Indivisable

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

Jimmy Hendrix

Our group attended our first cultural event at the Indian Cultural Center on September 24, 2011. IndiVisible: African-Native American Lives in the Americas was the exhibit’s title and, having grown up in Oklahoma, originally called Indian Territory, I went with some preconceived notions of what I might find. As the title of the exhibit alludes too I expected to see how these two marginalized cultures had come together, having been more or less thrown together especially after the Civil War.

The exhibit portrayed, through photographs and some first person narrative, specific examples of how the Native American and African American cultures began to come together. There was the story of Kitzy Cloud a child of Hispanic descent whose family was starving so traded her to the Ute tribe for food. At eighteen years old she married John Taylor, a Buffalo Soldier. Also Colonel Louis Cook, a man who fought for independence in the Revolutionary War, whose father was African American and mother was Abenaki Indian.

One thing became apparent to me while viewing the exhibit, and more so during our group’s discussion after we viewed the exhibit; that is, I had never deeply considered the origins of the blending of these two cultures. We all have puerile beliefs and thoughts, or perhaps more accurately non-thoughts, that have been stored away in our minds. They lie dormant some of them never to be considered again, while others are eventually prodded to the forefront. When we are children we are not capable of adult thought, and reasoning. The exhibit brought those still nebulously formed beliefs to my mind. Having grown up in Oklahoma, formerly and officially called Indian Territory in the nineteenth century, I am somewhat familiar with Oklahoma history. I had assumed that the coming together of these two cultures had taken place in mass over a short period of time after the Civil War, rather than over centuries, beginning in the fifteen hundreds when the Spanish began bringing Africans to North America.

But the most striking thing for is me the ostensibly contemporary shift of mindset within the Native American tribes to dis-enroll tribal members who cannot quantify the minimal amount of Native American blood in their veins. In 2007 the Cherokee Nation removed 2800 tribal members of African American descent who did not meet Cherokee protocol. It is happening among many Native tribes. While the exhibit did not explicitly say why these African Americans were removed from the rolls, the thoughts of some in our group were that it all came down to dollars in the form of federal funds. Because of that, in the end it seems to me that these two blended, marginalized cultures are not IndiVisible after all. My own newly formed puerile thoughts, thoughts based on very limited knowledge of these two cultures and the seeming new found parting, are that we, meaning all of us, look on each other as separate especially when the divisions are a result of limited resources. In a perfect world these divisions do not happen, but of course our world is not and never has been perfect. We are still dependent on manmade law to define our equality and separateness. Pragmatism cannot change that. Perhaps it is best to marvel at the wonders of humankind rather than become discouraged by our failings. There is a great and beautiful story within the history of these two “tribes”, and when I look at the world as I imagine it to be I see a progressive movement compared to how I imagine it to have been, and it gives me hope that one day we might all be IndiVisible.

Cody Davis