The Cherokee Word for Water

by Terra Trevor

I grew up within in a large extended Cherokee, Lenape, Seneca family. With grandparents and great-grandparents, with roots in Oklahoma. Great-grandma could fix a meal to feed fifteen of us and I loved to sit beside her coal black stove, listening to her stories. I’m the granddaughter of sharecroppers, and I was born to a teenage mother and father in 1953. When I was young, we were poor—but we had water. 

Having water meant we always had plenty to eat. We had fresh running water to rinse, soak and simmer pots of pinto beans and black-eyed peas.

In the summer when rainfall was not plentiful, since the water table was usually high, we could turn the hose on to soak the apple and peach tree and their fruit fed us in return.

There was water for pie baking, and when the sun seared overhead water to mix with Kool-Aid to freeze into popsicles. Home canned goods must be put up in hot, sterilized jars and we had water for boiling before we used them. We had water to wash our hands before pressing a tortilla on a hot skillet, and it was clean and safe to drink.

 

When no one else believed in them, they believed in each other. 


Set in the early 1980s, the story of The Cherokee Word for Water begins in a small town in rural Oklahoma where many houses lack running water. The film tells the story of a tribal community joining together to build a waterline by using traditional Native values of reciprocity and interdependence and is told from the perspective of Wilma Mankiller and Charlie Soap, who join forces to battle opposition and build a 16-mile waterline system using a community of volunteers. In the process, they inspire the townspeople to trust each other, to trust their way of thinking, and to spark a reawakening of the universal indigenous values of reciprocity and interconnectedness. This project also inspired a self-help movement in Indian Country that continues to this day.

The Cherokee Word for Water” is dedicated to Wilma Mankiller’s vision, compassion and incredible grace, and tells the story of the work that led her to become the Chief of the Cherokee Nation. The film was funded through the Wilma Mankiller Foundation to continue her legacy of social justice and community development in Indian Country.  

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time: Indigenous Thoughts Concerning the Universe


Exploring Quantum physics in relation to Indigenous peoples' understanding of the spiritual universe, this anthology includes writings from 40 Native writers from various nations. 

Unraveling the Spreading Cloth of Time, a brilliant anthology, explores an uncanny tension between
 Indigenous understandings of a moral, interconnected universe and the edges
 of western science and philosophy that -in time- come to the same 
conclusion.

Included are stories by Suzan Shown Harjo, Gabriel Horn, John Trudell, Dean Hutchins, Lois Red Elk, Suzanne Zahrt Murphy, Amy Krout-Horn, Jack D. Forbes, John D. Berry, Sidney Cook Bad Moccasin, III, Trace A. DeMeyer, Clieord E. Trafzer, William S. Yellow Robe, Jr., Bobby González, Duane BigEagle, Carol Wille`e Bachofner, Lela Northcross Wakely, Georges Sioui, Keith Secola, Mary Black Bonnet, Kim Shuck, Trevino L. Brings Plenty, Dawn Karima Pe`igrew, Stephanie A. Sellers, Natalie bomas Kindrick, Basil H. Johnston, Barbara-Helen Hill, Alice Azure, Phyllis A. Fast, Doris Seale, Terra Trevor, Denise Low, Vine Deloria Jr., Jim Stevens, ire’ne lara silva, Susan Deer Cloud, Odilia Galván Rodríguez, Tiokasin Ghosthorse, Tony Abeyta, MariJo Moore.
This anthology does not reveal secret “how to's” concerning the ceremonies of Indigenous peoples, neither does it reveal the “power” of medicine people, nor reveal knowledge meant to be kept in tribal protection. There is certain sacred knowledge from all Indigenous cultures that should never be written, which should only be passed on orally to those who are capable of the responsibility. Regardless, this anthology gives credence that Indigenous peoples have put into practice (for millenniums) what most physicists and scientists have considered only as theories. Exploring Quantum physics in relation to Indigenous peoples' understanding of the spiritual universe, these essays and poems include personal experiences, traditional stories, fictional and nonfiction ponderings, beliefs, and explorations.

