In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

218 The human spirit is beautiful and stubborn at the same time. Resilient yet bending, the flexibility of American Indians is like river canes in the Muscogee Creek tradition that dwell by the rivers, weathering the most vicious storms but rising back toward the sky when all is done. Like canes, Indians have been able to respond and adjust to new situations, mostly harsh circumstances , and they succeed. This acquired flexibility called adaptation— essential for survival—enabled tribal leaders and their communities to exercise the powerful dual themes of resilience and rebuilding. After four hundred years of colonized suppression, the indigenous responded but not in the way that those in power thought. Certainly not over night, but within a century’s stretch, the Native nations arose from the ashes of near ethnic cleansing and third-world neglect. The twentieth century has been an erratic era of challenges, problems, and major adjustments for tribal communities and their governments throughout the West. Mainly problems and challenges plagued Indian Country as public impressions viewed Indians as the vanishing race in the late nineteenth century, as second-class citizens in the early decades of the twentieth century, dangerous militants in the 1960s, and nonexistent for the remaining decades until Indian gaming reminded forgetful Americans that there are indeed Indians in the United States. On December 10, 2010, the last original Muscogee Creek allottee, Martha Berryhill, died. In the spring of 1993, I spoke at the rededication of the historic Creek Council House in Okmulgee, Oklahoma. As I made my presentation from the roof of the rear canopy of the Council House on Conclusion Resilience, Rebuilding Nations, and Problem Solved It Does Matter Resilience, Rebuilding Nations, and Problem Solved · 219 that warm day, I remember seeing a half dozen original Creek allottees standing and sitting in lawn chairs under a shade tree. My dad, John Fixico, observed with admiration from where he sat in his own chair. That vivid day is connected to my childhood memories of playing in the house of my grandfather Jonas Fixico and grandmother Lena Spencer Fixico on his allotment located north of the small town of Seminole, Oklahoma . My grandfather was Seminole, and my grandmother was Muscogee Creek. My grandfather is number 945 on the Dawes Rolls, and my greatgrandfather Aharlock Fixico is 940. I never realized until many years later as a historian studying my people’s history that my grandparents made huge cultural adjustments and personal sacrifices to farm the barren land that the Dawes Commission had assigned to my grandfather. My grandmother never attended school. That land, formerly a part of the Seminole reservation, is within the old boundaries of the present Seminole Nation. Like so many kinsmen, I danced as a child at the Gar Creek ceremonial ground, the last practicing Seminole stomp ground at present in the former Indian Territory. It is a truism that people change during their lives, but in another perspective they adapt and reinvent themselves as part of human evolution. In the case of Native people, they have done this and navigated within and between the cultural systems of two worlds—Indian and white—in a bicultural existence. Attachment to the earth is what I learned as a young boy during the Green Corn ceremonies that I was a part of, and I can still hear the singing of those youthful times in my head on occasion. It was entrancing that I could nearly envision on the other side of the fire the silhouettes of my departed aunts and uncles when dancing during my adult summers at the Euchee Kellyville ground near Tulsa. The fire, the sacred ground, and the kinsmen in ceremonial togetherness celebrate the ancient past and present for they morph into one reality. Like on a disk in an ethereal reality where time is blurred, a spiritual oneness forges the elemental earth with the other central elements—fire, water, and wind. Tremendous progress has occurred, if one will accept that the water gourd is half filled, and I truly believe that the Indian nations have accomplished much for themselves during the last hundred years and more. Another truistic observation is that perception is in the eyes of the beholder, and this can be sometimes misleading. In America, people believe rhetoric , not the truth, and convince themselves that the illusions of what they want to see are best. Commercialization has shrouded their reality. Through Indian eyes, life is a struggle of adapting and rebuilding and doing it again and...

Share