External links
- projectHOOP, Honoring Our Origins and People
- Native American Women Playwrights Archive
- Hokte Productions
Annette Arkeketa is a writer, poet, and playwright, and a member of the Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Oklahoma. She has conducted professional workshops in these fields, in addition to the creative process, script consulting, and documentary film making. She directed Native American film studies at Comanche Nation College.
Arkeketa also has Muscogee Creek ancestry. Her essay, "Repatriation: Religious Freedom, Equal Protection, Institutional Racism", was published in American Indian Thought (2004), a philosophical reader anthology, edited by Anne Water.
Arkeketa says,
My personal feelings about writing is that it is necessary for our Indian people to write and produce great works about ourselves. It is important to challenge ourselves to write in the genres that we are unfamiliar with. The more we write the better we become as fiction writers, non-fiction writers, playwrights, screenplay writers, journalists, poets, research and essay writers.
My more recent work has been concentrated in the area of media production for feature films and television documentaries. I believe television and the big screen is the most powerful media available to us today.
The importance of our visibility in these areas writing and the media is for our children. They deserve to perform our work on stage and film. Always they seek us on the shelves of libraries, magazine racks, and newspaper stands. They seek us as mentors and role models, let's not disappoint them.
Arkeketa's play Hokti has been produced by the Tulsa Indian Actors' Workshop (1997), Tulsa, Oklahoma [1] [2] and The Thunderbird Theatre (1998), Haskell Indian Nations University, Lawrence, Kansas.
Hokti is published in Stories of Our Way: An Anthology of American Indian Plays, UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 1999. [3]
Her play Ghost Dance has been performed at public readings at the Gilcrease Museum (2001), Tulsa, Oklahoma; Tulsa University (2002); American Indian Community House (2003), New York, New York. It has been performed with acting workshops in Lawton, Oklahoma. [4] In spring 2004 the full-length drama was produced by the Institute of American Indian Arts, Drama Department. Ghost Dance is published in Keepers of the Morning Star: An Anthology of Native Women's Theater, UCLA American Indian Studies Center, 2003.
More recently Arkeketa has worked as a documentary producer and has formed the production company Hokte Productions. Hokte means 'woman' in the Muscogee language. [5]
Her first documentary production was about Jimmy Pena, a visual artist from Corpus Christi: it is titled Intrinsic Spirit: The Artway of Jimmy Pena (2002, approximately 24 minutes). Pena's work is shown through his pieces as visual artist and muralist.
Her next work was Muh-Du Kee: Put Them Back (2004), a 1-hour documentary that follows Jimmy Arterberry, Comanche Nation NAGPRA coordinator, through the consultation process with Colorado state and federal institutions to repatriate the remains of his people. This documentary explores Arterberry's views about the NAGPRA process, archaeologists, policies, and solutions to a controversial human rights issues for Native Americans.
Pahdopony: See how deep the water is (2005) is a 21-minute film about the life of Juanita Pahdopony (Comanche), an artist, educator and activist. [6]
Chief George (2009) examines Rev. George Akeen (Cheyenne/Wichita) and his peacekeeping mission to the Middle East. [7] [8]
Arkeketa is reported to be co-producing a piece titled Being Indian in Oklahoma. She is seeking a producer for a family feature film screenplay A Good Day to Dance. It is a story of dance, familial love, and what it takes to win.
The Comanche or Nʉmʉnʉʉ is a Native American tribe from the Southern Plains of the present-day United States. Comanche people today belong to the federally recognized Comanche Nation, headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma.
Comanche County is a county located in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. As of the 2020 census, the population was 121,125, making it the fifth-most populous county in Oklahoma. Its county seat is Lawton. The county was created in 1901 as part of Oklahoma Territory. It was named for the Comanche tribal nation.
Lawton is a city in and the county seat of Comanche County, in the U.S. state of Oklahoma. Located in southwestern Oklahoma, approximately 87 mi (140 km) southwest of Oklahoma City, it is the principal city of the Lawton, Oklahoma, metropolitan statistical area. According to the 2020 census, Lawton's population was 90,381, making it the sixth-largest city in the state, and the largest in Western Oklahoma.
Charles Joyce Chibitty was a Native American and United States Army code talker in World War II, who helped transmit coded messages in the Comanche (Nʉmʉnʉʉ) language on the battlefield as a radio operator in the European Theater of the war.
White Parker (1887–1956) was a son of Mah-Cheeta-Wookey and Quanah Parker, chief of the Comanches. He married Laura E. Clark (1890-1962), a daughter of Reverend and Mrs. M. A. Clark, a former Methodist missionary to the Comanches. They had at least three children: Patty Bertha, Cynthia Ann Joy, and Milton Quanah (1914-1930).
Jeannette Christine Armstrong is a Canadian author, educator, artist, and activist. She was born and grew up on the Penticton Indian reserve in British Columbia's Okanagan Valley, and fluently speaks both the Syilx and English languages. Armstrong has lived on the Penticton Native Reserve for most of her life and has raised her two children there. In 2013, she was appointed Canada Research Chair in Okanagan Indigenous Knowledge and Philosophy.
