Looking at why our area has its unique political and religious attitudes.

Why would someone get an academic education to leave home and live in and assist another less-developed culture?

Understanding and accepting a different culture and the context of their world is one of the most difficult things about history and living with people. A society develops to assure their survival in their world.

Accepted norms and practices must be evaluated in the framework of that time.

The challenges of the clash between cultures are nowhere more evident than in the early settlement of Indian Territory. The struggle was not about right and wrong, but about different approaches to cultural survival.

The rapidly growing coastal people of predominantly European origin encountered the relatively small number of American Indians, who were native to the land.

Full disclosure is in order, to reduce the flak in our super-sensitive society. I am on the enumerated roll of a Native American tribe, with a documented, traced heritage through ten different tribes as far back as the 1680’s. Hey, people intermarried and cohabitated, just like now. A tribe is basically an extended family. My mother’s family was living here when my father’s English-Scots-Irish ancestors sailed up in 1720.

I am proud of both traditions and find it repugnant that a self-aggrandizing segment gets so upset over terms claiming to protect some perceived long-ago image. We are what we are now and our heritage was then. None of us want to go back living the way of our ancestors! I like air-conditioning.

Most of us are much more familiar with the European based history than the Native American, for very good reason, as we will see. The scenarios we will discuss are no more typical of all people than two people today are the same.

Most of the European culture were working-class people, struggling to get along, just like now. Census shows the vast majority of early settlers throughout America were dirt farmers, with an occasional fur-trader or merchant thrown in the mix. Their large family of children helped till the small family plot. Few had slaves, but saw slaves as competition to their little farm. Education was predominantly in the home or a small one-room Montessori type.

A very few were the one-percenters, who owned large property, assets, and government officials.

The colleges and universities were for religious training of ministers. These educated were responsible for taking on all the duties of what is now our professionals. They were counselors and advisers, helped the sick and destitute, were teachers and interpreters, wrote books, and were printers. After initial religious training, some clerked to become lawyers or apprenticed to become physicians. This old English education tradition led to early polymaths being religious oriented.

The background of collegiate training was why many early educators, publishers, and physicians in Indian Territory were preachers. After all, minister simply means agent and is related to administer. They were the cornerstone of society who cared for people.

Life was very difficult for most individuals, whether European, African, or Native descent.

First to dispel a myth. The American Indians were no more one with nature than we are today. They lived a subsistence lifestyle of hunter-gatherers with small gardens.

They did not believe anyone owned the land. If the game ran out, they simply moved to another area. This continued as a tradition in Indian Territory until 1907 when the Dawes Commission, headed by a Massachusetts Senator who knew nothing of the area and culture, forced the tribes to make an allotment of land to each member. The allotment to individuals allowed the unscrupulous to hornswoggle the unsuspecting.

“Native Americans have long had a cultural, religious tradition. Although the practices were somewhat different, the objective in some ways was not unlike part of the Christian teaching. The natives believed in a divine Creator and Great Spirit who gave the land to them. The Great Spirit was … all-powerful, everywhere, and all-knowing. With these fundamentals, the transition to Christianity was not that difficult.”

Family was all-important. The society was mostly matrilineal with the matriarch’s brothers involved with raising her children. If you were not part of their tribe, you were an outsider. Some tribes fought everyone; some were hospitable. Oh, like people today.

The Native Americans received education in their culture, but did not have a written language and recorded history as Europeans. That limitation restricted their ability to have written laws. So, the Eastern one-percenters were the purveyor of all formal laws and the legal system. Those who controlled the bureaucrats obtained laws to their advantage.

The only barriers to decimation of the tribes were the more-educated who went to live with the First Nations people, tried to protect them from encroachment, and to teach them, so they could survive in a larger society and culture. They were not expounding but living.

Such was the function of the gentlemen and ladies associated with the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions and the American Baptist Tricentennial Commission who made the months-long over-nights camping trip to live in Indian Territory.

Think about what life would be like without reading, writing, or arithmetic. Would you be willing to obtain higher education, so you could leave all you know to go help those without and protect them from the unscrupulous?

Go you therefore, and teach all nations…Matthew 28:19

Excerpts from our book:  Where Indians, Outlaws & Oilmen Were Real, ISBN: 9781658834643.