Debo, Angie (1890–1988)

views updated

Debo, Angie (1890–1988)

Prize-winning historian whose works described the tragic fate of North American Indians, especially the Five Tribes of Oklahoma, and whose interest in justice led her to become an activist on their behalf. Pronunciation: DEE-bo. Born Angie Elbertha Debo onJanuary 30, 1890, near Beattie, Kansas; died in Enid, Oklahoma, on February 21, 1988; buried in Marshall, Oklahoma, her home most of her life; daughter of Edward Peter Debo (a farmer) and Lina (Cooper) Debo; graduated University of Oklahoma, 1918; University of Chicago, M.A. in history, 1924; University of Oklahoma, Ph.D. in history, 1933; never married; no children.

Awards:

numerous, including John H. Dunning Prize from the American Historical Association (AHA) for The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic; Career Award for Distinguished Scholarship from the AHA (1987); first woman to have her portrait hung in the State capital rotunda in Oklahoma City.

Family moved to Marshall, Oklahoma Territory (1899); taught in rural schools; taught at West Texas State Teachers College (1924–1933); was curator of Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum (1933–34); was an independent scholar (1934–41); served as state director for the Oklahoma Federal Writers Project (1941–42); served as lay minister for the Methodist Church (1943–44); was curator of maps for Oklahoma State University Library (1947–54); was a scholar and activist on behalf of American Indians (1954–81).

Selected publications:

The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Oklahoma, 1934); And Still the Waters Run (Princeton, 1940); The Road to Disappearance(1941); Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State (1942); Tulsa: From Creek Town to Oil Capital (1943); Prairie City (Knopf, 1944); Oklahoma: Foot-loose and Fancy-free (1949); The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma (1951); Indians of the United States (Oklahoma, 1970); Geronimo (Oklahoma, 1976); author of nine other books (including one coauthored and three edited volumes) and numerous articles.

Angie Debo was born on January 30, 1890. Her parents, Edward and Lina Cooper Debo , were tenant farmers who managed through un-remitting labor and frugality, despite the depression of 1893, to acquire railroad land near Manhattan, Kansas. Then news of a "great commercial awakening" brought them into Oklahoma Territory, ten years after the famous land rush of 1889. Throughout her long life, Debo's most vivid memory was of November 8, 1899, when as a nine-year-old, she had sat on the seat of a covered wagon beside her mother, peering out at the tall "green wheat stretching to the low horizon," in Marshall, Oklahoma Territory, her new home.

Despite meager resources and her own lack of education, Lina Debo imbued her two children—Angie and her eight-year-old brother Edwin—with high aspirations. Described as a "practical feminist" who thought wives were entitled to an equal voice in family matters, Lina raised turkeys to pay for Angie's parlor organ and music lessons. She also encouraged her children's love for books and learning and instilled in them her Christian faith.

For Angie, growing up in Oklahoma Territory proved both exciting and frustrating. As her mother's apprentice, she learned the household and farm tasks so vital to settlers. From Lina, she also derived her love of flowers and gardening. But the young girl soon discovered that Oklahoma offered fewer educational opportunities than Kansas. When Debo completed eighth grade, with no high school nearby, she waited for an opening to teach in the rural areas. A resignation brought her into her own one-room schoolhouse, where she discovered that, in addition to dealing with children of widely varying ages and skills, she faced unruly boys who sought to drive 17-year-old instructors out of the classroom. Exerting firm control from the beginning, Debo attained the self assurance that led others to describe her later as a woman of "authority."

At last, in 1910, three years after Oklahoma had achieved statehood, Marshall opened its first high school. Angie graduated in 1913 at age 23. Two years later, she entered the University of Oklahoma, where she "came under the influence" of Edward Everett Dale. In his late 30s, the tall, slim unprofessorial figure illustrated his points with humorous tales drawn from his own pioneering and ranching experiences. At Harvard, where he had recently obtained his master's, he had studied under Frederick Jackson Turner, the historian whose famous essay, "On the significance of the Frontier in American History," had laid the basis for studying the West as a distinct region. Dale, having lived through many of the events described, credited his mentor with having "opened up a new Heaven and a new earth in the field of American history" and sought to inspire the same enthusiasm among the offspring of Oklahoma pioneers seated before him. Debo, whose background was similar, concluded that if Dale could become a college professor despite his late entry into college, she too could aspire to a similar career.

