Books by Friends: Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest
I met Greg Bigler during a visit to Tulsa not long after my brother opened his store Tulsa Runner in 2003. We renew our acquaintance and reaffirm our friendship whenever I return to Tulsa, hanging out at the store, running together with my brother and their pals, drinking coffee after a run, enjoying barbecue, beer, and camaraderie at Tulsa Runner holiday parties. Greg always makes me feel welcome no matter how “don’t ask, don’t tell” slow my running pace might be.
Greg is also a Euchee tribal citizen, member of Polecat Ceremonial Grounds, Harvard Law School graduate (1985) with a Master of Laws degree from Wisconsin Law School (1987), district court judge at the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, author of the recently published Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest: Tales from the Euchee Reservation, and hardcore runner who has, as Kristen A. Carpenter writes in her foreword to Rabbit, “without a doubt run more marathons than any other Indian lawyer.”
When I was in Tulsa for the holidays in 2019, Greg gave me a printed copy of his article Traditional Jurisprudence and Protection of Our Society: A Jurisgenerative Tail published in American Indian Law Review. This article introduced me to the complicated relationship between Native tribes and the American government that I do not recall having encountered in classrooms and textbooks. Maybe I was surreptitiously reading science fiction during class the day it came up. More likely the subject got only passing mention at best. I have picked up some general sense of this relationship and the history behind it over the years but never studied it in any systematic fashion. My knowledge and understanding of the subject remain sketchy.
Some of that history is about the advanced civilizations that existed before contact between the Americas and Europe in 1492. While we generally think of Mayan, Aztec, and Inca civilizations in this context, “North America also had great towns and societies…Agricultural innovation and trade moved goods thousands of miles between tribes and towns. That, however, all went away for various reasons, not the least of which is disease” (Trad. Juris.)
Resurrection of these self-sustaining societies, highly unlikely in any case, is not the point. The goal is not to create a society “independent of the larger society” around it, but rather retention of distinct attributes from the past that allows continuity of a “unique culture and society.”
We must therefore understand what obstacles we face and what allows us the greatest chance of success. Of course, a fundamental question is this: what are we trying to continue, and how can we determine the nature of our remaining society? (Trad. Juris.)
Traditional Jurisprudence was my introduction to the Euchee, a small tribe within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, with which they have been affiliated since they late 1700s. In the 1830s they were removed from Georgia with the Muscogee on the Trail of Tears. Although not federally recognized as a separate tribe, the Euchee claim an identity distinct from the Muscogee or any other tribe. They speak a language unrelated to any other and maintain their traditional religion, “which is similar but not identical to the Muscogee’s and that of other stomp dance people originally from the southeastern United States” (Rabbit).
Throughout his life Greg has been engaged in issues involving political sovereignty and preservation of Euchee culture and traditions as a lawyer and judge, through scholarly and legal writings, and through participation in ceremonial life and the duties that come with it. In Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest he bears witness to this in a heartfelt chapter about the “sad, bitter fact” of the acquisition of Native American human remains and cultural items by his law school’s parent institution, Harvard University, and other academic institutions and the failure of those institutions to “interact with the Indian tribes and return their stolen Ancestors”:
I graduated from Harvard Law School in 1985. Since then, I have almost exclusively practiced in the field of federal Indian law or in tribal law. In my personal life, participation in my Euchee traditional ceremonies shades everything I do. Our ceremonies teach us that the spiritual and physical world merge, they are not separated. Part of this is an awareness of those who have gone on, our Ancestors.
In 2015 when Greg was head judge of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation district court he initiated a project to translate the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples into the Muscogee language. Several Muscogee ceremonial grounds chiefs and other fluent Muscogee speakers participated in the project. When they came to Article 31 of the Declaration, which discusses the right to their cultural heritage, knowledge, traditions, medicines, and literature, and the right to control them, they began discussing what this means and what its purpose is.
They remembered how the old men at their ceremonial grounds…talked about these very things in their Muscogee language. What they said this meant, in their language, when literally translated back into English was: “Now this is our ways that was given to us and is very sacred and is not to play with.” (Rabbit)
Traditional Jurisprudence is a scholarly work. In a more informal manner Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest offers a window into Euchee (also spelled Yuchi) culture and traditions, their ways, through memoir, anecdote, short fiction, and tales featuring Rabbit, Bear, Wolf, and their friends. The animal tales are called di’ile, “a traditional story that usually involves animals, sometimes with a moral, sometimes simply a story. Rabbit was often the protagonist but was not always involved.” Rabbit is mischievous, vain, irresponsible, given to grand schemes and plans that fall apart, and perhaps akin to Coyote as trickster. At bottom though he has a good heart, so his wife and friends put up with him. In Greg’s telling, Rabbit loves his lattes, has a lot of girlfriends, and is jealous of Coyote. No one, it seems, talks about Rabbit’s heroics and adventures anymore. “But Coyote! Oh, everyone talks about Coyote. Coyote this, Coyote did that…Coyote even has movies about him!”
