Te Ata: Chickasaw Storyteller, American Treasure

In 1987, Te Ata (1895–1995) became the first person ever declared an “Oklahoma Treasure.” Throughout a sixty-year career, her performances of American Indian folklore enchanted a wide variety of audiences, from European royalty to Americans of all ages, and Indians from across the American continents from Canada to Peru. Richard Green’s beautifully written biography of Te Ata is based on extensive research in the artist’s personal papers, memorabilia, and the letters and photographs exchanged between Te Ata and her husband, Clyde Fisher.

Green,Richard

Humor & Entertainment

Chickasaw Press

Paul F. Lambert recounts the remarkable life of Pearl Carter Scott, child aviator, single mother, and revered Chickasaw elder. Born in 1915 and raised in Marlow, Oklahoma, Pearl Carter enjoyed a privileged childhood. Her white father was a gifted businessman who happened to be blind. Her mother was half Chickasaw and half Choctaw. When Pearl was twelve, she met Wiley Post, who was just beginning his aviation career, and he taught the adventurous young girl how to fly.
In this book, Paul F. Lambert recounts the remarkable life of Pearl Carter Scott, child aviator, single mother, and revered Chickasaw elder.
Born in 1915 and raised in Marlow, Oklahoma, Pearl Carter enjoyed a privileged childhood. Her white father was a gifted businessman who happened to be blind. Her mother was half Chickasaw and half Choctaw. When Pearl was twelve, she met Wiley Post, who was just beginning his aviation career, and he taught the adventurous young girl how to fly. After she turned thirteen, her father bought her an airplane and converted a pasture into an airstrip. She married at age sixteen, and by the age of eighteen, with one child and another on the way, she retired from flying—even though it had made her a celebrity.
Pearl and her husband raised three children, but the Great Depression and other circumstances dissolved the family’s fortune. Then a fire destroyed most of her and her husband’s belongings, and a few years later, she found herself divorced and poor. Yet Pearl maintained her positive outlook even during these difficult times. She turned to a life of service to the Chickasaw people and became a revered tribal elder who was inducted into the Oklahoma Aviation and Space Hall of Fame and the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame.

Never Give Up!: The Life of Pearl Carter Scott

Biographies & Memoirs

Lambert, Paul F.

Community & Culture

Arriving from the west ages ago, the people who became the Chickasaws settled in a portion of southeastern North America. As they were emerging from the Mound Builder culture into historical times, they became embroiled in the deadly quest of European colonial powers to extend their empires to the New World. By the 1730s, the Chickasaws were targeted for extermination. But, as Richard Green shows in Chickasaw Lives, the Chickasaw people survived and prospered. Then their one-time ally, the United States, became their adversary and forced the tribe to move west to Indian Territory. After several years of despondency, the people were again building a great nation. Simultaneously, however, a great horde of Anglo-Americans settled illegally on their new land. With some of those Americans clamoring for Oklahoma statehood, the U.S. government set a date to extinguish the tribe’s government and land base. Here for the first time is a selection of articles and essays that explain why that did not happen. Green explains how the tribe kept body and soul together until tribal government could be reconstituted and revitalized after the United States in the 1960s stopped attempting to vanquish tribal governments. The twenty-nine articles featured here are arranged chronologically from prehistory into the modern era. Topics include the Mound Builders, the epic battle with Hernando de Soto, European colonial manipulations and wars, Removal to Indian Territory, the land-allotment period, and the Chickasaw Nation’s revitalization in the second half of the twentieth century.

