I: Grandmother Undantva (Oona) Whitekiller

A History of My Mother in Three Parts.
Part I: Earlier Generations

by Tommy George

My Grandmother Oona at age 18, circa 1913

I have grandparents whom I never met, nor ever even heard of until I was in my 40's. The revelation came in the early 1990's, when my mother in the spirit of the times loosened up about her mixed race particulars. Mom had been seen as a purely white individual for half a century by then. It took a bit of doing, but the hastened process of documentation caused by World War II helped, and she looked white. She certainly had very few happy memories of her Cherokee childhood.

1838

My grandmother Oona Whitekiller was a full-blooded Cherokee whose parents and grandparents had been hounded down a trail of tears in one of US History's ugliest episodes--forcibly dislocated from the original Cherokee homelands (in what are now the Carolinas) and made to travel by foot, wagon, and horse to their new lands under the merciless sun of the Oklahoma territory. The extended family came to reside near Crudestruck, Oklahoma, on settlement lands distributed by the government. At the time of the Dawes Role (a census of Native Americans under new Anglophied names), my ancestors and many Native Americans chose the most vengeful names that their limited knowledge of English could invent. My people became the Whitekiller family. The Dawes Role abounds with Mankillers, Whitekillers, Deathgivers, Slayers and the like. 

In 1914, my grandmother Oona Whitekiller was left to fend for herself after the death of her father's sister (the last Whitekiller elder), who perished in the withering heat of that summer. Oona's legacy was the family home of unpainted wood in which she was born and where she spent her life watching others die, in time dying there herself.



The house and outbuildings perched on a low rise where the salt-plain of my great-great grandfather's Cherokee settlement acreage ended and tillable topsoil struggled to take hold. These lands belonged to her now. Their sole benefits were the small seasonal allotments of meat and produce delivered by a pock-marked neighbor who continued to share-crop the fertile northeast corner of her settlement land under an agreement made with with Oona's father, even though Clovis Whitekiller had been dead for two years.

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Oona was a dead ringer for her mother who had fled Whitekiller life in grand, horse-jumping style, deserting the settlement house when her daughter Oona was only three, leaping onto the east-bound iron-horse  From that train, she jumped onto prancing ponies in several different traveling Wild West shows, pursuant to an agreement struck with a theatrical agent whom only God knows why came to recruit talent from Indian lands near Crudestruck.

My great-grandmother (Oona's mother) stayed on the road for ten years with the shows, including Buffalo Bill Cody's. Her accomplishments were both impressive and disgusting. She had toured most of the United States and Europe, known Bill Hickox intimately, and acquired every sort of bad habit and sexual disease. Great-grandma's teeth had turned black from injections of mercury given her by European physicians who tried unsuccessfully to cure her syphillis years earlier. She finally returned home to Oklahoma when Oona was thirteen and remained in the Whitekiller family home until her daughter reached the age of sixteen. Then she passed on. 

The first thing my free-spirited great-grandmother had done when she returned unannounced from the cowboys and Indians circuit was to dispatch her surprised husband Clovis Whitekiller into town with enough money to buy for their home a spinet piano. She gave him permission to get drunk with what any money left over if he wished. Oona had abandoned Clovis for a decade with no word of explanation, but he followed her directions to a "t." In addition to commanding red men, the show-business trooper also knew everything about white men--especially the filthy propensities of white sex which she shared with her daughter, laughing and crying as she related tales of passion ambiguous to young ears, and sometimes grotesque, but always cautionary. 

She was already in the throes of tertiary syphilis syndrome when she returned, but the combination of opiate and cocaine available at the town druggist's could temporarily restore her verve and imagination for unclouded periods during which she and her daughter grew close. Although Oona knew her mother only over the wretched tailings of her almost forty years of native wildness turned wanton, the girl doted on her. She admired her sailor's cursing, but refrained from it herself. Oona's life was deeply influenced by her mother's independence.

Those teeth alone were enough to keep my grandmother Oona chaste and standoffish from the opposite sex until well beyond the usual age for Cherokee girls. Her mother's final days were grimly awful. Like those of the similarly afflicted Oscar Wilde, her sufferings terminated with an audible pop that expelled noxious fluids from her ears, nose, and eyes. As ashamed as it made my young Grandma Oona, she had to flee the scene and leave the preparation of her mother's body to the cousins.

Oona's father Clovis Whitekiller had long held the view that Cherokee lives were getting shorter under the white man's influence. He viewed the sorry, messy death of his wife as proof-certain. After her death, the remaining Whitekillers followed suit in orderly procession, starting with Oona's father. Clovis had the good fortune at least to die in his sleep, returning quickly and without fear to the Great Spirit. Still, his own death supported his theory. He had struck his head against a rail when he tripped in a drunken stupor on the railroad tracks that he walked to and from the town of Crudestruck. He lay there unconscious until his mortal coil was unwound over a half-mile stretch of track by an iron horse. The instrument of his uncoiling was a locomotive engineered by a white man.

The reaper returned to embrace each Whitekiller cousin in its turn, one-by-one, starting with the youngest and working up to the eldest, as if by schedule. Oona's maiden aunt, considered ancient at the age of sixty-two, was the last to go. Her departure from life left her brother Clovis's only child Undantva (Oona) on her own--at age eighteen the last Whitekiller.

Continue to Part II