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Rez Cars Explained and Remembered
When a writer is coming from a place of cultural difference, there are always choices to be made about how to finesse the difference even when, as in the matter I’m about to address, I think the distance is not great. It’s easy to write from the outside looking in, because the backstory slides in slicker than goose grease. Writing from the inside looking out is harder. I know this one is borderline.
Buying a car will always be a big deal to me.
The two material things I wanted when I escaped rural Oklahoma (formerly the Muscogee Creek Nation) were a place to live with lights and plumbing built in and a car that always started. Not to say I had a car that failed to start. I had no car, but I was car-crazy, like most teens of the day, on or off reservations.
All the reservations in Oklahoma save one — the Osage — were made to disappear with Oklahoma statehood in 1907. The Osage had enough oil to buy enough Congresscritters to keep their mineral rights, if not their surface rights, as a collective holding rather than what happened to the rest of us.
In most of Oklahoma, each tribal citizen got a few acres varying on the quality of the land called an allotment. The tribal government maintained land for administrative offices. That land and the allotments were held in trust by the federal government for the tribe…
