Generations and Other True Stories (15 page)

Part of the reason for the event is to educate the non-Indian public about the beauty of the American Indian culture and destroy stereotypes. During the festival, visiting Indians appear before school classes and other groups to explain their heritage and their ways of life. The art show also gives Indian artists an opportunity to bring their works to the city and perhaps make a little money.

But to the show's organizers, who over the years have become as urban as they are Indian, the festival also carries a personal meaning. “Our parents taught us to be proud of the fact that we're Native Americans,” Ms. Peterson says. “We've got to make sure we don't forget who we are. It's important to me that I do whatever I need to do to maintain my Indianness and to feel fulfilled as an Indian and as a person. And I don't want my children ever to forget who they are or what their culture is. But they were raised here in Dallas, and this is what they consider home. It's going to be important for the second and third generations of Native American families that there be something established here that they can identify with. This is something I see the American Indian Art Council accomplishing over the long haul.”

Her brother nods agreement. Then he says, “I want to see the Choctaw tribe do well, and if there is anything I can do to assist them, I'll do it. But I have no desire to live in Oklahoma. I'm thoroughly acclimatized to Dallas. You can't help who you are.”

Henry Johnson, like Pat Peterson and Richard Lester, is Choctaw. His wife, Bernice, is Seminole and Chickasaw. About a century and a half ago, their people traveled the Trail of Tears to Oklahoma, Mr. Johnson's people from Mississippi, Mrs. Johnson's from Florida. In 1963, Henry and Bernice and their six children traveled another trail from Ada, Oklahoma, to Dallas, looking for work. They were part of the relocation program that already had brought the Lester family and Bob Colombe to the city.

“We came here with a very young family, and we've raised all our children here in Texas,” Mrs. Johnson says. Four of the children, now grown, still live in Dallas. The two eldest sons have moved back to Oklahoma. Two foster children, younger than the others, still live with Mr. and Mrs. Johnson in Grand Prairie.

The contract that Mr. Johnson, a truck driver, signed with the Bureau of Indian Affairs promised him a better job in Dallas than he had in Ada. But the job the BIA found for him paid only one-third as much as he had made in Oklahoma. The BIA promised to find him a better one in a few weeks, but failed. So he went out and found one for himself. “I had to find a better job because I wanted to get my family away from that project,” he says.

Despite the hardships, the Johnsons never were tempted to give up and go home. “There were a lot of educational opportunities here that my children didn't have in Oklahoma,” Mrs. Johnson says. “It seemed that there was a junior college or a vocational school everywhere you turned.”

Over the years, the Johnsons have participated in most of the American Indian activities in the Dallas area and have worked to find help for Indian families in need. Mrs. Johnson was one of the founders of the Dallas Inter-Tribal Center, which offers health and educational help to Indians. “So they would stay here, instead of go home to what they left behind,” she says.

Although their children grew up in the city, and all of them eventually married non-Indians, they've neither ignored nor forgotten their Indian heritage. “My parents told us about the Seminole whipping tree, and what the green corn dance stands for, and all those things,” Mrs. Johnson says. “And we tell them to our children and our non-Indian in-laws, because they need to know, too. And our grandchildren need to know.”

Mrs. Johnson makes silver jewelry and beadwork and sells them at powwows and Indian art shows around the country. Her husband makes the elaborate feather bustles and headdresses that powwow dancers wear.

It's a craft he learned out of necessity. The Johnsons' eldest son, now thirty-four years old, became a dancer at age eight. His expensive bustles kept falling apart after only a few dances, so Mr. Johnson made a study of them and found ways to make them stronger. Other dancers admired his work and asked him to make bustles and headdresses for them. So Mr. Johnson took feathers with him on his truck-driving runs and worked on them at night in the motels where he stayed. Since his retirement from truck driving, he gets orders from Indian dancers all over the United States and Canada, and even from Indians serving overseas in the armed forces. He has taught his sons to make their own dance dress.