When I start on a research project I have no idea how it will turn out. I simply want to dig out the truth and record it. I am not pro-Indian, or pro-anything, unless it is pro-integrity.
—Angie Debo

In 1918, after earning her bachelor's degree, Angie saved her salary as a schoolteacher and principal, and by fall of 1923 she was attending the University of Chicago. Her disappointment over the defeat of Woodrow Wilson's plans for America's participation in the League of Nations led Debo, a lifelong Democrat, to study international relations. At that time, prompted by the decline in male enrollment with the U.S. involvement in World War I, higher education began to welcome women, and female enrollment in graduate schools rose dramatically.

When Angie's master's thesis, "The Historical Background of the American Policy of Isolation," was published by Smith College's "Studies in History" series in 1924, she was "greatly encouraged." Debo needed the reassurance. While the master's in that era was the desired degree for college-level teaching, most institutions stated flatly they would hire a woman only when men were not available. Nonetheless, West Texas State Teachers' College (now West Texas State) employed her. For the next decade—minus a year spent in residency at the University of Oklahoma—Canyon, Texas, became her home. While working on her doctorate under Dale who had obtained his in 1922, Debo was advised that the Choctaw Nation's archives in the Oklahoma University library had never been used. She had found her dissertation topic.

The year Debo received her Ph.D.—1933—was the same year she lost her teaching position, partly because of budget cuts necessitated by the Great Depression and partly because of personality conflicts with her department head, a man who never earned his doctorate. After serving as part-time curator of the newly opened Panhandle Plains Historical Museum, she decided to quit in summer 1934 and spend a year writing another book before seeking another professor-ship. She wrote Dale that she preferred to "do one year of creative work than to spend the rest of an ordinary lifetime just marking time." Based on her own quietly held but deeply felt religious faith, she was certain "that if we are committed to use [our] life in the best way that our special talents will permit us…we will be divinely guided into the kind of use that we were intended for."

For Debo, whose dissertation was published as The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (Oklahoma, 1934), that use was in writing the history of her homeland, Oklahoma, especially as it concerned the Five Tribes—the Cherokees, Choctaws, Creeks, Chickasaws, and Seminoles. A few months later, when her work received the John H. Dunning Award as "the most important contribution to American historical studies in 1934," her decision to become an independent scholar, despite the ongoing Depression, seemed warranted.

Without employment and relying on a small grant, Debo traveled to Muskogee, Oklahoma, and Washington, D.C., where she painstakingly searched Native American records and governmental archives to complete her third book. In this work, which she viewed as her most important, she uncovered a "criminal conspiracy." Through chicanery and manipulation of the legal system, prominent Oklahomans had taken most of the land and oil holdings from 70,000 Native Americans who had once owned the eastern half of what became the State of Oklahoma, leaving them largely impoverished. It was a startling discovery for a woman in her mid-40s. Growing up in western Oklahoma, Debo had known nothing about events in eastern Oklahoma, an area more distant to her, she noted, than "the most remote portion of the globe" and "farther away," in terms of her understanding.

Debo also acknowledged that had she known what she would find, she would never have started her study. Once into her subject, however, "I felt an obligation to go on with it." She worked rapidly, hoping that Oklahomans could profit from her findings as they debated whether to accept a state version of the federal Indian Reorganization Act (IRA) of 1934. Under the IRA, the older policy of forcing native peoples to give up their communal lands and traditions in order to become assimilated was being reversed. The new policy emphasized the rebuilding of tribal land bases and Native American traditions. Debo, knowing that her study demonstrated the consequences of forcing the Five Tribes to give up their holdings, wanted her work published quickly so that the public could benefit from her insights as debate unfolded.

Unfortunately, when University of Oklahoma president William Bizzell decided that the university press should not publish her study, Debo's contract was canceled. Bizzell, acting on the advice of his assistant, history professor Morris Wardell (also a student of Dale), feared that Debo's identification of powerful individuals involved in defrauding Native Americans could bring retaliation from the state legislature or lawsuits against the university or its press.

