History Lesson 
The Lost Tribe
Exiled from the Texas plains they once ruled, Comanches are haunted by the richness of their past.
(Page 4 of 5)
Motah studied elementary education at Arizona State, but he taught only briefly, working instead as a planner for other Plains tribes in the northern states. He came home to Oklahoma as something of an activist (he was one of the Comanches who took over the complex), and he had been deeply impressed by the cultural cohesion he had seen up north. It was a source of great sorrow to him that Comanche traditions seemed to be helplessly slipping away, replaced by a cultural crazy quilt stitched together with borrowings from other tribes. That is, arguably, the inevitable course of any society, but the Comanches were particularly vulnerable. As raiders and nomads they traveled light; they carried their culture in their heads. Their beliefs and manners were existential, rooted in action. Without the sustaining momentum of the open range, they began to collapse.
“We’re really a vanishing race,” Motah said. There was a tear forming in his eye. The Comanche language was dying out. People Motah’s age could understand it but could not speak it fluently, and within another generation or so it would be a ceremonial relic like Latin. Young people beginning to dance in powwows were susceptible to fads and fashions, forsaking the old Comanche dances and taking up the single bustles of the northern tribes. Instead of sitting up all night cross-legged at a peyote meeting, singing the old songs and invoking the old spirits, kids tended to hang out in the parking lot after powwows, drinking and smoking dope. Soon, even the definition of a Comanche would have to be revised. Intermarriage among the tribes had been so common since reservation days that 80 percent of the younger Comanches had no more than one-fourth blood. If they marry someone with less than the minimum blood quantum—a likely occurrence—their children won’t be Comanches. “This is the last generation,” Kenneth Saupitty had told me, “that our constitution will allow.”
Motah himself was married to a Kiowa, and though he and his in-laws got along fine, there were certain Kiowa taboos he had to watch out for. He could not speak directly to his mother-in-law, for example; if he did, his teeth would fall out.
“When it comes to the Kiowas,” he told me, “I’m like a Man Called Horse.”
Earlier that afternoon, Motah and I had visited the Comanche elder center in Lawton, where senior members of the tribe congregated every day for a free lunch. On the paneled walls were framed photographs of famous Comanches—Quanah with his implacable barbarian expression, Ten Bears in spectacles with a commemorative medallion around his neck. A few women in the front room were working at a quilting frame, but the rest of the elders were in the dining room, eating boiled hot dogs, sauerkraut, and canned beets. There were Halloween decorations on the tables. I sat down and talked for a while with an elder who reminisced about his childhood at the Fort Sill Indian School. He had arrived there terrified, not knowing a work of English. If you were caught speaking Comanche, he said, your mouth was washed out with soap.
Soon my attention was seized by a conversation at the far end of the table, where a woman was saying something about Adobe Walls.
“What’d you say?” an old man next to her asked. “Cement walls?”
“No, Adobe,” she said and then turned to me. “You ever heard of Adobe Walls?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said. “In fact, I always wondered what happened to Ishatai. Do you know?”
“Who?”
“Ishatai.”
“No, I don’t know nothing about him.”
After lunch we dropped in on a man named George “Woogee” Watchetaker, a former world champion powwow dancer (“I retired undefeated!”), artist, and rainmaker. Watchetaker was 72. He had been born in a tent, back in the days when Comanches were still suspicious of houses and the bygone more of the plains still had some sway. Back then, he remembered, Comanche men still plucked their eyebrows.
“My dad,” he told us, “he made his own tweezers out of a tin. He’d sharpen the tweezers with a file and pull his eyebrows out and his sideburns too.”
Watchetaker himself had a trace of a moustache and a growth of stubble on his chin. He wore glasses with thick black frames and kept his hair in two long braids tied with rubber bands. He had few teeth. His living room was filled with souvenir-shop Indian art—plaster busts of braves and squaws, paintings of wide-eyes Indian children and mounted warriors praying to the Great Spirit.
