Abstract
In Stories from Saddle Mountain: Autobiographies of a Kiowa Family, Benjamin R. Kracht and Lisa LaBrada's collection offers the autobiographies of two members of the Tongkeamha family, Henrietta and Raymond, and, through their stories, a portrait of Saddle Mountain, a site the latter concisely refers to as “sacred ground” (xiii). Throughout this book, Kracht takes a step into the background, but his presence as an editor is undoubtedly clear, sources confiding in him through face-to-face interviews, text messages, and even via Facebook, a web of connection footnoted in a larger story of family, place, and community. Lisa LaBrada, Henrietta Tongkeamha's daughter and Raymond's sister, is also thoroughly present, appearing explicitly in her introduction to her mother's memoirs and in both the memoirs of her relatives. Fortuitously, Henrietta's words to Lisa upon giving her daughter her memoir ring true: “Maybe my book means nothing. But I loved all of my family and my grandparents because they raised me. And Lisa, maybe someday it will be made into a real book for everyone to see how wonderful my grandparents were to me. They lived back then, and they lived the old way” (xxiii). Bringing together both Henrieta and Raymond's voices, Kracht and LabBrada do exactly as Henrietta wished, painting a portrait of Saddle Mountain in a time of transition, a land with a once thriving Kiowa community with now only a few who remain while also emphasizing the intertwined nature of land and Indigenous history.
Kracht builds on his years of ethnographic research on Kiowa communities and tradition, but his editing is at once transparent and mindful of scholarly conversations on Native histories and communication. He makes it clear how he came to know the Tongkeamha family, whose presence in the countryside around Saddle Mountain dates back to the original allotments resulting from the 1892 Jerome Agreement. Henrietta's memoirs and her focus on her grandparents—with whom she lived for much of her life—provides a window into the older traditions of Kiowa life as it affected her, and her memoir spans from her earlier memories (she was born in 1912) into the 1930s and 1940s. Raymond's narrative—written retrospectively from the twenty-first century—begins in his youth and continues to the present, carrying the Tongkeamha family—and the Saddle Mountain community—story into the present.
Beyond the introduction in which Kracht offers a brief history of the Kiowas and his relationship with the Tongkeamha family, the book is split into two sections: one dedicated to Henrietta and her memoirs and the other to Raymond and his. Each is divided into sections dedicated to the life of their subject, the editing decisions made and the reasons for them, and, finally, the memoirs themselves. Henrietta's is one narrative entitled “This Is the Story of My Life.” Kracht notes that he, along with Lisa LaBrada and Raymond Tongkeamha, made small adjustments to punctuation and capitalization while also standardizing some spellings. He points to some difficulty with incomplete stories and a generally fractured narrative. Interestingly, Kracht addresses this by interweaving the oral history interviews he himself conducted with Henrietta much later in her life with her narrative voice, drawing on Christopher Teuton's notion of “critical impulses” that can include bringing oral and graphic impulses such as interviews and written texts together to “creat[e] ‘fluid stability,’ the life force of cultural production and survivance” (20). While this inevitably can lead to some discord among dates and memories, especially in interweaving Henrietta's memoirs—which were first written in the 1960s—with her oral testimony in the 1990s, Kracht points to peoples, places, and memories as more important than dates but also notes the nuanced difficulty in “finding a balance between oral traditions and Western historical methods” (21).
Henrietta's memoir, entitled, “This Is the Story of My Life” details her and her family's private life, offering an intimate portrait of routines like drying meat or wagon trips to Apache to get ice cream. Other moments illustrate the time of tradition that Kracht promises in the introduction: rides in wagons and cars or transitions between hand washing to using mechanical laundry machines. Henrietta also speaks of religion and tradition, explaining the process of a peyote ceremony and the appearance of Isabel Crawford, a missionary among the Kiowa. Finally, Henrietta also gives some insight into her experience at federal Indian boarding schools, having attended Rainy Mountain Boarding School, Riverside Indian School, and Fort Sill Indian School, in addition to public schools in Sedan and Saddle Mountain. She explains daily routines, inspections, discipline, and punishment, but Kracht notes, her “silence regarding [Rainy Mountain's] deplorable conditions is puzzling,” especially given its water shortages and sanitary problems (7).
