Columns
How ‘Bout Them Cowboys!
Our friends Debbie and Ron Reed have season tickets to Oklahoma State University football games. Their seats are in the first row where one can offer advice to Coach Mike Gundy as I did on several occasions Saturday, November 25, 2023 during the Cowboy game against the Cougars of Brigham Young University. Debbie and Ron spent Thanksgiving with their son’s family in Texas and generously gave us their tickets and their excellent parking pass at the Wesleyan Center in Stillwater. Even though my Grandfather Redwine was a Baptist minister and I was baptized in the Pawhuska, Oklahoma First Christian (Disciples of Christ) Church, the convenience of the Wesleyan parking space almost made Methodists of Peg and me.
A win for O.S.U. Saturday would give the Cowboys a chance to play the Texas Longhorns for the Big Twelve Championship. If O.S.U. lost, their arch rival Oklahoma University would play U.T. The stakes were high as were the emotions of the crowd. It was a happening! O.S.U.’s excellent band, of which my eldest brother C.E. Redwine had once been a member, led the team and Pistol Pete into the stadium. Cheerleaders and pompon girls performed athletic routines my body was unacquainted with. Thousands of students raced excitedly all over the beautiful campus and we one-time students marveled at their alacrity.
My family’s connection with the school goes back to the days it was Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College. I started there in 1961. One of my sisters-in-law, Sarah, received her undergraduate degree there as did both of my brothers, C.E. and Phil. My other sister-in-law, Shirley, attended for a while then shoved my oldest brother through. O.S.U. has been good to all of us. Of course, Debbie and Ron and their family also have many significant connections to Cowboy U. In fact, Ron was once selected to be the representative O.S.U. Cowboy.
Speaking of Ron being a true cowboy, I have noticed he always has a rancher’s eye on the weather. Now I do not know if Ron had consulted the game-day forecast of constant freezing rain before offering us the tickets, but Peg and I did occasionally envision Ron and Debbie eating Thanksgiving leftovers while sitting in front of a warm fire. On the other hand, Peg and I were cheering while shivering at the game. As for weather phenomena, how about those clowns around us who were drinking cold beer while sporting shirtless orange outfits? Talk about your true fanatics! It reminded us of watching my alma mater, Indiana University’s Hoosiers, repeatedly lose in the fourth quarter as we sat through snow storms. At least the Cowboys hung on for a victory. As for Peg and me, pre-game we had dug out our old snow skiing clothes and sniveled up. Then after the game we praised Debbie and Ron for the great parking space once the double overtime game finally ended and we could stumble out of Boone Pickens Stadium and get into our warm, dry car. Let’s hear it for those John Wesleyans!
The exhilaration of sitting for hours in the freezing rain took both of us back to that glorious day skiing at Squaw Valley when we were captured by a blizzard on the top of a mountain. We managed to suffer skiing our blind way down a treacherous narrow ski trail to our vehicle and hurried to the nearest store where we bought dry underwear that we changed into in the car. Stillwater was a similar experience Saturday; I will not go into further detail.
Of course, when the Cowboys recovered that B.Y.U. fumble during the second overtime, for one brief shining moment we felt as warm as an Oklahoma Fourth of July. Suddenly, for about ten seconds, Peg and I were as impervious to the cold and freezing rain as the rest of the Orange Power crowd. Apparently Coach Gundy did not need my coaching suggestions. I guess that’s why he ignored my repeated shouted sage advice.
So, thanks Debbie and Ron. It was great to be back in Stillwater where I had not attended a football game since 1962. As far as I could tell, nothing had changed, at least in my mind
A Thrown Stone
On October 7, 2023 a force of Palestinians from the Gaza area adjacent to Israel launched an attack that lasted one day and killed 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Hamas has an estimated 30,000 to 40,000 fighters. Israel has 170,000 active military personnel with 450,000 reserves available for call up. Hamas has no air force or navy and attacked in jeeps, on motorcycles and with paragliders. Israel has many jet fighters-bombers, several warships including submarines, tanks and armored personnel carriers, and nuclear weapons.
Why would the Hamas David challenge the Israeli Goliath? 1 Samuel 17. The Biblical David used a stone to bring down the heavily armored gigantic Philistine then cut off his head. However, the vastly out-gunned Hamas fighters precipitated an overwhelming Israeli reign of death, terror and destruction on, so far, 14,000 Palestinian civilians for a month and a half with the Israeli promise of more to come. Surely Hamas anticipated its impotent assault could not defeat Israel and that Israel would react with a massive military response. So, why do it? The origins of October 7th are in the history of that small geographical area and those two related peoples, Jews and Palestinians, who claim the common progenitor of Abraham. Also, both believe the roots of much of the first five books of the Bible. Their histories and cultures are intricately and inextricably intertwined.
