Trails of Tears

From Oklahoma to Palestine

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I was on Choctaw land when I read that “settler-colonialism” was an offensive phrase that no respectable American should say.

There was no such thing as “settler-colonialism”, the pundits declared. It was a trendy buzzword invented by academics, removed from American reality.

We were in the Choctaw Travel Plaza in southeast Oklahoma when I read this declaration. The plaza looks like a typical truck stop but for The Great Seal of the Choctaw Nation by the gas and the pictorial history of the Choctaw people above the beer. The plaza is near Atoka, the Choctaw town where a billboard proclaims there is a museum dedicated to “The Civil War…and Reba!”

Reba McEntire grinned at us from the highway. She is one of many white Americans raised near indigenous land in Oklahoma, a state that differs from the southwest in that tribal representation is subtle and scattered.

When you are on the Navajo Nation, you know it. When you are on or near the lands of the 39 tribes and nations living in Oklahoma, it can take some figuring out.

Eastern Oklahoma is where the Choctaw Nation was forced to live after walking the Trail of Tears in the 1830s. They were displaced by settlers under the brutal policies of President Andrew Jackson.

“The Trail of Tears separated us from our indigenous homeland,” says Ian Thompson, Director of the Choctaw Nation of the Oklahoma Historic Preservation Department. “There have been other forced exoduses in world history, but this one affected us, and it’s more than being forced to leave a home that you have been in for a generation or two. It’s one that forced us to leave the land that we’d interacted with for 500 generations, that helped created our culture and language and help make us who we are, so it was an extremely, extremely traumatic event. Even more so because in the Choctaw way of thinking, west is the direction of death.”

I found a translation of Thompson’s speech on a placard on the Natchez Trace in Mississippi. It stood on the very spot where the Choctaw were displaced. There is little information about when he said it or to whom.

I only know that he said it in Choctaw. The language is still spoken because the Choctaw Nation persevered.

Their resilience is so admirable and the need for it so undeserved that it hurts the heart. Perseverance is a quality we praise in others, but there is nothing romantic about enduring hardship. Fortitude is an unwanted feat; pain its prerequisite. The admiration of strangers can never compensate for the loss of friends.

What people want is to live free and safe with their loved ones. That is what the US government stole from the Choctaw people. Languages and traditions can be revived, but you cannot bring back the dead.

Or the murdered.

If you lived in the 1820s and 1830s, would you protest indigenous displacement? Would you countenance the destruction of entire family lines? Would you justify children dying as they walked hundreds of miles to Oklahoma, a territory the Choctaw renamed — Oklahoma is Choctaw for “land of the courageous” — in an attempt to maintain their dignity? Would you call them “barbarians” to ease your guilt? Would you buy into the myth of the “Vanishing Indian”, and pretend their extinction was preordained? Would you lie and claim the land was empty when the colonizers arrived?

*          *          *

You might know the answers to those questions based on how you respond to the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians. After obliterating northern Gaza, Israel forced surviving residents to walk south in scenes reminiscent of the Trail of Tears:

“We walked with thousands of other civilians. I even saw a hospital bed being pushed along the way,” wrote Palestinian journalist Hind Khoudary. “Children, people in wheelchairs, the elderly, babies — everyone was carrying their backpacks, pillows, and mats… Together, we walked. I studied the looks on people’s faces. Terrified, they were holding white flags…People crying, angry, sad, eyes filled with fear. My emotions were blocked. All I could think was that I do not want to leave, that it was wrong to leave, that I must not leave.”

As of January 2024, the Palestinian civilian death toll is now over 23,000, including over 10,000 children.

Israel promised Palestinians that southern Gaza would be safe, then bombed them as they arrived. Palestinians are now being told to go to Egypt, unless they are first deported to the Congo, where they would work in brutal conditions in mines owed by Israeli plutocrats like Dan Gertler. They are told Gaza will be taken over by Israel and turned into settlements under which their murdered countrymen will lie.

Those are Israel’s plans. They are of a nature so horrific they sound like something out of another century — the 1830s, perhaps.

But “settler-colonialism” is just a trendy new phrase, I’ve been told.

I wonder if the objection to accurate Black and Native American history — what political operatives label “critical race theory” as they censor this history in schools — has as much to do with curtailing understanding of current events as it does with past travesties. Political operatives do not want students to know about any indigenous struggles, foreign or domestic, particularly in countries like Israel closely tied to the US.

Parallels between Israel’s treatment of Palestinians and early America’s treatment of indigenous peoples are stark. Once you know the twin histories, you cannot unsee it.

But a strange, unyielding fealty to Israel — no matter what atrocities it commits — spans both political parties, blocking honest discussion of the similarities. This fealty is shared by billionaire funders of right-wing propaganda operations obsessed with how Israel is portrayed in US schools.

Perhaps it is easy for pundits and politicians, cloistered in DC, to ignore Native American life. But on Oklahoma reservations, history haunts the roads.

It emerges in Cherokee-language road signs and in Muscogee-language graffiti. It appears in Native restaurants offering a sandwich named after Choctaw chief Pushmataha, like the diner we wandered into outside Atoka. The restaurant was called Sacred Grounds Too and the Pushmataha was a French dip with waffle fries. This is still America, after all.

