Photo by Krismas on Unsplash

This land is your land and this land is my land . . .

This land was made for you and me.

 Woody Guthrie, fellow Oklahoman born in Okemah in 1912, same year as my Daddy, had the right idea for a song that would ring truer, purer, and certainly more melodious than America’s national anthem. The song, at least its most familiar verses, according to the Woody Guthrie Center, “tells about the promise of America. It creates an image of a country with endless opportunities and beautiful sights and sounds.”

Like America, however, there is more to “This Land Is Your Land” than that. Much more.

Written in 1940 and first recorded by Guthrie in 1944 for Moses Asch, founder of Folkways Records, “This Land Is Your Land” was not released until 1951—without the verses that turn it into a protest song. Those verses include laments for those warned off “their” land by “No Trespassing” signs, those going hungry in the shadow of church steeples, and the hopeless “by the relief office”—all of them Woody’s people.

After daughter Nora Guthrie found the more radical verses “scribbled on a sheet of loose-leaf note paper,” she speculated in a National Public Radio interview on why some were recorded but not included and others not recorded at all. “This is in the early ’50s,” she remembered, “and [U.S. Sen. Joseph] McCarthy’s out there, and it was considered dangerous in many ways to record this kind of material.” Sounds familiar.

When Woody’s son, Arlo Guthrie, began singing his father’s most famous song both he and the legendary Pete Seeger took to singing all the verses Woody had written, the beauty along with the warts that is America. For some, the truth may spoil the song. For others, me included, it adds context and texture that is a part of America’s greatness.

I thought of Guthrie and “This Land Is Your Land” when in February it became public that Chuck Hoskin Jr., principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, whose land this really is expressed his nation’s desire that Jeep no longer use the Cherokee and Grand Cherokee names to badge two of its popular models. Hoskin told Car and Driver in a written statement of Jeep’s use of the names: “I’m sure this comes from a place that is well-intended, but it does not honor us by having our name plastered on the side of a car. The best way to honor us is to learn about our sovereign government, our role in this country, our history, culture, and language, and have meaningful dialogue with federally recognized tribes on cultural appropriateness.”

Such dialogue has come to the fore in sports and courts. The Washington Football Team eliminated its nickname, as did Cleveland in Major League Baseball. Cleveland had already moved on from its Wahoo logo, an offensive caricature and intends to adopt another nickname. The same is happening on all levels of sport. In Ohio, Miami University has replaced Redskins with Redhawks, and in Oklahoma, football powerhouse Union High School, in suburban Tulsa, also has canceled using Redskins. The Seminole Tribe in Florida gave Florida State University permission to continue to use its name and images in exchange for a scholarship program for students from reservations. Though Jeep has used the Cherokee name for more than 45 years, it discarded it in the early 2000s before reviving the badging in 2013. This drew the attention of the Cherokee Nation and resulted in rightly displeased responses.

The Cherokee Nation’s stature within the American legal system grew stronger with a 5-4 Supreme Court decision in July 2020. The court, as The New York Times, put it “affirmed Indian Country,” including Tulsa, Oklahoma’s second largest city. It was a conclusion that anyone who has lived in Northeastern Oklahoma has long recognized. Growing up in Nowata, a small town north of Tulsa and near the Kansas state line, I vaguely understood that this land was not my land but the Cherokees’ land. I simply had the good fortune to share it, and that is much more the case now for many small towns.

The support the Cherokee Nation provides Nowata, city and county, supplements poor state support. The Cherokee Nation makes schools, government, all aspects of Oklahomans’ shared public life better, and it does so despite the insulting treatment of Governor Kevin Stitt, who has tried to force the numerous nations to give the state a larger share of the proceeds from the casinos the nations are authorized to operate. It continues the despicable treatment of Native Americans at all levels of government.

The federal government forced the Cherokee to leave their native Southeast United States, endure the Trail of Tears, and make a new home in Indian Territory, which became Oklahoma. These remarkable people not only did this, but made ,everyone’s home better over the years, only to suffer every manner of abuse, now including Jeep’s. Compared with what governments have done to the Cherokee, Jeep’s lack of concern is seemingly less. And yet, the Cherokee Nation deserves so much better. This belief comes from someone who doesn’t have a drop of Cherokee or other indigenous blood.

And that is a great sadness of my life.

I cannot think of any country I would rather be a citizen of than Indian Country. I cannot think of a nation to which I would rather belong than the Cherokee Nation. (Well, maybe the Delaware Nation, of which my late, great friend Douglas “Bucky” Buck was a proud, steadfast member and maybe an even better powwow dancer than fellow linebacker.  I would have trusted Bucky with the next tackle that had to be made—and my life.

For a number of years, I worked for one of the then two newspapers in Tulsa. The other, the Tulsa World, had landed on our doorstep in Nowata (or close enough to it) each morning as I grew up. I learned to read by reading it. I loved it then, and I love it now for standing up editorially for the Cherokee Nation. “Tribal members are people, not cars or sports teams,” the World wrote. “Cultural appropriation is wrong, and it’s never too late to do the right thing. Jeep has that chance now and ought to take it. Find a new vehicle name and learn more about the Cherokee Nation.”

As to new names, how about a couple that environmentalist Cherokees might love: Sun and Wind?