Will Rogers had a presence at Texas conference
Will Rogers was born in Indian Territory and always called Oklahoma home although he never lived in the place of his birth after it became a state.
However, according to Amy Ware, doctoral student at the University of Texas, Will “remained connected to the Cherokee Nation into which he was born in 1879.”
She made one of four presentations at the Southwest/Texas Popular Culture Association conference in Albuquerque, N.M. Steve Gragert, Will Rogers
Museums executive director, and a Will Rogers scholar, chaired two panels at the conference with focus on Will.
Richard White, full professor at Louisiana Sate University, presented the introduction and first chapter of his new political biography about Will Rogers.
White’s presentation generated a lot of discussion about Will Rogers and the impact he had on the political times, according to Gragert.
“Every year, Will Rogers has a presence at the conference,” Gragert said, “I am pleased to see the geographical spread of the presenters and the diverseness of their topics.” The conference attracted more than a thousand scholars from all over the world.
Southwest Texas Popular Culture Association was founded 30 years ago by Peter Rollins, Oklahoma State University professor, who was involved in the first OSU Will Rogers Project, compiling 22 volumes of the writings of Will Rogers.
His wife, Susan, was the trainer for the first class of Will Rogers Ropers, docents who currently volunteer at the Claremore museum.
Presenter Danielle Williams, Georgia State University, in “Rogers, Radio, and Race” offered newspaper criticism of Will Rogers use of the “n” word on a national radio broadcast, referring to African-American spirituals, one of the few times Will Rogers Memorial archives indicate public criticism of Will.
Cynthia J. Miller, Emerson College, presented “Front Porch Philosophy, Back Porch Laughs: The Wit and Wisdom of Will Rogers’ Comic Masks.”
Ware is defending her dissertation this semester about Will Rogers and his Cherokee heritage.
In her presentation, “Will Rogers and Son: Will Rogers, Jr. and the Genealogies of American Indian Activism,” she talked about how Will Rogers was vocal about cultural and political struggled across Indian County and how he criticized treatment of American Indians in the United States.
She also mentioned his gifts of radios and headsets to the Claremore Indian Hospital and “support of the 1934 Indian New Deal, which ended allotment and promoted cultural pluralism in Native America.”
After his father’s death, Will Jr. became an advocate for American Indians. He was one of the National Congress of American Indians foundation members, an organization that exists today. He founded a variety of organizations to assist American Indians throughout the United States. He was a special assistant to Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall. He resigned when Richard Nixon was elected but remained a Bureau of Indian Affairs consultant several years.
“Will Rogers, a man not popularly associated with his own tribal nation, planted in his son a seed of knowledge that would lead to his involvement in Indian affairs throughout the second half of the twentieth century,” Ware writes.
Gragert said Ware shared a new article about Will Rogers. “Unexpected Cowboy, Unexpected Indian: The Case of Will Rogers,” was published in the Winter 2009 issue of Ethnohistory, the journal of the American Society for Ethnohistory.