could distinguish a Kaw dog dance from a Crow water dance? How many could give you even so much as a hoo-way?
Although a person still must be at least one-quarter Kaw to serve on the council, a time is coming when that proscription will have to change. Jesse says, In fifty years there won’t be much Kaw Indian left—there won’t be much blood at all. The decision’s made, and we all helped make it: I married a white woman. My children are half-breeds—but if you don’t want to get on the wrong side of them, don’t call them white.
A man walks into the maintenance shed and listens. Jesse says he is his second cousin, Joe Mehojah. foe’s a half-breed. He was tribal chairman after me, my right-hand man, but he works in maintenance now. He’s my boss.
Joe Mehojah is sixty-two, burly, squarely built, his baldness giving him the look of a Kansa warrior or a Marine grunt, both of which he has been: twenty-two years in the corps and, later, several weeks at Wounded Knee when the last federal attack occurred there. Along with Jesse, he also happened to be on Kaw business in the Bureau of Indian Affairs building in Washington when Indians took it over in 1972; both of them stayed for the seven days of the occupation until the bureau agreed to talk with the people whose welfare it supposedly oversees. A graduate of Haskell Institute, then the Indian high school in Lawrence, Kansas, Joe spent most of his early years with Native Americans of several tribes. He says, When I was younger, my mother and I would go into a café and people would stare. They were wondering what that Indian was doing with a good-looking white woman. She used to tell me, “You’re half-white, but you should take up for the Indian people.” My grandmother used to tell me, “Marry an Indian, marry an Indian.” And I did—a full-blood Oneida from Wisconsin. And I told my kids, “Marry an Indian,” and they did. Their children married Indians, so that my grandchildren are seven-eighths Native American, but only an eighth Kaw. In fifty years, quarter-blood Kaws will be like full-bloods today. It’ll be a tribe of no-bloods.
Joe laughs before he says this: Me, I know I’m a half-breed, but for years I blamed my father because a pretty white woman looked at him and he fell in love and married her, and then I was brought into the world. She’s my mother—whatever else she is, that’s what I want her to be—but I’m an Indian and I show it.
Looking at the first two chairmen of the reorganized tribe, men who four hours ago were picking up debris, I ask why they are working out of a maintenance shed rather than in the tribal office: a silence, shuffled sentences, silence, a few words spoken for my ears only, silence. Some topics a stranger doesn’t engage in without harming others. Jesse says, If I had one wish granted for my tribe, it would be for unity, harmony, prosperity. In harmony you can prosper. Today the almighty dollar gets in the way. For some people, it’s a good investment to build a chemical-waste dump on our new land, but people who’ve lived here and remember this land, the changes bother them because they see it turning ugly. We get so far apart, and that hurts me.
(Later, a senior Kaw explains this much: Tribal politics can be bad. Too much treachery. It used to be we spoke out directly, but not now. And younger ones don’t go to the older members for advice. I even heard one kid say, “I wish you’d tell those elderly people to stay out of our Kaw business.” He was talking about the blood Indians who rebuilt this tribe.)
I ask, while we’re on politics, why not get into religion too? Both men are Latter-day Saints. Before he goes back to cleaning, Joe recites the notion about Native Americans descending from the Lamanites, an ancient tribe of Israel that (according to The Book of Mormon) migrated to the Western Hemisphere. The widely accepted idea of Asian peoples crossing over the Bering land bridge he believes to be fiction. Jesse seems less sure, but he says, About the Lamanites—that all’s been brought down to me. I’ve been told that these lost tribes have been recorded. If it’s documented, that’s the way it is. But, even though we’re Lamanites, I still feel we’re Native Americans. I believe that every inch of ground you step on is Indian country.
I ask Jesse whether he would do anything differently if he could go back to the year he graduated from high school, and he says, Like what? and I ask whether he might marry a Kaw woman.
He doesn’t like the question: You’re asking me to forsake some fifty years of love. He falls silent. Then, To be rational, in these times you can see it would have been better for the tribe for me to have married into my own people—but who? Where was the woman for mel I was related to them all.
Silence again but for the wind. Jesse says, If I could go back with the voice of a chieftain, I’d advise my people to be more clannish rather than intermarrying. We all branched out and depleted our numbers—that’s the sad part of the whole thing.
The Missouria tribe is down to a pair of ninety-year-old full-bloods, I say, and then I ask, is it sad watching and waiting for the last Kaw? Jesse shakes his head. What else? What else? We were a proud tribe. To be the last—I don’t even want to think about it. If I’m the one, I’ll be a lonely Indian. When your people are gone, what have you got? A void.
Coming Morning turns his thumbs, the sun shaft gone, the air colder, the voice of the wind hung up in the barbed wire.
