Oklahoma! and Oklahoma (the show and the state)

Recently PBS, America's public/educational television network, has been broadcasting a recording of a recent performance of the 1943 Broadway musical show Oklahoma!

 
I am afraid that Oklahoma! upsets me, as I see it as very politically incorrect.

Let's look at several aspects of the past and present of the real entity that is Oklahoma-- that is, the state.

Beginning in 1831,* President Andrew Jackson, in defiance of the US Supreme Court, forcibly uprooted the Indians of the Cherokee, Choctaw, and several other tribes who had been living in the Southeastern United States and compelled them to migrate hundreds of miles--with enormous hardship including hunger and even death--to Oklahoma. Oklahoma was then known as "Indian Territory" and was to be a home, in fact essentially a refuge, for the Indians--theirs and theirs alone.

However, it was only a matter of a few decades before this promise was broken and Oklahoma was opened up to settlement by white settlers. True, a fairly sizeable tract of the state of Oklahoma is today Indian reservations, but they do not comprise a majority of the state's area.

Now, to look at Oklahoma today: Oklahoma is one of the most conservative states in the US. The city of Norman, Oklahoma, being the seat of the University of Oklahoma, is generally considered liberal; but evidently liberal relative to Oklahoma is still not really very liberal. In an event that was the subject of another PBS program, the following occurred in Norman: The Norman City Council attempted to issue a proclamation recognizing Gay History Month. This might seem harmless to a great many people, but evidently in Oklahoma such a move is controversial. A number of people, including the assistant pastor at a local church, stood up to make speeches attacking gay people, usually using false "facts." For example, the assistant pastor asserted--wrongly--that nearly half of LGBT people are infected with sexually transmitted diseases (STDs).

 

There was a young man in the audience that day, and he listened to those speeches. He himself was gay, and hearing how gay people were so reviled in his community--even in supposedly liberal Norman--caused him to commit suicide.

The assistant pastor, certainly one of the people whose words so tragically influenced this  young man, will not admit that he and his words had any role in the young man's suicide, though, I believe, he has admitted that his statistics on gays and STDs were incorrect. And, he later was elected to the City Council, replacing a woman who, at least at the time of the election, was widely known to be a lesbian.

So my knowledge of these past and recent events associated with Oklahoma affects my view of the state and is the reason why any praising or aggrandizing of Oklahoma by the musical show bothers me.

 
Maybe I need to keep in mind that Oklahoma! is a work of art and not see it as a political or social statement. However, its composer and librettist, Rogers and Hammerstein, are the same Rogers and Hammerstein who, six years after Oklahoma!, in 1949, wrote the musical South Pacific, in which they did in fact attempt to make a social statement, a statement about racial prejudice which was definitely ahead of its time.

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*The removals took place over several years. The Choctaw were the first to be relocated, in 1831, and the Cherokee the last, in 1838. Data from Wikipedia.

 

Copyright (c) 2014

Columbus' Stupid Mistake

Every time someone uses the word Indian, it requires clarification. Does it refer to a person from India, or a Native American? The problem stems from what I call "Columbus' stupid mistake."

As every schoolboy knows, when Columbus reached the New World, he thought he had reached India, which was what he had set out to get to. (At some point he realized, "This is not India." I don't know how long the realization took.)

Well, actually, it may be wrong to accuse Columbus of having been stupid. The ultimate cause of the error was that he had bad information on the size of the Earth. He thought, "It's x number of hours' sailing to India—based on what I know to be the diameter of this planet. I have sailed for about x hours; therefore I must have reached India." But the Earth is bigger than he thought, and he had no way of knowing that there was a very significant land mass between Europe and India (going west). So—maybe a reasonable mistake.

But his naming the New World natives "Indians" has caused a problem for more than 500 years. I imagine the Native Americans never cared for being called (and apparently confused with) Indians from India.

The British get around  the problem by using the term "Red Indian." Of course it would also help if we always, or reliably, used Indian only to refer to someone from India and used Native American (or "First Nations," as I believe they say in Canada) for the other meaning. It also works if you use "East Indian" for the Indians from Asia.

Copyright © 2014.

Who Spoke for the Indians?

In the 1850s, the 1830s—in fact for decades before the Civil War—there were well-organized, powerful, and certainly very vocal individuals and groups calling for an end to slavery—at least in the North.

On the other hand, the Indians (Native Americans) were being treated very badly and even exterminated; and I have never heard that there was even one individual who raised his voice in protest against this.

The treatment of the Indians is a sad, disgusting, tragic, criminal, and extremely long story. The saga could just go on and on.

Just a very few examples: During the presidency of Andrew Jackson, the Cherokees and several other tribes living in the Southeast of the United States were forcibly removed. With no more than the possessions they could carry on their backs they were forced to walk all the way to Oklahoma, even through bad winter weather. Many, especially the oldest and the youngest, died of disease or starvation. (Once they got there, they were told, Oklahoma, or "Indian Territory," would be theirs forever; and that turned out to be just one of innumerable, countless promises to the Indians that turned out to be totally meaningless.)

Similarly, in 1864, the Navajo were also "removed," and made to walk several hundred miles, and for a while were impounded in basically a concentration camp where nearly half of them died. (There is a lasting legacy of this in that all Navajo now alive are descendents of some 2,000 who survived this so-called Long Walk and so are inbred and suffering from diseases that result from the build-up of recessive genes.)

When the Indians were not being made to go on long forced marches like these, they were otherwise being killed by being given smallpox-infected blankets; being shot; having their villages burned and their crops destroyed; or having the buffalo, their source of food and nearly everything else in the case of the Plains Indians, exterminated. Or once on reservations and removed from their hunting grounds and thus no longer able to provide for themselves, they were not receiving food destined for them because of corrupt Indian agents.

Indians who somehow survived all the genocide by shooting and starvation had to undergo having their culture destroyed. Indian children, once in the power of whites—missionaries or teachers in special Indian schools—were forbidden to speak their language. Along with their native religious beliefs, which of course were also suppressed by the missionaries, language is virtually synonymous with culture, so that to deprive a people of their language is to virtually destroy their culture.

Of course I am viewing all this from the perspective of a  relatively enlightened person of the 21st century. But where was the person who was a bit ahead of his time, or was more humane, and who said, "These are people, they deserve to live, it's wrong to kill them, to try to wipe them out"?

Copyright © 2013.