Re-printed with permission from OklahomaToday.com
July/August 2011 issue p.74-75
Article by Brooke Adcox
Photo by Steven Walker

History Rewritten

Since the early 1990s, Richard Green has been a living history channel for the Chickasaw Nation. By Brooke Adcox

Point of view influences history. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the recording of Native American events and culture. It’s work that requires piecing together historical documents, personal diaries, interviews, and artifacts, all of which are rarely captured directly from an Indian voice. It’s a discipline the Chickasaw Nation began when it appointed its first tribal historian, Richard Green, in 1994.  Green’s white hair and dark-rimmed glasses may give him the appearance of an ivory-tower academic, but his concise writings are pointedly stripped of scholarly pomp and circumstance. “People are interested in people,” says sixty-seven-year-old Green, an Oklahoma City resident. “If you take people out of history and just report history, no one cares that much about it.” Green was an unlikely candidate for a historian when he was hired in 1992. The Muskogee native and non-Chickasaw had been a staff writer for the OU Health Sciences Center since 1974 and the editor of its quarterly magazine from 1979 to 1988. While working on a story, he came in contact with Jim Jennings, an Oklahoma City lawyer and member of the Chickasaw Nation.

Jennings later recommended Green as a researcher to Chickasaw officials, including Governor Bill Anoatubby.

Green was hired as a contract employee whose first project was compiling information about twentieth-century Chickasaws. At the time, there were few books written on the subject, so it was important for Green to have a medium to share his research. In 1994, the tribe established the Chickasaw Historical Society. Green pitched the creation of a quarterly publication, The Journal of Chickasaw History and Culture, to be distributed to society members. He was founding editor and shortly after was named the first tribal historian. He also has contributed to the Chickasaw Times since 1999. Books provide Green another outlet. In 2002, he penned the first biography of a Chickasaw, Te Ata: Chickasaw Storyteller, The majority of Richard Green’s work is done from his home office in Oklahoma City.

American Treasure (University of Oklahoma Press). Green continued his book work with a three-volume article compilation series, Chickasaw Lives (Chickasaw Press), published between 2007 and 2010. Whatever the medium, Green’s person-focused point of view is the backbone of his writing. “The Chickasaws back in the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century were not writing themselves,” says Green. “When you read these accounts, you have to keep in mind who is writing this, why, and what is important to them. You have to try to put yourself in the tribal members’ shoes, and the only way to do that is to broaden your outlook. Another way is to talk to Chickasaws today and ask them.” Like the information landscape, which has dramatically changed since Green’s hiring, the operations of the tribe have shifted. The rapidly growing Chickasaw Nation now has a Division of History and Culture, a 146-employee department that manages the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Sulphur, Chickasaw Press, and other language, cultural, and horticultural programs. While there have been many changes, Green still directly reports to Governor Anoatubby.

“Mr. Green has been invaluable to the tribe both as a historian and writer,” says Anoatubby. “He believes in the importance of what he’s doing.”

Get There: Readers can follow Richard Green’s work on Chickasaw.tv on the history and culture channel, and Chickasaw.net