Edd’s Land: A Novel of Four Cherokee Brothers in Early Oklahoma, a novel by Stan Rice, part two. Edd Making the Best of It, continued

Author Stan Rice has just published the third of three novels (Edd’s Land) in the series Trail of Tears: Novels of Cherokee Identity. Because Kindle has unreliable availability and formatting, the author has also posted a free PDF download ). This second novel is about four Cherokee brothers in early Oklahoma.

Here is Rice’s summary from Kindle:

Four mixed-blood Cherokee brothers, and the white swindler who steals their land and oil allotments, greet Oklahoma statehood in different ways. Edd Hicks loses not just his land but his fiancée to Averd Hargrove, a Claremore banker. Edd remains confident and upright, and brings order to his farmland and family. Frank Hicks learns confidence as he plots his dramatic revenge against Hargrove. Lon Hicks leaves his past behind in pursuit of a failed Hollywood career. William Hicks is ill with tuberculosis when he meets the great Oklahoma socialist crusader Kate Barnard. Frank, to the disapproval of his racist family and friends, falls in love and moves in with Bert Hicks, a black woman descended from slaves owned by Frank’s ancestors. Frank nearly gives up on his plan to scalp Hargrove until he sees Hargrove leading a lynch mob against Bert’s brother. The net effect of the vast wealth of the former Cherokee Nation is that Edd’s daughter Nina finally gets enough money back from the United States government to buy a new pair of shoes.

Each adult Cherokee received a land allotment on which to establish a farm. It sounds simple and fair enough, and Edd was willing to make the best of it. But it was the white guardians who had actual legal control over the land, which means they could sell it and keep the money for themselves. They usually did this by having the Cherokee land recipients declared legally incompetent. Clearly nobody could do this to Edd Hicks, who was highly educated by rural Oklahoma standards.

But Edd saw what happened to other Cherokees, including his own brothers (see later essays). White government officials continued to steal land from Natives long after the last shots were fired in the Indian Wars. In one case, Native children who owned land worth millions of dollars (due to oil reserves under the land) were living in a tree, while their guardians lived as wealthy men. This is a shameful part of American history that is almost never taught in courses.

But Edd, an upright man who believed he was doing God’s will, made the best of it.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 5. Rock Bunnies

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles, Light Apparel, Flow of Blood, Wisdom Builds Her House (all reviewed earlier in this blog), Rock Bunnies (reviewed here), Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

In Rock Bunnies, once again, Rice takes an idea from the fiction of H. G. Wells, in this case from The Time Machine. In Wells’s novel, the human species has evolved into two: the infantile Eloi and the shabby but hard-working Morlocks, as different as any two animal species. In Rice’s story, the Urbanites are rich white technologists who have evolved into a slightly-different race that lives in artificial cities, while the dark poor Rock Bunnies live in places the whites have destroyed. This story is set in the Black Hills, which (as anyone visiting Mt. Rushmore knows) is currently covered with pine trees, but in this story, set in the future, is a desert. The Rock Bunnies leap from cliff to cliff and live off of mountain goats and little clumps of edible wild plants.

A white Urbanite graduate student out in the desert sees a Rock Bunny who, as they almost never do, fall from a cliff and injure herself, perhaps mortally. He wants to rescue her but her fellow Rock Bunny vandals have destroyed his car, and he becomes their captive. The Rock Bunny woman, however, is the niece of their chief. They develop a friendship, and the chief—whom they call the Scientist, because he keeps the spirit of science alive among his people—wants the white man to stay with them as his son-in-law.

In this view of the future, which is otherwise bleak, Rice shows that this tribe of Rock Bunnies reveres science and its practitioners. Nice fantasy.

An Urbanite helicopter comes and finds the white man. The white man assumes it is to rescue him. In this, he is quite wrong.

As in other stories in this collection, Rice makes a strong case that altruism—the evolutionary basis of love—is the most important human adaptation. This is the message of both science and religion. As in many other Rice stories, there is also the theme of racism.

Blood-Brain Barrier: Stories from the Borderlands of Science, story 3. Flow of Blood

This collection of short stories by Stan Rice, who is also the author of nonfiction books of popular science and science novels, takes the reader to the frontier between science and worlds of the impossible. Readers of my science blog will appreciate the creative telling of scientifically impossible stories; readers of my religion blog will appreciate the question of whether, even if these things were possible, would they be good?

