Oklahoma Archives - Not Even Past

Rising From the Ashes: The Oklahoma Eagle and its Long Road to Preservation

On May 31, 1921, Greenwood, a district in Tulsa, Oklahoma crafted by Black business people and professionals, burned to the ground. After a young white girl accused Dick Rowland, a Black elevator attendant, of sexual assault, mobs of white vigilantes attacked this Black community and its citizens for what the white rioters perceived as an injustice against their women. Conservative estimates claim that by the melee’s conclusion some 1,000 homes were destroyed, dozens (if not hundreds) of lives were lost, and a remarkable number of businesses gone. One of the businesses razed in the chaos of the Tulsa Race Massacre was the Tulsa Star—the city’s first Black newspaper, established in Tulsa just seven years earlier. In 1936, E.L. Goodwin, a local Black businessman, bought the rights to the Tulsa Star, renaming it The Oklahoma Eagle.

The Tulsa Star, November 9, 1918 (via Newspaper.com)

Intertwined with the story of the The Oklahoma Eagle is my own story. My family moved to Oklahoma when I was an infant, so that my father could attend law school at the University of Tulsa. After graduating in 1999, my father’s first job was as a law clerk at Goodwin & Goodwin, Attorneys at Law. I grew up listening to the stories of Jim Goodwin, the son of E.L. Goodwin, and playing with his beloved Westie aptly named Justice. In the same building where E.L. Goodwin and his staff worked to publish, The Oklahoma Eagle, — at the time the only Black newspaper in the city of Tulsa — my father and Jim Goodwin toiled away at civil rights cases for indigent clients. These efforts to publish the paper were not without struggle. Four years before my father began working at Goodwin & Goodwin, it looked like the Goodwins were going to lose control of The Eagle.

A framed article discussing the Eagle’s financial struggles that hangs on the wall at The Oklahoma Eagle.(via author)

With determination and the support of local benefactors, The Oklahoma Eagle survived these financial struggles. In remembrance of the hard times and the faith that carried them through, the Goodwins constructed a hanging altar of sorts known as the “Wall of Faith,” which sits outside where my father’s office once was.

“The Wall of Faith” located at The Oklahoma Eagle offices (via author)

Many years later and after my father went into private practice, I returned to The Oklahoma Eagle in 2016, this time as a staff writer and legal intern with my father’s former partner, Jim Goodwin. Mr. Goodwin assigned me to cover local and national criminal justice matters because of my background in community organizing and newspaper writing with Saint Louis University’s student newspaper, The University News. That summer I wrote about topics ranging from the police murder of Ollie Brooks to the Orlando Massacre. However, these articles are not available online. As I discovered during my time at The Eagle, the paper lacked the infrastructure to enable digitization of the paper’s archive and current issues. To begin solving this problem, I worked with then-editor Ray Pearcey to create social media and a proper website for the paper. Still, I worried about the paper’s growing archive and how to preserve it. The Tulsa City-County Library had already microfilmed some of the older copies of The Eagle in the 1980s, but the vast majority of the paper’s near 100-year old archive remained either missing or in grave condition. After some quick research, I realized digitization is an expensive endeavor and certainly not one I could accomplish as a rising junior in college. So, I left The Eagle at the end of that summer and returned to school.

Fast forward another few years to the summer of 2019 and I am a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin. Mr. Goodwin approached me earlier this year and requested I return to The Eagle one last time to complete his dream of digitizing the paper. I had no previous experience with physical archives, much less with digitizing archives, but I have always enjoyed a challenge. When I arrived at The Eagle offices, I was not sure what to expect as I had never before seen the physical volumes of the paper’s archive. The room where the archives rest do not contain the conditions archives typically do such as climate-control, archival boxes, and an ordering system. Rather, the archive room has clear water damage and the papers lay unboxed with the thin protection of trash bags covering those that are not simply left open to the elements. Mr. Goodwin and his family have fought vigorously to keep the paper alive and in the meantime, some upkeep has fallen by the wayside. After seeing the condition of the archive, I knew we needed to act fast and protect this important resource of Black Oklahoma history.

