Chickasaw Artist Kristen Dorsey Advocates for Native American Representation

Members of the Crow Nation arrive at Standing Rock

As most of you know, last November hundreds of Native American Water Protectors were gathered with members of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe near the Cannonball River in North Dakota where they attracted global media attention for bravely facing off against authorities and contractors to oppose the construction of a section of the Dakota Access Pipeline that would encroach on sacred tribal lands and threaten the fresh water supply for thousands of people in the region.



It is recognized by many as the largest gathering of Native American protesters in U.S. history.

And in many ways it was an awakening of both conscience and spirit.

Not just for the 566 different tribes recognized by the federal government, but for thousands of indigenous peoples around the world and millions of non-indigenous people in America and in other nations around the globe.

Set against the backdrop of the collective shock of the election of Donald Trump, the Standing Rock protests were also a timely reminder of the immense power of peaceful protest, non-violent resistance and the freedom of expression - principles enshrined in the bedrock of American values.

For young and old alike it was a lesson in the importance of standing up for what's right, even in the face of seemingly overwhelming odds - especially in a nation where the power of financial institutions, corporations, conservative political interests and the 1% seems to have grown exponentially.

While there was extensive media coverage of the Standing Rock protests, particularly the unforgettable images of members of law enforcement and private security using dogs, rubber bullets, water from hoses and other means to try and subdue peaceful unarmed protesters, too often it seemed as if the actual voices of indigenous peoples were lost or even somehow secondary to those images.

Now obviously there was media coverage of what the protesters wanted in terms of stopping the pipeline construction, but from my perspective, in many instances the mainstream media rarely dug under the surface into what brought those protests into being.

Chickasaw Artist Kristen Dorsey

Or what it was that drew hundreds of people from other tribes in different parts of the U.S. (and from tribes in other countries too) to travel hundreds or even thousands of miles to a remote stretch of North Dakota to stand side by side with the Standing Rock Sioux.

For those interested in understanding more about the broader protest movement taking place in indigenous communities across America, the critically-acclaimed Viceland recently premiered a new series airing Fridays at 9pm called Rise.

Just go to the Viceland Website to see clips or watch episodes for free online.

The first two episodes probe deeper into the Standing Rock Protests and offer insight mainstream media didn't take the time to cover.


That said, I thought it would be appropriate to follow up my previous blog about the environmental impact of new pipeline construction in America and switch gears by sharing the powerful words of the renowned Chickasaw metalsmith, jewelry designer, business owner, feminist, activist (and surfer!) Kristen Dorsey.

She's a really interesting and multifaceted artist and entrepreneur who designs and sells custom jewelry based on the themes, traditions, customs and imagery of traditional southeastern American indigenous culture where the Chickasaw once lived and thrived until being forcibly removed from their ancestral lands and moved hundreds of miles west by the U.S. government in the 1830's during what is commonly known as the "Trail of Tears."

Take a couple minutes to read an interesting interview Kristen did with author and blogger Kate Hart; it offers some insight into her work, life and advocacy for indigenous peoples and feminist empowerment.

And for you ladies out there, or guys looking for a gift for Valentine's Day, check out her Website to see some of the really cool jewelry she designs and sells.

She's got a few videos about her work on the Chickasaw Nation Video Network too if you want to learn more about what she does.

Oklahoma Rep. Tom Cole 

Last week my friend James shared a letter Kristen wrote to the Republican Deputy Majority Whip, Oklahoma Congressman Tom Cole, just over a week after Trump was elected president.

Cole is also a member of the Chickasaw Nation, one of only two Native Americans currently serving in Congress, and James felt strongly that Kristen's letter eloquently voiced the concerns and hopes of indigenous peoples across America.

People who understand that strong representation in this divided Congress is more critical than ever in the face of the threats posed to the environment, the welfare of indigenous peoples, Native American rights and tribal sovereignty by the Trump administration.

That said, here's the text of Kristen Dorsey's letter, I hope you'll take some time to read it as it offers insight into the goals and aspirations of the emerging indigenous protest movement in America and beyond.

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November 15, 2016

Congressman Tom Cole
4th District of Oklahoma
2467 Rayburn HOB
Washington, DC 20515

Dear Congressman Cole,

I would like to congratulate you on your many years of dedicated public service. Today I write to call on you to advocate for Native America within Congress. I understand that you are obligated to the general population of Oklahoma citizens, and not just your Native American constituents; however, it is the unfair burden of the few to represent the many when they are members of an underserved and underrepresented population.

I know that you are proud of your Chickasaw heritage and citizenship, and I know that a strong Chickasaw woman raised you to be so. I applaud and celebrate your political achievements, which give me hope that one-day more Native American voices will cry out within the walls of government. I know that we are mutually related through the bloodlines of Te Ata, who herself was an ambassador for Native People.

