The Glass Nation: A Cherokee Story

By Emily Parker

In 1997, the Nation of the Cherokees faced a war of two factions that threatened to tear them apart. The Glass Nation paints a portrait of those events, recalling what happened to various people during that time of turmoil.
In the midst of the run-up to an election for a new chief, a candidate’s past misconduct comes to light, and a scandal ensues. As tribal council members struggle reach a place beyond the impasse, chaos engulfs the Nation. It is a time of disorder for most tribal members, many of whom do not understand just what is at stake. The tribal leadership must work to overcome the turbulence and reestablish peace among the membership.
Sharing a firsthand account of real events, this narrative gives a history of events surrounding a struggle within the Nation of the Cherokees during the late 1990s.

• Language: English
• Publisher: LifeRich Publishing
• Release date: Feb 11, 2020
• ISBN: 9781489725639

Emily Parker

Emily Parker is the digital diplomacy advisor and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. Previously, she was a member of Secretary Clinton’s Policy Planning staff at the State Department, where she covered twenty-first-century statecraft, innovation, and technology. Before joining the State Department, she was an op-ed editor at The New York Times and an editorial writer and op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal. She is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are.

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THE

GLASS

NATION

A Cherokee story

EMILY PARKER

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Copyright © 2020 Emily Parker.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

LifeRich Publishing is a registered trademark of The Reader’s Digest Association, Inc.

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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2562-2 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2561-5 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4897-2563-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019920617

LifeRich Publishing rev. date: 12/13/2019

CONTENTS

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Chapter IV

Chapter V

Chapter VI

Chapter VII

Chapter VIII

Chapter IX

Chapter X

CHAPTER I

I t was the accident that changed everything. Life was not the same. And never would be.

It’s funny how an accident can transport you from one life to another. Suddenly. In an instant. I went from budding journalist to unemployable. My boss saw to that. My ex-boss. The thing is, a lot of things happened at the same time. I always heard that God never gives you more than you can carry. I think God forgot that little adage in 1997. I almost ended up with a broken back from the weight. Not quite, but almost.

A sweet little newspaper in Kansas saved me. At least for awhile. And brought me back to the land of the living. But that’s not the real story.

It was a really cold January day in Cherokee County, Oklahoma. I was alone in my blue Jeep Wrangler, working on a story when it happened. On my way back to town from a little lakeside village, the slick spot rose up and smote me. Right in the face. I was doing about 50 on a road where ice had patched itself like a checkerboard. Ice, clear, ice and clear. It was a little patch of ice that eventually did me in.

The Jeep slid just enough, turning the dry pavement into the bad guy. The last thing I remember thinking was I’m going too fast. And then lights out, across a ditch and into a tree. That introduced my face to the steering wheel. I ended up with a concussion and a cut that came within an eighth of an inch from taking out my left eye.

From somewhere came a soft patting on my arm. It sounded like a little old man speaking to me, telling me that help was on the way. I never found out who he had been. I put a letter in the newspaper, thanking him. Maybe he was my guardian angel. If there are such things. Anyway, that was the beginning of the end for one life. And a damned hard road leading to the next.

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2008

I sit here trying desperately to put words to what happened. Words, once my forte` are now their evil twin. My friends and co-workers used to call me a walking thesaurus. Now I have to carry a thesaurus and ask for help. Using association to remember words and names. And that generates a whole new form of conversation. Especially when that moment of silence turns into an eternity as I struggle to remember what the hell I was just talking about.

I still felt the aches and pains from ten years previous. My ankles often gave out on me, the ankles the doctors said were just fine. Can’t see anything so there must not be anything wrong. Right? But there was. I felt it every day. My legs had been jammed against the door of the Jeep and my knee broken.

It was my mom’s birthday when it happened. Mama had died in 1977 from lung cancer she had contracted while visiting with her best friend, who was a chain smoker. We didn’t know about the hazards associated with second-hand smoke then. I thought of the irony, her best friend killed her over coffee and cigarettes.

Anyway, I ended up in the hospital, driven there by an ambulance from Cherokee Nation EMS. They tried to do an MRI on my knee but I freaked out in the coffin-like machine. I have severe claustrophobia. Just talking about it causes me to feel as though I’m suffocating. They didn’t do the MRI and I walked on crutches for weeks before we found an open MRI in Muskogee. My bone doctor called and freaked on me.

Get off that knee right now!

So, I got back on the crutches and stayed there for several more weeks. I remember being in a wheelchair at my dad’s 80th birthday celebration in February.

Later, on crutches, I still managed to fall on my face several times. The weeks following my accident were really miserable. I felt as though I couldn’t catch my breath. I rolled to the front door in my wheelchair, propped it open and gulped air. I had no idea I could have asked my doctor for something to help. Just didn’t think of it. I had been raised to deal with pain and misery without help. Medicine was a last resort. So I suffered.

My middle child sat up with me several nights while my chest beat a drum clear through my back. It felt as though I was being gored by a really large bull, whatever that might feel like. But I imagined it must have felt that way. When that finally ceased, I still had my claustrophobia, aches and pains, including migraines to enjoy. Strange knobs and bumps appeared on my head and ten years later, were still painful to the touch.

While I was having all this fun, my editor, Carla Lumpkin, was having to write a little more. Poor baby. She hated that. It was her goal in life to stay glued to her chair in front of her monitor. Layout the pages, fluff up someone’s ego with a nice editorial and smoke. But that was it.

Without me to fill in around the ads, she was forced to actually work. Not that she wasn’t a good writer. She was. She preferred to keep it to herself and let reporters do the legwork. Ask the hard questions.

The area newspaper had two main reporters, a photog and sports editor. Bill Scoop Williams covered the courthouse and city council. He was good at it. Anyone who can develop a rapport with every office in the courthouse, and keep that rapport for years, is good at his job.

As for me, I was the other reporter, ie, photographer and layout person on weekends. My beats included everything else in the tri-county area. Small government, county commissioners, human interest, Illinois River politics and the big one, Cherokee Nation.

The Nation’s capitol was in my town. Surrounded by rolling green and billowing thunderheads, the Nation produced its own menagerie of color and cumulus. They had their own way of gathering storm clouds.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Cut to 1997 and the accident.

By the time I found out that my leg had a crack in it, my career at the Times was over. That was in May. In March, I heard by way of the grapevine that the editor had been having a hissy fit over rumors told to her. I fear my death has been greatly exaggerated. According to wagging tongues I was cruising the local track field on two solid feet, enjoying a paid time off, while she toiled away at the paper.

My friends at the paper, which later Carla claimed were nonexistent, told me about it. As I licked my wounds and babied an aching body she was slathering her own pain with self pity.

I didn’t have a lot of sympathy for her. In fact, next to none. It was hard to feel anything for her. Carla played the hardnosed journalist but she told the same stale stories about her press escapades until they had become a joke. In fact, she had become a joke, behind her back.

The worst crime she committed wasn’t the felony she pulled off later or the lying she did after. It was the theft of my work. I think the worst sin to a journalist, besides making up stories, was to steal them from another journalist. It would create greater havoc than a fundamentalist usher at a gay