Below the Turf
One October morning I walked along Turkey Creek a few miles northwest of Wonsevu, south of where the stream joins Cedar Creek, close to the Marion County line. I turned up nothing more than the beauty of the woodbound vales and the slightly tilted grasslands rising away to the west where the Flint Hills disappear into the leveled topography of central Kansas; I took several photographs, put my field glasses on a dickcissel singing out of season, watched a meadowlark raise its wings into a little gust and, letting the wind do the flying, glide up and over a fence. Envious, I said to the bird, I hope the hell you appreciated the fun you just had.
It wasn’t really so much of a windy day as a day of a hundred winds: puffs, huffs, wafts, drafts, soughs, and murmurs. The sun wasn’t quite warm enough to make them entirely welcome. On the lee slope above Turkey Creek, where the winds eased in a sheltered vale I thought ideal for a campsite, I took a rest in an upland gully, a sharply banked wash eroded through an old and long overgrazed pasture. The land tilted enough to the east so I could sit somewhat concealed against the west bank of the ravine and look over the opposite side onto a run of pocket gopher mounds. I pulled out the binoculars and watched. Ranchers don’t care for gophers and their burrows that can break the leg of a horse, so cowhands shoot and poison the rodents even though their tilling, aerating, and fertilizing the soil are most beneficial to the grasses and forbs and legumes cattle depend on.
Some minutes later, a gopher showed its head, then disappeared. I was upwind. I played the glasses over the high, faded moon: not quite full. I checked it against my new lunar-phase watch, a
thing too nice, really, for the field: the little golden disk of moon in a blue-enameled field of pentagonal stars was nearly full too.
My friend Jim Hoy, who grew up a few miles south from where I was and of whom I’ve spoken, says the Flint Hills don’t take your breath away—they give you a chance to catch it. I sat in that hinterland until mine was caught up, and still I sat, eyelids drooping, sunning dozily like a reptile in autumn. I reminded myself of what I’d written in my notebook the night before as directions for the next day:
Make a little journey of conjunctions, concurrences; spend time crossing—or at least brushing past—others’ latitudes and longitudes; since you can’t occupy the same space at the same time they do, try occupying the same time at the same time.
I began to nod. (Once, when I fell asleep near Matfield in a little observation post like this one, a nickering horse woke me, and a young ranch hand asked what I was doing. Embarrassed to be so surprised, I said I was working and explained my interest in the county; he told me this and that; then, when he turned his horse to leave, I heard him mutter, Wish I could get damn work like that.)
I roused myself, played the binoculars over the quiet gopher mounds, followed the glide of a red-tailed hawk, the labored flight of a crow, and then turned the glasses onto the opposite side of the gully: exposed rootlets of grass and dried soil and, about four feet below the turf, something that didn’t belong. I got up, dropped to my knees, and put on my spectacles to look closely.
A small arrowhead. An archaeologist would more accurately call it a projectile point, specifically a “side-notched bifacially flaked lithic of chert” angled downward into the soil as if driven by a falling spear. I looked it some time before I took my pocketknife and carefully removed it. No other artifacts anywhere visible, no disturbed earth to indicate a campsite. The color of a thunderhead, the point wasn’t especially well made, but rather misshapen and unbalanced with its tip missing; it was probably knapped out of flint found near here—a cobble from a creek or maybe a nodule dug out of one of the ancient quarries still visible in Chase; it was an utterly commonplace point, the kind you could lay down on the bar at Darla’s and stir nothing more than a disparaging remark. But it possessed one thing I’d never before encountered: given its distinctive shape and being deeply buried in uncultivated soil as it was, I was sure the last hands to touch it were at least three thousand years gone. The next hard rain would have washed it loose and removed the certainty of its long and perfect isolation. Out of the thirty centuries it had lain there, I had a thirty-minute chance at conjunction during my rest, and in that brief concurrence, the old spearman and I ended up brushing past each other.
I sat down again, the point in my palm. Here was an authentic memorial to an unknown Indian. Thoreau said in his Journal that whenever he found “arrowheads” he knew the subtle spirits that made them are not far off, into whatever form transmuted. The hunter who let that spear or dart fly surely didn’t imagine it coming down nearly into the twenty-first century to be found by a man whose only piece of stone was an iota of quartz in a lunar-phase watch. Yet the hunter, who would have used quartzite for projectile points, must also have been an observer of the waxing and waning of the moon: across three thousand years, he and I were linked by three stones—chert, quartz, and moon.
Had he come to this open terrace to take gophers? (Their bones do turn up in ancient middens.) Was he looking for something larger? An elk? An enemy? (This three-centimeter-long point was quite capable of killing a bison.) Did he hit his quarry? Is that how the point broke, or was he using it broken? Maybe he lost the dart or snapped it, or maybe he just threw away the point. (I say “he” with some assurance: aboriginal him ting was universally a masculine pursuit; were the artifact a scraper or knife, the last hands to touch it could have been feminine.)
