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50@50 – Green Country, OK

When you tell people you’re going to Oklahoma for vacation, they blankly stare and just say “Oh”.  You can see in their eyes the unanswered question, “But why?”  I’ve spent a lot of time in Oklahoma.  My honeymoon was there – actually both of them – and my child was born there in the midst of my sophomore year of college.  And I’ve spent countless weekends in its diverse landscape.

 

 

 

 

 

Oklahoma Territory 1890, Creative Common Media

For each essay in this blog, I try to stay focused on its original purpose: to examine how the landscape inspires and/or impacts the development of its culture.  But I admit I’ve had a tough time putting my experience on paper this time.  How can I assert that the landscape has shaped the culture when 39 distinct nations (not to mention the Euro- and Meso-American settlers) make their home here?[1] That would be like half a million people of 39 countries moving into Britain! Not so different from New York City, I guess.

My purpose was to immerse myself in “Native America” – which is how the state markets itself.[2] The terrain of Oklahoma is like a microcosm of the rest of the continental U.S. (minus the big peaks). Positioned nearly at the center of the country, the east is covered with lush rolling hills, rivers, lakes and hardwood forests. The west is more rugged and arid.  I have no idea to what degree, or not, relocation deposited native peoples onto similar landscapes. Regardless, the belief systems, values, multigenerational memory, and the way of seeing seems to have resulted in an organic, adapted inter-relationship between native peoples and the landscape.

The burgeoning of cultural and heritage centers throughout the state is very exciting. Many of us are guilty of a homogeneous perspective, and these centers focus on the different tribes as separate and individual cultures. To think of in western terms, they are as distinct as those from Wales, Normandy and Carthage. We spent a day in Tahlequah, the capital of the Cherokee nation visiting the  heritage center.  I learned many things including that the first school of higher learning for women west of the Mississippi was opened by the Cherokee in 1851! We also explored the town,and of course, the beautiful landscape along the Illinois River – which since my college days has been taken over by rafting companies..

Staying in Tulsa, I was pleasantly surprised to be able to hike on an urban “mountain” just west of downtown. The trails are an interlocking system of flat and hillier trails. We hiked 4.4 mils of the blue and yellow trails, which had some incline, but were fairly level. The red trail is listed as easy and less than a mile long.

Our second day, we ventured out to Oxley Nature Center, an 800 acre wildlife sanctuary, about seven miles north of downtown.  Most of the connecting trails are less than ½ mile long, and the mostly dirt paths are largely wheelchair accessible. One feels completely removed from the city. I wondered if the lake and waterways were always here – was this a peek of the area’s environmental past? Though I certainly didn’t expect to see deer galloping along the path!  The beauty of a space like this is its ability to transport us from our everyday lives, and to cause us to examine the built environment around us.

My first conclusion is that there is so much more to learn and to understand. Secondly, culture may stem from the land, but also from memory. Multitudes of people in the modern world do not live in their birth place, or that of their parents or grandparents. We carry with us family memory of the “old country”.  What the land was like, what it produced, how people lived. That doesn’t mean we don’t adapt to the new place. For those who believe we are connected to the physicality of our environment, the new landscape shapes anew, but not in ways unlike the past. The values, beliefs, and knowledge of those transported, link to the new location and allow the new place to begin its process of cultural rebirth.

Most of us will not be dispossessed, driven from our homes and forced to walk hundreds of miles watching our family members die on our way to a place we don’t want to go. What makes exploring and hiking in Oklahoma so refreshing is, of course, the wonderful diversity of the land itself, and the miracle of these individual tribes thriving, connecting with the landscape, and creating culture.