Published by rENEGADE pLANETS pUBLISHING


Edited by MariJo Moore and Trace A. DeMeyer
Dedicated to Vine Deloria Jr


Red and White . . . and Blue

By Sara Sue Hoklotubbe

The church was full.  I sat next to my husband on the back pew and opened my hymnal to the designated page.  It was the Sunday before the Fourth of July; all the hymns were patriotic.

The crowd stood and sang.  My husband stood in silence.  I tried to sing along, but my heart wouldn’t allow it.  They sang of liberty, of gleaming alabaster cities, and of gold refined.  They sang of pilgrim’s pride, the noble, and the free.  Thoughts flooded my brain about my Cherokee ancestors and how their way of life had been ripped away, their land stolen, all to give this new nation its “freedom.” 

A memory came to me.  It was my grandmother’s voice breaking as she told me how her father’s Indian land lay at the bottom of a man-made lake, taken for the greater good.  My great-grandfather moved the school house he’d built with his bare hands, piece by piece, to another location before the water took it all.

I thought about how I had been pulled out of line at London-Heathrow airport and asked what kind of name I had.  American Indian, I replied, hoping, knowing in my heart those words might work better than trying to explain my Choctaw name.  A man ushered me to an area where I stood next to a woman wearing a burka and waited my turn.  They searched my luggage and then they searched me.  I had been profiled for bearing my husband’s name – Hoklotubbe. 

I wanted to scream that my name is a proud warrior name, a name that existed before the United States was even a country.  I wanted to tell them that Hoklotubbe means “to listen” and “to kill” in the Choctaw language.  But I didn’t.  Instead, I submitted, just as my ancestors did so long ago to the invading Europeans.    

Gingerly, I closed the hymnal and placed it back in the rack.  As the others celebrated songs of Independence Day, I silently mourned.

I tell this story with mixed emotions.  My father was white; my mother was Cherokee.  I am proud to be Cherokee, but if the white settlers who raped the land and herded the Cherokees away from their homes in Georgia and Tennessee hadn’t eventually migrated into Indian Territory, I would not exist.  Or if I did, I would not have my father’s freckles and his hazel eyes.  I would not have his love of music or his storytelling skills.  I would not be me.  Why, then, is it so painful to sing of pilgrim’s pride?

Perhaps it is because Americans have conveniently forgotten the Native holocaust that gave birth to this country.  Today, the uneducated public describes treaty obligations as government handouts.  The government requires that we possess Degree-of-Indian-Blood cards to prove we are Indian, much like a show dog must have pedigree papers to prove its noble bloodline.  Native owners of restricted land, original land allotments, are required to seek permission from the Bureau of Indian Affairs to lease their land, and then the money is squandered by that very agency.

Quiet indignation stirs inside me.  It lives in conflict with how blessed I feel to live in a country with political and religious freedom.  My father, my uncles, and my husband are all combat veterans.  None of them were flag-wavers when they came home from their respective wars, yet my heart is full of gratitude, knowing they fought for my right to voice these very words, however blue and unpatriotic they may sound.   

The Best in Show winner of the recent Five Civilized Tribes Art Show was a striking clay sculpture by Troy Anderson titled:  "Halfbreed -- Am I Red and White or Am I White and Red?"  This piece of art spoke to me.  I identify with my mother’s Cherokee heritage and can trace our lineage to before the removal.  Yet, I cannot deny my father and his white ancestors.  They are part of me; I am part of them.

I’m glad the Fourth of July is over and those patriotic songs have been put away for a while.  In the meantime, I remain Red and White . . . White and Red . . . and Blue. 

Copyright © Sara Sue Hoklotubbe


ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Sara Sue Hoklotubbe is a Cherokee citizen and the author of the Sadie Walela Mystery Series set in the Cherokee Nation where she grew up.  The American Café, (The University of Arizona Press, 2011), the second book in the series was chosen as a finalist for the 2011 ForeWord Book of the Year Award by the American Library Association.  The book was also named as finalist for the 2012 Oklahoma Book Awards.  Sara was named Writer of the Year by Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers for Deception on All Accounts, (The University of Arizona Press, 2003), the first book in the series.  Both books were chosen and released by the U.S. Library of Congress as Talking Books for the Blind.