In Kansas, archaeologists recognize four general periods before the coming of Europeans and history: the Paleo-Indian, from perhaps 10,000 B.C. to about 6000; the Archaic, until about A.D.I; the Early Ceramic, for the next thousand years; and the Middle Ceramic, to about the arrival of the Caucasian, which, in this location, was Coronado himself, who, in 1541, may have walked as close as fifty miles due west of this gully.
What little we know of these prehistoric peoples in the southern Flint Hills comes almost universally from two sources: relic hunters tramping over cultivated fields—a means of recovery that yields little information because of the disturbed context of the artifacts; or from underfunded archaeologists hurriedly exploring sites threatened by the construction of water impoundments. In the 1970s, professionals examined more than fifty locations along the Turkey and Cedar Creek drainages when the Cedar Point Reservoir project was yet alive, and, in the southeastern corner of the county, they made several digs near the headwaters of the Verdigris River before a small lake covered them. Within thirty-five miles of the county borders, archaeologists investigating hundreds of sites endangered or destroyed by half a dozen big reservoirs have recovered abundant material, although much of it is repetitive or difficult to interpret and doesn’t yet add substantially to a profile of the various peoples.
But the findings do undermine a notion common among countians that the single term “Indian” accurately describes all those who lived here before 1541 as well as their descendants: yet the ancestors of the spear thrower were as different from him as the people who built the first ring at Stonehenge from King Alfred’s subjects. Those who came after the hunter, some of them perhaps his distant heirs, were people who eventually made different tools, ate different foods, and prayed to different gods in a different language. The human flux through here has been of peoples markedly distinct from one another: to consider them all as merely Indians is about as informative as lumping together Henry VIII and King Tut because they were white men.
What could I surmise about the Archaic hunter who left that point above Turkey Creek? He lived in a time following widespread extinctions, when the great beasts—mammoths, mastodons, camels, huge species of bison—disappeared because of massive climatic changes and, perhaps, the relentless hunting of his more numerous ancestors (the overkill theory). Using spears and probably atlatls (the bow and arrow has been in America only about a thousand years), he pursued the lesser bison we know, and also elk and deer, as well as much small game: raccoons, skunks, rabbits, squirrels, gophers, wood rats, moles, turkeys, geese, ducks, box turtles, mussels; he took catfish, gar, bullheads, suckers, drum, chub. His people gathered grapes, gooseberries, blackberries, smartweed, Solomon’s seal, and (surely) dozens of other plants which the women ground and cooked into food and remedies.
Perhaps because of the leaner times, his familial band was smaller than those of his ancestors. His dwellings were insubstantial but suitable for his life of following the seasons of the animals and vegetation. He was, generally, a less adept and artistic knapper of flint than people before him, but artisans of his time did make small clay figures, possibly deities he believed had a hand in the reduced world he lived in, beings who had taken away the great beasts he knew only from legends and songs he heard at night before the fire burned to coals and he could sleep and dream of hunting not gophers and coons but animals nearly as tall as elms, abundant as bluestem.
His broken chert point, a piece of the Permian sea, let me touch origins. It seems as if the Archaic hunter used such marine chips to make weapons, while the successor Caucasian took chunks of sea stone for apparently benign things like the commodious Spring Hill Ranch home or the Second Empire courthouse; but the point maker’s path—his stone age way of life and its parallels around the globe—led to limestone courthouses and libraries: the Caucasian overwhelmed stone age people above all with writs—legal, scientific, ecclesiastical—although the weapons were the assumptions and attitudes the documents express.
That projectile point was an Archaic hunter’s most lethal instrument, a thing intended for killing, but it reminded me how our most deadly instruments are really habits of mind which yield up
not life but merely luxury.
That I sat in a gully eroded by overgrazing with the flint in my hand was a concurrence seeming to lead me to inevitability: I’ve never thought myself a determinist (too un-American), but, looking at the spear point as an expression of will and intelligence which once helped a hunter feed his little band, I wondered whether it was also something that helped him choose his destiny. The path from that flint and others like it led to 1541 and to me and my lunarphase watch. So then, this question: could his people have chosen other ways which would have prevented their eventual obliteration? Was there any course where edged flints did not lead to Coronado?
If the ultimate use of will and intelligence is survival, then the pocket gopher across the gully had a better claim to and hope for continuance than either I or the hunter, who, were he to return here today, would immediately recognize the rodent; but what would he make of me, my wrist watch, the overgrazed pasture?
I took out my notebook and traced around the point and sketched its contours, and then, thinking how much longer than limestone walls the flint would endure, I went to a deep cleft in the dry soil and dropped the flint back into the earth.
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