Indigenous
Writers and Kansas, May 29, 2019 Denise
Low, Ph.D.
for the Kansas Literature Map Project of Washburn University
sponsored by Humanities Kansas, Washburn, and Haskell Indian Nations University
Kansas, in the center of the United
States, is a crossroads in the history of Indigenous peoples. It enters settler
history with the Louisiana Purchase of 1803, between the 18th and 19th
centuries. The region is geographically on the cusp of the “frontier” in that
history: Kansas City is the gateway to the West. Kansas writers inherit
complicated histories and landscapes.
The
terrain varies widely. Parts of the state are western high plains and
canyonlands, and in the southeast, at the other extreme, is a section of the
Ozarks. In between are short-grass prairies, wetlands, and oak savannahs. Nineteenth
century land trails are the Oregon, Santa Fe, Chisholm, and Pony Express; and
each evokes a history.
Before
the United States government colonized the region, nations that lived here included:
Arapaho, Cheyenne, Comanche, Kaw, Kiowa, Lakota, Osage, Pawnee, Otoe and
Missouria, and Wichita peoples. As European settlement pushed west, all of these
nations were deposed from their lands, but not without conflict.
The
U.S. government designated this region as an Indian Territory at the time of
the 1830 Indian Removal Act. About thirty Eastern tribal nations were relocated
to reservations in Kansas, including Lenape and Munsee (Delaware), Shawnee,
Miami, Kaw, Osage, Peoria, and Wyandot. Today, four federally recognized tribal
nations remain from those times: Potawatomi, Kickapoo, Sac and Fox, and the Iowa
Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska. In addition, federally recognized tribes in
Oklahoma have land holdings in Kansas, notably the Wyandotte Nation, which has
three casinos in the Kansas City, Kansas, area; and the Delaware Tribe of
Oklahoma, which has a second tribal headquarters in Caney, Kansas, and eighty
acres in North Lawrence, currently undeveloped.
Kansas
is adjacent to Oklahoma, which was the reduced Indian Territory from 1834 to
1907, and migrations from one state to another are common. As the Civil War
conflict spread into Indian Territory in the 1860s, tribal groups that
sympathized with the Union fled into Kansas. Some returned after the war, and
some did not. During World War II, many Oklahomans of all backgrounds migrated
to Wichita to work in the airplane factories. Oklahomans and other neighboring
states send large contingents of students to school at Haskell Indian Nations
University. Haskell has, according to its website today, students from “150 federally recognized
sovereign nations from 38 states.” Most of these return home, but some remain
in Kansas.
Haskell has been an important center
for Native education since 1884, and many students and staff have distinguished
themselves as writers, from Ella Deloria to Stephen Paul Judd. Native Kansas
writers come from this complicated map. They may identify as members of federally
recognized tribal members from Kansas or elsewhere. They may be members of
unrecognized remnant groups of Indian Territory when it included Kansas.
Academic migrants form a substantial group of Kansas-related authors. They are
often transients who spend some time as professors in the state and move on.
Perhaps the most distinguished writer with
Kansas connections is Ella Deloria, Dakota (1889-1971), an early anthropologist
who worked with Franz Boas, founder of that social science. She is aunt to the
author Vine Deloria, Junior. Her publications include Waterlily and Iron Hawk,
novels; Dakota Narratives, a
collection of stories; and numerous other anthropological and narrative prose
publications and papers. At Haskell from 1923 to 1928 she taught dance and
physical education. In the summers, she worked with Boas with Lakota
linguistics and other projects, often uncredited. In 1928, she published The
Wohpe Festival (Multilith), and that early publication must
have been a writing project from her Haskell days. Her extensive online archives,
sponsored by the American Indian Studies Research Institute of Indiana
University, include all of her books and articles.
Langston Hughes is another
famous writer with Kansas ties. Although he was born in Joplin, Missouri, in
1901, as a baby his mother moved him back to her mother’s home in Lawrence. He
benefitted from the Lawrence school system for his early educational skills and
also his grandmother’s schooling in oral traditions of her family. She had ties
to the Pamunkey Indian Tribe of Virginia, which finally gained federal
recognition in 2015, and to Eastern Cherokees. Hughes describes her as a Native
woman in his autobiography, “My grandmother looked like an Indian - with very
long black hair. She said she could lay claim to Indian land, but that she
never wanted the government (or anybody else) to give her anything."
Langston never knew his grandfather Charles Langston, and his father was in
Mexico. Often his mother was traveling to find work, so Grandmother Langston
was the writer’s most influential family member. He opens The Big Sea
with a description of his mixed identity:
You see, unfortunately, I
am not black. There are lots of different kinds of blood in our family. But
here in the United States, the word "Negro" is used to mean anyone
who has any Negro blood at all in his veins. In Africa, the word is more pure.
It means all Negro, therefore black. I am brown.