The Johnsons have been the organizing force behind the Texas Red Nations Powwow, which for the past three years has attracted dancers and musicians to Dallas. Proceeds from the event are used to help Indian students in the Dallas Independent School District. The Johnsons also encourage DISD teachers to come and learn about the Indian culture, take pictures to show to their classes, and arrange for Indian performers to come to their schools.

“I think interest in the Indian culture has increased in recent years,” Mrs. Johnson says. “Sometimes I think it's becoming
too
popular. It's kind of a fad. Here in Texas, there are a lot of want-to-bes and fake Indians who are doing a lot of inappropriate things that they think are Indian. And when the fad is over with and gone, the damage is done, and we have to be the bearers of what's left.”

She's especially critical of non-Indians who try to imitate Indian art or Indian religious ceremonies and desecrate such sacred objects as the smoking pipe and the eagle feather. “To do these things is just outrageous,” she says. “To us, it's like a slap in the face. Only certain people may use the pipe. Only medicine men known to the tribe are allowed to perform certain rituals. And this is the way we teach our children. ‘This is not for you to do,' we tell them. ‘If ever one day you have the honor of being selected,
then
you can do these things. But if you aren't, then you honor the ones who are.' ”

“When you sing an Indian song,” Mr. Johnson says, “you better know the language of what you're singing. If you don't know the language, and you don't know what you're singing, you don't amount to nothing. You're just a want-to-be. You've got to know who you are and where you're from.”

Because of stereotypes that white people have created of the American Indian, sacred traditions and Indian dignity are violated almost every day without a thought or a care, Dennis Wahkinney says. He tells of a torrid, dry afternoon when he was listening to the radio and the disc jockey suggested that the city find an Indian to make it rain.

“Then some guy called in and told the disc jockey, ‘Offer them a fifth of whiskey and they'll do it.' And another guy called and said, ‘If you want a downpour, you have to offer more than just a fifth.' ”

Then Mr. Wahkinney called in and explained that the rain dance is sacred to those tribes who practice it, that it's a ritual of prayer, and nothing to joke about.

“You know what the disc jockey replied? He said, ‘You ought to learn to laugh at yourself.' ”

He tells of a company in New York that markets a drink called Crazy Horse Malt Liquor, billing it as “The Drink of the Warrior.”

“A court has ruled that it's OK,” Mr. Wahkinney says, “that it's freedom of speech. But would they be permitted to produce Martin Luther King Malt Liquor, ‘The Drink of Basketball Players'? They couldn't do that to any other race. But people still have it in their minds that it's OK to belittle the Indian people.”

Mr. Wahkinney grew up north of Lawton and went to a small country school in Elgin, Oklahoma “The prejudice there was very bad,” he says. “There was no getting around it. I grew up with an inferiority complex because of it, and for a while, when I was a young adult, I didn't really identify much with the Indian culture, because to me it was just problems. It lessened my image of myself, my self-esteem. I didn't learn much about the Indian culture until I became a member of the Baha'i faith. Baha'i puts an emphasis on individuality. One of its basic teachings is unity in diversity.”

He tells of going to the Choctaw reservation in Mississippi and viewing a video made by a Baha'i friend. “The video showed all the Indian people from different tribes dancing in their native dress. Eskimos dancing in the big fur coats, Navajos with their headbands and silver belts, others dancing in their feathers. But they were all dancing in such incredible unity. This feeling just overwhelmed me that it was OK to be an Indian person. It was OK to be a Comanche. It was then that I began to really want to learn about the Comanche people, to learn about Indian culture.”

So when his employer, the Internal Revenue Service, transferred him from Oklahoma City to Dallas in 1984, he volunteered to help with
Beyond Bows and Arrows
, which had been started a couple of years earlier by Frank McLemore, a Cherokee and a prominent leader in the Indian community. When Mr. McLemore left the program, Mr. Wahkinney took it over.

He would go to the Dallas Public Library to research the program, to learn about the different tribes. Then he started going to powwows and manning an information booth about his program. Then he started taping the music at the powwows to broadcast for his audience.

