Vacations with Cowboys & Indians : Oklahoma : A journey into American Indian territory lets visitors learn tribal traditions such as tepee building.

The temperature dropped suddenly at dawn, and a cool rain began to drum on the tepee. Someone scurried about inside, closing the flaps and reinvigorating the dying embers of the fire that had been built in the middle of the night. I moved my ground sheet a little from the edge, where raindrops kept falling on my head, and snuggled in my blanket near the fire.

The rain passed quickly; except for the flurry with the flaps, we hardly noticed it. But our companions in the two other large tepees had not fared so well. When I stuck my head outside, I saw several people hurrying for the bath houses, wearing nor’easters against the southwestern weather. Although the rain was short and mild for Oklahoma, it was a near deluge inside the other tepees.

We were camped at Cherokee Landing State Park on Lake Tenkiller in the heart of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma. We had arrived at dusk the night before and, in the dark, stumbled over ropes and lodge poles for a couple of hours in our first lesson in putting up tepees.

As we erected the skeletons of lodgepoles and tied them off by whipping a rope, it seemed none would be big enough to house even a handful of people. But as the canvas was wrapped and the poles adjusted, the tepees got bigger and bigger.

After a late dinner, we agreed on the tepee assignments: Nine women in the largest and two in the smallest, then three couples and four bachelors in each of the other two larger ones (one bachelor somehow wound up with the couples).

I was in the bachelors’ tepee, which was fortunate for me, because it was the only one whose canvas cover was unwrinkled. Tepees will deflect the rain, but not if there are wrinkles: The folds gather water until it begins to seep through the fabric.

So it rained indoors on our friends. The rest of the day, the campsite was littered with drying bedding.

The movie “Dances With Wolves” has added impetus to a growing general interest in the native peoples of America, particularly the Indians of the Great Plains. It is a study that can be commenced anywhere there’s a library or bookstore. The opportunity to go beyond books, though, had brought 17 of us to Oklahoma from around the country to join a tour with the somewhat ungainly name of Journeys Into American Indian Territory. (The tours are conducted monthly, April through October.)

The tour plan included meetings with tribal elders and officials, discussions with anthropologists, visits to tribal headquarters and museums, and attendance at powwows and dances. We didn’t expect to dance with wolves, but we expected to learn something firsthand of how American Indians of various tribes and traditions view this world we share and to experience at least a bit of life on the plains through staying in tepees.

This was the right place to come. Oklahoma’s American Indian population (252,000, the greatest of any state) is as diverse as a mini-United Nations, representing 67 tribes from the Mohawks and Senecas of New York to the Modocs and Nez Perces of the West Coast and encompassing virtually all the indigenous cultures of this land. The name itself is usually translated as Land of the Red People (from the Choctaw “okla,” people, and “humma,” red).

Our itinerary, with some last-minute alterations, included three nights in camp at Cherokee Landing, about 10 miles from Tahlequah, the Cherokee capital; two nights at Anadarko, where we attended the 60th annual American Indian Exposition and viewed an Apache fire dance, and the first and seventh nights at the home of Michelle Hummingbird, a Cherokee, and her husband, Shawn, in Oklahoma City.

One of the beauties of the flute is its intimacy. Alan D. Emarthle used it to bind his listeners to him when he softly played a soothing climax to his recitation of Seminole and plains Indian legends, including a Comanche tale of how the flute was created. In this legend, a bird came from the clouds in answer to a man’s prayer, and found a small cedar branch that had been struck by lightning, making it hollow. The bird then pecked holes in the branch; the wind passing through the holes created the different notes.

The flute playing wound up an impromptu tour Emarthle gave us through the Seminole Nation Museum in the Seminoles’ capital, Wewoka, on our way to Cherokee Landing. Possibly startled at the relatively large group of us entering the museum, he had rushed past and disappeared. When he re-emerged, his Florida State University Seminoles T-shirt was covered by a traditional Seminole patchwork jacket. It had been the wedding jacket of the first Seminole chief in Florida in the 1940s, and the chief had given the jacket to Emarthle’s father, who was a missionary from Oklahoma.

He then took us through the museum, of which he is co-director. He gave historical and cultural perspective to all of the exhibits, explaining the works in the art room, and then finished with the legends and the flute playing. His seriousness, good humor and sincerity combined with his informativeness to turn a routine museum hop into a sometimes-moving learning experience.

We spent three days at Lake Tenkiller, a 10-minute ride from the Cherokee Heritage Center and from the Cherokee Nation headquarters in Tahlequah. Michelle Hummingbird arranged for meetings with elders of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees, a group that values tradition and is seeking recognition as a separate tribe. We also met John Ketcher, the deputy paramount chief of the Cherokees.

The Heritage Center complex is superb. Its Cherokee national museum contains many exhibits, paintings, artifacts and dioramas, all made clear by audio-visual aids that allow each individual to get, in effect, a personalized tour.

Outside is the walled village of Tsa-La-Gi (this is what the Cherokees call themselves; the name Cherokee is actually Choctaw). It is a re-creation of 16th-Century Cherokee life in the eastern United States, long before the tribe’s removal to Oklahoma in the early 19th Century.

A third component of the center is the “trail of tears” musical drama, performed on a striking outdoor set. This tells the story of the Cherokees from their resettlement here until Oklahoma statehood in 1907.

