From Julia Coates .... Hello, everyone – Summary: The context of poverty and patronage in northeastern Oklahoma is at the base of the contests over the administration and direction of the Cherokee Nation. Interested? Read on… To watch/listen to this update, go to youtu.be/lupf9AYZ2IM In the late 1960s and early 1970s, a young anthropologist named Albert Wahrhaftig worked among the Cherokees. He was engaged with activists of the time (some Indian and some not) and worked in some of the most traditional communities of the Cherokee Nation, informed by people such as Hiner Doublehead and Finis Smith. Many Cherokee scholars since have drawn on Wahrhaftig’s very valuable work and his complex descriptions of the social dynamics of the time, both within the Cherokees and between the Cherokees and the non-Indian power structure in northeastern Oklahoma. In an era when the Cherokee Nation was just beginning to stand up again governmentally and economically, after decades of being under the thumb of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Wahrhaftig and many of the younger, activistically-oriented Cherokees viewed the tribal leadership of W.W. Keeler and his attorney Earl Boyd Pierce as an “establishment,” employing the Vietnam-era rhetoric of the time about a leadership that in their view was too acculturated, too entangled with federal and corporate structures and out of touch with traditional Cherokees. Wahrhaftig’s work can be critiqued on many points, but in hindsight, many of his observations and predictions resound with great accuracy. He described a stratified Cherokee society and a small, rural system in northeastern Oklahoma in which individuals of Cherokee heritage, but without substantial connections to deeper Cherokee cultural and community traditions, values, and worldview, held many of the positions of local influence – sheriffs, mayors, town councils, school boards, judges, police chiefs, district attorneys, etc. Although I have never agreed with the racialization of the dynamic he described, in which he named such persons “white Cherokees,” the description of a certain strata of Cherokees who held power and authority is accurate, as many from the region will acknowledge. It was a system that mirrored larger structures in Oklahoma which have long been corrupt, virtually from day one of the state’s existence. (A recent national report quoted in the Tulsa World named Oklahoma the 11th most corrupt state in the country based on systems of political and business patronage, favoritism, kickbacks, etc.) Early and mid-20th century, the Democratic Party was predominant in the state – after all, this is the state that spawned Woody Guthrie and strong contests over labor and unions, as well as other progressive issues. But it was never the progressive arm of the party that dominated in the state’s politics, rather the backroom-dealing southern Dixiecrats. And it led to reactions on the part of the citizenry. One of my elder relatives recently told me that when he first registered to vote in Pryor (Mayes County), he registered as a Republican in opposition to the political corruption represented by the Dixiecrats. And others have told me that it was exactly that corruption that turned Oklahoma into a red state. (And I might add, I think many are finding that both red and blue are problematic in the great state of Oklahoma). As the Cherokee Nation was beginning to rise in the time when Wahrhaftig was working, he essentially predicted that it, too, would soon be overcome by the corrupt power structure of the region dominated by “white Cherokees” that he saw as unresponsive to the more traditional communities except to draw them into allegiances through the dispensing of patronage and favors to people who were among the poorest in the country. Wahrhaftig saw Ross Swimmer in the same light, and when Swimmer was elected as Principal Chief in 1975 (near the end of Wahrhaftig’s period of fieldwork and publication about the Cherokees), Wahrhaftig and others seemed to feel it was a continuance of that local “establishment.”
Posted on: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 08:53:09 +0000
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