Maybe when reservations are distant, officials do not see the parallels with the plight of Palestinians.

Or maybe these officials have no conscience at all.

*          *          *

My family drives through Oklahoma every year on the way to my sister’s house in Texas for Christmas. (I wrote about our first stop, the Christ of the Ozarks complex in Arkansas, here.) Except for detours for hiking and the occasional museum, Oklahoma has been a journey more than a destination.

This year was different. We had a site to see: Okmulgee, the town where our favorite show, Reservation Dogs, was filmed.

If you have not seen Reservation Dogs, finish this article and start watching it. Created by Sterlin Harjo of the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, it is one of the best shows of this century, and the top show I would recommend families with teenagers to watch together.

Reservation Dogs is also the first show conceived, written, and directed by indigenous people, with a primarily indigenous cast. It shocked my children that peoples whose presence on this continent predates Europeans by centuries did not get the chance to create a TV show until 2021.

The show is about four Native American teenagers in the fictional town of Okern, Oklahoma who desperately want to get out. Over three seasons, the plot expands to include their elders and the broader community. The writing and acting are so poignant that simple plot descriptions — “the one where Willie Jack goes hunting with her dad” — are enough to make me tear up. But it is also funny and wildly creative, with elements of magical realism thrown into its rough, familiar world.

Reservation Dogs is the first show filmed entirely in Oklahoma. My children are Missouri born and bred, which means they rarely have the chance to see where TV shows and movies are filmed. The closest they get are post-apocalyptic flicks shot in St. Louis, like Escape From New York, which John Carpenter chose because St. Louis was so run-down, he did not need to build a set.

Okern, Oklahoma looks like Missouri. There’s nothing fancy and people take beauty where they can find it. That familiarity — our same prairies and trees, our casual clothes, our wasted time and prosaic wonders — was jolting to see on screen.

And while Reservation Dogs is specifically about Native culture — wonderfully specific, with in-jokes, like the blurring out of owl eyes, that outsiders are not meant to get — it also captures how contemporary teenagers act and talk better than any show I have seen. Especially teenagers living in the center of the US: another rare representation.

We entered Okmulgee off of Gun Club Road and were greeted by a large sign saying Reservation Dogs: FX. It was the only overt nod to the show we would encounter.

Okmulgee is larger and livelier than the fictional Okern. We wondered what its residents thought of tourists and tried to be respectful. Our first stop was obvious: Sonic Drive-In, or as it will be forever known, “the Reservation Dogs Sonics”. The Midwest-Southern chain restaurant features in many plots on the show.

This, too, was refreshingly familiar. My children were introduced to Sonic when we were doing a float trip on the Big Piney River by the Devil’s Elbow and got pulled over by the Missouri “river police”, who gave them a citation for “fishing or hunting with your favorite relative” that included a coupon for a free Sonic ice cream cone. Catfish is life, but Sonic is magic.

After our delicious lunch of Sonics, we were unsure where to go. We explored the town, visiting a bookstore and historic buildings, and drove around a residential neighborhood where a key character lived, refraining from taking photos so as not to disturb anyone.

And then we decided to see the Hideout.

The Hideout is an abandoned construction site where the teenage characters meet to spray-paint and climb and talk, as kids do. It is also the site of one of the show’s most devastating scenes.

I was not sure if I was supposed to be in The Hideout, for both legal and moral reasons. This is the place where the fictional world of Reservation Dogs and the real-life hardship and history of Native life — the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Okmulgee — merge. We walked across an empty lot to the ruins. Ruins are nothing new for us. We are Missourians, and everything is in ruins, and we are used to exploring them.

These were Native American ruins, though: modern Native American ruins. The graffiti from the show — LAND BACK, CREEK PWR, NDN LAND, drawings of feathers and a clenched fist — was still on the walls. I did not know if the graffiti was created for the show or already there or if more was added later.

But I knew it reflected a reality that I did not inhabit. It conveyed an injustice I did not experience and a suffering I could not feel. It was, to put it plainly, not my territory.

We left quickly and we left it alone.

*          *          *

In 1831, George W. Harkins, a Choctaw attorney and chief, wrote his scathing Farewell Letter to the American People. He discussed being betrayed by the federal government and the state of Mississippi.

“Although your ancestors won freedom on the field of danger and glory, our ancestors owned it as their birthright, and we have had to purchase it from you as the vilest slaves buy their freedom,” he wrote.

He added: “I ask you in the name of justice, for repose for myself and for my injured people. Let us alone — we will not harm you, we want rest.”

The US government refused to give them rest. They broke treaties over and over. They remade the image of the American Indian through newspapers and cinema. They stole Native children and put them in boarding schools and tried to destroy their language and culture. They censored history. They lied to white children to try to assuage the natural fury that emerges from a child’s conscience when witnessing injustice.

There is something bizarre about the fact that US schoolchildren are not taught basic information about the tribes that not only once dominated the continent but still live here. The latter part is what strikes fear into those who seek domination instead of liberty and justice for all.

