History Lesson 
The Lost Tribe
Exiled from the Texas plains they once ruled, Comanches are haunted by the richness of their past.
(Page 5 of 5)
Wahnee, as the leader, sat to the west of the earthen fire ring. The fire ring was in the shape of a crescent, the ends pointing east. In classic peyote symbology, the crescent represented the path of a man’s life from birth to death, but over the years the religion had taken on an admixture of Christianity, and the shape of the fire ring now symbolized, as well, the hoof print of the donkey that Jesus rode into Jerusalem.
When everyone was settled, Wahnee brought out the sacrament—Father Peyote—and placed it on the fire ring. It was a gray, wrinkly nubbin of cactus, ugly with knowledge and medicine. Wahnee then passed around corn shucks and a bag of Bull Durham tobacco, the makings of the ceremonial cigarettes that were to be smoked during the evening’s first prayers.
After the smoking and the praying Wahnee distributed a leather bag of peyote buttons and a vial of peyote powder. I ate one button, enough to be polite, and swallowed some of the powder, afterwards rubbing my hands over my head and body as the ritual mandated. The bitter taste almost made me gag and the peyote sat uneasily in my stomach, but I began to gaze contentedly at the perfect glowing coals of the fire.
Then the singing began. Wahnee sang four songs, holding a staff and eagle feather in one hand and shaking a gourd with the other. He was accompanied by a drummer who pounded out a stern rhythm on a No. 6 cast-iron kettle that had been half-filled with water and hot coals and then covered with a taut deer hide. Thus constructed, the drum was a little model of Mother Earth herself, a reverberant fusion of water and fire.
When Wahnee had finished with his songs he handed the staff and gourd and eagle feather to the man on his left. Each participant sang four songs, and when the circle was completed they began again and then again. It went on for five or six hours. I stared at the fire, trying to locate some sort of tonal entrée into the music, but all the songs sounded indistinguishable to me. Nevertheless, I felt bound up in them somehow, and when each one ended I experienced a tiny wave of sadness along with the sensation that the temperature in the tepee had dropped a few degrees.
At two in the morning Wahnee sang the midnight song—about a band of Comanches long ago who had lost their horses and, while walking along a creek, killed a bear—and then he left the tepee to blow his cane whistle. He blew the whistle in each of the four directions, announcing to the world our prayerful presence there in the tepee. The notes he produced were so sharp and resonant it seemed that they were reaching us from the rim of the earth and that Wahnee himself had been transformed into some sort of magic bird.
When he came back he walked clockwise around the fire and took his seat again in front of Father Peyote. The singing and praying began again and went on for another three hours. At the next interval I asked Wahnee, according to protocol, for permission to leave the tepee for a moment. He nodded his head good-naturedly, and I stood up and made the circle to the east, taking care not to make the mistake of passing in front of anyone who was smoking and eating peyote. The fireman held the flap open for me as I walked out into the night, the songs commencing again behind me. The night was very cold and the sky was clear. There was dew on the grass and it glistened in the starlight. I was not supposed to go back into the tepee until there was a pause in the singing, so for a long time I just stood there and watched it. The tepee’s canvas skin was transparent, and the fire pulsed inside it like a beating heart, in time to the drum and the voices.
I wondered for how much longer such vibrant remnants of the old Comanche life would endure. During the time I spent in Oklahoma I kept hearing about someone who, at least in theory, seemed perfectly poised between the Comanche past and the Comanche future. He was a great-grandson of Quanah Parker, and he had gone to Hollywood on a “sacred mission” to make a movie about his ancestor.
I met Vincent Parker for dinner at Chaya Brasserie near Beverly Hills. He would not tell me his age (“That’s my secret,” he said defiantly. “I have held onto that one little sense of mystery”), but he looked about thirty. He was wearing a Giorgio Armani suit with a matching tie and pocket square, and he carried a topcoat draped over his arm. His olive skin was smooth, and his hair was fashionably long and tousled.
Sipping a glass of red wine, he studied the menu. “I think I’ll have the shrimp ravioli,” he told the waiter. “The only problem is I hate to change wines.”