At mid-day Sunday, we crossed the Arkansas River at Muskogee and passed from Cherokee Nation into the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. According to Robert Fields, an anthropologist among the tour leaders, we would cross more than 20 such tribal boundaries in the 194 miles between Tahlequah and our destination, Anadarko, where the American Indian Exposition was about to begin.

We were also passing from an area of hills, forests, rivers and dozens of man-made lakes (Oklahoma has more shoreline than any inland state) to the rolling southern Great Plains, heading for the true “Dances With Wolves” territory.

In the novel on which the movie was based, the action takes place in the southern plains and the Indians are Comanches, the lords of the plains, not Sioux. The changes for the movie created a number of historical and cultural anomalies.

Sunday evening in Anadarko, we experienced the highlight of the trip, an Apache fire dance at the Indian City, USA, historical park. As the sun set, we joined the throng, mainly American Indians, at the edge of the dance ground and awaited the dancers.

The first four emerged from the dark shelter of a stand of trees and trotted single-file onto the dance ground, circling the giant fire as their elders opposite the entrance drummed and sang.

The dancers, Apaches from the Mescalero reservation in New Mexico, wore leather skirts and leggings, covered with bells, jingles and rattles, and their heads were covered with tight cloth masks out of which grew tall, pronged sculptures like large candelabra. In their hands they carried narrow, two-foot-long slapsticks that they sometimes beat rhythmically against their thighs.

After the Mescalero group had greeted the fire four times from the north, south, east and west, a second foursome, Oklahoma Apaches, entered and greeted the fire. The greeting consisted of an approach to the fire in single file, at the end of which the dancers raised their arms, did a step and said something that can only be spelled as “hahahahahaha” but which in fact was a soft, smooth, extended sound that rose in pitch and then floated on the aIr.

The dance lasted about three hours. The elders, led by Nathaniel Chee of Mescalero, N.M., would sing for several minutes as the dancers performed what appeared to be free-lance movements. Then all would rest for a short time as the dancers trotted gracefully around the field waiting for the next song.

Around the edge of the ground, women and girls wearing shawls danced a two-step movement that carried them around the ground like a train. So smooth and graceful were they that, when you couldn’t see their feet, they seemed to be on rails with no shoulder or head rising above the others.

Grace was what the fire dancers were all about, too. The lead Mescalero dancer was so smooth as he glided around the fire that I went down to the edge of the ground to verify that he was actually lifting his feet.

I was bewitched by the dance. The only comparable experiences I’ve had involved London’s Royal Ballet or traditional social events in Africa, to both of which I’d compare this performance.

As anthropologist Bob Fields said the next day, “You should feel privileged to have seen a fire dance.”

Lucky, too.

GUIDEBOOK

Sleeping

in Tepees

One-week tours are operated by Robert Vetter, c/o Journeys Into American Indian Territory, P.O. Box 929, Westhampton Beach, N.Y. 11978; (516) 878-8655 or (800) 458-2632.

Price is $695 per person, not including air fare to Oklahoma City, where trips begin.

In 1992, these trips and themes remain: Aug. 3-10, Indian history; Aug. 13-20, music and dance; Sept. 2-9, social relations, and Oct. 8-15, native religion.

On Passing from One World to Another

Jim Henson lowered his voice in song, softly and melodically invoking blessings in Cherokee upon the 19 visitors before him. The beauty of both the sound and the sentiment required no translation: The meaning passed directly from his spirit into ours.

As he sang, tears covered the cheeks of a Cherokee woman among us, one of our guides. His prayer moved us all, especially her because she was both guest and host, giver and receiver of the blessings.

For a moment, Michelle Hummingbird existed simultaneously in two worlds--that of her own people and that of the people to whom hers had been forcibly joined. In bringing our tour group to meet Henson, vice chief of the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokees in Tahlequah, Okla., she had allowed us to briefly be a part of a world we did not know.

Exposure to a different culture and world view was a major goal of the trip. American Indians must live simultaneously in two different societies with completely different assumptions about communication, individual responsibility, interpersonal relationships and so forth. As Robert Fields, a professor of anthropology at the University of Oklahoma, put it in his first lecture to us: “An Indian must pass from one world to another many times every day, maybe even 50 to a 100 times.”

An example he cited concerned young people speaking with their elders. Among most native peoples, it is disrespectful to look directly at one’s elder. “Why are you staring at me?” the elder may ask. We were told this sort of rebuke was common, because young people often mixed the customs of the two worlds.

In no place I’ve traveled have I encountered people friendlier and more welcoming than Oklahoma Indians of whatever tribe. Yet they are also perfectly frank in their bitterness.

On the first day in camp, Fields, a Pawnee, told us, “People may come around and ask you questions and peek into your tepees. A boat may pass by and the people in it holler insults and rude remarks. If they do, that’s OK: You’ll experience something I have every day of my life.”

More common were regrets over having been deprived of their cultural heritage.

“I was never allowed to learn Cherokee,” said Hummingbird. “My parents would tell me, ‘We don’t want what happened to us to happen to you’ “--harsh punishments American Indian students got for using tribal languages at government boarding schools.

If there is a single attitude that epitomizes the gulf between the world view of America’s native peoples and those of European descent, it is the concept of the life continuum. American Indians perceive the world--its people, land, flora and fauna--as belonging simultaneously to past, present and future generations. Treaties forced upon Indians are considered shams, because land belongs to the dead and the unborn as much as it does to the living.