Carter Curtis Revard was an American poet, scholar, and writer. He was of European American and Osage descent, and grew up on the tribal reservation in Oklahoma. He had his early education in a one-room schoolhouse, before winning a Quiz Bowl scholarship for college, subsequently attending University of Tulsa for his BA.
Joy Harjo is an American poet, musician, playwright, and author. She served as the 23rd United States Poet Laureate, the first Native American to hold that honor. She was also only the second Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to have served three terms. Harjo is a citizen of the Muscogee Nation and belongs to Oce Vpofv. She is an important figure in the second wave of the literary Native American Renaissance of the late 20th century. She studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts, completed her undergraduate degree at University of New Mexico in 1976, and earned an MFA degree at the University of Iowa in its creative writing program.
Anna Lee Walters is a Pawnee/Otoe–Missouria author.
Joseph A. Dandurand is a Kwantlen person (Xalatsep) from Kwantlen First Nation in British Columbia. He is a poet, playwright, and archaeologist.
Myra Yvonne Chouteau was an American ballerina and one of the "Five Moons" or Native prima ballerinas of Oklahoma. She was the only child of Corbett Edward and Lucy Annette Chouteau. She was born March 7, 1929, in Fort Worth, Texas. In 1943, she became the youngest dancer ever accepted to the Ballet Russe de Monte-Carlo, where she worked for fourteen years. In 1962, she and her husband, Miguel Terekhov, founded the first fully accredited university dance program in the United States, the School of Dance at the University of Oklahoma. A member of the Shawnee Tribe, she also had French ancestry, the great-great-great-granddaughter of Maj. Jean Pierre Chouteau. From the Chouteau family of St. Louis, he established Oklahoma's oldest European-American settlement at the present site of Salina in 1796. She grew up in Vinita, Oklahoma.
Magdalena Hergert Becker was a pioneer Mennonite missionary. She served as Field Matron at Post Oak Missionary in Oklahoma for 28 years. The matron position was one created by the US government to assist with assimilation efforts. Becker was considered a success in the matron program as some Native Americans did identify as Christian.
Hanay Geiogamah is a Native American playwright, television and movie producer, and artistic director. He is a professor emeritus of the school of theater, film, and television at the University of California, Los Angeles. He also served as the director of the UCLA American Indian Studies Center from 2002 to 2009. Geiogamah was born in Oklahoma and is Kiowa and a Delaware Nation descendant. He is a widely known Native American playwright and one of the few Native American producers of both television and film in Hollywood.
David Emmett Williams was a Native American painter, who was Kiowa/Tonkawa/Kiowa-Apache from Oklahoma. He studied with Dick West at Bacone College and won numerous national awards for his paintings. He painted in the Flatstyle technique that was taught at Bacone from the 1940s to the 1970s.
Rance Hood is an Oklahoma Native artist who echoes traditional Native American culture in his paintings. A self-taught artist, Hood was raised by his maternal grandparents who exposed him to Comanche Indian ways and values.
Marie C. Cox was a Comanche activist who worked on legislation for Native American children. She received many accolades for her efforts including the 1974 Indian Leadership Award from the Bureau of Indian Affairs and state recognition that same year as the Outstanding Citizen of Oklahoma from Governor David Hall. She was named as an Outstanding Indian Woman of 1977 by the North American Indian Women's Association, and served on the National Advisory Council on Indian Education from 1983 to 1990. In 1993, she was inducted into the Oklahoma Women's Hall of Fame for her work with foster children and the founding of the North American Indian Women's Association.
Josephine Myers-Wapp was a Comanche weaver and educator. After completing her education at the Haskell Institute, she attended Santa Fe Indian School, studying weaving, dancing, and cultural arts. After her training, she taught arts and crafts at Chilocco Indian School before joining the faculty of the newly opened Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She taught weaving, design, and dance at the institute, and in 1968 was one of the coordinators for a dance exhibit at the Mexican Summer Olympic Games. In 1973, she retired from teaching to focus on her own work, exhibiting throughout the Americas and in Europe and the Middle East. She has work in the permanent collection of the IAIA and has been featured at the Smithsonian Institution. Between 2014 and 2016, she was featured in an exhibition of Native American women artists at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.
Beth Cuthand was born a member of the Little Pine First Nation in Saskatchewan and has lived in the four western provinces of Canada. She is the author of Voices in the Waterfall, a collection of poetry and prose published by Theytus Press in 2008. She is also an editor of Reinventing the Enemy's Language: Contemporary Native Women's Writings of North America and co-author of The Little Duck: Sikihpsis, a Cree/English children's book published in 2007.
Ketch Ranch House or Ketch Ranch was private property located in the Wichita Mountains of Southwestern Oklahoma. During the early 1920s, the forest reserve residence was established as a working ranch and vacation home for Ada May Ketch and Frank Levant Ketch who served as mayor of Ringling, Oklahoma.
Joyce Lee "Doc" Tate Nevaquaya was a Comanche flute player and painter from Apache, Oklahoma. He is known for his contribution to the Native American flute music. His efforts in learning how to make Comanche flutes and play as well as compose contemporary Comanche flute music is considered to have saved the declining art from being lost completely. However, he said he considered himself a painter first, and painting was his primary art throughout his life.
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