“People think that because I do the radio program, I know a lot,” he says, “but I'm just learning a little here and there. It's through getting involved in the community that I'm learning the most. But I don't feel that I need to live with it all the time, the way a lot of people do. It's not that ingrained in me. That bothers me sometimes. I don't feel that I can be as traditional as a lot of people I know, simply because it will never be as much a part of me as some other Indian people. I kind of backed into it. I've had to find ways to get in touch with the Indian culture so I'll know about the people I serve. I find peace in that.”

Ken Brown is one of those who goes to Oklahoma to the powwows. He also goes to powwows in Texas and Colorado and many other places. He loads his feathers into his van and goes, often with relatives and friends riding with him.

“The powwow world is a pretty big world,” he says. “A lot of people in the non-Indian world don't know about it. They don't know that many Indian people depend on the weekly contest powwows for a living, like rodeo performers make their living on the rodeo circuit.”

A recent powwow that Mr. Brown attended in Tulsa attracted more than five hundred dancers from the United States, Canada, and Mexico, and a half-dozen drums. A drum is the Indian equivalent of a band. Six or eight or ten men sit in a circle, beating a single drum and singing. At the larger powwows, there are northern drums, which specialize in the high-pitched, falsetto singing style of the northern tribes, and southern drums, who sing the lower-pitched songs of the southern Indians. Many of the songs are old, many are new, and they're sung in many languages. The drums take turns performing, and the dances alternate between social dances, in which anyone may participate, and the contest dances, in which the professionals compete for prize money.

Many powwows also include sessions of gourd dancing, which honors military veterans. In gourd dancing, the people simply stand in a circle and shake rattles, sometimes for three or four hours. “Non-Indians come in, watch awhile, get bored, and leave,” Mr. Brown says. “They want to know, ‘Where are all the feathers?' The southern tribes love to gourd dance. And it appeals to a lot of older people.”

Around the fringes of the dancing arena, vendors sell food, Indian jewelry, beadwork, leatherwork, clothing, pieces of art, and tape cassettes of the more popular drums and their singers.

Traditionally, powwows were held in open fields, and some still are. But many are in downtown urban areas now, in air-conditioned convention centers. Hundreds, sometimes thousands, pay admission to watch the dancing. Profits usually aid some Indian cause.

Mr. Brown is Sioux and Creek, originally from the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota. But his father didn't like life on the reservation, so the family moved to Oklahoma, and eventually to Dallas when Ken was in the third grade.

“My father was fairly independent,” Mr. Brown says. “He didn't like the government at all, the BIA programs and stuff. He didn't want us kids to be influenced by them, for fear that we might have the desire to ‘go back home,' as they say. He loved Texas. He had this fascination with the state. And he wanted us to be able to handle city life. My dad's whole thrust was: Stay in school, get your education, learn how to handle things. It was a wise plan.”

Mr. Brown started dancing when he was five or six years old and his family was living in Anadarko, Oklahoma. But his father died when Ken was fifteen, and the Indian influence on his life “took a nose dive, because with his death we lost any connection we had with the reservation. It was difficult to make the Indian way a lifestyle in Dallas. But it's real healthy if you can balance those things—city life and the Indian things.”

Mr. Brown works in the display department of the Dallas Public Library, and spends much of his spare time trying to educate both non-Indians and Indians—especially children—about Indian culture.

“Dancing gives self-confidence to kids,” he says, “and there's nothing wrong with that, especially for Indian kids, who tend to be more shy than most because we're such a small percentage of the population. Sometimes you're afraid to let anybody know about your Indianness, because then everybody focuses on it and wants to know every answer in the whole wide world about every Indian tribe. And if you're a kid, like I was, you can only speak for your own tribe. If something else comes up, about totem poles or canoes, then a kid can be embarrassed when he shouldn't be. Sometimes it's good to ask a question back. If they ask, ‘Were you born in a tepee?' I ask, ‘Were you born in a covered wagon on the prairie?'”