Chickasaw Lives: Explorations in Tribal History (Volume 1)

History

Americas

Edmund Pickens lived through a crucial period in Chickasaw history. During Removal in 1836, he traveled with his wife and children on the sad journey from the Chickasaw homelands to Indian Territory. Like other Chickasaws, he faced many hardships after settling in the new territory. But as Juanita J. Keel Tate shows in this first book-length account of Pickens’s life and times, he persevered and triumphed as a statesman and tribal leader.
Tate devoted forty-seven years to researching and writing about Pickens, visiting many courthouses in the Chickasaw homelands to locate early homesteads and Pickens family records. In Edmund Pickens (Okchantubby): First Elected Chickasaw Chief, His Life and Times, Tate describes Pickens’s service as a representative on several Chickasaw commissions that negotiated important treaties in Washington, D.C., and his work as a member of the delegation that signed the Treaty of Doaksville with Choctaw leaders in 1837. Pickens helped develop the 1856 Chickasaw Constitution and served in the Chickasaw Senate from 1857 to 1861. He signed the treaty of alliance with the Confederate States of America in 1861 and lived through the tumultuous period of the Civil War. Afterward, he served as a commissioner, negotiating the Reconstruction Treaty of 1866. Respected by the Chickasaw people for his devotion and trustworthiness, Pickens was the first elected chief of the Chickasaw Nation. With this insightful biography, Tate provides the testimony to Pickens’s character that this great leader has long deserved.
Juanita J. Keel Tate, ninety-eight-year-old Chickasaw elder, is noted for her considerable knowledge of tribal history and culture. A great-granddaughter of Edmund Pickens, Tate has been inducted into the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame and the Chilocco Indian School Hall of Fame.

Edmund Pickens (Okchantubby): First Elected Chickasaw Chief, His Life and Times

Keel Tate, Juanita J.

A collection of poems illustrating the cultural and familial experiences of a Chickasaw woman For Rebecca Hatcher Travis, writing a book of poems is similar to growing a pecan tree. Both take a long time to develop. For the poems in this exquisite collection, “the seeds were planted in childhood and earth, and blossomed with family and love.” Hatcher Travis bases her poems on memories of her Chickasaw family and the Oklahoma landscapes surrounding her as a child. The poems also are testimonies to the ancestors who have passed on to the next life. Featuring the poem Picked Apart the Bones, which won the First Book Award for Poetry from the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas.

Picked Apart the Bones

Literature & Fiction

Travis, Rebecca Hatcher

Poetry

A stunning collection of paintings of living Chickasaw elders In August 2004, Oklahoma Centennial project artist Mike Larsen approached Chickasaw Nation leaders with an idea to honor living Chickasaw elders―sages of his own tribe. He wanted to learn about their families and hear their stories, and he wanted to connect with their Chickasaw strength and spirit. Larsen’s vision was to paint a series of portraits of these elders. Accompanied by his wife, Martha Larsen, the artist began a creative process that turned into a personal journey. During the interviews, the Larsens were often treated like members of the elders’ families. They listened and learned what it means to be Chickasaw―what it means to “know who you are.” In the Larsen studio, carefully rendered sketches progressed from paper to canvas to yield the 24 remarkable paintings reproduced in this volume. Martha Larsen has written a richly detailed narrative, based on each elder’s interview, documenting his or her cultural beliefs, experiences, and history.

They Know Who They Are: Elders of the Chickasaw Nation

Arts & Photography

Larsen, Mike

Larsen, Martha

History & Criticism

The life of Woodrow “Woody” Crumbo (1912–1989) parallels the twentieth-century evolution of American Indian art. An accomplished Native dancer, flutist, silversmith, and poet, Crumbo is perhaps best known today for his oil paintings and silk screens—revolutionary artworks that were denigrated by some critics at first but that helped move Indian art to museums of fine art, as well as its markets. Now the life story of an Indian artist who often went against the grain is told by an accomplished Indian storyteller.
Chickasaw author Robert Perry’s interest in gathering and preserving elders’ stories from neighboring tribes prompted him to write this long-awaited biography. Starting with a suitcase full of newspaper clippings provided by Crumbo’s widow, Perry traced Crumbo’s first flowering as an artist from his studies at Chilocco Indian School, where he befriended several Kiowas who taught him about their dances and regalia and introduced him to the traditional Kiowa cedar-wood flute.
The book follows Crumbo from Chilocco to his studies at Wichita University and the University of Oklahoma, his years touring as an Indian dancer, and his position as director of art at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma. Later, Crumbo collaborated with Taos artists, helped organize Indian art exhibitions at the Gilcrease and Philbrook art museums in Tulsa, and directed the El Paso Museum of Art.
Uprising! Woody Crumbo’s Indian Art tells a compassionate and inspiring story as it fills a gap in the historical record regarding indigenous artists of the century just closed.