For the next three years, barely subsisting on small grants, Debo lived a hand-to-mouth existence, while Joseph A. Brandt, director of the Oklahoma University Press, sought another publisher for her work. Her 1939 manuscript, The Road to Disappearance, which traced the history of the Creek republic until its termination, again told a tale of white duplicity. The Oklahoma Press, short on funds, was unable to set a publication date. Nor had Brandt found a publisher for her work on the betrayal of the Five Tribes. In her correspondence, Debo, who seldom indulged in self pity, uncharacteristically described herself as "completely at the end of my financial and spiritual resources," and still "desperately trying to find something to do—teaching, lecturing, research, anything," as she approached 50.

A year later, Princeton University Press published her work on the Five Tribes as And Still the Waters Run. Shortly thereafter, The Road to Disappearance appeared. Though neither enjoyed a large sale, they, along with her earlier work on the Choctaws, incorporated anthropological studies and, unlike many works of that era, examined tribal people in all their complexity instead of presenting them as stereotyped savages or victims without true historical identity. Finally, unlike many scholars who ended their accounts with the late 19th century, Debo carried hers—always with Native Americans at center stage—well into the 20th.

Six years after losing her teaching position, Debo, still impoverished, borrowed train fare to travel to Oklahoma City. Boarding at the YWCA for fifty cents a day, she sought to become the administrative head of the Oklahoma Federal Writers' Project. Gaining this position staved off destitution for another year, but her independent spirit and impatience with the writing skills of her staff guaranteed frustration. By 1941, with the WPA's Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State almost finished, Debo returned to her parents' home in Marshall, where she resumed writing. By 1943, her book Tulsa: From Creek Town to Oil Capital was fast disappearing from Oklahoma bookstores.

Shortly after, Debo, having obtained an Alfred A. Knopf Fellowship, was at work on Prairie City, the story of an Oklahoma town, a composite of Marshall and nearby communities. By tracing its development up to U.S. entry and participation in World War II, she provided a humorous and affectionate account of her community. Conscientiously honest, she also discussed the nativism, racism, religious bigotry, and greed that had marred local life and fortunes.

During World War II, given the shortage of teachers and ministers, Debo taught high school history and served as Marshall's lay Methodist minister. By 1947, the 57-year-old writer and her widowed mother were living in Stillwater, where Debo served as curator of maps at Oklahoma Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Oklahoma State University). That year, she turned down the chance to join the university's history department. Although teaching was her favorite pastime, producing books was her highest priority. This was true even though she found writing grueling labor, which she enjoyed as much as a "galley slave enjoyed rowing." Two years later, she published Oklahoma: Foot-loose and Fancy-free, still one of the best interpretative studies of the state. Again, while her love for her homeland was evident, she took residents to task for engaging in environmentally destructive practices and neglecting many of the state's cultural and educational resources.

In 1951, the Indian Rights Association published the results of her field work among the fullbloods of the Five Tribes, an update on conditions since the publication of And Still the Waters Run. In The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma, Debo revealed that these tribes were losing their remaining lands at a rate of about 35,000 acres annually. To reverse this trend, she called for the expansion of economic and social services, especially in public health and education.

At that time, Debo's diary recorded her struggle as she tried to meet her job responsibilities while her mother, suffering from arteriosclerosis and diabetes, faded in and out of senile dementia. Nonetheless, despite the burdens of caretaking, Lina's death in June 1954 left Angie bereft and convinced that "creative work" was "the only antidote to grief and loneliness." But new concerns impeded Debo's progress as a writer. In the early 1950s, Congress and the federal government had inaugurated the policy of Termination, an attempt to end federal relations with tribes while placing them under state jurisdiction in matters of law and order. To counter what she saw as a gross violation of national trust and responsibility, Debo bombarded representatives and senators with letters and spoke frequently to clubs and church groups. Eventually, when Termination proved disastrous for those tribes that underwent the process, such as the Menominee of Wisconsin, federal policy changed and Termination ended.