The stories in this collection are The Man Who Could Work Miracles and Light Apparel (reviewed earlier), Flow of Blood (reviewed here), Wisdom Builds Her House, Rock Bunnies, Entropy, Olga the Science Cat, Doghouse, and Fresh Air.

 

 

In Flow of Blood, the science is not impossible, as was the case with the two previous stories. It is about a viral fever killing people in Africa, including graduate students trying to stop it. As I write these words, the ebola virus is spreading almost uncontrolled in the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Perhaps the most important plot component of this story is racism. The white male grad student was raised to be a racist, until he meets and loves a black female grad student from Africa. He goes with her to study and fight the disease in her birth village. He becomes ill, and she goes back to Kansas to be with him. His family at first rejects her, thinking that Africa is where all viral diseases come from. But they have just suffered another loss: another son has died of a viral fever, but this time it was the American hantavirus. This shared experience of death brings them together.

Medical science is not just about germs and medicine, but about the struggles and perils of real people. And sometimes it takes a medical tragedy to bridge the gulf of racism.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part two.

This novel, which I introduced previously, introduces some very serious issues, even though the author treats them with humor.

First, racism. Rea and her mother are full-blood Cherokee, while Earl is a white racist. (He obviously wasn’t when he first married the mother. Rice leaves this unexplained.) The way Rea describes it, white people see Native Americans as “dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the rez in flyover country.” Can’t get much worse than this, can it?

Yes, it can.

Not only is the racism contemporaneous but extends also into the past. Most white people (as Rea explains, echoing the words of Rice’s nonfiction book Forgotten Landscapes) see Natives as, at least in the past, savage hunter-gatherers. But many tribes, including Rea’s Cherokee tribe, fed large populations from big farms, and lived in big cities—some of them the biggest in the world a few centuries ago. Whites see themselves as not only being but having always been the forefront of civilization.

And there’s more. The adoption of Native children by white parents sounds like a good idea, only it resulted in the erosion of Native cultures, even when the white parents had the best of intentions. The 1978 Indian Child Welfare Act directly addressed this problem. You can read about it in at least two novels by Barbara Kingsolver.

The second issue is the oppression of women. Earl is not only violent toward Rea but also intends to rape her—and would have, were it not for the intervention of poison ivy. One of the reasons Rea loves Marten is, as she says, “You know how to grab a woman by the part of her body that matters most—her brain.” Rea becomes something of a heroine among women and among Cherokees, although she was just trying to live her life.

River Weeds: A Novel of Love, Lust, and Poison Ivy, part one.

How could you resist a book with a title like this?

Here is the author’s summary from the Amazon website:

“Marten, a young scientist, meets Rea, a stunningly beautiful young Cherokee woman who works at her family’s convenience store. To their mutual surprise, Marten and Rea kiss within minutes of meeting. Her bitter white stepfather, Earl, forbids her to get an education. But Marten discovers Rea’s secret place down by the river where she reads and writes. This soon becomes their love nest. Marten helps Rea get involved in his research on poison ivy. She keeps a vial of urushiol, the active ingredient in poison ivy sap. Marten and Rea get married.

“Rea knows her stepfather intends, someday, to rape her. Only someday is now. Earl removes the bolt from Rea’s bedroom door. She and her mother decide to move in with Marten right away. They go to Earl’s house when they think he is away, but he is there and tries to rape Rea. During the commotion, Rea pours the urushiol extract into Earl’s whiskey, which he drinks. Urushiol takes a couple of days to induce inflammation. When Earl later pursues Marten into the swamp, he falls in and drowns because the inflammation—from inside his throat—has closed off his breathing.

“Police investigations slowly piece the story together. The Cherokee tribal defense attorney at the preliminary hearing claims Rea acted in self-defense, but the District Attorney establishes that urushiol acts slowly—a couple of days—thus Rea’s act of keeping the urushiol in her drawer was premeditated. Despite the background of vocal tribal support, Rea goes on trial for manslaughter.”

Like other Stan Rice novels, this one has a lot of science in it, but in a fun way that most readers can understand. And it also tackles some big questions—another feature typical of Rice novels. Come to think of it, I have never seen a Stan Rice novel that you can just sit back and leave your brain off the hook. As a reader of this blog, you might like this.

Is there such a thing as True Love? Or Love At First Sight? Most scientists would say no. Among them are the offbeat, weird mathematicians Conway and Thurman, and the narrator, Marten, a botanist, all of them at Drury College in Springfield, Missouri. Conway and Thurman figure out the incredible mathematical odds against the existence of True Love. And it is a calculation that readers can understand, not just something like Spock coming up with a probability estimate as if by magic.