Thanks mainly to the help of the British and Americans the Palestinians who had been living in what is now Israel for hundreds, if not thousands, of years have gradually been displaced by a Jewish population seeking a homeland. The Jews look back to thousands of years of history for their claims. Britain’s Balfour Declaration of 1917 began the process of Palestinian expulsion and America has supported it financially, politically and militarily since 1948. Once again one might ask, why?
With the British, as we Americans can attest, colonialism has been a way of global conquest for hundreds of years. British insertion into the Middle East was and is simply a vestige of the Elizabethan Age. America has a different raison d’être, in part as a reaction against Great Britain’s colonial treatment of our 13 Colonies.
An important event in the American Revolution was King George’s Royal Proclamation of October 7 (note the irony of the date), 1763 that sought to prohibit expansion of American colonists into lands west of the Allegheny Mountains from Canada to the Gulf of Mexico. The Proclamation reserved that great expanse of America for the “indigenous population”. This was not done by Britain to protect Native Americans but to preserve control to the British. The people of the Colonies saw this as encouraging Indians to kill Colonists. In fact, this 1763 Proclamation was at the heart of our 1776 Declaration of Independence’s complaint about King George:
“He (King George) has excited domestic insurrections amonst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.”
This American attitude towards Native Americans is akin to Israel’s attitude toward Palestinians. And after England was defeated, Anglo-Saxon Americans declared a Manifest Destiny in which their Christian God had ordained that the United States from the Atlantic to the Pacific and from Canada to Mexico was the sole province of Anglo-Saxons and that the savages who lived there should be eliminated. This attitude toward Native Americans is similar to the attitude of some toward the presence of Palestinians in traditional Palestine.
Such an attitude may be what led Hamas to make such a vicious and futile attack on October 7, 2023. Many Native Americans fought back against the onslaught of Manifest Destiny long after it was a fait accompli. Of course, they were called terrorists. And as Chief Red Cloud of the Sioux Nation said:
“They (white men) made us many promises, more than I can remember, but they never kept but one; they promised to take our land, and they took it.”
Hamas may have lived for several generations under a system of a Jewish God giving Palestinian land to the Jews and decided there was nothing more to lose.
Forever Hopeful
According to the International Court of Justice, the United Nations General Assembly and the United Nations Security Council, Israel has illegally controlled Gaza for many years. The Palestinian people live under what is effectively a military suppression in which Israel denies freedom of movement and self-determination to Palestinians. This situation is reminiscent of what American colonists faced from Great Britain before 1776 and what Native Americans faced from the United States. Resistance from the colonists and the Native Americans was called terrorism by the conquerors.
Whatever one may think of Hamas, that is, evil terrorists or patriotic resistance fighters, it is probably incorrect to believe they are stupid. They surely knew they could not defeat the fourth most powerful military, one with jets, tanks and nuclear weapons, with missiles, pick-up trucks and automatic weapons. In fact, the attack of October 7, 2023 lasted one day. So why do it?
Twelve hundred Israelis were killed but that led to 11,000 Palestinian deaths over a month and a half, so far, and the destruction of much of Gaza. Such a response was surely anticipated. The attack by Hamas appears to have been an irrational, nihilistic act of savagery, a hopeless self-destructive reaction to generations of suppression and denial of human rights.
All peoples, including Israelis and Palestinians are entitled to defend themselves and strike back at those who attack them. The defense should be specific to the attackers. For example, Custer may have had a legitimate mission of protecting settlers, but his massacre of Chief Black Kettle’s tribe at the Washita River in western Oklahoma on November 27, 1868 did not target renegade warriors but non-combatants. What Israel is doing in Gaza is illegal collective punishment, not revenge specifically against Hamas.
So, what to do? As with most solutions to difficult problems, first one should stop the behavior that is causing the damage. The United Nations, particularly the United States and Great Britain who were most responsible for creating and sustaining Israel, should enforce a ceasefire. Then massive amounts of human relief such as water, food, shelter and medical care, should be provided. A cooperative organization of international United Nations peacekeepers, investigators and courts should ferret out the members of Hamas responsible for October 7 and bring them to justice and determine and prosecute any war crimes committed by Israel.
A re-building of Gaza’s infrastructure should begin and a formal long-term goal of a true two-state solution should be instituted. In other words, first stop the bleeding then bandage the wounds then rehabilitate both Israel and Palestine with a view toward a real and permanent peace. Are these things immensely difficult, yes. Impossible, maybe. But what is the alternative? And after all, that was the guarantee when Israel was created out of Palestine on the basis of the Balfour Declaration in 1914:
“…[I]t being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine …”
First Cousins and Neighbors
The Middle East is often called the Cradle of Civilization. Mesopotamia flourished between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers starting 4,000 years ago and Egypt became ascendant a thousand years earlier. During these 5,000 years there have been numerous cultures that have populated this region of Northern Africa and Middle Eastern Asia. Each of these peoples claims a part of this area of the earth as a homeland. This yearning by all involved and each’s legitimate historical claims have led to thousands of years of cooperation and conflict between and among these similar and related cultures.