Raymond's memoirs are divided into four narratives, one written in 2018 and the other three in 2019. Unlike Henrietta's details of her life with her grandparents, Raymond provides “stories of his adventures and exploits” that detail his knowledge of the best fishing spots or his hunting exploits (61). On one such occasion, he took the family's rifle out to shoot just before Thanksgiving. Suspecting that his parents were having difficulty providing food, he used the last twelve shells, explaining that “I had to make every shot count and I did” (73). While Henrietta discusses her Christian faith, Raymond is much more explicit, and, as he looks back on his Thanksgiving haul, his narration adds, “Praise the Lord for providing” (73). Additionally, Raymond is clearer about the racism permeating towns and schools, offering stories from his youth of White parents disliking the fact that he was a starter on high school sports teams when their children could have had spots. Most importantly, Kracht emphasizes, is Raymond's connection to the land, and his stories are intertwined with his experiences both in Saddle Mountain and in his other adventures in the North and Southwest.
Overall, it is the vibrance of the landscape that forms this text's addition to the scholarship on Indigenous family histories. This compilation of Henrietta and Raymond Tongkeamha's memoirs trace the changes to Saddle Mountain, both in terms of its environmental and its demographic changes. Both Henrietta and Raymond lived through great change in their ancestral land throughout their lives. Yet, as Kracht notes, Raymond still “often seeks solace from the outside world at the old homestead along East Cache Creek, where he reminisces about friends and relatives from the past. His stories are embedded in the landscape, as are the songs emanating from the old dance grounds. There, he anticipates reuniting with the ancestors waiting for him on the other side” (62). One easily gets a sense of the importance of this place and the dug-down details of a life intimately painted by its writer, as well as the care taken by its editor to ensure that the narrative voice remains consistent.
Additionally, Henrietta's memoir and oral testimony provides a critical insight into the life of a Kiowa woman in the early twentieth century. Hers is a voice LaBrada describes as “[n]ever high pitch or shrill … But just the right, light level and very clear with strength” (xxi). As mentioned above, Henrietta had hopes for her “book,” and Stories from Saddle Mountain bring this desire to fruition. It provides a critical source for future scholarship looking to explore the lives of Kiowa women, especially in this time period following the “opening” of reservations to non-Native homesteading in 1901.
Methodologically, there does appear to be some inconsistency between the editing process between Henrietta and Raymond's narratives. The melding of Henrietta's story between her older memoirs and interviews Kracht conducted in the late 1980s and early 1990s makes it difficult to compare some of the concordant instances between her and Raymond's stories. Likewise, Raymond's final sections were written with a specific eye toward being included in this volume, perhaps skewing the presentation of his stories. However, Kracht's argument about the critical role that landscape plays in Native history and his citation of scholars like Lisbeth Haas, Christopher Teuton, and Margo Tamez in many ways overshadow the chronological merging done in the process of compiling this book.
Additionally, Kracht's own closeness to the Tongkeamhas—Raymond calls him his “nephew”—is evidence of his steps to avoid reinscribing harm upon his interlocutors (149). Having first become close to the Tongkeamhas through Clifton, Henrietta's son and Raymond's brother, he explains that Clifton was once taken advantage of by a schoolteacher who published a story he presented that was secretly recorded, and it is clear that Kracht has been in conversation with both LaBrada and Raymond throughout the editing process, working to respect and preserve their family's voice each step of the way.
Ultimately, this represents a well-crafted and respectfully curated history that emphasizes the connection between Native history and geography. It also provides an important narrative of transformation both in land and in people, one told in part by a voice “clear with strength” and the other that brings this history into the present. Stories from Saddle Mountain: Autobiographies of a Kiowa Family is a thoughtful collection of Indigenous family histories with an important methodological intervention.