I call on you to hear me now. We are fighting for this land and our struggles are woefully underreported in mainstream media. Many Americans see us as extinct, absent, and conquered. Throughout history Chickasaw people have fought for our right to exist. Today our tribal Nation is thriving but my deep fear is for our future generations. They will inherit an Earth that is sick. It is sick with climate change, which is already resulting in massive ecological destruction, and increasingly dangerous natural disasters. The fossil fuel industry has left so many irreparable scars on our earth. Take for example the effects of fracking in Oklahoma. Man-made earthquakes are displacing your citizens. Take for example the Exxon oil spill, our elders cried that day because they saw our ancestral homelands in the southeast devastated by impending environmental effects that we don't even fully comprehend.

I fear for my unborn children. As I write this, thousands of Native People around the country are led by the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in demonstrations against the completion of the Dakota Access Pipeline. In the past few months, despite peaceful demonstrations at the construction site near the Cannonball river, our Native American brothers and sisters have been under assault by militarized police as they do everything in their power to protect sacred burial sites and a sensitive watershed from destruction. I urge you to view the on the ground footage of the violence waged against our water protectors by the North Dakota police. I also urge you to contact the Standing Rock tribal leadership to hear their perspective and gain a deeper understanding about the lack of tribal consultation over this project.

Your website states that you support pipelines because they are a safer way to transport crude oil. I hear your arguments, however, according to the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration in 2015 alone there were 715 pipeline incidents. I do understand that much of our economy is built on oil. I also understand that my children and children's children cannot drink contaminated water, or breath polluted air, or live in an ecosystem eroded by massive species die-offs due to rising temperatures. I believe that there are solutions and clean energy technologies which need research, development, and implementation. I also know that our Chickasaw Nation believes the same or Governor Anoatubby wouldn't have sent monetary support along with an official statement of support to the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe.

I urge you to re-evaluate your policies and set your political course to move away from the fossil fuel industry. Please actively consult the scientific and tribal communities and reach across the aisle to develop a sustainable energy plan with goals of reducing emissions and dependency on oil, both foreign AND domestic. I also urge you to advocate for the United States to honor our commitment to the Paris Climate Agreement. Every country must work together to save our planet for future generations. Our Chickasaw ancestors sacrificed so much for us. We must now make our own sacrifices for the sake of future generations. Leaders are the people who sacrifice the most and I understand that I am calling on you to make fundamental changes to your political platform, which has undoubtedly contributed to your political success thus far. I do not ask these sacrifices of you lightly. Our future generations need your voice now more than ever.

Chokma’shki,

Kristen Dorsey (Chickasaw Nation)

Plantations to Greenwood: Intolerance in The American Mainstream

Plantations tobacco shop in Oklahoma

The KKK marches to celebrate the election of a president-elect who named an overtly racist anti-Semite like Steve Bannon as a key White House policy advisor.

Republican fundraiser Betsy DeVos gets tapped as Secretary of Education, a billionaire with no experience in public school education with a dubious record of lobbying to shift Michigan taxpayer's dollars to poorly performing charter schools.

Lately it's kinda feeling like intolerance is going mainstream in this country.

Check out this photo my friend James sent me the other day,  he lives out in Oklahoma and he recently snapped this photo of a tobacco specialty shop in a mall near Oklahoma City called "Plantations."

Is intolerance going Main Street as well? Or is this a not-so-subtle pushback against what some see as "political correctness" in America?

James and I have been tight since we were classmates and became close friends at West Windsor-Plainsboro High School South back in the late 1980's.

Our initial bond over a shared passion for graphic novels and films eventually morphed into a professional creative partnership that endures to this day.

We both share a somewhat offbeat sense of humor marked by cynicism, as well as a similar political outlook, so when he texted me this photo the other day we both had a good laugh.

As two of the handful of ethnic minorities in our suburban New Jersey high school in the late 80's, James and I found a measure of comfort in one another's company based on our shared sense of cultural isolation in the (then) mostly-white community of West Windsor.

Slaves picking cotton on the Oak Valley Plantation
in Vacherie, Louisiana    [Getty Images]

So having (at times) been on the business-end of some not-so-nice acts of hostility, violence or ignorance related to our respective ethnicity growing up - we couldn't help but laugh at the idea of someone deciding to name their specialty tobacco store Plantations.

Now I really don't know much about this store in Oklahoma aside from the name.


It has a rather generic Facebook page which suggests that it has also branched into serving coffee as well (which was also grown on plantations), but undoubtedly the word plantation conjures different things to different people.

Journalist and writer Kelsey Minor offered an interesting perspective on plantations in an essay published on the Huffington Post back in 2015.

Given the context of the institution of slavery in this country, why would someone intentionally name a tobacco shop, or any other place of business, "Plantations?"

To provoke in order to tout an "anti-PC" perspective?

Scarlett O'Hara's slave "Big Sam" happily marching
off to labor for the Confederacy in Gone With the Wind 

Or simply to evoke some kind of sentimental memory of old tobacco plantations in the same way the 1939 film Gone With the Wind sought to romanticize the 19th century southern slave-plantation system in America?

Personally speaking I come from a cultural background where some of my ancestors harvested tobacco (and other crops) as part of the systematic indentured servitude of the horrific institution of slavery.



An institution based on the incalculable misery of enforced human bondage that was the backbone of the American agrarian economy in the 18th and 19th centuries.

