Human/Nature
by Colleen Thurston for South Summit 2023
The last time I was in New Orleans, while pitching the documentary I’m currently making, someone attending the pitch asked me “what do you mean when you talk about an Indigenous diaspora?” Which was an identifying phrase I used in my pitch. I suppose to some, those words are diametrically opposed. Diaspora meaning the dispersion of people from their homelands. Indigenous meaning being native to a specific place. But to the majority of Indigenous people in my state, Oklahoma, diasporic is the definition of our existence. We were — and still are — Indigenous to our homelands — now the American South, but we were forcibly removed from those homelands to the land that was then called Indian Territory. Okla Homma. Okla, meaning people, homma meaning red. In the Choctaw language, Land of the red people. When we got there, we named it as our own after ourselves, and then began the long process of making it home. Not homelands, but home.
In a timed pitch session, I didn’t have the capacity to explain in detail the complications of existing as a dispossessed Indigenous person in a Nation within a Nation in a region known as the South.
“But is Oklahoma the South?” is another question I’ve had directed towards me, too many times to count. Said with a “Southerner than you” inflection. Sometimes from people who live in our homelands and who identify as Southerners themselves. But before Okla Homma was home, we were the original Southerners. The Choctaw — my people, the Chickasaw, the Seminole, the Muscogee, the Cherokee. Our Nations and reservations encompass nearly half of Oklahoma, but our presence blankets the South still. It’s the Choctaw culinary knowledge that provides fille powder for fille gumbo. The southern staple of cornbread comes from Indigenous cuisine. Our language is slow and spoken with a drawl. Our place names dot the southern landscape. Atchafalaya, Tuscaloosa, Tallahatchie. Oklahoma is far from the only place we named. But the places named by us with our language in our homelands, are the ones from which we’ve been forced to disconnect.
Just as I’ve been asked, I have asked my own questions about Southern and diasporic identities. Is that land really the South, or is it the old Nations? Are Nations land based? What happens to national identity when an entire nation moves? What if the United States — its people and government — was suddenly forced to move elsewhere, to someone else’s land? How would US Citizens’ identity change if their land base suddenly changed?
So am I a southerner if my peoples’ identity was only based in the South since time immemorial?
How can the South be sanctuary if it’s a place we were forced to flee?
A sanctuary is a place of refuge, of safety. Where you’re held close, and in comfort. It’s a complicated term, when you belong to the land, when you define yourself not just by where you live, but by where your Nation is and maybe also where your homelands are.
Reflecting on these questions and considering how the land can define identity, I think perhaps it’s just as much about where you’re from, and where you live, as it is about how these places affect our physical bodies, and the stories we tell about the places, and ourselves within these places. Some Indigenous people define themselves by their water source. In introductions, and as an actual, Indigenous land acknowledgement.
Presently, I am of the Arkansas River. It’s what makes up my physical body and it’s where I live and where I was born. But my DNA holds memory of water from generations back. I don’t know the words for the generational water that made me — that knowledge was lost or not passed down. Maybe it was Caddo Creek. Maybe seven generations ago it was the Tallahatchie River when we lived near what is now Greenwood, Mississippi before the Removal. Greenwood — named for a Choctaw chief, Greenwood LeFlore. Tallahatchie — named from the Choctaw words Tvli, meaning rock, hvcha meaning river. River of rocks. I’d guess more people know it for its relationship to the fictional Billy Joe McAlister who jumped off its bridge in Bobbie Gentry’s country song or for the horrific lynching of 14 year old Emmett Till, whose body his murderers threw in the Tallahatchie. I don’t know the Choctaw stories of this river though. Were they lost when we were separated from it? Is the river the only one who holds that knowledge now?
Illi hvcha. Illi meaning death, Hvcha meaning river. River of death. Identities can change though. The river once, and always, provides life. Okchaya, meaning life.
I’m making a film about rivers. One river in particular — the Kiamichi. This river exists wholly in the Choctaw Nation — the new Nation, in Oklahoma. One of the film’s protagonists, Sandy told me “when we were removed as Choctaw people to this country, when they got here and they saw this river, they must’ve felt better because they knew there was water.”
Was this when they — our ancestors- began to identify themselves by this new river? As people of the Kiamichi? Just as in the old Nation, in this new one, the rivers provide for us and define us.
