Riddle of America, The - Waldorf Research Institute

ly to the south and west, except for one important fact: the horse returnedto the Americas with the Spaniards. This was a boon to the Plains Indians.French trappers and traders arrived 150 years later. The goods thatthey brought, especially guns, also made life easier, in some ways, for NativeAmericans. However, their lives in this region took a turn for the worse atthe beginning of the 19th century. Land in what was to become Oklahomapassed from the Spanish to the French to the United States. The first settlershad arrived in Oklahoma just prior to Thomas Jefferson’s purchase of theLouisiana Territory in 1803. Jefferson soon won approval from Congress tosend out men to explore this vast new territory. Shortly thereafter, he conceivedthe idea of making a place there for the “Five Civilized Tribes,” whowere in the way in the South: the concept of “Indian Territory” was born,which would eventually lead to Oklahoma as we know it today.“Removal” became the official government policy in 1816. TheChoctaws were soon on their way to Oklahoma. Sixty-seven other tribeswould be settled in Indian Territory before the government was done. Theirre‐settlement pattern in Indian Territory mirrored their original distributionacross the country. Indian Territory, thus, became a microcosm of the countryas a whole. This is the second characteristic of life here: it is a contractionand concentration of life spread out over the entire continent.This phenomenon was to repeat itself toward the end of the centurywhen Indian Territory was opened up for white settlement. The originalimpulse that brought white settlers to this country resurfaced in the openingof Oklahoma: the hope of freedom and fresh opportunity for the unfortunateand the outcast. The process of settlement that took place over a periodof centuries for the country as a whole took place in a matter of days andweeks in Oklahoma.This contraction appears to be a metamorphosis on the human planeof the architectural forces that created such diversity in the physical landscapeand arranged a climate where wet meets dry, warm meets cold: NativeAmericans from the four corners were assembled here, and then people fromthe four races and nearly every culture. Within this circle of life, a force isworking to “compress” the human relationships in our society. Just as theforces in leaf and stem are concentrated in the calyx to hold the buddingflower, so here astral forces are at work to create a chalice, or “heart region,”to hold the etheric waters of life. Given their sensitivity to Mother Nature,the Kiowa and others who lived in this “heart‐land” would naturally idealizethe practice of the virtues of the “heart,” enshrined in their culture.73