My friend James' descendants were part of a vast culture that first introduced tobacco to European colonists back in the 16th century, in fact it was the explorer Columbus who became the first known European to "discover" tobacco when he recorded an entry in his diary after seeing a Native American in a canoe loaded with tobacco leaves on October 15, 1542.

James is an exceptionally talented professional illustrator and sculptor who makes his home with his wife within the boundaries of the 13 different counties that comprise the Chickasaw Nation.

The Chickasaw are one of the Five Civilized Tribes, Spanish explorer Hernando De Soto was the first European to make contact with them in 1540 during his exploration of the interior of the southeastern United States, when the tribe lived in areas of Mississippi, Tennessee and Alabama.

They lived in towns and had an organized system of tribal government by the time Europeans began expanding west in larger numbers in the 18th century.

The Chickasaw-owned WinStar World Casino  

Like other tribes such as the Cherokee and Seminole, the Chickasaw were forced to cede their traditional lands to the U.S. and were forcibly relocated Oklahoma in the 1830's; some 500 Chickasaw died along the  Trail of Tears.

Like some other tribes they also owned slaves, and brought them with them to Oklahoma.

Today the Chickasaw are a federally recognized independent nation of some 49,000 people.

James and his wife make their home in Ada, Oklahoma where the Chickasaw government is centered and oversees not just the land and people, but also a vast network of economic interests with a nearly $14 billion footprint that includes 18 different casinos and hotels and a wide array of businesses that includes radio stations, truck stops, gas stations, entertainment venues and of course, smoke shops.

So the Chickasaw know tobacco too, they were growing it for hundreds of years before the 1830's when they lived in the Mississippi valley and Tennessee; where their ancestors had lived for thousands of years.

So in a way that "Plantations" sign on the outside of that tobacco shop near Oklahoma, City is symbolic of some deep, unhealed wounds in this country.

Part of the 35 square blocks of Tulsa, OK destroyed
during the Tulsa Race Riots in 1921

For example James told me that outside of Ada there's a limestone quarry located on the site of what used to be a small town of freed slaves.

He said it was essentially destroyed and wiped off the map by enraged mobs of whites in the early 20th century in the same way that hundreds of African-Americans were killed in the Tulsa, Oklahoma neighborhood known as Greenwood in 1921.

To this day he said it's hard to get people in Ada to even talk about it.


The Tulsa Race Riots, as they are commonly known, were never taught as part of the American history I learned in school.

One of the worst incidents of racial unrest in U.S. history, they took place over the course of May 31 - June 1, 1921 when mobs of enraged whites, including Tulsa police, tore through the thriving black community and murdered hundreds of African-American men, women and children and burned 35 square blocks of some 600 black-owned businesses including 21 churches, 21 grocery stores, 2 movie theaters, a bank, a library, a post office, hotels, barbershops, and scores of private homes to the ground.

This massacre was documented in the 2008 book "Black Wall Street" by Jay Jay Wilson and Ron Wallace.

The area known as the Oklahoma Territory wasn't made a state until 1907, the approximately 15,000 African-American residents who lived in the Tulsa section known as Greenwood in 1921 were part of the thousands of blacks who migrated west to Oklahoma to escape the entrenched racism of the south during the late 1800's.

Dr. A.C. Jackson

Some had fled slavery as runaways, while some had come as slaves of the Chickasaw or other tribes during the Trail of Tears in the 1830's; some were feed blacks simply looking to make a new start.

Some came from other parts of the country, including Chicago, New York, Boston and Philadelphia seeking business opportunities in the thriving mid-west community that was once known as the 'Black Wall Street'.

Some residents were nationally recognized figures, like physician Dr. A.C. Jackson (pictured left).

According to the 2007 book 'Black Wall Street: From Riot To Renaissance In Tulsa's Historic Greenwood District', the Mayo brothers regarded hi as the most prominent black surgeon in the country at the time.

He was shot and killed trying to leave his home during the riots.



The Greenwood section of Tulsa was a prosperous independent black community attacked and destroyed by a cooperative effort by the KKK, local law enforcement, municipal and business leaders and private citizens - so there's a legacy of racial hatred and bigotry that still looms over Oklahoma.

And not just against African-Americans either.

For example, one of the events the Chickasaw produces, the annual Artesian Arts Festival, takes place in Sulphur, Oklahoma about 30 minutes from Ada.

James told me that he was walking around the festival with family and friends not far from the Chickasaw-owned Artesian Hotel when he saw a one of those chalkboard signs outside of a small local bar with the words "Two-For-One Pow-Wow Shots!" written in chalk.

He said the group all stopped and laughed about the absurdity of such a term being misused in such a demeaning and subtly racist way that made it a derogatory reference to Native American culture written on a sign during an event sponsored by the Chickasaw Nation that attracts scores of visitors.
   
One of the group went inside to speak with the bar's white manager about it, and he actually came outside and erased it from the board, which was cool but as James told me - didn't he realize that using the term "Pow-Wow" to sell shots during a Native American arts festival might be considered offensive?

Maybe the person who decided to name a tobacco shop Plantations didn't consider that either.