“Here about 1969,” he said, “I used to be a big drunkard. I used to smoke. The day before Christmas I got tired of it and wanted to quit. I went to bed and watched TV till midnight and then woke up at five-thirty, waiting for the TV to come on again. I was looking out that window when I saw something. It was a figure standing there. It looked like smoke. I wasn’t scared or amazed at what I saw. Pretty soon it spoke to me—’George, you know what you been doing is wrong. You got a short time to live. But if you change your way of life, you’re gonna be well respected. You’ll live a long time. Your name will go a long way. Remember my words. Listen to me’
“Then,” Watchetaker said, making a snakelike motion with his hand, “he just slunk away. I didn’t say anything to anybody about what I saw. That evening I played Santy Claus. My craving for drinking stopped just like that.”
Not long after that incident, when West Texas was suffering under a drought, Watchetaker was asked to come to Wichita Falls and make rain. He had never professed to be a medicine man and was afraid to put himself on the line, but the spirit spoke to him again and told him to go ahead and try. He went to Wichita Falls, set a bowl of water down in the middle of a shopping-center parking lot, blessed it, smoked over it, and spit water in the four directions.
“And it hadn’t been a minute before a bolt of lightning shot across the sky and it started raining. Next day they had big headlines: He done it.
“So I remember the words that that vision has told me,” Watchetaker concluded. “I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, and my name has been everywhere.”
That night there was a moon—a Comanche moon, bright enough to light the warpath—shining on the fields as we drove back to Lawton. Motah told me about the time, a few years back, when he had decided to go on a vision question. IN the bygone days a vision quest was the classic Comanche rite of manhood. A teenage boy would go out into the wilderness, deprive himself of food and water for four days and nights, and wait for his “visitor,” usually an animal spirit who would issue instructions and leave the boy with a personal fund of mystical power—his medicine.
For his vision quest, Motah picked a site near a spring and made a circle of sage. He remembers being strong and confident the first day, but by the second day he was so thirsty he could not refrain from licking the dew off some nearby leaves. After a time his parents, both of whom had died years before, appeared to him, pleading. “You don’t have to do this,” they said. “Come with us.” But he stayed in the circle. He was taunted by a group of nenuhpee, sinister apparitions that take the form of tiny warriors and are also know to modern Comanches as leprechauns. “You’re a fake,” the nenuhpee jeered. “You don’t belong here. You don’t know anything about the old ways.” Several more visitors appeared—some benign, some malevolent—but before the prescribed four nights had passed Motah was so hungry and sick and scared that he crawled out of his circle.
“I went home and slept for two days,” he said. “I went to see a medicine man to tell him about my experience. He was extremely interested. He said he hadn’t heard of a Comanche going on a vision quest for fifty years.”
At the Comanche elder center I had been introduced to Thomas Wahnee, a 77-year-old retired roofer who was born, he told me, the year Quanah Parker died. Wahnee was a quiet, modest man who gave the impression of being subtly amused by everything he saw. He wore dark glasses and a hearing aid, and a single incisor dangled precariously from his upper jaw. Wahnee was a peyote man. Like many other elders, he had grown up in the Native American Church, attending meetings back in the days when participants still wore buckskin shirts and tied their braids with otter fur. Not all Comanches, of course, followed the peyote road. Most adhered to some variant of traditional Christian worship, while others found spiritual expression by participating in powwows. But the Comanches were the first Plains Indians to acquire the peyote religion, and they played a major role in its dissemination.
Wahnee invited me to attend a meeting of the church, and one cold winter evening I arrived at his house. A growly pit bull was chained up at the side of the house, and in the back yard a tepee stood next to a stock fence.
Ten people, mostly men in their sixties, had gathered for the meeting, and we sat around in Wahnee’s house until late in the evening listening to tales of power and witchcraft and medicine. When the fire was built Wahnee and the elder men led the way into the tepee, carrying their toolboxes (containing gourds and feather fans and other paraphernalia of the peyote rite) like men going off to work a late-night shift at a factory. We circled clockwise around the outside of the tepee and then went inside and sat down on sofa cushions on a bed of sage.
My Library