Beginning in 1958, Debo satisfied her pent up desires to travel the world, visiting Europe and Mexico. In 1966, at age 76, she journeyed through Africa, touring Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, and Egypt before returning home. Four years later, Debo's still popular work, Indians of North America, appeared (1970). Partly the outcome of a summer institute offered to teachers of Indian students, it was also inspired by her desire to write a book describing America's "true imperialism," its shameful treatment of its native peoples.

By now Debo had transformed her Christmas mailing into an activist network on behalf of indigenous people. From Marshall, she coordinated an effort in which she received information from unidentified agencies and then sent an ever-widening circle of correspondents the salient facts about the impact that Congressional bills would have on Native Americans and advice about approaching local and national politicians. As she related in a 1974 article, she had always begun her research with an open mind, wanting only "to discover the truth." Earlier, she had thought that when her work appeared in print, her job was done. "Later I came to see that after my findings were published I had the same obligation to correct abuses as any other citizen." Debo's ever-expanding network played a vital role in the Alaskan Native Claims Settlement Act of 1971, in which the Native peoples were given 40 million acres of land to continue their traditional way of life. Her group later helped win water rights for the Papago Indians and campaigned for similar rights for the Pima Indians, both Arizona tribes.

In 1972, Debo began a biography of Geronimo, the Apache chief who had long been portrayed as a bloodthirsty warrior clothed in a blanket of human scalps. Basing her study on her interviews of the 1950s with his descendants and other Apaches, she sought to dispel the libelous myths surrounding this figure. Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (1976) won the prestigious Wrangler Award and a prize from the Southwestern Library Association.

The last decade of her life brought more honors as the Oklahoma American Civil Liberties Union, in which she was a founding member, created the Angie Debo Civil Liberties Volunteer Award. She received an honorary degree from Wake Forest College and the Outstanding Alumni Award from the University of Oklahoma. These years, however, also brought increasing pain and infirmities, for by 1978, she was crippled from osteoporosis and her sight and hearing were failing.

Nonetheless, between 1981 and 1985, Debo worked with her friend from the ACLU, Gloria Valencia-Weber , along with historian Glenna Matthews , on an oral history project. They were assisted by Aletha Rogers . Debo recorded her experiences growing up in Oklahoma and the difficulties she had encountered later as a female historian. In 1985, the State of Oklahoma honored Debo by displaying her portrait, the first woman to be so acknowledged, in the Capitol rotunda, alongside that of such figures as Sequoyia, Will Rogers, and former speaker of the House of Representatives, Carl Albert. The oral history project, having received a number of grants, resulted in a film, "Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo," produced by Barbara Abrash and Martha Sandlin . Focusing primarily on Debo's struggle to publish And Still the Waters Run and her work on behalf of Indians, the film appeared on the PBS series "The American Experience" in the fall of 1988. Unfortunately, however, Debo had died on February 21, 1988, only weeks after Glenna Matthews had accepted the Career Award for Distinguished Scholarship on Debo's behalf from the American Historical Association.

Nonetheless, Native American leaders, such as Wilma T. Mankiller , formerly the principal chief of the Cherokee Nation, continue to honor Debo, and Oklahoma newspaperwoman Edith Gaylord Harper has established the biennial Angie Debo Prize for the most significant book on the Southwest published by the University of Oklahoma Press. Finally, Debo's works, meticulously researched, have proved so reliable that they have formed the basis of court decisions favoring Native American rights. Her example of courage and integrity continues to inspire those who remember her as a friend and those who meet her for the first time through her writings.

sources:

Angie Debo Collection, Special Collections-University Archives, Edmund Low Library, Oklahoma State University, Stillwater, Oklahoma.

Valencia-Weber, Gloria. Angie Debo 1890–1988: An Autobiographical Sketch, Eulogy and Bibliography. Published by The College of Arts and Sciences and Department of History, Oklahoma State University, June 1988.

related media:

Indians, Outlaws and Angie Debo, produced by Barbara Abrash and Martha Sandlin, Institute for Research in History, 1988.

Shirley A. Leckie , Professor of History, University of Central Florida and author of Elizabeth Bacon Custer and the Making of a Myth (University of Oklahoma Press, 1993)

Women in World History: A Biographical Encyclopedia