An introductory note for the story “Shajwane and Gojithlah” (“Rabbit and Monster”) explains that this di’ile “shows that society addresses problems through council meetings, discusses what is expected of its males, the results of transgressions against society, the nature of punishment, and what the concept of friends and relations demands,” in short, “how Euchee people are supposed to act. Yet ultimately this is just a story that Euchee women used to tell their children.”
The Euchee maintain their unique identity within the context of an intrusive modern world and influence by Anglo-American, Hispanic, or other tribal societies and cultures, and despite influences from the broader American society:
Through a constant washing over us of this mainstream society, a dilution easily, unconsciously occurs of our own unique tribal identity, a subjugation of Eucheeness. Though unintentional at this point, this gradual erosion is perhaps more effective than, or perhaps the end result of, the forced boarding schools of the 1920s and ‘30s that cut Indian boys hair, suppressed Native languages, and attacked tribal religion. (Rabbit)
By the 1990s the Euchee language was in danger of becoming lost. In 1990 Greg and his mother, Josephine Wildcat Bigler (1921–2016), started a Euchee-language class. She grew up speaking Euchee until she started school and continued to speak it at home until she went off to college. Her fluency gradually lessened over the years but she could still speak it well throughout her life. Greg himself “grew up knowing a few words and perhaps a few phrases.”
He explains, “I didn’t want us to just learn how to count to ten, to teach the colors, or name the animals and birds. I wanted to learn how to speak, how to talk with each other.” At that time there were still probably several dozen fluent speakers of Euchee, all in their seventies or older. Thanks to the efforts of Greg, his mother, and others the language has undergone a revival with growing numbers of young people learning to speak it fluently.
More glimpses into Euchee ways come through accounts of Green Corn and stomp dance ceremonies, wild onion dinners, often held at tribal churches, and Euchee doctors—sometimes called medicine men by others, “mostly whites, but even many other tribes,” but the Euchee “tended to call doctors, at least in English.”
[Doctors] treated the sick and the ill, both physically and spiritually caused illnesses. They knew plants and how to prepare them. Each sickness had a plant. Each plant had a song. Or maybe it was a song for each illness. Maybe that is the same thing. They understood that the physical and the spiritual were tied together, in treating one you treated the other. Today, Western medicine calls that holistic medicine. To us, it was just doctoring. We don’t have those doctors among our Euchee people anymore, but our traditional people still like to use plants. Herbs, as some call them. And we still rely on numerous medicines for our ceremonial grounds.
Stomp dance is a traditional dance performed by Muscogee Creeks, Cherokee, and other tribes. For some tribes stomp dance “is social. Maybe at their pow-wows, during the day, exhibitions at schools, for an hour or two in the evening.” For the Euchee stomp dance is “religious, ceremony, sacred, spiritual…We dance all night, till sunup, around our medicine fire.”
Not spiritual in the Western-understood sense of an internal quest for peace or centeredness, but spiritual as in a world filled with animate life, Spirits that interact with us, some Spirits we see or seek, some we feel, some that simply are. We as modern people may not regularly mingle with Spirits, but the traditional Euchee life that still infuses us strongly pulls on that existence. These themes remain a part of us and our Euchee ways as we continue as a people.
Greg writes that Euchee people enjoy sharing stomp dance with others in a respectful way. “We just don’t want to advertise it.” Part of being respectful is not getting into the particulars involving Euchee ceremonial grounds, “as some things are better discussed in person or learned by doing.”
Contentious issues related to tribal sovereignty and treaty obligations crop up in this country with distressing regularity. They were at the heart of the Keystone XL Pipeline controversy, where the federal Bureau of Land Management granted right-of-way for the proposed pipeline’s path across tribal lands without consultation with the tribes as required by law (Rosebud Sioux). More recently the Oglala Sioux Tribe told South Dakota Governor Kristi Noem she “was no longer welcome on tribal lands, and its leaders referred to her rhetoric linking immigration and crime as opportunistic and dangerous” (Brewer, Ahmed, What to know). Here in the Northwest tribal rights come into play in disputes over salmon restoration (Schick, In a Major Shift) and water rights (Powell, The Supreme Court) where cities, farmers, tribes, and business and environmental groups often find themselves at odds with each other.