He challenges the idea that identity can be reduced to a simple formula,
and he suggests some of his complexities in his positioning in the African
American community. My Lawrence biography of Hughes, co-authored with Thomas
Weso, gives some of his diverse background and connections to abolitionists in
Kansas.
These two authors also
illustrate the extremes of identity among Kansas writers. Enrolled Native
writers reared in Kansas include Joshua Falleaf, Lara Mann, Pamela Dawes
Tambornino, Gwen Westerman, Robert Warrior, and Daniel Wildcat. All of these
Kansas natives have ties to Haskell except Westerman, who attended K.U. I am
including writers of critical essays in this list, as well as creative
writers—but not technical writers.
One of the more prominent Kansas-born writers is Gwen Westerman. Westerman is a quilter, an academic,
a poet, and a storyteller. She has dual enrollment in very different tribes,
Cherokee Nation and Sisseton-Wahpeton Dakota Oyate. She studied with my mentor
at KU, Bernard Hirsch, who taught English and American Indian Literature at KU
in the 1970s. She is a faculty member at the University of Minnesota-Mankato.
Westerman co-wrote MniSota Makoce: The Land of the Dakota, with Bruce
White, which won a Minnesota Book Award. Her collection of poetry, written in
Dakota and English, is entitled Follow the Blackbirds. Her poetry is
receiving recognition, as Heid Erdrich included her in the important anthology,
New Poets of Native Nations (Greywolf, 2018).
Pamela Dawes Tambornino
is a prose writer whose collection of stories, Maggie’s Story: Teachings of
a Cherokee Healer, is an authentic account of her experiences with her
Oklahoma grandmother. She also has Osage tribal heritage through her father,
and this is another example of complicated ancestry. Pam was former director of
the Haskell library, when she won the national federal librarian award of the
year, and she also taught in the English department for ten years. She has
publications in Tribal College Journal, the Chicken Soup for the Soul
series, Summerset Review, and Yellow Medicine Review. She
has been living in Linwood and just moved to Lawrence.
Joshua Falleaf, enrolled Lenape from Caney, Kansas, whose MFA is in
poetry writing, has been a professor at Haskell since 2010. He writes poetry
and essays, and his background and scholarship are assets to his teaching of
Native students. He also has had responsibilities with his ceremonial grounds
in Oklahoma.
Thomas Pecore Weso, my husband almost thirty years, came to Haskell from the Menominee reservation in Wisconsin, as did his
mother, aunts, and uncles, and also the generation before that, his grandfather
and great uncles. His Prairie Band Potawatomi great-grandfather may have been a
student here as well. His family illustrates the deep ties to Haskell many Indigenous people have to this Kansas institution. His award-winning book Good Seeds:
A Menominee Indian Food Memoir, has sold well and won national and
international recognition. He is at work on his second memoir for Wisconsin
Historical Society Press.
Devon Mihesuah, enrolled Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma
with Chickasaw heritage, has published, according to her website, over a
hundred “refereed journal essays, book chapters, commentaries, editorials, and
books.” These include award-winning novels, food essays, a biography of the
Cherokee Ned Christie, and much more. She edited the influential American
Indian Quarterly for nine years and has been at the University of Kansas
since 2005. Her critiques of the field Indigenous Studies appear in numerous
articles and important books.
Luci Tapahonso, Diné, is a prominent transient
writer who lived in Lawrence. She taught at K.U. from 1990 to 1999, while her
husband Robert Martin was president of Haskell. She is author of poetry,
children’s books, and essays—the latter of which I believe are not recognized
enough for their important insights about rhetorical differences between the
Diné and English literary traditions. She writes in Diné and often uses a
syntax that reflects her first language. Perhaps less well known is her
activism while in Lawrence. She insisted on the establishment of an Indigenous
Nations Studies graduate degree as part of her negotiations with KU, as well as
a diversity fellowship. She served on the Kansas Arts Commission and received a
Kansas Governor’s Arts Award. She has left her mark on the state.
Among writers who have heritage but are not
enrolled, Diane Glancy deserves special comment. She recently has a member of
the First Families of the Cherokee Nation, which suggests a new category for
people with heritage but no tribal membership. She writes about her work:
My heritage affects my worldview.
For years, I have written about Native history, and I have done research to
uncover unrecognized and overlooked parts of that history. I have traveled to
the places where that history happened. I have written about the importance of
land, of being, of presence. https://passionpassport.com/native-american-visibility/
She grew up in Kansas City, where her father worked in the meat packing
plants, and she lives in Prairie Village, Kansas. Since 1984 she has published
poetry, fiction, essays, and drama. Her novel Pushing the Bear
(Harcourt, 1996) retells the Cherokee Trail of Tears with historical accuracy
and detailed maps. She has innovative approaches to literary structures in all
of her writings. Her edited collections include Visiting Tipi Town: Native
Writing after the Detours, an essential text of hybrid genre writings for
me when teaching at Haskell.
