History Lesson 
The Lost Tribe
Exiled from the Texas plains they once ruled, Comanches are haunted by the richness of their past.
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The chairman’s office is located in a wing of the Comanche Tribal Complex, which sits on a rise just off the H.E. Bailey turnpike, a few miles north of Lawton. The building has the anonymous multipurpose design of a nursing home or a municipal annex. The day I was there, a Ford Aerostar was parked on the lawn, next to a monument that listed the names of Comanche warriors from Adobe Walls to Vietnam. The Aerostar was a bingo prize that was to be given away the next weekend in a game of Bonanza.
There are eight thousand four hundred and ten Comanches. About half of them still live here around the old reservation lands of southwest Oklahoma. To officially be a Comanche, to be counted on the trial rolls, a person must have a “blood quantum” of at least one fourth. Once enrolled, a member is eligible to vote for the officers of the Tribal Business Committee and to qualify for the various assistance programs and grants that are channeled to Native Americans through the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
Comanches no longer have a reservation. It ceased to exist in 1901, the year the federal government implemented the Jerome Agreement, a scheme by which the reservation was broken up for the benefit of white entrepreneurs and settlers who had long coveted the Indians’ land. In compensation, each Indian was given an allotment of 160 acres in the hope that this would force the Comanches to become assimilated homesteaders rather than wards of the government. To a small degree, it worked. Most Comanches didn’t become farmers of their won allotted lands but leased them out instead. For a time, the lease payments provided a reliable economic base, though with each new wave of descendants the per capita value of the original parcels grew more and more diluted. Of greater importance was the fact that allotment, which brought with it a flood of settlement into Indian country, put jobs for the fist time within practical reach of most Comanches.
But whatever prosperity has come to the Comanches has been decidedly marginal. Comanches have all the familiar problems of other Indian peoples, including staggering rates of alcoholism and diabetes. And for all the worldly benefits that came with allotment, nearly half of the Comanches in the Lawton area were unemployed. Those who have jobs—who are fortunate enough to be employed as civilian workers at Fort Sill or as bureaucrats at the Tribal Complex of the BIA—often have extensive kinship obligations that leave them supporting as many as a dozen people on one salary. The Comanches may have lost their reservation, but there does still seem to reside within them the traces of a reservation mentality. Though they never became tillers of the soil as they whites expected them to, they did cease to be nomads. They clung to the old reservation the way their ancestors might have lingered at a dying campfire. The Second World War, in which many Comanches served, helped to disperse them somewhat, but few of the People became wholeheartedly cosmopolitan enough to take on the alien priorities of the white man’s world.
As I visited Comanches I kept sensing a kind of languor, a reliance on certain earthly rhythms that white people do not seem to feel. Many of them were poor, and though they were certainly not poor by choice it seemed to me that as a people they shared a fundamental disinterest in the ideal of wealth. Even the dynamic rhetoric I encountered at the level of tribal government had the air of mimicry.
“I have maintained,” Saupitty was telling me, “that we don’t have a choice as far as economic development goes. We’ve got to provide work in some way. We’ve got a big bingo expansion coming up. We’re moving it into downtown Lawton, right off the interstate access. We’re talking a fifteen-thousand seater. Then we’re going to expand the complex. At this point we’re thinking about an amphitheater, maybe a KOA campground, a store that would be an outlet for souvenirs. We’ve looked at horse racing. Horses and Comanches should be compatible.
“Horses and Comanches,” he mused. “You know, we’ve been told about that by books and movies all our lives.” He looked up at a woman who was passing out agendas. “What about you, Joyce, can you ride a horse?”
“I was thrown off once,” she said. “Haven’t been back on since.”
The old Comanche way of life came to an end with such punishing swiftness that, to an outsider, the Comanches of today still seem to be trying to absorb the shock. At one moment the People were running after wild buffalo on the plains, wolfing down the animals’ raw livers and gall bladders, and in the wink of an eye, there they were on the reservation, wearing shoddy preacher clothes and gouging Mother Earth with plows. If there was ever a group of people not meant to be farmers, it was the Comanches. They chased after cattle on horseback, filling them full of arrows and bullets and then cutting them open and feeding the steaming offal to their children.
Some Comanches, of course, were more flexible than others. Quanah—now Quanah Parker—became a spectacular success in this strange new world and before long was one of the most celebrated and richest Indians in the country. His half-white blood, his regal bearing, and his status as a revered former enemy made him a sentimental favorite among his conquerors. A group of ranchers built him a 32-room house whose roof was painted with giant white stars. He invested $40,000 in a railroad, the Quanah, Acme, and Pacific. He had his own stationery, a per diem for official travel, and even a place in Theodore Roosevelt’s inaugural parade.
In other ways Quanah hewed to his former life. He had numerous wives, and when he was instructed to get rid of all but one he responded by telling the agent to choose which wife he should keep. He had no interest in teachings of the missionaries—Baptist, Mennonite, Catholic, Dutch Reformed—who descended upon the reservation and instead turned to the “pagan” peyote religion that was becoming increasingly important to the demoralized Indian peoples of the Southwest. Quanah initially opposed the allotment program, but he was still regarded by many of his people as a sell-out, and they remembered that it was the white men who had appointed him chief of the Comanches.
Comanches are individuals, and Comanche politics is therefore contentious and confused. I was never certain, as I listened to accounts of recent tribal history, exactly which chairman had been recalled when, which members of the business committee had used tribal funds to lease Learjets and start fast-food franchises, which officials stood accused of outright embezzlement. Saupitty himself was recalled—illegally, he maintains—during his first term in 1980. In reaction, a group of his supporters seized the complex, charging the originators of the recall with misappropriation of funds and demanding an audit. The standoff lasted six months. Some Comanches applauded the activists and camped out in their tepees in support; others threatened an armed assault. The crisis finally dissolved, but not before the Bureau of Indian Affairs suspended all federal funds until the Comanches resolved their differences. Today the affair—the Comanche Civil War—is commemorated by a small plaque that sits in a stubbly field next to the complex.
To read the inscription, one has to crawl through a barbed-wire fence.
Long ago, when the Comanches wandered unimpeded across the plains, they would occasionally happen upon the bones of extinct mammoths. No creature in the People’s experience matched the size of those bones, so they surmised that the bones belonged to the Great Cannibal Owl, a malicious entity that carried off human children in the night. The Great Cannibal Owl was said to live in a cave in the Wichita Mountains, an alluring range of granite, laced with streams and abandoned gold mines, that rises as light as a cloud from the Oklahoma grasslands. The country around the Wichitas has a hallowed, ancestral feel to it, but when you drive through it with a Comanche you cannot shake the feeling that it is, like the rest of Comanchería, a paradise lost.
“Our Comanche people don’t like owls,” Hammond Motah said as he drove around the base of the Wichitas, listening to the muffled bombardment from Fort Sill’s vast gunnery range. “They’re taboo. If my wife and I are at home at night and we hear a screech owl outside, we’ll run out and chase it away.”
Motah managed the print shop at the Comanche tribal complex and also served as the tribe’s public information officer. He worse slacks and gray suspenders, and though he was fluent in PR jargon (he spoke frequently of the need to “develop a format” for my inquiries), the more time I spent with him the more I was convinced that his worldliness was only a veneer. In his late forties, Motah had the classic physiognomy of a Comanche: a stout body and a broad, powerful, contemplative face.
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