How great literature can change your life

Friday

A significant and unexpected 5-4 Supreme Court ruling sided with Native Americans earlier this month, giving me an opportunity to share one of my father’s prose poems about Indian rights. As the Smithsonian points out, as a result of McGirt v Oklahoma,

much of the eastern half of Oklahoma [now] falls within Native American territory. The decision—which places criminal cases involving Native Americans on the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation under federal, rather than state, jurisdiction—is “one of the most consequential” legal wins for tribal rights in decades, report Jack Healy and Adam Liptak for the New York Times.

The case hinged on a key question: Did the reservation, established by U.S. treaties during the 1830s, continue to exist after Oklahoma officially became a state in 1907?…

“This is a historic day,” Principal [Creek Nation] Chief David Hill tells the Times. “This is amazing. It’s never too late to make things right.”

Writing for the majority, Neil Gorsuch invoked

the country’s long history of mistreating Native Americans. “On the far end of the Trail of Tears was a promise,” he wrote. “Forced to leave their ancestral lands in Georgia and Alabama, the Creek Nation received assurances that their new lands in the West would be secure forever. … Today we are asked whether the land these treaties promised remains an Indian reservation for purposes of fed­eral criminal law. Because Congress has not said otherwise, we hold the government to its word.”

Apparently McGirt v Oklahoma will have little effect on non-Indians living on the land. As Kevin Gover, director of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, acting under secretary for museum and culture, and a citizen of the Pawnee Tribe of Oklahoma explains,

The Court did not give eastern Oklahoma back to the Tribes. Nobody will lose their land or their home. The decision simply means that Indians in that part of the state are subject only to the criminal jurisdiction of the Tribes and the United States, as is true on Indian reservations in many other states.

Nevertheless, he believes that the court’s decision “is a ‘welcome’ one because it upholds the principle that Native American treaties should be honored unless Congress explicitly revokes them.”

Scott Bates’s poem focuses on the figure Christian G. Priber, a man who, understanding European designs on Native American land, tried to get various eastern tribes to unify in opposition. He failed, of course, but I was heartened to see Gorsuch mention the long history of broken treaties. On a personal note, the central Tennessee route of the Trail of Tears, noted by Gorsuch in his ruling, runs less than a mile from where I live.

Bates’s poem appears in The ABC of Radical Ecology (1982). Priber’s resistance to oppression is very much in the spirit of the multi-racial coalition that has sprung up out of Black Lives Matter. It may smack a little too much of white savior complex—I would like to see more about the Indian players in the drama—but Priber was still a remarkable man worth celebrating.

P Is for Priber’s Paradise

P is for Priber
one Christian G.
and his Kingdom of Paradise
in Tennessee

listen to the story
of one man’s dream
to save America
from the white man’s scheme

from the English and the French
and their whiskey and their bribes
and their stealing of the country
from the Indian tribes…

About 250 years ago
in an area of East Tennessee not very far from Knoxville
near where Lenoir City—which means the Black City—stands today
in the Cherokee capital of Great Tellico
Colonel Joseph Fox
Special Emissary from the English Governor at Charles Town on the Atlantic seaboard
had just marched in with his men

Chief Moytoy and the other assembled notables of the Cherokee Nation
had gathered to hear him

Colonel Fox announced
in peremptory tones
that under the authority invested in him by the Crown of the Great King across the Broad Water
he had come to arrest
that dangerous and subversive agent
one “Priber, a Foreigner”
who was to be handed over to him immediately
so that he could be taken back to Charles Town under armed guard
and tried for sedition

The Native Americans stood passively arms crossed
they made no sign

At which point
the dangerous and subversive individual in question
Christian G. Priber scholar linguist friend and advisor of the Cherokee
stepped forward