Reservation Dogs is a masterful show. But I worry it will be a relic of a brief time when Native people were encouraged to tell their own stories, and non-Native people were willing to listen. Reservation Dogs should not be a rarity but the beginning of indigenous-run productions as a routine phenomenon. There have been more since, in particular Dark Winds, set on the Navajo Nation and also featuring the wonderful Zahn McClarnon.

But the backlash is strong, and the most enduring legacy of Native negotiations with white men is betrayal.

Why am I writing so much about a television show? Because it’s a really good show. Because its creation was long overdue. And because it’s over.

I have seen too many past-tense triumphs to count on continuity, too many annihilations of merit and memory to believe that I can overpraise the underdog.

*          *          *

One week after visiting Okmulgee, we drove the Natchez Trace in Mississippi from Natchez to Tupelo. It began and ended with Native American burial mounds: Emerald Mound, built between 1200-1600 AD, and Bynum Mounds, built in 100 BC.

This is the original territory of the Choctaw. Halfway up the Trace, I found the sign with the quote from Ian Thompson outside a pine tree forest. Another sign explained I was standing on the demarcation of land between the Choctaw and the settlers.

Then it explained how the American government ignored this demarcation and stole it all.

The Natchez Trace has been used as a trading route for a millennium and has been protected from commercial interests for nearly a century. It was an old Indian route that turned into a place where white men went looking for redemption during the “Great Awakening” of the early 19^th century. Not all of them found it: Meriwether Lewis, of Lewis and Clark fame, committed suicide on the trail.

The Natchez Trace is remote and rugged. Its trees are old and gnarled, with roots ready to trip you up, and the weight of history makes you feel like you have it coming. This is a place that has always been ancient, for Native Americans as well as for white colonizers.

It is easy to imagine this terrain looking the same in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. I tried to imagine living in the time the Choctaw learned that their land, ingrained in the soul of their culture, had been stolen.

I could imagine it, because I am watching it play out every day in Gaza, with the backing – yet again – of the US government.

I could imagine it, because my country is run by people who want to strip the US down and sell it for parts. People who feel no sentimentality for this land, no reverence for nature, no desire to preserve American culture outside of the wealthiest cities.

I live in a US that plutocrats and extremists are more determined to break up than in any time since the mid-1800s.

I live in Missouri, a state that wealthy northern liberals say should secede along with the rest of the south and southwest. This is their code for “let’s get rid of the states with the most Black people, the most Native people, and a lot of Latino people.” Right-wing operatives love that some liberals embrace this position, because it will let them practice state tyranny without even the pretense of federal objection.

Rich northern liberals pretend their problem is with “red state” governments. But you don’t leave the people suffering under those governments in the lurch if that’s your true objection.

I live in the land of the disposable people. All Americans do — if the handling of covid should have taught us anything, it’s those with power consider everyone subject to removal.

*          *          *

America is in a dark time, and it is set to get worse. But what has convinced me more than anything that no monstrosity is impossible in the 21^st century is the impunity of Israel’s war crimes.

I witness the murders of Palestinians children only from afar and still reel at the cruelty. My tax money is paying for this slaughter, and I oppose it with all my being. All I can do is write about it.

Americans are discouraged to draw parallels between Native American and Palestinian history. One professor who did so got fired and spent years driving a school bus to make ends meet.

It is risky to speak out. But is wrong not to. If anyone should understand ethnic cleansing, it is Americans, because our country was founded upon the genocide of indigenous peoples, followed by centuries of cover-ups.

That means understanding ethnic cleansing as a choice: a deliberate evil that was valorized and whitewashed, a mass murder whose conspirators placed the ringleader on the twenty-dollar bill.

It means admitting that new villains make the same horrific and preventable choices today, giving billions to an apartheid state that slaughters children with impunity.

Even in this century, Native and Palestinian fates overlap in disturbing ways. In 2006, criminal plutocrat Jack Abramoff was indicted after stealing $15 million from the Choctaw Nation, whom he described as “monkeys”. His goal was to use their money to fund right-wing Israeli businesses and charities and create a “sniper school” for Israelis on the Palestinian West Bank.

Abramoff was an operative tied to the Bush administration stealing money from indigenous people to kick other indigenous people off their land in another country — but we are not supposed to talk about settler-colonialism?

*          *          *

There is an obligation to document what we witness. If we do not, the killers will, and they will lie. In their narrative, the victims will become the oppressors and the oppressors will be the victims, until the real victims are dead enough to be selectively included — but as tokens, never on their own terms.

The killers of children and of history have long been the same. They are people who seek to steal the present, so they murder the past and the future at once.

We did not intend to retrace the Trail of Tears on our Christmas drive. But there’s something about seeing where Choctaw civilization began in Mississippi, and where it ended up in Oklahoma, that leaves you with one furious thought, equal parts devastation and determination: This did not have to happen.

And it does not have to happen now. Nothing is preordained. Ethnic cleansing is a choice. Genocide is a choice. Never forget who made it — and who covers it up.

Choctaw land in Oklahoma

The ancestral homeland of the Choctaw in Mississippi

The Reservation Dogs hideout

Ticketed on the river, got free Sonics!