A Proud American Native : Heritage: Harry Tahsequah of Yorba Linda is 7/8 Comanche, and counts the tribe’s last chief among his ancestors.

When people first notice Harry Tahsequah’s dark brown eyes, aquiline nose and high cheekbones, many immediately begin describing their own American Indian heritage. Whether they’re 1/4 Apache or 1/16 Klikitat, their point is always the same: Indian blood flows here, too.

Tahsequah, 38, the director of security at St. Jude Medical Center in Fullerton, listens politely, then tells his story in a deliberate, self-assured manner. He often leaves his new acquaintances quite amazed.

He has yet to find his match in the Indian ancestor department, for his great-grandfather was Quanah Parker, the last chief of the Comanches.

Adding to the family intrigue, his great-great-grandmother, Quanah Parker’s mother, was Cynthia Ann Parker, a white woman who lived among Comanches after being kidnaped as a child. Many present-day Comanches, in fact, believe she was the inspiration for the Mary McDonnell character in “Dances With Wolves.”

Tahsequah, who is 7/8 Comanche, oversees security operations at St. Jude with a confidence that is perhaps born of his martial ancestry.

“By the way I present myself, people know right away that I’m very proud of my heritage,” he says. “They know right away that I’m a Native American.”

He grew up on reservation property at the Comanche Reformed Church Mission in Lawton, Okla., and moved to Orange County in 1978. As a boy he learned Comanche dances and performed at powwows, but was intentionally kept from much of his heritage.

“My Great-Aunt Wanada was one of Quanah’s daughters, but she didn’t talk much about him to me,” Tahsequah says. “She didn’t speak much Comanche to me, either. That was her way of saying she knew I’d be growing up in the white man’s world.”

Even though Quanah Parker himself was half-white, he was an influential Comanche leader from his mid-teens until his death, according to historian William T. Hagan.

From the 1820s until they finally surrendered to reservation life in 1875, the nomadic Comanches raided white settlements and gave fits to the Texas Rangers.

The Comanches were expert horsemen who loved to attack by moonlight. “The fullness of a ‘Comanche moon’ was something to be dreaded by Texans in the 1860s,” Hagan says.

Quanah Parker belonged to one of the fiercest Comanche bands, the Quahadas (Antelope), and was involved in raids from the age of 16. His band was the last of the Comanches to surrender to the whites and move permanently to Ft. Sill, Okla., in 1875.

It was only after they became resigned to living on the reservation that the many Comanche bands unified into a tribe, and Parker’s leadership abilities made him the ideal liaison between them and the whites. He was officially named Chief of the Comanches in 1899 by the commissioner of Indian Affairs, who declined to name another chief after Quanah Parker died.

“Quanah Parker was a warrior and came and went as he pleased,” Tahsequah says. “Yet he crossed that line into the white man’s world.”

Indeed, Parker’s cleverness in bridging the Indian and white ways of life provided him with the best of both worlds.

He was an acquaintance of President Theodore Roosevelt and, along with Geronimo of the Apaches, was one of the six Indian leaders who rode in Roosevelt’s inaugural parade. Parker was a shrewd cattleman, a railroad stockholder and a friend of many of the Texas congressmen whose territories he had terrorized decades earlier.

Yet to the consternation of white officials, Parker unlawfully retained six wives, was a leader in the peyote rituals and wore his hair Indian-style, in two long pigtails, until he died in 1911.

Quanah Parker’s mother, called Naduah (Keeps Warm With Us) by the Comanches, was born Cynthia Ann Parker. After being kidnaped at age 9 in a Comanche raid on Ft. Parker, Tex., in 1836, she became a prized wife of a Comanche leader and gave birth to Quanah and two other children. She lived as a Comanche until she was taken by the Texas Rangers in 1860.

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Quanah Parker’s hundreds of descendants honor his memory when they gather for a family reunion each August. The family alternates the reunion site between Texas, the home of the white Parkers, and Oklahoma, the home of Quanah’s Indian descendants, Tahsequah said.

When Tahsequah was 11, the families moved the remains of Quanah Parker’s sister, Prairie Flower, who died as a child, from Texas to Ft. Sill, where Parker is buried. In a sign of respect for the Comanche Nation, the Texas Rangers escorted the mile-long funeral procession up to the Oklahoma border. Tahsequah and his brothers and cousins acted as pallbearers during the ceremony.

The family also honored Cynthia Ann Parker in pageants held several years ago in Quanah, Tex. In buckskins and on horseback, Tahsequah and his older brother re-enacted the capture of their great-great-grandmother. Actress Marie Cheatham played the role of the adult Cynthia Ann Parker.

Cynthia Ann Parker’s life was the subject of “Ride the Wind,” a novel by Lucia St. Clair Robson published in 1988. Many Comanches believe Cynthia Ann Parker was also the inspiration for the white Indian in Michael Blake’s “Dances with Wolves.” In Blake’s novel, she is reared by Comanches, whereas in the movie version she lives among Sioux.

“The people who made the movie originally asked the Comanches to participate as actors,” Tahsequah said. “The tribal people said they’d think about it, but I guess they called back too late.”

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Work in security seems to be in Tahsequah’s blood. His father and eldest brother work as guards in Oklahoma, and he says that even Quanah Parker was a sheriff--of Cash, Okla.--for a brief period.

In his 10 years as security director at St. Jude’s, Tahsequah said the worst crises that he and his seven-person staff have handled have been “Code 100s”--irate patients. They also deal with drunken visitors, respond to accidents and oversee employee safety procedures.

Nearly every weekend, Tahsequah plays golf with fellow hospital workers. His pool game is also sharp, since he recently bought a home in Yorba Linda that had a pool table.

Tahsequah’s first wife was not an Indian, and neither is his second. Of his three siblings, in fact, only one is married to an Indian.

“My parents never did stress that it was important to marry an Indian,” he says. “They never said it was anything to look down on, but that you should marry who you love.”

Tahsequah and his present wife, Jan, live with her three teen-age children by a previous marriage; they don’t plan to have children themselves.

Although Tahsequah knows only a smattering of the Comanche language, he tries to keep it alive in his family. His year-old step-granddaughter calls him Tho-ko (grandpa). She also knows the term for “lift your head up” (chu-woh) and “bird” (uht-su).

Tahsequah reflects often on his special ancestry and heritage, and he does hope to return to live in Oklahoma someday. It is partly because of this pride that he prefers the term Native American over Indian.

“The word native means a person who was here originally,” he says. “The word Indian just says you’re an Indian. You could be from anywhere.”