For Whom the Drum Beats
MARGOLIS, RICHARD J.
States of tie Union FOR WHOM THE DRUM BEATS BY RICHARD J.MARGOLIS Brothers, we thank you for educating our children in your schools; but we have observed that for a long time after our children...
...They threatened to sue Osborne, Sanders, Payne and the school board for damages...
...Noyabad wondered how Indian children, despised and derided, could be expected to grow up with a sense of their own worth, and how a school that promoted fights between whites and Indians could be expected to enlarge racial understanding...
...a board member kept asking...
...Yet here they were, a century later, gathered at Tia-Piah Park and waving placards that pleaded, "Save Our Children...
...Another student had been hurt...
...The coaches found Waysepappy and ordered him into the car...
...And Payne, the principal, speculated on the incident's hidden meaning: "This conflict is not basically Indian and white-It's Randy and Burt...
...Driving back to school, they saw Raymond Paddyaker, another Indian freshman, and sent him to the gymnasium, too...
...Sanders and Osborne accused the two Indian students of attacking Prather outside the gym door...
...About a year ago the safety valve jammed...
...By all accounts it was a lackluster bout-Paddyaker lacking the desire, and poor Prather lacking the strength...
...The coaches chased the students back to their classrooms, told the puzzled Paddy-aker to wait in an adjoining office and ordered Prather and Wayse-pappy to remove their shoes and strip to the waist...
...no one can explain why the coaches dragged him into their act...
...Then they startled everyone by organizing Indian Pride Day, the first concerted Indian protest in Elgin's history...
...Emboldened, the Indians drew up a new petition demanding that the schools hire Indian teachers and bus drivers, serve free lunches to all Indian children, and consult with Indian parents on matters relating to their children's education...
...Price: $1.00...
...they beat for us all...
...Payne, are you going to let them do this to me...
...Paddyaker claimed Sanders had given him "four licks with the paddle" just before his fight with Prather, and had threatened to beat him if he told anyone...
...It was on the billboards ("See a Real Squaw Weaving Rug"), and in the souvenir stores (a plastic hip-flask, for instance, displaying a besotted, red-nosed Indian, with the caption, "I'm one drunk in-jun...
...all day the drums...
...Contempt for Indians was part of the social landscape in hundreds of red-and-white towns like Elgin...
...He began to cry...
...and he kept running, barefoot and bare-chested, till he reached Taylor Noyabad's house a mile away...
...A class in physical education was going strong in the gvm...
...Having made "a thorough investigation," Hise wrote, the board had decided "that it was in the past, is currently, and will continue to be in compliance with state and Federal laws...
...Prather won the fight, and that might have been the end of it...
...Farther down the alley they spotted Prather, whom they told to report to the gymnasium...
...Sobbing and gasping for breath, he blurted his story to Noyabad...
...Do not ask for whom the drums beat...
...Paddyaker had watched the fight...
...Feuds between the red and the white are not uncommon in such schools...
...but someone watching had run back to the school for help, whereupon two athletic coaches, David Sanders and Dale Osborne, drove to the rescue...
...the Onondagos to the English (circa 1760) They came from all corners of the state to help their brothers in Elgin improvise and celebrate a gala school boycott that they called Indian Pride Day...
...Some white students find it amusing to beat up "blanket butts," a term roughly equivalent in splenetic content to "wops" or "kikes...
...All day they picnicked, sang, danced and beat their drums...
...By the time they arrived the fight was finished...
...In other words, no apologies would be tendered and no teachers would be dismissed, or even reprimanded...
...What do they want...
...and the new organization dispatched a petition to the Elgin School Board demanding a full inquiry into the gymnasium incident, as well as the dismissal of Osborne, Sanders and Payne...
...Army had kicked or cajoled more than 150 Indian tribes...
...Meanwhile, the coaches were presiding over a second "supervised fight," this one between Prather and Paddyaker...
...A radio disc jockey joke: "He used to be a member of the Blackfeet tribe-then he wiped his feet...
...Until that moment the Indians in Elgin had never demanded anything, so we may excuse the school board's initial skepticism...
...he simply turned around and walked out...
...At this point the school principal, Larry Payne, happened to walk in, and Waysepappy shouted to him across the length of the gym, "Mr...
...All three boys drifted into an intricate dispute over who had really won those fights...
...Payne didn't answer...
...but we have observed that for a long time after our children return home they are not good for anything...
...So the reluctant fighters fell upon each other, and once again Waysepappy got the worst of it...
...In any case, the Prather-Wayse-pappy feud was "settled" in the traditional manner: with a grudee fight in the presence of the boys' friends, the match taking place during lunch-hour in an alleyway a few blocks from school...
...The school is an American Pandora's Box, a pressure-cooker stuffed with the darkest emotions of a divided red and white community-fear, rage and mutual contempt...
...The immediate pressure came from a feud between Burt Wayse-pappy, an Indian high school freshman, and Randy Prather, a white senior...
...Before long Payne announced he would not be back next year...
...Nevertheless, the board scheduled an open hearing...
...He wrenched free of Prather and ran out the door...
...they were unaccustomed to the spectacle of whites retreating...
...That night he called a meeting, the first meeting of the Elgin Indian Education Association...
...Taylor Noyabad is a Comanche elder, pastor of a Pentacostal church...
...But the fight was far from finished...
...Elgin is a tiny waystop in Oklahoma's Comanche County-a dusty, not-quite-forgettable village where ranchers and Indians buy supplies and send their children to school...
...Said Harry Leonard, a banker: "They want everything free...
...All day the dancing...
...What do those people want...
...The legalistic double-talk suggested to Noyabad and the Indian Education Association that they were in another of those "supervised fights...
...But the gentlemen were whistling in the dark...
...some Indian youths repay the compliment by roughing up "farmers," an unloving label for members of the predominantly white Future Farmers of America...
...The next day school board president Homer Hise, a hardware merchant, sent Noyabad a fussy little note...
...But the coaches had made up their minds...
...Said another board member: "We don't have to consult with nobody...
...Sanders soon followed suit...
...In the car, according to Waysepappy, the coaches informed him he was going to fight Prather again, only this time it would be "a fair, supervised fight...
...it was not the first time he had been told a sad tale out of school...
...There were Comanches, Crows, Ki-owas, Cherokees, Kickapoos and many others-for this was Oklahoma, famed Indian territory of frontier days, into which the U.S...
...they mirror the towns they serve...
...Once resettled, they would be little noted nor long remembered, or so the theory went...
...The drums will surely overtake them just as they overtook Payne and Sanders, just as they are overtaking school officials across the land...
...Do I have to fight...
...In the end, Payne and the two coaches conceded they may have made "a mistake in judgment...
...Waysepappv timidly demurred, pointing out that he and Prather were "quits...
...The meeting was a model of confusion, with charges and countercharges twanging through the Oklahoma night...
...He listened without surprise...
...The Indians were surprised...
...The school board's response was entirely predictable...
...I had to get back to my office," he explained later...
...It was literally in the air...
Vol. 55 • August 1972 • No. 16