A chapter in Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest is devoted to the time Greg and his law partner G. William Rice went to the Supreme Court “to litigate, appeal, argue, and ultimately win by unanimous decision” the case Oklahoma Tax Commission v. Sac and Fox Nation (1993). “The case concerned the Sac and Fox assertion that tribes were exempt from state taxation on their automobiles garaged on tribal lands.” Greg’s account of his role is modest. Bill Rice delivered oral arguments. Greg was along, he writes, “only to carry the briefcase.” Writing in Tulsa Law Review, Angela M. Risenhoover declared that the Supreme Court decision represented a great victory for all Indian tribes in Oklahoma:
The primary issue in the case…is that of Indian country and reservation disestablishment. The Supreme Court put an end to the argument repeatedly asserted by the Oklahoma Tax Commission that there was some distinction between a formal reservation and trust land. The Court held “the McClanahan presumption against state taxing authority applies to all Indian country, and not just formal reservations.” (Reservation Disestablishment)
The spirit of openness and generosity in the sharing of Euchee ways that runs through Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest makes the chapter “Seven Thousand Dzogala” all the more striking in tone and the depth of feeling about the issue taken up there. The title refers to the “almost seven thousand Native American remains” in the possession of Harvard University in its Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. These remains represent only a portion of the “human remains and other cultural items such as funerary objects, sacred objects, and objects of cultural patrimony” possessed by Harvard and other institutions.
Harvard released in September 2022 a report on slave and Native remains in the university’s possession, which tried—but for many Native alumni failed—to make amends…I have a visceral, emotional, cultural reaction that needs expressing, one that fundamentally explains how Harvard and other institutions so morally failed in their obligations. Harvard, and many other institutions, still fail to comprehend the depth of these wrongs…However, the harm and traumas of stolen Ancestors housed in boxes deeply impacts Native students and alumni. Institutions seem unable, or unwilling, to acknowledge such personal wrongs beyond issuing a formulaic “land acknowledgement” before an institution’s presentations.
There is a special pleasure to be had in finding that one really enjoys a book written by a friend. It is also refreshing to encounter discourse about tribal culture where a deep sense of belonging is conveyed absent the clangor that accompanies a lot of contemporary discussion and debate about matters of identity and difference. Past and present wrongs and injustice are called out forthrightly, sometimes with deep emotion and moral argument, as in “Seven Thousand Dzogala,” but without rancor. So are the challenges of maintaining “Euchee family, church, and ceremonial relations” amid “so many other interactions and institutions [that] are non-Euchee or non-Native.”
There is much here that can inform my thinking about questions of group identity, racial, ethnic, and so on—relationships between identity and the broader society, political and cultural sovereignty, assimilation and appropriation, and the ten thousand others that vex us. Rabbit shows that it is possible to take up these things both respectfully and with moral clarity and integrity while keeping faith with traditions and heritage that shade everything one does.
Keep the faith. Stand with Ukraine. yr obdt svt
References and Related Reading
Gregory H. Bigler, Rabbit Decolonizes the Forest: Stories from the Euchee Reservation, University of Oklahoma Press, 2024
Gregory H. Bigler, Traditional Jurisprudence and Protection of Our Society: A Jurisgenerative Tail, American Indian Law Review, Vol. XLIII, Number 1 (2018–2019)
Greg Bigler: Screw Shoes (tips for running in icy conditions), Indigenous Well
Graham Lee Brewer, Trisha Ahmed, Kristi Noem’s banishment from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, AP, February 7, 2024
Laurence Powell, The Supreme Court and Tribal Water Rights, American Bar Association, January 22, 2024
Angela M. Risenhoover, Reservation Disestablishment: The Undecided Issue in OklahomaTax Commission v. Sac and Fox Nation, Tulsa Law Review Vol. 29, No. 3, Spring 1994
Tony Schick, In a Major Shift, Northwest Tribes — not U.S. Officials — Will Control Salmon Recovery Funds, ProPublica, December 21, 2023
Keystone XL Pipeline (Rosebud Sioux Tribe v. Trump), Native American Rights Fund archive, updated June 2021