He was a small plump not very handsome man
with his hair trimm’d in the Cherokee manner and
dressed in the garb of a warrior “with a deerskin jacket, a flap before and behind his privities, and deerskin pumps or morgissons, laced in the Indian manner on his feet”
who politely informed Colonel Fox in good English (although he had been born and brought up in Germany)
that in his official capacity as Prime Minister and Secretary of State of the United Indian Confederation called “The Kingdom of Paradise”
speaking in behalf of his superior, Emperor Moytoy, standing by his side, and the members of his Council here present
it was his duty to inform the Governor’s Emissary
that the English settlers as well as the French invaders
were trespassers on Indian lands
and that the sooner that he his Governor and all the English removed
themselves from the continent the better
since America belonged to the Indians
and the Indians intended to keep it
and he turned to the glowering Cherokee warriors on either side of the English party
and told them quietly and fluently in their dialect that they were
not to remove the scalps of the visiting delegation (as they were doubtless itching to do)
but they were to conduct them safely out of Great Tellico and start them on their journey 500 miles back to the usurped English settlement by the sea

which they did

removing the furious Colonel Fox and his uneasy soldiers from their midst
with a message to the English Governor he would never forget and alas later avenge
ENGLISHMEN  GO  HOME
leaving the little foreign menace
to turn back to more pressing and certainly more interesting matters

In particular he was perfecting a Constitution for the Indian Commonwealth the Kingdom of Paradise
and spelling out some of the major clauses to wit
This in a society of liberty egality and legality
Each should work according to his talents for the good of all, as he could
That there would be no superiority
That his own condition would be no different from that of any of the others
That all goods would be held in common
That the women would live with the same freedom as the men
That there would be no marriage contracts and parties concerned would be free to change relationships at will
That the children should belong to the state and be always provided for
That all persons “of all Colours and Complexions should be admitted freely into their society”
That there should be general religious freedom
That the only individual property would be books ink pens and paper
And that “the natural rights of mankind” rather than “tyranny, usurpation and oppression” were the Law of Nature and the basic precepts of the American Kingdom of Paradise

Well you know or can imagine what happened
After six years of working to organize the Southeastern Indian nations into a peaceful confederation
After having encouraged the Cherokee’s already established cooperative communal society in which all work was done in common and in which marriage depended upon the will of the married
After having built up a good society on good will booklearning and energy and a remarkable talent for languages
After having been driven out of his native Germany for his progressive ideas
After having arrived in Charles town by way of London with a trunkful of books and a great proficiency in “Dutch Latin English and French”
After having sold his other goods and disappeared into the Wilderness and adopted the ways of the Cherokees
Learned their dialects worn their clothing painted with their paints danced their dances and lived with the daughter of a noted warrior
(all the time carefully maintaining his small Pribery Library and his supply of precious paper and ink)

After having taught his new friends some of the rapacious ways of the white man including the intricacies of weights and measures so that they could keep from being swindled by the traders
After having written a Cherokee dictionary and a Constitution in book form
After six years of living teaching and organizing in the Wilderness
They got him

Christian Priber was ambushed by a group of Creeks in the pay of the English near the Indian village of Tallapoose in northern Alabama
where he had gone to consolidate alliances with the Muskhoge the Choctaws and the Western Mississippi tribes
He was accused of being an insurrectional French agent
and thrown into prison in Frederika Georgia
where he lived for a time and
where he died

But now
250 years later
that the Indian nations have been broken up and driven west to dusty empty leftover lands
leaving the English and the French and their millions of descendants to spread like a plague of locusts westward from the Atlantic Coast destroying the earth and filling the land with their shopping centers industrial parks ugly cities and crowded recreation areas
now that the paths of the Cherokees have become endless asphalt and concrete deserts crowded by murderous machines
where in the words of Robert Lowell “a savage servility/slides by on grease”

now that Sequoia means nothing more than another polluting power plant and Tellico is another huge embolism blocking one of the beautiful blood streams of the continent
where the oil slick of power motors the wake of water skiers and the poison of acid rain have drowned what used to be forests and shady streams
in the shadow of the hills that the Cherokee hunted and farmed which are now being stripped denuded decapitated and disemboweled for greed and luxury

it is time to think again of the dream of Christian Priber
and his work for a land where

The women and children will be equal and free with the men
there will be no poor and no rich
no exploitation no war and no pollution
where there will be only beauty and harmony
and where all will work together for the good of all…

for P is still for Priber
who is very much alive
though they let him die in prison
in 1745

and P is for his Progeny
and People who Protest
against the men who steal the land
and kill the wilderness

Red White and Yellow Black and Brown
we all must make a stand
and fight for Priber’s Paradise
a just and lovely land