The Dawes Commission play

Creek language play premiering during tribal festival

By Leta Rector“The Dawes Commission,” the latest stage play by director and playwright Bob Hicks will have its world premiere 8 p.m., June 15 during the Muscogee Creek Nation Festival in Okmulgee.

“The Dawes Commission” is almost entirely in the Muscogee language with subtitles shown in Power Point.

“There are a lot of stories in Indian history that are harmful,” Hicks said. “This story about allotment has interested me for a long time.”

Set in 1904, the story focuses on a Muscogee family who is visited by an agent from the Dawes Commission. The agent’s orders are to persuade the Creeks to accept allotment.Comment:  For more on Native theater, see 2013 Festival of New Plays and Wood Bones Opens in New York.

Tom Cruise stole Indian land

Tom Cruise and the Indian Subprime Crisis

By Steven Paul McSloy[I]f we are going to understand Thomas Jefferson, we have to talk about Tom Cruise.

Why Tom Cruise? He is our biggest movie star and thus our biggest teller of the myths America tells itself, myths which can be powerful and difficult to root out from society and from the law.

One of Cruise’s lesser works, the 1992 film Far and Away, opens with Cruise as a young man in Ireland, as English soldiers have come to take his family’s land. His father is dying of a heart attack during the foreclosure, and he grabs Cruise by the lapels and tells him, “Hold onto the land.” Cruise then goes to America.

To digress for a moment, Ireland was the practice run for the New World. Elizabethan England sharpened its legal knives about dispossession in rationalizing their conquest of Ireland, characterizing the Irish as tribal, pagan, matriarchal and without a fixed conception of individual property. As the “discovering” sovereign and with the good fortune of reading John Locke on property (“Whatsoever then he removes out of the state that nature hath provided…he hath mixed his labor with, and joined to it something that is his own, and [he] thereby makes it his property.”), the English had legal arguments to dispossess the Irish, and this idea was carried in ships to America.

Far and Away ends with Cruise at the starting line of a land rush, about to race forward and claim some land in Oklahoma, following the guideposts laid forth by Jefferson. Indian land had been opened as part of the Allotment process, and he is going to fulfill his father’s dying wish by taking Indian land, irony notwithstanding.

The dramatic image of Cruise at the starting line, ready to bring progress to the continent, is easy to imagine upon reading Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall’s 1823 opinion in Indian law’s foundational case, Johnson v. M’Intosh:

“Conquest gives a title which the Courts of the conqueror cannot deny, whatever the private and speculative opinions of individuals may be, respecting the original justice of the claim.”Comment:  For more on the subject, see Flathead Homesteading Worth Commemorating?

Flathead homesteading worth commemorating?

CSKT Council pulls out of Flathead Reservation homesteading centennial celebration

By Vince DevlinReversing an earlier decision, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribal Council has elected not to participate in a commemoration this year of the 100th anniversary of the Flathead Indian Reservation being opened to homesteaders.

The decision will "significantly change" plans that were two years in the works, according to Lois Hart, president of the Polson Flathead Historical Museum.How the tribe feels:The federal government's decision to open the land to homesteaders, successfully fought for more than two decades by Chief Charlo before it happened in 1910, is certainly seen in different lights by reservation residents who are tribal members, and those who are not.

"There are obviously mixed feelings about it," Hart said in a 2009 interview with the Missoulian.The outrage of land allotment:Indian families were given first choice on 80- to 160-acre tracts of land. Some 2,460 signed up, but many more, upset that their reservation was being opened to white settlers, refused to participate.

Land left after the Indians had chosen their acreage was declared "surplus," and made available to nontribal members.Comment:  This land rush opened up a particular reservation to the white man's thievery. How is that something to celebrate or even commemorate? Rather, we should be condemning it as one of the many outrages perpetrated on Indians by the US government.

For a similar controversy in Oklahoma, see Countering Land Run Celebrations.

Below:  The Oklahoma land rush. "We're rugged, self-reliant individualists who pull ourselves up by the bootstraps. Now give us our free Indian land, dammit!"