From left to right: Ray Pearcey, former editor of The Eagle, pictured with Jim Goodwin and Chad Williams. (via author)

Immediately, I scoured the internet and consulted my colleagues about how to proceed. Eventually, I located an existing partnership between the University of North Texas and The Oklahoma Historical Society (OHS) to digitize old Oklahoma newspapers. I sent an email to the Director of the OHS’s Newspaper Digitization Program, Chad Williams, proposing we form a partnership. Williams responded enthusiastically and said the OHS had been waiting for The Oklahoma Eagle to approach them. I thought my work had been accomplished just two days into my summer-long stay at the Eagle. This was not the case. I had not anticipated the deeply emotional process necessary for Mr. Goodwin to let go of the paper, his father’s enduring legacy and ultimately, his own. For the remainder of the summer, we debated back and forth about everything, from the expense necessary to digitize the paper ourselves to the changing role of newspapers in society. Indeed, newspapers are a dying form—one more likely to lose than to make money. Mr. Goodwin wanted to find a mechanism for him to sell his archive, produce income to sustain the paper, all while maintaining control of it. Disabusing him of this as a way forward proved to be one of the most difficult tasks of my burgeoning career.

Ultimately, Mr. Goodwin agreed to the OHS’s offer to digitize The Oklahoma Eagle for free while allowing us to maintain copyright privileges. During the process of signing this agreement, we discovered that someone from the paper (this person’s identity is still unknown) had been sending a copy of The Eagle to the OHS for forty years. The OHS, unbeknownst to the paper, had been microfilming issues for all that time. This has made the digitization process much easier than expected. In August, Williams along with a team of researchers gathered the remaining physical volumes of the paper and have begun work to digitize them. They will be returning the physical copies in archival boxes, so that the copies might survive longer. According to the agreement, the digitized version of The Oklahoma Eagle’s archive will be made publicly available on The Gateway To Oklahoma History by 2021, the 100-year anniversary of the Tulsa Race Massacre. As Lead Archivist on the project, I am still working with both The Oklahoma Eagle and the Oklahoma Historical Society to ensure the seamless nature of this partnership.

Final agreement between the OHS and The Oklahoma Eagle (via author)

As the Greenwood community prepares for the centennial anniversary of the Race Massacre, the city of Tulsa is finally reckoning with its dark history of displacement and genocide. In 1997, the city of Tulsa first convened a commission to lead an excavation of suspected mass graves containing the bodies of those killed during the Massacre. For political reasons, that search never happened. Now, a second commission has formed and has been tasked with leading the search. This time, however, the Mayor and the Tulsa Police Department have labeled this work a homicide investigation. Working with a team of archaeologists, historians, local activists, and government officials, the Mass Graves Commission hopes to locate the bodies of those deliberately discarded and forgotten. The history of The Oklahoma Eagle and the history of the Race Massacre are part and parcel of one another. Hopefully, as the 100-year anniversary approaches, the work of the Commission and the work of the OHS can meaningfully pay homage to the lives and intellectual history lost to this tragedy. The Oklahoma Eagle stands as a testament to Greenwood’s rich legacy of endurance as the paper quite literally rose from its ashes.

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Who Put Native American Sign Language in the US Mail?

More on the Kiowa from our featured author of the month.

by Jennifer Graber

In 1890, a strange letter with “hieroglyphic script” arrived at Pennsylvania’s Carlisle Indian Industrial School. It was sent from a reservation in the Oklahoma Territory to a Kiowa student named Belo Cozad. Cozad, who did not read or write in English, was able to understand the letter’s contents—namely, its symbols that offered an update about his family. The letter provided news about relatives’ health and employment, as well as details about religious practice on the reservation.

Letter written using Kiowa sign language. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

While Belo Cozad understood the letter, Americans working at the school did not. Neither did reservation officials who saw the letter once Cozad returned to Oklahoma. Anthropologists working there sent a copy to the Smithsonian’s Bureau of Ethnology, where a staff member set out to understand it. Interviewed back on the reservation, Cozad provided “translations” of the letter. The anthropologists concluded that several Kiowas, though hardly all, knew this writing system. Although Cozad insisted that his parents and grandparents had long known the practice and taught it to him, the specialists concluded that it was of “recent origin.”

Letter written using Kiowa sign language. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The anthropologists were partly right. The system had only recently been put on paper. But the gestures and signs that inspired it, recently labeled by non-Natives as Plains Indian Sign Language, had been used by Kiowas for generations. Indeed, one of the Smithsonian workers likely recognized it from earlier work on Native signing systems. The marks on Cozad’s letter mimicked the signs for individual words. A circle followed by four loops signifies four brothers. Three horizontal lines stand for the number three. A box with vertical lines, followed by a swooping downward and then upward line, means that someone has been buried in a grave. Together, the signs tell Cozad that he no longer had four brothers, but only three. One had recently died and been buried.