Parker closed his menu and regarded me with an emphatic gaze, blinking incessantly, as if there was something wrong with his contacts. “I’m a living example of what Quanah Parker wanted,” he said. “I am in some respects what he envisioned for his people. He wanted them to retain not only their identity but also to be at ease in this dominant society.”
Vincent said he was the great-grandson of Quanah and Chony, the chief’s first or second wife, depending on which scholar you accept. He had grown up in Lawton in a family with eleven brothers and sisters. His parents—who had the good fortune to strike oil on their allotted land—instilled in their children the Parker ambition to master the white man’s world.
Vincent graduated from the University of Oklahoma, worked for a time as an aide to Oklahoma Governor George Nye, and dabbled in tribal politics, running unsuccessfully for vice chairman after the 1980 takeover. He was keenly aware that his ancestor presided over all his endeavors.
“I told my father I felt different from any of my brothers and sisters. My father said, ‘You are different. When I look at you, I see him.’ “
That was powerful medicine. To a Parker, Quanah was hardly a typical mortal.
“He was a way-shower,” Vincent said as the waiter brought his shrimp ravioli. “The Christians had their Jesus, the Indians had their Gandhi, and the Comanches had their Quanah Parker.”
Vincent had the feeling that he was meant to be a way-shower too but wasn’t sure how he was to accomplish it. He spent a lot of time in the Star House, Quanah’s famous residence, sitting in his great-grandfather’s chair and praying for guidance. One night his mission came to him: He would write and produce a play about Quanah. He secluded himself in the Star House to write the script, and when it was finished he blessed it by fanning cedar smoke over it with an eagle feather. Nine months later, the play premiered as an outdoor pageant in Quanah, Texas, with members of the Parker family making up the cast. The pageant ran for five years, and then Vincent moved to Los Angeles to pursue the goal of commemorating Quanah in a feature film. Bankrolled by his family, he traveled west with a sense of sacred purpose and a wish list. (“Before I left Oklahoma,” he said, “I wrote in my journal that I wanted a Gucci watch. I love black and gold. The first day in L.A., I went to Gucci and bought it.”)
During his time in L.A. Vincent has worked in various post-production positions for Disney Studios, learning the industry to prepare himself for his task. With his remarkable tenacity and focus, he has already begun to beat the odds. A documentary on Quanah that he produced has just been completed, and he has come close to putting together the funding for a feature. In his spare time he has dabbled in modeling and has been hired to appear in a commercial for Jeep Comanche, in which he will face the camera and say, “Comanches. My forefathers led them. Now I drive them.”
“Sometimes it’s hard,” he said. “I’ll call my father and tell him I have no energy. I get tired of playing the social circuit, putting up with the Hollywood bullshit. At any given moment I question it. I can understand how Jesus wept and questioned his own mission.”
On the other hand, it’s not so terrible. “Going to dinner at Spago, Le Dome, and Nicky Blair’s. That’s my world. I love the wonderful cultural activities that are afforded to me here. People laugh at me because I spend so much time at Tiffany’s, but there are so many wonderful things there! I give no apologies for being driven in a chauffeured limousine. Quanah himself had a surrey with silver trim. If he were here today he’d be with me in the limo. What made him effective is the spiritual influence he brought about. If anything, that’s what I’m trying to hold onto.”
After dinner we walked down the street, toward the Beverly Center, talking about the Adobe Walls song that Quanah had written after the battle and that was one of the few surviving Comanche songs from pre-reservation days. It was a song of mourning, a song of loss.
“I do intend to protect the integrity of this project at all costs,” Vincent said, returning to the movie. “I tell producers, ‘You’re going to continue your careers in L.A. I’m not. I’m going back to these people in Oklahoma, and no amount of money could compensate me for the damage I could do. I cannot sell out!”
I stared frankly at this improbable person. He may have been just another Hollywood hustler with a messiah complex, but I didn’t think so. Beneath his fashion-plate exterior, there was something steely about him, and it was not hard to imagine him in another time as an arrogant and fearless warrior, a lord of the plain.
“I’m not playing around out here,” he said with sudden passion as the Beverly Hills traffic surged by us. “I’m on the warpath.”
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