If the worst war is a civil war, the Middle East has seen the yang and yin of almost inexplicable struggles countless times over countless years. The Palestinians and Jews are the latest peoples to yearn for the same geographical area of the Middle East. Each has a bona fide historical claim. And even though the two peoples are genetically and culturally first cousins whose common mythical progenitor was Abraham from the Land of Ur (Iraq), many in each group do not allow for the other group’s aspirations for a homeland. Further, because much of the rest of the world has intervened and interfered in this region, it is incumbent upon those interloping countries to act as honest brokers and facilitate a lasting peace with mutual freedom, security and prosperity for all Jews, Arabs and others in that region. Such an outcome is in everyone’s best interests.
The historical intricacies of the region are enhanced and aggravated by the interwoven religions that center upon this geographical area. The Torah of Judaism, the New Testament of Christianity and the Koran of Islam might lead an objective observer to believe each of these “People of the Book” would recognize and respect the adherents of the other faiths. However, countless often contradictory interpretations have been relied upon to justify and encourage actions that belie the egalitarian philosophies contained in these great writings. It makes one wonder if John Lennon’s call for ♪ No religion too ♪ in his anthem Imagine might have been prescient or even prophetic.
Our current crisis in the Middle East has its roots in the British Balfour Declaration of 1917 calling for a Jewish national homeland in Palestine that contained many Arabic peoplesand a small minority of Jews. The letter from the United Kingdom’s Foreign Secretary, Arthur Balfour, to Lord Rothschild of the British Jewish community contained the following proviso:
“…[I]t being clearly understood that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine…”
Not surprisingly as the United States’ experience with generously giving Native American land to non-Indians should have cautioned, this grand plan to create a place for Jews was not well received by the inhabitants already living in Palestine.
Then in 1948 the United States under President Truman was the first country to recognize the state of Israel. The U.S. has been Israel’s most important supporter diplomatically, financially and militarily. Since Britain and America were most instrumental in the establishment of Israel in Palestine, they have the moral obligation to provide the impetus diplomatically, financially and militarily, to establish a homeland for the Palestinians Israel displaced. That homeland should include East Jerusalem, Gaza and the West Bank as well as full and equal citizenship for all people, Jews and others, who reside in Israel.
It may turn out that the establishment of a free and independent state of Palestine will take as long and be as difficult as the establishment of Israel. But a reasonable place for the United States and Great Britain to start is the end of diplomatic, financial and military support to any entity that opposes such a truly permanent peace plan. And because the United States and Great Britain have spent great amounts of money and great efforts towards the economic, humanitarian and security needs of Israel since 1948, it is morally just that the United States and Great Britain implement a full-scale Marshall Plan for Palestine.
A View of Killers of the Flower Moon
Peg and I saw the movie Killers of the Flower Moon Friday, October 20th. It exposes the numerous murders of Osage Native Americans one hundred years ago. The film rightly concentrates on the sins of the Killers and the victimization of the oil-wealthy Osages. I appreciate the light cast upon the deaths of the betrayed victims but, as one who was born and reared on the Osage Nation, I hope viewers realize the tribe were and are much more than victims.
As I watched director Martin Scorsese’s 280-million-dollar epic and paean to the Osage victims I thought of the Osage friends I grew up with in the 1940’s, 50’s and 60’s and to the Osages I live among today. On my desk is John Joseph Mathews’ book The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters and Charles H. Red Corn’s A Pipe for February. Mathews personally signed his book for my mother. Maria and Marjorie Tallchief were Osage prima ballerinas of world-wide fame. Osage artists and sculptors such as John Free are numerous and talented. For example, among Charles Red Corn’s relatives are well known painter Jim Red Corn and writer for the award-winning TV series Reservation Dogs, Ryan Red Corn.
The Osage Nation has always been patriotic and has contributed many military services people to our country, such as WWII General Clarence Leonard Tinker and my personal childhood friends, Ralph Joseph (Bud) Malone and his twin brothers Jerry and Gary. All three Malones were Osages who served in Viet Nam. Gary gave his life for his country, The United States of America, in 1966. Bud, Jerry, Gary and I played baseball and football together throughout our childhood. Bud was a fine infielder and running back. Another Osage friend of mine was Freddy Spotted Bear who pitched on our American Legion baseball team that was coached by my oldest brother, C.E. Redwine. I was Freddy’s catcher. My other brother, Attorney at Law Philip W. Redwine, for many years collaborated on legal projects involving Native American rights with Osage attorney Browning Pipestem who was called the Legal Warrior. Bud Malone’s daughter is also a practicing attorney.