Linda Rodriguez, born in
Fowler, Kansas, graduated from high school in Manhattan. Her Cherokee heritage is the basis of her
writings, including the most recent book of poetry, Dark Sister,
nominated for an Oklahoma Book Award. She won a St. Martins Press/Malice
Domestic Best First Traditional Mystery Novel Competition for her first
Skeet Bannion mystery, which was also a Barnes & Noble Mystery Pick. She
has published ten books, and more are pending.
These are some comments about writers with
connections to this region, and all the writers deserve thoughtful readers
beyond this annotated catalogue. To summarize some insights about these authors
and their writings:
- ·
They reflect
contemporary situations for Native peoples, even when writing about historic
themes. None romanticizes or simplifies a complicated history. Pushing the
Bear, by Glancy, is informed by deep geography as a structure. Mihesuah’s
Ned Christie biography engages with issues of biased journalism and influence
of mainstream stereotypes like the larger-than-life savage.
- ·
Careful
research informs the works, so vague generalities about Native peoples,
prevalent in the pulp Westerns of the 20th century, are not
perpetuated. Tribal affiliations are specific.
- ·
They reflect
the complexity of multiple viewpoints. As people of mixed heritages and/or
histories, they balance multiple perspectives without one erasing the other, as
Tambornino presents her Cherokee grandmother’s life in the Osage community of
Pawhuska, for one example.
- ·
Forces of
nature and land’s rights are essential.
Here
are some thoughts about the future of Indigenous writers in Kansas.
- ·
We will see
more writers of several tribes, either dually enrolled or with one official
enrollment but other cultural influences. Gwen Westerman is one example of
this.
- ·
Writers with
three, four, and more tribal affiliations will create a new kind of diversity
among Native writers.
- ·
Indigenous
people from Mexico and other Latin American countries will find recognition as
another category of Native writer, outside of U.S. government recognition. The
current poet laureate of Kansas, Huascar Medina, is of indigenous Panamanian (and
Puerto Rican descent). Xánath Caraza of Kansas City, Missouri, is an immigrant
from Vera Cruz whose mother is Aztec. She has published trilingual poetry in
Nahuatl, Spanish, and English.
- ·
The visual and
written arts will merge, as in the works of Stephen Paul Judd, Choctaw and
Kiowa; Thomas Yeahpau, Kiowa; and Tvli Jacobs, Choctaw—all former students at
Haskell involved with film and text.
- ·
Indigenous
people will continue to select media that will enhance their abilities to
sustain and develop traditions.
The diversity of Kansas Indigenous writers reflects
the central position of Kansas on the continent. It is midway in history of
European settlement and also in geography, as Haskell and other universities continue
to attract people from many nations. The attention of Kansans to education,
even when in self-interest as in the founding of Haskell Institute, creates an
environment that encourages writing and writing communities. These communities,
within and across tribal membership lines, will continue the storytelling in
genres that are simultaneously old and new.
Native
American Kansas Writers
This annotated list is intended as a beginning point
for further researchers. The emphasis is on literary writers.
Joshua
Falleaf, Caney (Delaware), MFA, McNeese State University, Haskell faculty 2010
to present.
Langston
Hughes, Lawrence (Pamunkey and other heritages), writes in his autobiography The Big Sea of his Native heritage and
conflicted identity as a mixed-blood person. He lived in Lawrence from infancy
to age 13. Wikipedia has the correct birth date and information about Hughes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Langston_Hughes#Ancestry_and_childhood
Lara
Mann, Valley Center (Choctaw), published Indigenous
Game Theory (Chickasaw Press, with LeeAnn Howe), and poetry chapbook, “A
Song of Ascents and Descents" Salt Publishing (UK) in 2014 in Effigies
II https://laramann.weebly.com/
Native
American Writers Connected to Haskell or KU
Christie
Cooke, (Dine), MFA, University of Arizona, Haskell faculty 2008 to present
Stephanie
Fitzgerald ([Cree] Nehiyaw/Ininiw, at KU 2000-2019, director of Indigenous Studies,
Arizona State University, 2019). Books include: Native Women and Land: Narratives
of Dispossession and Resurgence (University of New Mexico Press,
2015), and co-editor of Keepers of the Morning Star: An Anthology
of Native Women's Theater (UCLA American Indian Studies Center,
2003). http://english.ku.edu/stephanie-fitzgerald
Tvli
Jacob (Choctaw, former Haskell student), filmmaker from Oklahoma.
Thomas
Pecore Weso (Menominee, AA degree from Haskell 1993, BGS and MA, University of
Kansas), resident of Lawrence 30 years. Good
Seeds: A Menominee Indian Food Memoir (Wisconsin Historical Society Press,
2016), and a second memoir completed www.tomweso.com