No such thing as True Love? At least, this is what Marten thinks until he meets Rea and instantly falls for her. And she for him. They seem as different from one another as anyone can be: he is an academic, she works at an interstate C-store. But it turns out this poor woman has an insatiable thirst for science and nature; she just has never had the opportunity to pursue it, other than secretly reading books of which her bitter white stepfather Earl disapproves. You know, evolution and all that. As quickly as she falls in love with Marten, she also realizes he might be her escape from Earl.

So the conflict and plot are set up right away. Marten loses Rea almost as soon as he meets her. How far would you go to find someone you had just begun to love a few minutes previously? And then he has to rescue her from her oppressive life.

I think the readers of this blog would enjoy a novel in which scientists are real people, and non-scientists are frequently smart too.

The Princess of Kashgar: A Historical Romance about a Neglected People

Historical romances are often set in exotic locations, but not too exotic. One group of people that gets overlooked in fiction, and non-fiction, in the English-speaking world is the Uyghurs of central Asia. Central Asia itself, a land of dusty hills and sheep, gets overlooked except in fiction about Marco Polo. And right now the Uyghurs desperately need our attention and respect. They live primarily in the extreme northwest of China, where the Chinese government is trying to force them to abandon their culture and assimilate into the dominant Han culture. About a decade ago, they were in the news because China had begun re-education camps to this end.

But Stan Rice’s novel The Princess of Kashgar takes place within this neglected Asian culture.

This is the author’s summary of the novel from the Amazon website:

“Arzu is a beautiful young artist from a Uyghur village near Kashgar, on the Silk Road. She is accustomed to being admired, especially by Muhemmet, who leads a revolt against the ruling Mongol Empire. The Mongol warriors kidnap Arzu, planning to take her to Xanadu for Kublai Khan. But she and her mandarin lover Tao escape to a secret paradise in the Altai Mountains, the Valley of the Peach Blossoms. They unintentionally corrupt this paradise. Expelled, they go to Xanadu, where Arzu becomes not only Kublai’s favorite woman but also his close confidante. Only Arzu can keep the Mongols from destroying Kashgar. The Khan then wants Arzu to go back to Kashgar and assassinate Muhemmet. Still unsure if she wishes to join Muhemmet’s rebellion or obey the Khan, she finds Muhemmet and takes a dagger with her into his bedroom. Her assassination attempt fails, and the Mongols slaughter her people. When the Khan dies, Arzu and Tao flee back to the mountain paradise that may or may not accept them.”

 

 

The author has taken on a very difficult literary trope: a paradise hidden in the mountains of Asia. It is almost a cliché, which sounds like the Shangri-La of James Hilton’s Lost Horizon. The Shangri-La trope is itself enough reason for some people to put down the novel without even looking at it. But wait. It all depends on how the author handles it. Hilton’s novel was not actually about the people living in Shangri-La; it was about the Europeans who fly into it in an airplane and meet a wise old man, who turns out to himself be European. The native Asian people themselves play no part in Hilton’s novel except they raise the food and provide sex. Hilton’s Lost Horizon therefore falls into the same racist category as H. Rider Haggard’s She and William Henry Hudson’s Green Mansions: a true lost paradise, whether in Hudson’s South America or Haggard’s Africa or Hilton’s Himalayas, must have begun as an outpost of white civilization. It is time for this racist trope to end. The author of Princess of Kashgar has given us an indigenous Asian paradise, based upon Chinese legend.

The novel The Princess of Kashgar has filled an overlooked spot in the map of historical romance.

Breathtaking Racism in Modern America against Native Americans

I have just published my sixth book, Forgotten Landscapes: How Native Americans Created Pre-Columbian North America and What We Can Learn from It. I am starting a series of essays and videos to promote portions of this book. You can find more information about this book and these videos in my science blog.

 

When you hear about racism in America, you usually think of white racism against black people. More recently, racism against Hispanics have been in the news, since being Hispanic makes you a possible illegal alien, until proven otherwise. Once in a while you hear about racism against Asian Americans. And, of course, immigrants from every country in the world, except the very white ones, face discrimination.

But there is one group about which you hear less often, the largely-silent victims of racism: the Native Americans. Natives are underrepresented in reportage and in fiction. Many if not most Americans think of Native Americans as dirt-colored drunks passed out in the ditch on the Rez in flyover country. Most Americans who have this image of Natives say this with pity, rather than with scorn, the way true racists would say it.

