0.1 Editor's introduction: on frank g. speck’s oklahoma and indian  (Page 3/4)

The Oklahoma Center for Community and Justice, with its goal of promoting tolerance and inter-community dialogue, is, at its core, an interfaith organization that has promoted cooperation among the adherents of the state’s diverse religions. It has been most successful in bridging Christian, Jewish, and Islamic communities, but has struggled to find ways to connect with those--particularly in native communities--who do not practice one of these world religions. Such organizations have also been most successful in cities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma City, and Norman. Such cities are more socially and culturally diverse than the smaller towns and rural areas that comprise the majority of state. These considerations of religious and social diversity together with the dynamics of urban, suburban, and rural settlement bring us to Speck’s other essays.

On the surface, “Creek Negroes,” “Creek Myths,” and “Creek Missions” all seem to relate solely to the complexities and history of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, one of the state’s many native nations. Strictly, and in terms of specific detail, this is true, but in actuality each of these essays evokes matters that are much more broadly relevant in the history and present-day circumstances of Oklahoma. Speck’s account of the Creek Freedmen speaks to the general circumstances these people shared with the Freedmen communities of the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and (to a lesser extent) Seminole Nations (Miles and Naylor-Ojurongbe 2004; Sturm and Feldhousen-Giles 2008). The complex and painful cultural, social, economic, political and legal struggles of these Freedmen communities are front page stories in present-day Oklahoma (Feldhousen-Giles 2008).

“Creek Myths” is an overview of the customary verbal art of the Muscogee (Creek) peoples. This oral literary heritage remains important to culturally conservative Muscogee people today and it is a source of inspiration for Muscogee authors and artists (Gouge 2004; Womack 1999). It also points to the cultural sharing that links the Muscogee people to their native and non-native neighbors. Many of the folktales that Speck heard in his travels among the Creek, Yuchi, and Chickasaw are shared not only among the region’s native peoples but are also central to the broad African American oral tradition. The stories of the trickster Rabbit are the best known manifestation of this regional and inter-ethnic tradition (Urban and Jackson 2004).

The observations that Speck makes in “Creek Missions” are about the disruptive ramifications of “on again, off again” Christian missionization, but they speak more broadly to the ways that the specific practices of European American colonization of the Creek Nation, whether intended as beneficial or as purposefully exploitive, resulted in manifold negative consequences that the peoples of the Creek Nation, and of Oklahoma more generally, had to struggle to find ways of coping with. Any sensitive observer of the state today would, I think, note that these struggles to find meaning, order, justice, and security are ongoing in a place where people live with not only the memory of, but the everyday effects of, a complicated and very difficult past. (For discussion of Christianity among the Southeastern Indian peoples--including the Muscogee (Creek) in Oklahoma, see Clark 2004.)