Had I gone to school in Iowa, perhaps I'd have known this guy, a headman named No Heart; after all, his people left their name behind when they went west and south. We're Iowans because of him--and them. But his descendants are a proud people, who live in Oklahoma, just outside of the town where my son's family lives, just across the Cimarron River.
When most white folks think of Native Americans, they think of a string of Lakota warriors in feathered headdresses, here and there a bear tooth necklace maybe, a gang of killers wielding bows or a Winchester, a fur shawl thrown over a shoulder, all of them riding paint ponies up atop the next grassy hill.
White folks think of fights and raids and fierce, devilish screaming, somebody butchering somebody else. The frontier is now more than a century behind us now, and what's left--the detritus of all of that history--is a collection of images that may well belong more identifiably to Hollywood than to history.
The Ioways don't fit the mold. No Heart may have distinguished himself for bravery, as the sign beneath his impressive statue maintains, but he did his fighting against his long-time foes, the Sauk and the Fox from the east, and the Dakota from the west, tribes who almost always outnumbered his. And against a host of illegal immigrants who simply pushed the Ioways out of their way.
That land was ceded to the government in 1824, then again in 1836 and 1838, and the tribe was given a reservation in Kansas, just ten miles wide and twenty miles long. If there was a "long walk" for the Ioways, a "Trail of Tears," it's not recorded, perhaps because their ranks had been so depleted (there were less than a thousand already when Lewis and Clark met them) that they were too often too easily raided and thus looked toward Kansas and eventually Oklahoma reservations as safe zones.
To say the Ioways wanted to go to Indian Territory is dead wrong. For them, as with other smaller, less war-like tribes, Indian Territory (Oklahoma) was at least something of a safe haven.
All of which means that No Heart's bravery--as the sign says--may well have less to do with outright, bloody warfare than with the kind of negotiations he did for his people with the white folks whose ever-increasing presence made traditional tribal life impossible. There are, after all, more ways to maim a people than bloody warfare.
Just happened to run into No Heart yesterday--a strikingly proud figure--while I was being jerked along by a rambunctious five-pound Pomeranian. No Heart's presence is daunting, but his story--and the story of his people who left their name across an entire state--is more complex than Hollywood--or most of us--can handle.
Greeted him here just yesterday here, a fellow Iowan, in Perkins, Oklahoma, his people's home. Made me proud.
1 comment:
Thanks for this informative piece,so typical of most Native tribes. America doesn’t begin to know their stories, and frankly most don’t really care all that much. I’m afraid this is true of our Christian community also. I commend you brother, for telling us about these people, from whom we can learn so much if we made the effort. I count it a privilege to have lived in their midst for 23 years, and often speculate that I learned more from them than they did from me.
Your piece reminds us of the enormous diversity even among Native people, and there was never a Native unification movement that lastest, and likely never will be. The tales of troublesome neighboring tribes are often told by the elders—at least so I am told. (I do stand to be corrected).
Yet, one of the most important books I ever read was entitled “Modern Indian Psychology” by Father John Bryde, a one time priest to the Lakota. He identified 5 great Native values that seems to cross all their cultures—Sharing, Respect for Indian Wisdom, Respect for Creation, Individual Freedom and Bravery. I saw these lived out even in the lives of my students 50 years ago, and it was an honorable witness.
Ron Polinder
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