Symbols relating the death and burial of Cozad’s brother. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

With this letter, Cozad’s family took an old form, Plains Indian Sign Language, and adapted it for their new situation. With the hope of reaching their kin in boarding school, they had put signs onto paper and placed it in the US mail.

Kiowas displayed a similar capacity to adapt older forms from the realm of religious practice. Ritual gatherings, especially their version of the Plains Indian Sun Dance, were threatened by declining buffalo herds and, eventually, military supervision and criminalization. Even so, Kiowas found ways to adapt their Sun Dance rites to new conditions, including purchasing buffalo hides from Texas ranchers and choosing ceremony sites far away from government supervision.

They also experimented with new sources of sacred power. Between 1868 and the end of the century, some Kiowas borrowed peyote rites from neighboring indigenous peoples. Soon, Kiowas developed their own peyote songs and added peyote to the pantheon of beings and things imbued with power. Other Kiowas accepted the message of Wovoka, the Paiute leader of the movement that came to be known as the Ghost Dance. They danced with the expectation that relatives who had died and depleted buffalo herds would be restored. Still others considered Christian missionaries’ proclamation about Jesus as a powerful figure who provided healing in this life and heaven in the next.

Kiowa ritual life followed a pattern recognizable in the Cozad’s sign language letter, namely the adaptations of older forms for new and difficult situations. For generations, Kiowas had gathered to seek blessing, protection, healing, and empowerment from beings imbued with dwdw, or sacred power. At Sun Dances, these efforts focused on the sun and the buffalo. In other venues, Kiowas sought visions and healing that could be bestowed from powerful animals, plants, or places. Often, Kiowas presented offerings as they made supplications, or to signal their thankfulness when blessings were received.

In their letters, Cozad’s family took the long-practiced gestures of sign language and sent them across the hundreds of miles that separated the reservation and boarding school. Kiowa religious life exhibited a similar pattern. For the sake of connecting family and maintaining land in a desperate colonial situation, Kiowas sought new ways to engage sacred power. Even as they looked to new sources, they maintained the postures of supplication, the same tokens of thanks. Cozad’s letter included references to these new practices. The writers tell Cozad, through signs, that Jesus is looking down over all the tipis and beyond in the four cardinal directions.

Symbols show Jesus looking over the Native Americans. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

The relatives encourage Cozad to pray to Jesus. They also signal the diversity of religious forms among Kiowa people. At the letter’s end, through signs that stand for the moon and the morning star, the family relates that a fellow Kiowa has been out singing peyote songs.

Symbols relate how one Kiowa experimented with peyote rites. Used by permission from Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum.

In a period of unwelcome and devastating change, Kiowas did new things. They tried peyote rites and Christian prayer. They wrote letters and put them in the US mail. But all these things reflected older ways of being and doing. And all these things functioned to maintain family, kin, nation, and land in an increasingly perilous situation.

This article originally appeared on the OUPblog, May 9, 2018.

The Gods of Indian Country

by Jennifer Graber

In 1930, historian William Warren Sweet wrote that the “conquest of the continent” was America’s greatest accomplishment and its churches’ “greatest achievement” involved “the extension of their work westward.” Drawing on Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis about the importance (and closing) of the American frontier, Sweet’s classic and oft-read textbook identified westward movement as fundamentally important to American religion.Historians of American religions have rightfully turned away from Sweet’s conclusions. Indeed, since the 1960s the study of American religions has been transformed from a sleepy corner of the historical profession to what commentators have identified as an increasingly popular subfield. The scholarship now includes excellent monographs on long-neglected groups, oft-overlooked sources, and is shaped by theoretical insights from critical work on religion, race, gender, ethnicity, and labor. During the field’s much-needed transformation, the frontier faded into the background, at least for a time.

A new generation of scholars has returned to the frontier, bringing with them all the critical tools now available in the subfield. Rather than asking how religion fueled American expansion, they have investigated how the experience of expansion reshaped American religions, those practiced by both settlers and Native people. It’s within this new mode of writing that I set out to study the religious transformations prompted by the invasion and defense of lands inhabited by Kiowa Indians and later designated Indian Territory (and eventually Oklahoma) by Americans.