Visit Sara Sue on the web at: www.hoklotubbe.com

How the Land was Lost: El Potrero

By Deborah Miranda, author of Bad Indians: A Tribal Memoir

At the end of June 2012, I traveled back to my homeland in the Carmel area of California. My goal was to discover more about Rancho El Potrero, the piece of land that was awarded to my 5x great-grandfather, Fructuoso de Jesus Cholom Real by Governor Alvarado of Mexico soon after secularization (when Mexico, then occupier of California, closed down the missions). 

Read more How the Land was Lost: El Potrero

Ridin’ the 40 Home


A page from Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory 

(for big sis K.R.)

They say everything is bigger
in Texas, that is propaganda.
Riding back from Albuquerque
sister at wheel. We talk, squawking
clicks, a pair of ravens making
magic with our tongues.
Keeping language carefully —
cuz we women know words are spears.

Holding breath through Texas,
Tribal plates, eagle feather, beaded
tobacco pouch swinging from rearview
mirror like lighthouse guiding coppers:
INDIAN WOMEN TRAVELING.

Texas don’t like their Indians or Mexicans.
Why tolerate neighbor Indians crossing
invisible borders—never really there
to begin with? Our chatter slows. 
Silence, along I-40 through Tejas.

Sis’s car big enough to hold
eight, more with determination.
Carried folks from half the tribes
in Oklahoma to and from meeting.
Indians pilled up one on top the other,
individual lines drawn through Traverse
representing “the I-35 dividin’ line—
two different countries,” sis says.
Southeast Indians and Plains Tribes.
Sis’s car is a mini Okie Indian County.

In this car Indians slept, prayed, played.
Gone to NAC meetings crawled in
worn, tired from prayers, peyote,
fasting, mourning, rites and rituals.
This wagon sheltered, kept Indians both
sides of I-35 safe, out of cold. Housed so
many prayers doors burst vibrate singing
with medicine in languages old as earth.
                                                     
We pass the Oklahoma state line,
exhale, our tongues come back to life.
Not that we were worried, riding in
purple peyote wagon, full of prayers
weren’t no way we wasn’t getting home.
Pick up conversation as if silence never
shrouded us, as true sisters can—half
with words spoken, half with knowing
in marrow, memory, whispers in blood.

Looking up Oklahoma sky rolling by stars
are so close you can ask them to dance,
move, twirl for you, blink and keep
an ever-watchful eye. Eyes of those who
walked on before us. Oklahoma night sky
hangs low over plains stretching to meet
endless horizon. We roll forward rhythm of
wheels making music— I swear hear
Three Dog Night sing
Well I never been to Heaven,
but I’ve been to Oklahoma…”

First published in Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory, Mongrel Empire Press, Norman, OK 2012. 


ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Rain Prud'homme-Cranford (Louisiana Choctaw/Creole/Mvskoke/Metis/Celtic) is the Sutton Doctoral Fellow in English at University of Oklahoma, She won the 2009 First Book Award in poetry for Smoked Mullet Cornbread Crawdad Memory (Mongrel Empire Press-Fall 2012), from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas, (NWCA). Her second book, Miscegenation Round Dance: Poèmes Historiques, is currently under review and she is working on her third poetry and prose manuscript: RAW: Lwizyàn Mestizà Unsilences & other poetical oddities. A self-described “TriRacially Fluffy and Fabulous” Louisiana Méstiza, she is of Louisiana Choctaw, Louisiana Creole,  and Mvskogean descent paternally, and of Canadian Métis and CelticAmerican ancestry maternally. She was raised and grew up along the Gulf south in Mvskogean-Creole homelands. Creative and critical can be found in: Tidal Basin Review, Natural Bridge, SING: Indigenous Poetry of the Americas, Yellow Medicine Review, American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Louisiana Folklife Journal, and various others. Rain is the National Secretary for Wordcraft Circle of Native Writers and Storytellers and as of 2012 the Assistant National Director of NWCA. She is the newly appointed Editor-in-Chief of the NWCA Literary and Art Journal (Red), launching Spring 2013. She lives in Oklahoma City, near her sister beadwork, regalia, and mixed media artist Tee Shawnee and family where the sisters collaborate and laugh with family and children.

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