I played with, went to school with and occasionally fought with numerous Osage friends. Today our family physician is Osage Matthew Cameron Rumsey. Dr. Rumsey’s uncle, Clinton Rumsey, and his grandfather, Mongrain (Mogri) Lookout, and I played football together at Pawhuska, Oklahoma High School. Mogri also helped develop the lexicon for the Osage language that was spoken by the actors in Killers. My and my sister’s and brothers’ long-time Sunday School teacher at the First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) in Pawhuska was proud Osage Violet Willis
In other words, the movie is an important and relevant exposé of a great tragedy, The Reign of Terror, but I would not want the audience to be unaware of the many and varied positive contributions members of the Osage tribe have made to our society; they are legion. Osages, just as non-Osages, include competent, complex, heroic, flawed, interesting, valuable, talented and justifiably proud working members of the great tribe that is America. The Reign of Terror certainly must be acknowledged for the evil it was and I am grateful the movie does so and does it so well. However, the Osages as a culture, a tribe and full-blood citizens of The United States of America should be also recognized as triumphing over that great stain on our collective history.
A Eulogy for the Victims of October 1878 Revisited
Since 1990 when German born American Ilse nee Dorsch Horachek made me aware of the tragedy of 1878, my wife Peg and I have researched, spoken, written and helped produce a short movie about those events. And in our historical novel, JUDGE LYNCH!, that we published in 2008 we called for a public monument to the victims to be erected on the southeast corner of the Posey County Courthouse campus where the bones of Daniel Harrison, Sr. may still be buried. Our principal focus has always been the injustice done to the victims and the shameful failings of our legal system. Finally, thanks mainly to teenager Sophie Kloppenburg with input from numerous others a memorial marker to the victims was erected on the campus of the Posey County Circuit Courthouse October 23, 2022. Sophie also organized a one-year commemoration that was held October 21, 2023 and asked Peg and me to participate. The following is the eulogy to the victims that was published in Gavel Gamut after the monument was dedicated in 2022.
EULOGY FOR THE VICTIMS OF OCTOBER 1878
BY
JUDGE JIM REDWINE
FIRST PUBLISHED THE WEEK OF OCTOBER 23, 2022
ACCORDING TO JOSEPH CAMPBELL, TO BE UNAWARE IS THE ULTIMATE SIN. FROM THE AUTUMN OF 1878 UNTIL TODAY, OCTOBER 23, 2022, IN SPITE OF NUMEROUS EFFORTS TO BRING THE CARNAGE TO LIGHT, MOST OF POSEY COUNTY, INDIANA STAYED WILLINGLY UNAWARE OF THE MEMORY OF THE SLAUGHTER OF DANIEL HARRISON, SR., THE BURNING ALIVE OF DANIEL HARRISON, JR., THE SHOOTING OF JOHN HARRISON, THE LYNCHING ON THE COURTHOUSE CAMPUS OF JIM GOOD, WILLIAM CHAMBERS, EDWARD WARNER AND JEFF HOPKINS AND THE POGROM THAT CAUSED ONE-HALF OF THE REMAINING NEGRO RESIDENTS OF POSEY COUNTY, INDIANA TO FLEE FOR THEIR LIVES.
THIS MEMORIAL RESTS WHERE LOCUST TREES ONCE BORE THE STRANGE BLACK FRUIT WITH ELONGATED TONGUES, BULGING EYES AND NUMEROUS BULLET HOLES FROM THE GUNS OF WHITE CITIZENS WHO USED THE BODIES FOR TARGET PRACTICE.
FINALLY, WE CAN DEDICATE CONCRETE ACKNOWLEDGEMENT OF THE WHITE CITIZENS’ ORCHESTRATED AND DISCIPLINED CAMPAIGN OF TERROR AGAINST THE BLACK COMMUNITY AND THE SHAMEFUL COWARDICE OF THE LEGAL SYSTEM AND THE NEWS MEDIA TO NOT ONLY CONDONE THE TERRORISM, BUT TO ACTIVELY HELP HIDE IT FROM HISTORY.
WE DO NOT CELEBRATE TODAY AND WE CANNOT ATONE FOR YESTERDAY. WE CAN, AND DO, ACKNOWLEDGE WRONGS LONG IGNORED AS WE GATHER ABOVE WHERE THE BONES OF DANIEL HARRISON, SR., MAY STILL LIE MOLDERING, AND WE CAN AND DO SAY TO ALL THOSE VICTIMS FROM OCTOBER, 1878, WE AS A COMMUNITY, FINALLY, ARE PUBLICLY AWARE.