(excuse the funky formatting. i wrote this in notepad and i'm too lazy to fix it in here...live with it...lol)


it's amazing how much changes in eight years. we decided to make a day trip to
okla to see my grandmother. both my sisters were born there, and my dad too.
we have lots of family there. an aunt and two cousins (one of which went to
prison for methanphetamines) live in a small town outside of okla city, the town
coincidentally, is right down the road from mustang, where my dad used to pastor.
i have two other sets of aunts and uncles. my father's brothers. one set, my aunt
was vice president of an oil company and her husband worked as a geologist.
the other set, my aunt came from money, lots of money. the story goes my uncle wanted
to go into computer programming. my aunt didn't want him to because there was no
prestige in that job, so she convinced him to become a lawyer. he would later work
as assistent da for the city, and managed to successfully sue john wayne (tho i can't
remember the crux of the suit).

as i mentioned in my little history lesson a several entries back, okla was once
indian territory. as the ugly americans spread throughout the country, they rounded up
many of the indian tribes and shipped them from florida(actually they walked) to okla. (a few of
the cherokees stopped in the north carolina mountains, where there is a reservation. the town is called
cherokee and the country is also called cherokee)

as a girl i was fascinated with indians. it probably didn't help that in fort smith our
next door neighbors were actual, full-blooded indians. mrs miles' husband had been a chief
(tho i didn't know that until this trip back). i had the biggest crush on her son, who hated
my freakin fat ass to no end.

so fascinated was i, that i even considered attending northeastern okla state university in talequah,
a mostly native american university.


talequah, okla is only about an hour away from fort smith and it is the seat of the
cherokee nation, and for years, the tribe's chief was wilma mankiller (what a name, eh?). talequah is the
home of tsa-la-gi, a passion play of sorts about the trail of tears. in talequah, at tsa-la-gi
(pronounced (hard ch)cha-la-(hard g)gee there is a cherokee museum and an actual village so that visitors
can see how the cherokee once lived.

unlike in cherokee north carolina, you can buy actual native american stuff, such as jewelry and art. in north carolina,
much of the merchandise was made in taiwan.

of course, okla was the home of the five civilized tribes. you can still visit sequoyia's home (the cherokee chief that invented their alphabet, and sorry,
i know i misspelled his name) as you travel through, the names of most towns and/or lakes are
native american. eufala, shawnee, wewoka, checotah, etc. we used to joke about how lake
eufala got its name. a group of indian braves were walking through the woods, when one of them fell
and another tells him you-falla. lol...ok, and sally-saw (sallisaw) henrietta's po' toe (poteau--apprently the cajuns made it to okla also, as there are a few
places with cajun-like names)...uh, yeah
btw, when you pass checotah, you'll see big signs proclaiming that checotah
is the home of american idol, carrie underwood. henrietta, okla claims the cowboy's troy aikman (tho i don't believe he
claims them).

well, i'm here to tell you that the native americans are taking back okla...one stinkin' casino at a time. that
was the biggest change. when i left, there wasn't a casino in the whole state as far as i know,
but now, every little exit you come to has a casino. the size varies depending on the size of the tribe. and i
even saw casinos for tribes i'd never heard of before, such as the sak and fox tribe.

now if you've enough indian blood in you, that you can document and trace--not an easy task, then you don't have to get
an okla license plate, instead you can get one with whatever indian nation you belong to. instead of oklahoma at the top,
it'll say something like "choctaw nation" likewise, if you
can prove your indian blood, you can get health care dirt cheap through your indian nation.

at one time, they were accepting 1/64th or maybe even 1/82 indian blood, but i think so many
people jumped on the covered wagon, that they've had to scale that up a bit.

my aunt (by marriage) is 1/16th choctaw and gets all her healthcare for next to nothing. she was showing us
a book that documents her family lineage, and was telling us about a great great uncle that they found dead under a tree.
she was asked one of her relatives why he was hanged. the relative asked, "who told you he was hanged?" she said
"well, they found him under a tree with a broken neck."

and if you have indian blood in you, you can also get your college paid for (or pretty damn close).

so, if you want to experience how it was in the before time, not only are there places like talequah
but there are always several native american festivals. okla city has a huge native american arts show
each year called (i think) Red Arts Festival (don't quote me on that tho).

there were a lot of prejudices against native americans, even and probably especially in okla once the
sooners came streaming in and taking the land. my (step)grandfather used to call them "injuns" to the day he
died.

my mother (and father actually) grew up in okla city, in an area called capital hill (because of course, it
is near the capital building) their high school was the capital hill indians. as a kid, she used to drive the 30 minutes to
capital hill when i needed shoes. we'd always go to the j.c. penny's, which was three floors and i remember getting lost in there
once, and the same man always waited on us in the shoe department.

slowly but surely, more native
americans came into okla city and began taking over that area of the city (i'm sorry, but where ever there are poor people, the crime rate increases
and it was no longer safe for my grandmother to live there). my grandmother finally moved
to a newer part of the city. i say new, but she lives only a block over from where we used to live, so it's
not really "new".

okla city is ugly. it's flat, spread out, and filled with nothing but dirt. it started as an oil town, so there are oil wells, and
those little pumper wells everywhere (which when you go thru texas, you'll often see decorated as such fanciful things as grasshoppers).

there are nicer areas of the city, and they even have a lake there, which, believe it or not, i didn't know about when i lived there
and didn't find out about until after i married my first husband and we went with friends to her parents' house near the lake.

the land to and around the city is rolling, low hills, mostly pasture land. a year or two after we moved here, i heard in one
afternoon they spotted forty tornados just outside of okla city (and around chickasaw, where my friend lived at the time).
tornados love okla because of the wide open spaces. and because there are so many tornados, if you ever sign up for a tornado
hunting trip, you'll more than likely end up in okla. either u of o, or olka state u has a weather program for that very reason.
living in okla is the reason i don't have a fear of storms. because every thunderstorm is violent, and on an average day, the "wind
comes sweeping down the plain" at an average 25-30 mph gusts. walking in downtown ok city takes real stamina. the wind blows so
hard around the tall buildings, that one has to practically hang on to walls just to get around. it's not surprising that they've
built extensive underground shopping/eating/entertainment catacombs.

once you go past ok city, the landscape begins to flatten out, and resembles the prairies of texas.

as we left ok city, my oldest sister and i insisted we get to eat at one of our favorite spots. ummmm, yummy. we both love our
del rancho. it's like sonic only better and older. the same one is still in the same place from when i was a kid. and used to, every
trip to ok city meant an old-fashioned hambuger from del rancho.

(picture coming forthwith)


ok, well, i've rambled on enough...ya'll have a good one!