Uprising!: Woody Crumbo’s Indian Art

Perry, Robert

Volume Two features profiles of thirty-six tribal members, including an Olympic gold medalist, a recipient of the Congressional Medal of Honor, a Chickasaw Nation attorney general who rode with notorious outlaw Billy the Kid, and three Chickasaw governors who played crucial roles in the twentieth-century revitalization of the tribe.

Chickasaw Lives: Profiles and Oral Histories (Volume 2)

Douglas Henry Johnston was governor of the Chickasaw Nation from 1898 to 1902 and from 1904 to 1939. His tenure in this position is the longest of any American Indian chief executive. In this much-anticipated biography, Michael Lovegrove chronicles Johnston’s remarkable political life, telling the story of how he led his people—with diplomacy and efficiency—through the devastating dissolution of tribal lands at the beginning of the twentieth century and through the contentious struggles in the three decades that followed.
Drawing on a range of sources, Lovegrove shows the enormous impact Governor Johnston had on the development of the Chickasaw Nation. A mild-mannered, intellectually gifted statesman, he stood steadfast at the helm of his people, helping them navigate federal allotment during the Dawes Commission era at the turn of the century. In his capacity as the federally appointed Chickasaw governor after Oklahoma statehood in 1907, Johnston led the Chickasaw and Choctaw Treaty Rights Association, which successfully fought the State of Oklahoma’s efforts to tax allotment lands. The governor and his colleagues vigorously challenged these taxation initiatives in federal court, arguing that they violated the Dawes Act of 1887, the Atoka Agreement of 1897, and the Curtis Act of 1898. Fortunately, Johnston lived and led his people long enough to see new hope emerge in the Indian New Deal of the 1930s.
A valuable addition to the history of the Chickasaw Nation, this richly textured historical narrative reveals the tribulations and accomplishments of a great statesman.

A Nation in Transition: Douglas Henry Johnston and the Chickasaws, 1898-1939

Lovegrove, Michael

A rich pictorial profile of the twentieth-century Chickasaw experience When Oklahoma achieved statehood in 1907, the U.S. government declared Chickasaw titles to tribal lands null and void. The Chickasaw Nation was, in effect, legally abolished. Yet for the next sixty years, the Chickasaws struggled to regain their sovereign identity, and eventually, in 1970, Congress enacted legislation allowing the Five Tribes, including the Chickasaws, to elect their own governing officers. In 1983, the Chickasaws adopted a new constitution for their nation. In Chickasaw Renaissance, Phillip Carroll Morgan profiles the experiences of the Chickasaw people during this tumultuous period in their history, from the dissolution of their government to the resurgence of their nation. A sequel to the award-winning book Chickasaw: Unconquered and Unconquerable, this equally beautiful volume features more than 100 new images by celebrated Oklahoma photographer David G. Fitzgerald. His stunning portraits of tribal elders and numerous other subjects are supplemented by historical photographs from the Chickasaw Nation archives. To construct his narrative, Morgan drew on the extensive research of a team of scholars, who interviewed Chickasaw elders and provided valuable information from tribal archives. The result is an enlightening exploration of the impact of changing federal policies on the Chickasaws and other Native tribes of Oklahoma, and a tribute to the resilience of these peoples as they grappled with the major events of the twentieth century.

Chickasaw Renaissance

Morgan, Phillip Carroll

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