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

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.

White Man vs. Native, Pt. 1

The more modern, and politically correct, version of the title I have given this post would be, "European Meets Indigenous People."

Such encounters, whatever you call them, have usually been disastrous for the native peoples. This includes the Spanish and other Europeans in the Americas; the British in Tasmania; and various Europeans, most notably the Belgians, in Africa.

The Spanish in the New World: Starting when Columbus landed on Hispaniola in 1493, the native people on that island had nearly vanished* in the space of only 30 years—from being exposed to European diseases, being enslaved, etc.

During the conquests of Peru and Mexico by the Spanish, the Spanish conquerors displayed cunning, cruelty, and deceit. These traits, plus again the diseases that Europeans brought, again resulted in massive deaths of the native peoples.

In Bolivia the Spanish conquerors wanted to mine silver from the mountain known as Cerro de Potosi or Cerro Rico, near the town of Potosi. A huge amount of silver (along with other metals) was extracted from this mine over 500 years, at enormous human cost. For one thing, working at the the mountain's 14,000 foot altitude was at or beyond the limit of human capacities. Also,

The Spanish called the mountain Cerro Rico, or Rich Mountain, for the silver they extracted from the mountain. Some 3 million Quechua Indians were put to work here over the years. Hundreds of thousands died, casualties of cave-ins, or killed by overwork, hunger and disease [http://www.npr.org/2012/09/25/161752820/bolivias-cerro-rico-the-mountain-that-eats-men].

Metals are still being extracted from this mountain and miners use coca leaves to help them endure the mining conditions.

United States: In what is now the United States the Indians were treated very, very badly. This tragic and even disgusting history is very long and can't easily be summed up here. I'll give only a few examples that stand out in  my mind.

In New England the English settlers before long came to make war on the native peoples are wiped out several tribes in very short order.

In California, the Spanish friars who operated the missions enslaved the surrounding Indians, forcing them to get up very early and pray for an hour and then work in the fields for a very long day.

In the Southeastern United States, the lands of the Cherokee and several other tribes were coveted by the white Americans. President Andrew Jackson ordered the Cherokee to migrate to what is now Oklahoma. The Supreme Court ruled that Jackson could not do this but he simply defied the Court and did it anyway. The Cherokee marched on foot through winter weather and many died of starvation, exhaustion, and so forth.

But once there—Oklahoma was designated "Indian Territory" and the promise was made that this was to be the Indians' in perpetuity. However, in 1893 Oklahoma was opened up to settlement by white settlers and the Indians were dispossessed of much of their territory.

In much of the second half of the nineteenth century, once the US Army was done fighting the Civil War, it moved on to the task of "pacifying" the Indians, which generally meant slaughtering all the inhabitants of Indian villages, including women and children. The Indians already were weakened by white man's diseases, against which they had no resistance, and hunger due to the buffalo, or bison, which was a main food source for Plains Indian tribes, having been wiped out.

Indian children were often taken away from their families and sent to special Indian schools, where they were punished for speaking their own language. (Canada generally was no better than the US and similarly suppressed native languages and cultures.)

In Hawaii, as in other Pacific islands, an idyllic place, even a paradise, was unfortunately subjected to the influence of Christian missionaries who proceeded to get the women to cover their breasts and in  other ways did their best to destroy the culture and the happiness of the native people.

Tasmania: In Tasmania, to subdue and control the native population, the ruling British mutilated and hung many natives and eventually wiped them out.

Africa: King Leopold of Belgium permitted or even ordered unimaginable cruelty and atrocities to be committed against the natives.

So actions which today would be called crimes against humanity occurred on several continents—everywhere that Europeans came in contact with native peoples. As I said, this list is far from complete; the true story would be much longer and even sadder.

And I do not even include all the instances where missionaries suppressed and destroyed native cultures, languages, and religions.

Africa also suffered from its people being captured and shipped to the West to be slaves. But slavery was not entirely the result of the efforts of Europeans--there were Arab slave traders, and some Africans enslaved their fellow Africans--but it always relied on Europeans as one component of the slave trade.
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* Recently there's been evidence that the Taino—one of the native peoples who inhabited Caribbean islands before Columbus' landing—have not disappeared. There are a goodly number of people today who claim Taino descent and/or some degree of Taino blood.

Updated April 26 and June 6, 2013.

Copyright © 2013 by Richard Stein

A Very Brief Summary of Wrongs Done to Native Americans

In the 1830s, US President Andrew Jackson, in defiance of a decision by the Supreme Court, ordered the Cherokee Indians, Choctaws, and several other tribes in the American Southwest, to leave their homes and march westward to a new land that was promised them, Oklahoma (which was then named Indian Territory). The story of this forced march (The "Trail of Tears"), is an extremely sad one. According to Wikipedia, "Many Native Americans suffered from exposure, disease and starvation en route to their destinations. Many died, including 4,000 of the 15,000 relocated Cherokee."*

Maybe even sadder, the promise of this land for the exclusive and perpetual ownership and use by the Indians was broken a few decades later, when white settlers started moving in.

In 1868, the Treaty of Ft. Laramie promised 41,000 square miles of land (in four states, centered around Montana) to the Lakota (Sioux) Indians. Again the treaty with its promises was broken a few decades later when gold and silver were discovered on those lands and white settlers began dispossessing the Indians of what had been promised to them.

The Indian cultures had no concept of land ownership, and when they did agree to sell their land to the White Man they often did not really understand what they were doing. Or, when they agreed to sell, they had been backed into a position of having no choice. Their lands--hunting and burial grounds, sacred mountains, and so forth—were enormously important to the Indians and yet they had to leave them, again and again.

Time and again, promises made to the Indians and treaties were simply forgotten and ignored by the US government. That is only one aspect of all the wrongs and mistreatment perpetrated against the Native Americans. The buffalo (bison), on which the Plains Indians depended for food, were deliberately, systematically, and efficiently wiped out as a matter of US government policy. This virtually destroyed Indian culture and turned a proud people into dependents. The Indians, deprived of their food source, were forced into dependence on the government's Indian agencies for handouts of food, and these handouts were not always adequate or dependable; and there was much corruption, fraud, and abuse in the system of Indian agencies, all to the detriment of the Indians whom they were supposed to benefit.

The catalog of wrongs done to the Indians is endless and shameful. They often were simply massacred, shot and their homes burned. They were given blankets infected with smallpox, perhaps deliberately (my impression is that the evidence on that is not completely clear).

As I have written elsewhere, in my view it is extremely cruel to deprive a people of its culture and its language. In addition to the utter destruction of the buffalo-centered hunting lifestyle of the Plains Indians, Indian cultures were vitiated in other ways, too. Indian children were removed from their families and sent to "Indian schools" where they were forbidden to speak their native languages and punished if they did so. This was all part of a policy to force the Indians to assimilate to the White Man's culture, but obviously done out of a lack of any respect for their own culture. Racial attitudes meant that the Indians were regarded as "savages"--even by Andrew Jackson, who professed to love the Cherokee. Clearly, Jackson held conflicting and irreconcilable attitudes toward the Cherokee. (Notions of the superiority of any European and Christian culture to any indigenous New World culture also worked to cause the Spanish conquerors to destroy the great empires of the Aztecs, Maya, and Inca.)
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*Wikipedia, s.v. Trail of Tears.

Copyright (c) 2011 by Richard Stein