The Power of Memory
by Yvette Moore
Maxine Barnett, 75, is a former president of Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference United Methodist Women. She is also one of a few people who can speak Euchee, a language, culture and people that nearly slipped away in rural Oklahoma until elders came together to remember.
"My grandmother spoke Euchee; that’s all she would speak," Ms. Barnett said of the woman who reared her, her older sister and her brother after their mother died. "When we went away to school, we were outnumbered. There were so many different tribes -- Cherokee, Creek -- we stopped speaking it."
According to government records, when they went away to school, they also stopped being Euchee. To qualify for the Indian school, Ms. Barnett and her siblings had to be enrolled in a tribe, and Euchee is not recognized as a tribe by the U.S. government.
That practice dates to 1893 when Oklahoma was preparing for statehood. To co-opt the land into the new state, a plan emerged to give U.S. citizenship to Choctaws, Chickasaws, Cherokees, Creeks and Seminoles –- known as The Five Civilized Tribes because of their advanced legal and educational systems. Commonly held Indian Territory lands were divided into individual allotments to tribe members. Tribal laws and courts were to be abolished.
Indian leaders tried to avert this destruction by petitioning to have the Indian Territory admitted to the United States as a separate state. They drafted a constitution and presented it to Congress, but their proposal was rejected. Oklahoma was granted statehood in 1907 and the Indian Territory was divided. Tribe members had to be counted and enrolled to qualify for their land allotment.
"The Euchee was such a small tribe, and when they were allotting the lands, no one spoke up or maybe whoever was doing the counting just counted them as Creek," Ms. Barnett said. "I’m enrolled as Creek because Euchee is not recognized, but we’ve always spoken a different language."
As Ms. Barnett’s school years passed and daily living took center stage in her life, Euchee language, stories and ways faded into childhood memories. Then Ms. Barnett’s sister retired and moved back home. When they tried to talk to each other in Euchee, as they had done as children, they realized how much they had forgotten. They visited Euchee elders to solicit their help in remembering words and stories in the language.
"We decided we’d all get together once a week just to talk," Ms. Barnett said. "There were about seven of us. We shared stories. We’d just speak the language. When we made mistakes, no one laughed. We helped one another.
"We had older women who did not attend the class, so we would go to them and listen to their stories. They would tell us some of the history and help us along that way. We did it for six years."
Story by story, Euchee came back to Ms. Barnett and her sister. They are again fluent in the language.
Now, Ms. Barnett is an elder, determined to pass on the Euchee language and culture to her children’s children. She shares Euchee songs and stories about rabbits, coyotes and wolves with children at a local community center.
"The children like it," Ms. Barnett said. "I don’t think they have gotten to where they can speak the language, but they know a lot of the words -- and they are learning the culture."
Ms. Barnett said the children are learning how to dry corn, make a garden and pick wild medicinal herbs.
"These were just everyday things to us growing up," Ms. Barnett said. "My grandmother was a medicine woman. She always wore an apron and would go out in the woods for about an hour a day. She brought that apron back full of nuts, berries and herbs, whatever was in season. She was a medicine woman. She doctored us at home for toothache, headache. She did all that for us."
Ms. Barnett said the classes are important because the children need to know who they are. The Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference also plays an important role in keeping Indian culture and languages alive for children, she said. Local-church services and district and conference gatherings are like homecomings. Many tribes are represented, and they learn and sing one another’s songs.
"I just feel great being a part of that," Ms. Barnett said. "When I was on the South Central Jurisdictional Core Planning Group, I remember going to Oklahoma Conference and a woman made the remark to me `You’re such a small conference, why not just join Oklahoma Conference?’ If we did that, we would lose our identity. We couldn’t sing our songs anymore. We couldn’t share our stories anymore.
"When I sing in Euchee, it’s just different; singing just comes more alive to me. If we give up our Oklahoma Indian Missionary Conference, most of our people would just stay home."
Ms. Barnett is an active member of United Methodist Women at Pickett Chapel United Methodist Church in Sapulpa, Okla. For many years the congregation may well have been the only Euchee church anywhere, she said. Intermarriage is making the church more diverse.
"But we still sing a lot of Euchee and Creek songs," she said.
Yvette Moore is managing editor of Response.