Alex RedCorn Story

Hello, my name is Alex RedCorn. I'm from Pawhuska, Oklahoma. It's got a lot of history here. It's a lot of, Osage roots, a lot of Cowboy and Indian roots and a lot of oil boom roots and it used to be absolutely bustling. It's not a ghost town but it's slowly been trying to regain its footing.

Back in the 1920s a lot of oil money was coming through town because the Osages had mineral rights so it's a very much an oil boom town but there was a lot of corruption from white people marrying into the tribe and trying to take advantage of head rights, so they'd marry in and either poison or kill their spouse somehow and then they’d be able to inherit the oil head rights and that money. A lot of that corruption died off with some of the oil economy receding. In recent times we've started relying on gaming and it's brought some revenue back to the tribe and back to the town, so it's gone from oil boom to now it's relying on gaming revenues.

My father was born on a reservation. My mother was born in a well to do neighborhood and family, a white family and I married into a blue-collar white family. They are all awesome and they've all made me who I am today. When I was a child, I knew I was Osage but I knew I was also white and blonde. That's another one of those things, it just is what it is, but as a child it's confusing sometimes because you're told one thing and then you go to school and you're reminded that you might not be that because of the way you look. It takes a while to sort that out and to have pale skin and blonde hair, but you have something else inside of you that isn't necessarily easy to understand especially for young people. And you know what, even into my high school and college years, when you start becoming more independent, you're still trying to sort out what that means and how it defines you. When you go into our dance, there's lots of people who have long black hair and braids and there's people who have short blonde brown hair like me.

My family is not the only pale skinned Osages around town. When we redid our government recently into a three-branch system, it was debated as to whether or not we should set blood quantum requirements and whether or not those requirements should be honored in citizenship. So you would have to be x amount of blood to become an Osage citizen and have the benefits of any Osage nation programming. I think a lot of people realized that because of our entanglements, as Jean Dennison would describe them, we really would be putting the expiration date on ourselves if we did that. I mean the full bloods are not gonna be around forever. In order to preserve our future, I think we decided that blood quantum can't play as big of a role. My decision to become a teacher is kind of funny because a lot of people start freshman year in college, sophomore year in college thinking like, okay I'm gonna do this and a lot of them change. I started with education and within a couple of years I realized I picked right. It is what I wanted to do. I chose teaching because I realized its power in affecting change in young people, and I wanted to be a part of that.

My primary class was full of Geography and the very first unit of every year we  would talk about culture and what is culture, and the first thing you have to break down is that the color of your skin is not culture, they always think along ethnic lines and so I tried to break that down and tried to reconstruct the notion of culture in a more complete way. And I would model with my culture. Some questions that would come up when they learned I used to live on a reservation, I spent time on a reservation, do you even have TVs? I would joke around them with that. I'd tell them, we live in these things they have walls, they have a roof and we call them a house. It's mostly curiosity because they’ve never been taught anything except what Indians are supposed to look like. We're fighting against school curriculum that basically stops teaching about Indians after removal in the late 1800s, and then Indians just kind of end in the curriculum.

Pop culture doesn't help. We're just trying to fill in the gaps for everybody. And that's why things like mascots are such a big issue. When people talk about mascots, people get caught up on the name. And it's all about the name, what the name means and how offensive or inoffensive it is. To me that's a distraction to the real issue, what I call the mascot curriculum and it's being able to do the tomahawk chop in front of an Indian, like it's an honor and not offensive when it's actually mockery right in front of your face. I was in white schools and our rival was the Indians and there were posters that went up that said, 'scalp the Indians' on it or 'send them back on the trail of tears'. People do those things. I had an administrator one time tell me 'let's go scalp the redskins'. He didn't even know. That's a well-educated person, good person too, but even the most intelligent leaders in our communities, this is a total ignorance gap for them. This indigenous world is so different, that it's really hard for people to understand. It's not like all white people are bad [LAUGH] but indigenous people often feel like they have to be defensive to protect what little we have left after centuries of systematic cultural destruction.

So I taught social studies in suburban Kansas City for seven years and eventually I started to feel a little bit disconnected in some of the stuff I was doing, so I started looking into tribal education departments and Indian education and really trying to make myself more complete as an educator, as it relates to who I am. That kind of led me eventually to Kansas State where I started a doctoral program and a focus on indigenous and tribal needs within educational leadership. I've learned that being an agent of social justice is just as much about being conscious of yourself and the systems you're operating in as it is about understanding other people's culture and other people's perspectives. In 2015 we started a partnership between the Osage Nation and Kansas State University to help train indigenous educators, and we started with the creation of an educational leadership academy. We're trying to train individuals to fill some of those needs, you not only have certain educator skills as a professional but also certain cultural skills as members of the Osage Nation. So one of the things that's hard for educators to do is to take time off work to attend school, so through our partnership with the Osage Nation, we are bringing K-State professors to Pawhuska to offer training on site on the reservation.

We want to accommodate people so they can be working people while improving their skills as educators. To me student success in Indian country is about much more than helping students pass tests. That's very important, but we also need to pick up the pieces from an attempted cultural genocide, put them back together and try to move them into the future. Students need to be knowledgeable about their own histories, their own past, their own language. And we need to help them understand that that's something to be proud of.

The greatest lesson I've learned regarding social justice is probably that you gotta get people in the right places to help make some of these important decisions. The door has been cracked open, but we need more people with the credentials and the skills to help make those decisions. I believe there is a cost to promoting social justice in education. People, when they feel like they've been raised in a world where they're supposed to treat everybody equally, and they feel like they're carrying that out, even though sometimes they may unknowingly be violating those values, they get very defensive. That lack of perspective and that lack of understanding creates kind of a backlash. and sometimes when you are the only person in a community, for you to stand up, you don't have a lot of people to have your back because they haven't walked in your shoes.

My identity could easily become an Osage-only story because there's so much intrigue around it, but there is an entire other side of my family that has helped define me, and it's a white Irish Catholic side of the family and they're also very important to me. I met my wife as a freshman in high school and we've been best friends really ever since. We've been through a lot of ups and downs, she really pushed me in a lot of ways to better myself. And when we got older and we got married, we adopted two children. They're awesome. And they make my day. I also married into an excellent family and they have taught me just as much about life as my Osage elders. That's why I'm a walking entanglement.