THE BROKEN HEART LAND TRILOGY

By Dr. Blue Clark

The American Indian side of my family have all been radicals when it came to Native cultural survival. I have taught American Indian Studies for forty years in university classrooms. I grew up in eastern Oklahoma in the vicinity of the staging of the events in Vicki Lynn Mooney's BROKEN HEART LAND Trilogy. Her plays provide insights into real historical incidents as her mixed-blood Indian extended family experiences them.

The family includes Anglo-American, African-American, and American Indian individuals who represent the extremes of each of those groups. Federal policies fractured Indian families, impoverished and exploited them, and on occasion even killed Indians who resisted. One of my Indian ancestors was jailed for her resistance. My own family background within the region led me to enjoy and sometimes squirm in my seat as I watched the characterizations and action taking place before me on stage.

Vicki Mooney is of Cherokee Indian heritage and her work portrays the historical events that hammered Indian people both as they trod their 1830s' Trail of Tears into Indian Territory, underwent their adjustment to a new region and the American Civil War that destroyed large portions of their area and led to loss of lands during Reconstruction, then the seizure of more land under the allotment policy of the turn of the Twentieth Century that gave birth to the State of Oklahoma in 1907.

Before allotment, the region the Five Tribes occupied equaled the size of the state of South Carolina. Allotment affected over 101,000 American Indians in Indian Territory and left just 1.5 million acres under tribal and federal control.

The process was arbitrary. If a full-blood Indian was ill or stubborn and did not sign up by the deadline, that individual and descendants were not officially "Indian" according to the U. S. government. Missionary boarding school influence, federal government paternalism toward Indian "wards," and non-Indian settlement and exploitation of former Indian lands all took their toll on the Indian peoples and freedmen in the territory. Tribal peoples entered their "dark ages" with allotment/assimilation in the 1880s and would only emerge from the misery beginning in the 1930s.

Vicki Mooney's playwriting reveals an American Indian story at the same time that she sets forth the intimate tale of the human condition with raw emotion. BROKEN HEART LAND details Alma Wimsey's feelings as she faces a child marriage to an older white man in 1903, amid the background of non-Indian settlement following allotment.

HOOP JUMPER tells the difficulties Weli Wimsey faces as he signs the Dawes Roll driven in part to obtain acreage for his daughters and his wife. In the shadows are opponents called "Resisters." The extended family of Weli has a mixture of backgrounds reflecting the booming oil patch of Tulsa, Oklahoma, in 1920 with a half-black son, a white-raised grandson James, and the married Alma, as well as a cousin who is an active Ku Klux Klan supporter.

That volatile family mix is mirrored in the real events in Tulsa that exploded a year later in the Greenwood Massacre, earlier known as the Tulsa Race Riot. It was arguably the worst in U. S. history. In the past, I have written about it.

Vicki Mooney's trilogy helps the audience to understand the attitudes and actions that bubble below the surface of the territory leading to the explosion of settlement, dashed dreams, and of violence. She opens a window into those attitudes and events.

More: Angie Debo, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (Princeton University Press, 1940; reprinted by University of Oklahoma Press, 1984); Frederick E. Hoxie, A Final Promise: The Campaign to Assimilate the Indians, 1880-1920 (University of Nebraska Press, 1984); Judith Royster, “The Legacy of Allotment,” Arizona State Law Journal, v. 27 (Spring 1995): 1-78.

--Blue Clark (member of the Muscogee Nation) holds the David Pendleton Chair of American Indian Studies and is a Professor (Retired) at Oklahoma City University School of Law, and, author of Lone Wolf v. Hitchcock: Treaty Rights and Indian Law at the End of the Nineteenth Century (University of Nebraska Press, 1999) among other works.