I can write these things because I am a member of the Cherokee tribe, with my lineage completely documented. And I build my book, Forgotten Landscapes, around ten generations of my family’s history.

Perhaps the major part of the racism against Native Americans is that most Americans (assuming themselves to not be racist) believe Natives were hunter-gatherers prior to the coming of European “civilization.” The racists would say “savages” instead of “hunter-gatherers.” Those who consider themselves non-racist would say that there was (or is) nothing wrong with being a hunter-gatherer.

Many people even think that the European-white American conquest of Natives was a blessing, because it replaced a miserable savage condition with a happy, white civilized condition.

But this perception of Natives is about as wrong as it can possibly be. The factual basis upon which anti-Native racism is based is just simply wrong. Not just offensive, but factually incorrect. Some tribes, it is true, were hunters and gatherers. But many tribes—such as the Cherokee tribe from which my family comes—were not hunter-gatherers.

Native Americans had large cities before European contact, and by the time Columbus came these cities had shrunk into large villages, but they were still connected by strong continent-wide trade networks. There were millions of healthy well-fed people who were able to resist Viking invasions (which nobody else did) and would have resisted later European invasions had it not been for European diseases such as smallpox, and European guns.

Native Americans transformed the North American landscape by the controlled use of fire, by skillful group hunting, by agriculture, by irrigation, and even by planting orchards. The whole face of “wilderness America” was an artificial product of Native activities.

I’m not talking about Aztecs and Incas and Mayas here—regarding whom everyone has heard—but the civilizations of North America, which reached their peak around 1200 AD. It has been erased from history, and from the landscape, by racist assumptions. You can hardly find any remnant of it anymore; we don’t even know what they called themselves, or which tribes still in existence are their descendants.

We are here; we have been here longer than any other group; and we had an important impact on the American landscape, until we were decimated by Europeans starting in 1492. You need to know this about us. Too often, people look right at us and do not see us.

These are big claims, I realize, but I explain and document each of them in my book, which I encourage you to read.

Race and History, As If You Needed Another Example: Jackson Barnett, part one.

If there is one thing that conservatives are proud of in America, it is that rich people can do whatever they want with their money, so long as it is not criminal, and then maybe even if it is. But this rule did not apply to people of color. In particular, Native Americans were regarded by the white governments (federal, state, and county levels) as being childishly imbecilic and unable to decide what to do with their own money.

When the federal government sent the Five Tribes (including my tribe, the Cherokees) to what became Indian Territory and later Oklahoma, they guaranteed by treaty that the land belonged to the tribes. For example, a large part of what is now northeastern Oklahoma belonged to the Cherokee Nation.

The Cherokees, like the other Five Tribes, considered that they owned the land as a tribe, not as individual landowners. The white authorities did not like this. It was too communist. They decided they would force the Natives to become capitalists. With the Dawes Act of 1887 and later the Curtis Act of 1898, the Five Tribes were required to have their tribal land divided into individual allotments for each tribal citizen, including minors. This may not sound unreasonable in itself, but it was a solution in search of a problem. So why did the white federal government do it?

They did it for two reasons. First, when they divided up the land into allotments, of which my grandfather Edd Hicks got acreage in section 26N township 17E, the total acreage of the allotments did not add up to the tribal territory. That is, there was land left over—which the government could sell. Second, the government could then control what each tribal citizen did with their land. There were restrictions.

For Natives with one-sixteenth or less blood quantum, there were no restrictions. Edd was about one-quarter, but he registered as one-sixteenth so that he would have no restrictions. For Natives with one-half or more blood quantum, they were restricted from selling the allotment or anything pertaining to it, which would include mineral (oil) rights. Their allotments had to be managed by guardians, as if the Natives were children who did not know how to take care of themselves.

Guardianship, as you might expect, was considered necessary for minor orphans. They really did not know how to manage their land. Guardians were supposed to take care of the land until the orphans grew up, then let them have it. The guardians could charge a reasonable service fee for the work. The national average for guardianship was 3 percent of the value of the property. In Oklahoma, it was on the average of 20 percent and in some cases 80 percent. Meanwhile, the orphans in many cases received no money at all from the sale of oil from their land. The guardians who practiced this method were known as grafters, and in Oklahoma in the early twentieth century this was a term of pride. Sixty thousand Native minors in Oklahoma owned $129 million in property. Some of the guardians had 200 to 300 wards. Two Creek children had land that was worth $250,000. They lived—and died—in an orphanage that was mysteriously dynamited. Then the guardian handled their probate. Guess who got the money.

