OKLAHOMA CITY (AP) – When Richard Green began researching the people and culture of the Chickasaw Nation nearly 20 years ago, he found little information. The few books, he said, were Eurocentric and written by white men who failed to interview any Chickasaws.
As tribal historian, Green has helped fill that void – interviewing hundreds of Chickasaw people and writing scores of profiles, oral histories and historical accounts, along with four books.
Many false stereotypes exist about historical Chickasaws, Green said, from their having lived in tepees to all being reserved and taciturn. They lived in wood and thatch houses before they were forced to move to Indian Territory from the Southeast, centered around Tupelo, Miss., he said. The tribe has about 40,000 citizens worldwide, mostly in Oklahoma.
“At first I didn’t know if they’d answer my questions,” Green said, “but it turned out most did. I just had to show them that I wasn’t in a hurry and wanted to know their stories.”
In his research, Green has traveled throughout the Chickasaw Nation (south-central Oklahoma) and from Harvard University outside Boston, to the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress and National Archives in Washington, D.C., and London’s massive public records office. He’s attended Chickasaw dances, eaten traditional “pashofa” meals of cracked corn and pork and written about the tribe’s language revitalization program. Only about 100 to 150 people still speak Chickasaw fluently, and most are older than 60, he said.
Green’s heritage does not include any native tribe; he’s second-generation Irish-American. But he considers that irrelevant to his job, he told The Oklahoman.
A Muskogee native, he grew up with many Indian classmates and teachers. He earned a history degree from the University of Oklahoma in 1967, then served in the Peace Corps in the Philippines.
“Because of those experiences, I already had an appreciation for how cultures could be different and in some ways, very different,” Green said.
A former writer for the OU Health Sciences Center, Green profiled Everett Rhodes, a Kiowa physician from Meers who is best known for being the first Indian leader of the Indian Health Service. That experience caused him to query tribes about profiling and honoring their elders.
Among Green’s proudest achievements are helping secure thousands of Chickasaw artifacts from Tupelo collectors for the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur. The collection includes native-made products from shell, clay and stone and European and American products such as glass beads, metal tools and gun parts.
If the artifacts hadn’t been secured, they’d have been sold, Green said, “by people not interested in culture, but making money on the Internet.”
Green’s goals include a book on Chickasaw warriors and another covering prehistory until 1763, when the Europeans started keeping records about the tribes they encountered.
In other American Indian tribes, historians fill different roles. In Durant, Choctaw historian Ian Thompson writes a column in the tribe’s newsletter and teaches cultural camps. One-sixteenth Choctaw, Thompson learned a bit of his native language and culture from his uncle. He learned to speak fluid Choctaw while earning archaeology degrees at OU and in camps of the Choctaw Nation.
To do his job, “you have to have a deep passion for the Choctaw people, not just the past, but today and the future as well,” he said.
For the Binger-based Caddo Nation, Bobby Gonzalez’s focus is on reburying Caddo human remains and collections held by museums nationwide.
“We’re trying to make amends to something that never should have happened,” he said. “It gives peace and closure not just to our ancestors, but to the tribe as well.”
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Information from: The Oklahoman, http://www.newsok.com
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