Quanah Parker, Comanche leader

Quanah Parker, the gentleman at right holding a spear.

Rasa and his helpers did a great deal of work on The Starseed Signals, but a couple of mistakes did slip through. The German actor mentioned in Chapter One is Conrad Veidt, not "Conrad Veldt." (He was Major Strasser in "Casablanca.")

Chapter One also has a reference to Quanah Parker as "the great Cheyenne war-chief," when in fact he was a Comanche. Wikipedia has much of his colorful life, which included having as many as eight wives at one time and helping to found the Native American Church, which uses peyote as a sacrament.

I lived for many years in Lawton, Oklahoma, where I worked for the local newspaper. Parker is buried in Comanche County, at Fort Sill. Parker and the Comanche tribe were settled in the Lawton area after being subdued by the U.S. Army, and it's still common for Lawton residents to interact with Comanches. I used to get my hair cut by a Comanche barber, and at the newspaper I worked for many years with a Comanche tribal princess.

Oklahoma, where I grew up, originally was "Indian Territory," a place where Native Americans were settled after their original lands were invaded and occupied. Native Americans from the eastern U.S. such as the Cherokees, Creeks, Choctaws, Seminoles etc. were settled in what became the eastern part of Oklahoma, while tribes from the Great Plains and western U.S., such as the Comanches, were settled in the western part. So, for example, I grew up in Tulsa, which originally was a Creek Indian town, named by the Creeks who settled there. The Lawton area is where Comanche, Kiowa and Apache people were sent. (The Apache leader Geronimo also wound up at Fort Sill.) Eventually, after the rest of the U.S. was settled, Indian Territory was opened up to white settlement, too.

Oklahoma's Native American heritage was highlighted in controversy over Sen. Elizabeth Warren's alleged Cherokee ancestry. Warren was born in Oklahoma City and grew up in Oklahoma. Without getting into the weeds of the dispute (DNA tests apparently do show some Native American heritage),  I think what was missed by people unfamiliar with Oklahoma is that because of its heritage, almost everyone in the state is Native American, believes he or she is Native American,  or wishes he or she was Native American. Claiming a Cherokee ancestor is particularly common, so Warren in a sense was simply an average Oklahoman. 

An anecdote: Years ago, while I was waiting to be fed at a buffalo burger cookout at Fort Sill, a beloved annual ritual in the Lawton area, a Comanche in line with me told he he could never figure out how the U.S. government could have forced the famously warlike Cherokees to move to Oklahoma. Given that everyone in Oklahoma had a Cherokee grandmother, he reasoned the Cherokees must have been an enormous tribe, much bigger than the Comanches, and very difficult for the U.S. Army to push around.