There’s a lot of joy, sorrow and conflict in the world, and in the Osage community these days. Last week, a video released showed a horrendously violent police murder of another young black man.
This dreary winter, I’ve been reading.
We go to the library in Woodland, the nearest place to connect with a regional library based in Clark County, necessary for a serious book lover. It’s housed in a two-story wooden building with an old oak tree in the play yard. In the early dark—the sun sets around 4:30 in mid-winter—the paned windows glow.
I’ve been reading Geary Hobson in the Fall 2022 issue of Yellow Medicine Review from Southwest Minnesota State University. It includes a range of stories, poems, and comedy. In “The Old Hunter,” Hobson, a retired professor at the University of Oklahoma, who is of Cherokee and Quapaw/Chickasaw ancestry, describes a father’s funeral. It carries all the complexity of life—the richness of growing up in one place close to the land. It’s a first person narrative, told close to the speaker and his love for his father, who was an exceptional hunter and trapper. The changes in land use around the Big Woods that made hunting not viable as a way of life, sound like changes in the forestland here. In Arkansas, timberlands between levee and the river began to shrink, and hunting wasn’t allowed in certain areas. Dredging impacted the survival of wildlife, and prioritized irrigation for rice farmers. In our region, it was sports fishers over commercial fishers, power for cities and irrigation for agriculture rather than salmon runs. But there’s beauty here too: this morning sea lions leaping out of the water like porpoises while they follow the smelt.
In Hobson’s story, there are two pastors preaching the funeral service, one Baptist and one Methodist, which Hobson says, is to ensure that the father, who found his church in the woods, would find his way to heaven at last. The narrator, Frank, describes small town life, the many cousins, granddaughters of relatives, who you may not know by name if you haven’t been home for a while. He feels the distance of being away for twenty plus years.
Hobson describes the layers of ethnicity, tensions in between groups, the way I’ve heard it. His characters embody tensions between people who were “more Indian than white, around people who were more white than Indian,” and some among the protagonist’s relatives who looked down on a Native in-law.
Hobson’s story feels like home, the way I learned country here from my husband’s stories of this particular land during his time growing up, and my life here for thirty years, mixed with bits of the stories of our Osage and Cherokee families generations back. When I come home to the Osage, I drive the land. Favorite routes, of course, often in the Tallgrass, because who can get enough? My husband drives other parts when he comes, following maps, getting the layout in his head. I want to know the land in Osage County better. I’m learning, hearing stories from friends, family as we travel. Where folks grew up, who was nearby. It’s the way I know to make myself at home.