The crusading reformer Kate Barnard, who ran the Department of Corrections and Charities, and who was one of the few honest people in the Oklahoma government, found out about it during her routine inspection of the living conditions of orphans. She found some Creek Indian children living in a tree, drinking from a stream, and living on handouts. She vividly described having to take scissors and cut out matted filth from their hair. These kids were millionaires, but they didn’t know it because their guardian, who had sixty other wards, did not tell them. He just kept the oil money. Kate spent the last part of her life trying to bring the grafters to justice. While she had been popular for her crusades to improve conditions in orphanages and prisons, she met with hatred from Oklahoma and county governments when she tried to rescue the Native orphans from grafters. This broke her health and she died without having finished her work. You can read all about it in the wonderful new biography by Connie Cronley (A Life on Fire: Oklahoma’s Kate Barnard).

In other cases, oil executives hired people to kidnap the minors and take them someplace where no one would recognize them. It was not, as far as I have heard, violent kidnapping. According to Cronley’s book, one of the oil executives who did this was Thomas Gilcrease, best known as the benefactor of the museum that bears his name in Tulsa. It is hard to, even today, think of any name more revered in Tulsa even by progressives than that of Thomas Gilcrease. But he hired someone to take a rich Creek orphan to England and get him to sign his oil rights to Gilcrease. More about Gilcrease in a later essay.

But it was not long before the federal, state, and local governments figured out that all they had to do was declare adult Natives to be mentally incapacitated in order to appoint guardians for them, who would decide what to do with the land. This was fairly easy to do, since state and county officials all believed that all Natives, even adults who were successfully running their farms, were mentally incapacitated. If Edd, who was smart enough to be on school boards and could raise any crop and any kind of livestock, would have been deemed incompetent if his land had oil on it.

This is the plot of the 1949 movie Tulsa (“the lusty, brawling saga of a city of adventure”), starring Susan Hayward, Robert Preston, and Chill Wills. Jim Redbird, the rightful Muskogee owner of oil land, played by Pedro Armendáriz, was declared mentally incompetent by a judge. When he looked at the oil extraction and cracking on his land, for which he was receiving no money, and which spilled flammable pollution all over the ground, he touched a cigar to the hydrocarbons and burned up the oil rigs. This is one of the few early movies that shows Natives fighting back against white oppression. Perhaps oblivious to the fact that this movie was showing white Oklahomans engaging in criminal acts, Tulsans welcomed Hayward and Preston to their city and celebrated the opening of the movie. Tulsa grew as “the miracle city” directly because of the discovery of oil, and almost all of its early twentieth century philanthropists were oil men. To what extent the most famous of them might have profited from illegal acquisitions from the Muskogee Creek tribe, and to what extent the artistic culture of Tulsa is still dependent on that money (aside from Gilcrease), is something that few people, if anybody, knows anymore.

And this is exactly what happened to a Creek Native named Jackson Barnett. The reason this essay is on this blog is that racism has no scientific basis. See part two, to be posted soon.

No Such Thing as Truth

It used to be, decades ago, the political left that believed in factual relativism. There are still a few examples today. But now factual relativism has become a characteristic of nearly the entire political Right. Truth is whatever they claim it to be, regardless of evidence: either the lack of evidence to confirm their beliefs, or encountering evidence that contradicts them.

The most famous recent example of this is that Donald Trump claims that he got more votes than Joe Biden. Despite a complete lack of evidence, millions of Americans still claim that Trump actually won the election. I have nothing more to say about this in what I wish to keep a short essay.

But recently, in rural Oklahoma where I live, a new example has surfaced. In McCurtain County, sheriff’s office audio recordings show law enforcement officials glorifying the old days in which they could lynch black people. So be warned: if you are a person of color and live in or come to Oklahoma, there is a significant minority of law enforcement officers who would be perfectly happy to see you killed. Thankfully, most law enforcement officers do not feel this way.

The reaction was swift. Protestors assembled outside the county courthouse in McCurtain County. Even the famously extremist Republican governor of Oklahoma called for these law enforcement officers to resign.

But McCurtain County had a different response. They claimed that the recordings were fake. Who made them? No answer. Who even could have made them? No answer. How could anyone have faked the recordings, giving them the voices of actual officers? It was simply some unspecified vague liberal conspiracy to embarrass McCurtain County racists.

As a scientist, I live by evidence. No society can operate, and no laws can be enforced, if evidence is just something that you can make up, the way the extreme political right is doing nearly all of the time.