Water provides hope, and comfort. Water provides clarity, and cleansing. Water is a sanctuary. Rivers are places of beginning, they are life sources. With Sandy, I visited the spring fed headwaters of the Kiamichi in the mountains of Southeastern Oklahoma, in the Choctaw Nation. The water trickles out of the earth there, a tiny bubbling that moistens the clay and creates a small furrow that ever so gradually widens as the trickle becomes a stream. Here, the headwaters resemble a birth canal. It’s where the community and the ecosystem of the river valley are born of the Kiamichi. The river is the matriarch of the area.
I don’t have the knowledge of the ancestral waters that made me. When we were removed from our homelands, we stopped passing down some of our knowledge. Dealing with the trauma of removal, of genocide on the Trail of Tears, some stories and oral traditions were lost — or halted. With the disconnection from the land came a disconnection from cultural knowledge, from the language that belongs to that place, and from place-based identity.
In Oklahoma, we were re-born as people. We are resilient, but the trauma did inform the stories we tell ourselves. And colonization shaped our cultures. We lost our focus on our traditional matriarchy, and centering life sources — mothers, women, water — as the creators of us as people. To know who we are, we must know who made us.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been a water person. That first immersion in an Oklahoma lake in the summer brings a full body sigh of contentment. A refuge from the stifling heat and humidity. It’s when the water in me is balanced by its surrounding liquid kin. I’m most at ease in water. Water composes me and comforts me — it is my sanctuary. Water is alive. It holds memory. It creates us, it defines us, and it holds our histories and stories. It’s the stories that we tell ourselves about place, about identity, about who we are as cultures, as humans, that bring us a sense of communal self awareness. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are can be as self-assured as a free flowing river, winding its way through the land, knowing where to go and where it comes from. So in stories, we claim our being.
Diasporas are free flowing and while disconnected from homelands, diasporic communities give birth to new ways of being. New streams off of main waterways.
When we were removed to Oklahoma, we brought our seeds with us to grow food to provide for us and future generations. Seeds grown for generations in Choctaw — southern — soil. Seeds born of a life giver, that create and sustain life. We plant our seeds — corn, squash, beans, tobacco, peas — in the land wherever we remain and we nourish them with the water of the land. Right now, I have corn sprouting from heirloom Choctaw seeds in my backyard in Tulsa. My son helped my plant our Tanchi Tohbi: Tanchi meaning corn, Tohbi meaning white. This is the corn that is used to make cornmeal for my favorite — cornbread. These are the seeds that made the trek from the old Nation in the South with us, and that have survived their own displacement. Though the soil and the water may be different, we grow where we are planted. We create and sustain life.
I don’t know if I’m Southern, but I do know where I’m from — I’m born of the Arkansas river, and seven generations removed from the Mississippi River delta. The water that ran through my grandparents bodies now runs through mine. And the stories I tell, the language I use, about place, about history, will run through the next seven generations as well.
_________
As we are, water is alive. It holds memory. It creates us, it defines us, and it holds our histories. Histories that are made up of our stories.
Stories that provide for us, stories that we tell ourselves — over generations, about who we are. Like water, stories define us. It’s the stories that we tell ourselves about place, about identity, about who we are as cultures, as humans, that bring us a sense of communal self awareness.
The stories are passed down, but not the questions. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are are as self-assured as a free flowing river, winding its way through the land, knowing where to go and not questioning where it belongs. So in stories, and with language, we claim our being.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Colleen Thurston is a documentary storyteller and film programmer from Tulsa, Oklahoma. Her films explore the relationships between humans and the natural world and focus on Indigenous perspectives. Colleen has produced for the Smithsonian Channel, Vox, and museums, public television, and federal and tribal organizations. Her work has screened at international film festivals and broadcast nationwide.
Colleen is an Assistant Professor at the University of Oklahoma, the project coordinator for the Indigenous video series, Native Lens, and is a programmer for Hot Springs Documentary Film Festival.
She is a Firelight Media doc lab alum, a Sundance Institute Indigenous Film Fund Fellow, and a citizen of the Choctaw Nation.
This piece was commissioned by the New Orleans Film Society for South Summit 2023. South Summit received critical support from JustFilms Ford Foundation, which is part of the Ford Foundation’s Creativity and Free Expression program and is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Arts Council New Orleans.