Americans got their first long-term experiences on Kiowa lands and engagements with Kiowa ritual activity when Quakers were assigned to administer the Kiowa, Comanche, and Apache Reservation in 1869. Ready to engage their fellow humans trapped in “heathen darkness,” Quakers distributed food rations, organized schools, and held meetings for worship among the reservation’s more than 5000 Native occupants. Quaker workers frequently mentioned Kiowa “superstition” as the greatest obstacle to their acculturation of Euro-American habits and assimilation into American life.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

Several years later, however, a Quaker administrator saw something he recognized as real religion. Kiowa elders and young men requested that he transcribe a petition for them. They were concerned that American buffalo hunters were devastating the herds. These hunters acted illegally and the Kiowa petitioners implored the federal government to stop them. In the petition, they claimed that Kiowas and the buffalo had been created together, to be like brothers. They argued that one could not live without the other. If the U.S. government failed to protect the herds, Kiowas would also die.

National Archives, Bureau of Indian Affairs

While Native claims about relations to other-than-human beings were hardly uncommon, the Quaker employee had no reference point for understanding such connections. But unlike dismissive attitudes he displayed earlier in his tenure, the Quaker seemed open to seeing something new. In his account of the proceedings, he referred to the “gravity” and “reverential feeling” of the smoking session held prior to the discussion. In a letter, he encouraged federal officials to act because the buffalo were a “matter involving [Kiowas’] traditional religious belief.” For years, this Quaker worker had witnessed Kiowa buffalo hunting, as well as their use of hides for tipis and meat for food. He had observed, and even sent troops to monitor, Kiowa Sun Dances, rites in which the people gave thanks for the buffalo. After these experiences, he eventually saw something “religious” where he had once seen only heathenish practices unworthy of the descriptor.

Similar to the Quaker’s change in perspective, American expansion shaped Kiowa ritual life. Around the same time as the buffalo petition, Kiowas struggled to maintain practices that had been central to them for generations. They held Sun Dances in summer, even as hunger beset them and federal officials sent troops to monitor them. Along with efforts to sustain older practices, Kiowas also considered new ritual options. While men who raided south into Texas and Mexico had long encountered Native peoples who engaged peyote as a source of sacred power, Kiowas had never adopted it as a regular practice. That changed in the 1870s. With their Sun Dances under scrutiny and people suffering from outbreaks of disease, Kiowas gathered for peyote meetings. Welcoming ritual specialists from other Indian nations, Kiowas brought the rites to the reservation and developed their own practices and songs. Within two decades, peyote practices were widespread among Kiowas.

The Ghost Dance of 1889-1891 by the Oglala Lakota at Pine Ridge. Illustration by Frederic Remington, 1890.

Eventually, Kiowas would consider two more ritual options from outside their own traditions. In the 1880s, the first Christian missionary arrived. Under the tutelage of a Kiowa man who studied in the East and received Episcopal deacon’s orders, a small number of Kiowas accepted baptism in the early 1880s. Affiliation with Christianity increased after a host of missionaries arrived in the 1890s. Around the same time, messages from Native neighbors told of a Paiute prophet who claimed the world could be renewed through dance. Called the Ghost Dance by Americans, the movement spread to reservations across the West. Kiowas adapted it their situation, using feathers to identify the movement, singing songs and dancing with the hope of restoring depleted buffalo herds and returning loved ones lost to hunger and disease. By 1890, Kiowas participated in older Sun Dance and healing practices, as well as peyote rites, Christian worship, and Ghost Dancing, all in the hope of sustaining their lands and people threatened by American occupation.

William Warren Sweet wrote that there was no more influential “fact” in the development of American religion than “continuous contact with frontier conditions and frontier needs.” No historian working today would make such grand claims. Events on the “frontier” must be considered in relation to American efforts to reconstruct the South, debates about Chinese immigration in California, labor disputes and unrest in the North, and legal conflicts over Mormon plural marriage and what constituted acceptable religious practice. Even so, encounters prompted by expansion played a significant role in reshaping the religious worlds of settlers and Native people. It lay at the heart of settler ideas about American civilization and it functioned as one more resource in the struggle for Native peoplehood, lands, and sovereignty.

Jennifer Graber, The Gods of Indian Country: Religion and the Struggle for the American West

and more on the book here.

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