Many people have asked how I came to have a life in this world of classical music. They really mean to ask, “What is an Indian doing here?” Most often, I am the first and only Native American that people know. Lots of people see us as a part of a cruel history (true), or being greatly disadvantaged (true), being drunk (I’ve been drunk many times), or weeping at the sight of litter (not very true). My ethnicity certainly does influence who I am, but likely in different ways than people think.
I am 1/2 Muscogee from the Thlopthlocco Tribal Town, and 1/2 Choctaw. My sweet mother is a full blood Choctaw who is almost 90 years old and living in the world of Dementialand. After her father died of tuberculosis, Ma grew up in the rural community of Kanima with her four brothers and her mother. We called her mother, “Pokne”, the Choctaw word for grandmother. Their first language was Choctaw and all were happy until Pokne met and began dating a white drunk named Roy. I don’t know the whole story and never will, but I am sure she was having financial difficulty as an uneducated Choctaw single mother. As children, my sister Lisa and I never like Roy. He had a thick country accent and a giant wooden leg. My mother’s half-siblings were 1/2 white and 1/2 Choctaw. Because of this, they were VERY LOUD PEOPLE. Lisa and I were typical Native kids—quiet, but blunt. But when we were around loud people, we became mute. Roy would try to talk to us and we would simply whack him on the head with our fingers and run off. When Roy and Pokne married, he didn’t want her previous kids around. Ma and her brothers ended up living on their own. Pokne would provide food, but they were very much orphaned. Up to that time, my mother had been very close with Pokne. It must have been devastating to have been left behind, especially when they started another family.
The State eventually took the kids and split them up at two different boarding schools/orphanages. My mother and her little brother ended up at the Goodland Orphanage. These schools are the American equivalent of the Canadian residential schools, where so many mass graves have been found. In order to “civilize” these kids, they were not allowed to speak their tribal languages and had to modify their behavior to the standard of their Christian teachers. There was good and there was bad, but I have always been horrified by the sheer arrogance of Christian missionaries that their way is the one true way.
After a few years, mother had even worse luck. She had been coughing and was diagnosed with tuberculosis, the same disease that killed her father. At this point, there was no treatment and she was sent to the Talihina Indian Tuberculosis Sanatorium (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4880940/Photos-reveal-haunted-Tuberculosis-sanatorium-ruins.html), where she would have to finish high school. My mother is the Native patient quoted in this Daily Mail article. Ma was quarantined there for a total of five years in two different stays. Many of her friends died and they removed one of her lungs, then told her to never marry or have children.
She did make friends and must have felt extremely lonely. Ma would always tell me that everyone listened to country and western music. She got sick of the twang and found a classical station. After this, it was all she wanted to hear. With the greatest luck in the world, she met my kind father and they moved to the small town of Holdenville, in the southern part of the Muscogee Nation. When they produced my sister and me, she only listened to music of Beethoven. It is the only music I heard until I began playing piano at age 5. I like to say that I was educated by Wilhelm Kempff and Alfred Brendel through the greatness of Beethoven. I am still enamored by these three great artists and I am completely indebted to my mother. Without her years of pain, the life that I now lead would not be close to possible. After I showed an near obsession with music, mother found a local 15 year-old girl named Cindy Harkins. She would become my first teacher, and I would become her first student.