Rebecca Barnett, Interview
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Created: Tuesday, May 9, 2023 - 14:00 |
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Summary:
An interview with Muscogee (Creek) Nation citizen Rebecca Barnett.Description:
An interview with Muscogee (Creek) Nation Rebecca Barnett . A downloadable transcript may be found by link: Rebecca Barnett. This interview has been indexed through the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History Center's Oral History Metadata Synchronizer system at the University of Kentucky. For an indexed copy of the video, please follow the external link found in the bar on the right of this page.
Transcription:
The Muscogee (Creek) Nation
Historic and Cultural Preservation Department Oral History Program
“A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Against Covid-19”
As Remembered by: Mrs. Rebecca Barnett
Interview by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
Date: 10/30/2021
Transcription: The Audio Transcription Company
Edited by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
MIDGE DELLINGER: This is Midge Dellinger, oral historian for the Muscogee Nation. Today is October 30, 2021. I’m at my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma interviewing Muscogee citizen Mrs. Rebecca Barnett who is also at her home in Hanna, Oklahoma. This interview is being performed remotely and over the phone due to the continuing COVID 19 pandemic. I’m performing this interview on behalf of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Historic and Cultural Preservation Department for the oral history project titled “A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee Creek Nation Against COVID-19.” Mrs. Barnett, thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday morning to be here with me and to participate in this project. And I just want to ask you first, do you agree to this interview?
REBECCA BARNETT: Yes, I do.
DELLINGER: Thank you very much. So [00:01:00] what we’re going to do, I’m going to start out asking you some questions about your personal life and your background, and so I’m going to begin with what is your tribal town and clan?
BARNETT: Okay, my tribal town is Tvkvpvce, and my clan is Wotkvlke, racoon.
DELLINGER: Okay. And you know, I should have already said this, if at any time during this interview you would like to speak in your language, Muscogee language, please feel free to do so.
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BARNETT: Okay, I sure will.
DELLINGER: Okay. All right, so Mrs. Barnett, where were you born, and where did you grow up?
BARNETT: Well, I was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but I grew up in Hanna, in Hanna, Oklahoma. And I’m still here.
DELLINGER: Oh. (laughs) And where is Hanna? If somebody didn’t know where Hanna was, where would you tell them it’s located?
BARNETT: Well, we’re [00:02:00] on—we’re west of Eufaula. Oh, yeah, west of Eufaula in a very small town. There’s a post office and a nutrition center and a school. That’s all there is in Hanna. And it used to be a booming town at one time when my mother was growing up here. She grew up here too. So it was a booming town. There was banks and everything. And a tornado hit it.
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And it tore everything up in Hanna, and it never has rebuilt. So but we’ve been here. My mother and her family grew—they all were here. And I left for a while, and I came back. But we’re a very small town, but we’re just of Indian Nation Turnpike on number nine highway.
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DELLINGER: Okay. And will you talk a little bit about what life was like, you know, as a child growing up in Hanna? [00:03:00]
BARNETT: Well, there was—I started school at a new country school called West Liberty. And it was a one-room school. And the building’s gone now. And then after that shut down we were transferred to Hanna, Hanna School, and I was probably in the second grade when I transferred there. There was a lot of American Indians, a lot of Creeks. I think our school was like 97 percent Native American. So it was—we all spoke Creek too. We all spoke in the language.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: And it was a little different, you know, but then there was post office, and there were stores, two little gas stations there, post office, of course, and the school. There was a lot of children there. And some people that had moved [00:04:00] off came back, but it was a rough little town. They only took care of themselves, and they all— everybody knew each other. And lot of people were afraid to come to Hanna. But we grew up here, so it was nothing for us to be, you know, in—to grow up here. But now a lot of people heard lot of bad things about it, I guess, and it was because they took care of each other, even the non-Indians, and then they all just kind of looked after each other. Now, my grandkids are going to school with the kids that I went to school with’s grandkids.
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DELLINGER: Wow. That’s really cool though.
BARNETT: Yeah, it is because we all know each other. And of course, now there’s not very many. We’ve lost a lot of Native people, you know. So there’s not very many here, [00:05:00] as far as Native Americans go.
DELLINGER: Right, and when you say we’ve lost a lot of—you know, you’ve lost a lot of the people there in the town, why is that?
BARNETT: Well, lot of it, we just buried one here about three weeks ago, maybe a month ago, due to COVID.
DELLINGER: Um-hm.
BARNETT: We’ve probably lost about three or four to COVID, maybe even five down here, and they were Native.
DELLINGER: Yeah, and that’s a lot when you’re considering the size of your town.
BARNETT: Yeah, there’s only maybe—now, this is what I heard. They say there’s about 300 people that still live here, you know, that still reside here, and out of that, there was, like, five Creeks, Muscogee (Creeks) that died to the COVID.
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DELLINGER: Okay. Well, let’s go back to your childhood. [00:06:00] I want you to talk a little bit about who your parents are and if you have any siblings or, you know, even your grandparents, will you talk a little bit about your family?
BARNETT: Yeah, my grandparents, my grandmother was Sallie Narchaby. And she grew up in Ulan, and she was a speaker. She didn’t know English. But she was a fluent speaker of the Choctaw language and of the Muscogee (Creek) language. And my grandfather was Sekomahe Smith, Sekomahe Smith. And Sekomahe means barely there or hardly there. He was born as a premature baby that could fit in your hand.
DELLINGER: Oh my gosh.
BARNETT: And his mother died at birth. So medicine men raised him. [00:07:00] Because it was extraordinary then, it wasn’t ordinary for a baby to be born like that so he was special to them. So medicine men, all men raised him, no women. And they said they would go to a neighbor, and they would get goat’s milk from this neighbor, and that’s how they raised him. Well, he became the chief of Hillabee Ceremonial Ground until he was about ninety years old, maybe even more. And so when he got to where he wasn’t able, well, then somebody else took over, and the ground’s still going now. But then my parents, is Yahdeka Byrd. He was Seminole/Creek. And he was raised in Eufaula area. And my mother, of course, was Dixie Smith Byrd. And she [00:08:00] was raised in
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Hanna all her life. She went to Hanna School, and she said Hanna School at one time was a two-story building.
And that building is still standing, it’s just a lower level now. But they were both speakers. My whole family were speakers. I had one aunt and two uncles. And they were all speakers. And so then my mother, my grandmother not to be able to speak English, we had to communicate with her, so that’s all she speak to us was in the Muscogee language. And so I have a brother. His name is Yahdeka Byrd, Jr. And there’s just two of us. And my father passed away when I was seven years old. And my mother raised us by herself in Hanna. And she built a home close to her mother, and our family cemetery [00:09:00] is there, and they’re all buried out there. And she was the last one to be buried there about seven years ago. I lost my mother about seven years ago. So but my brother lives in Glenpool, and I’m still down here. I left for about nine years, and I came back. And I’ve been here since. I raised my girls here. I have three daughters. I have eight grandkids. And I’m married to Mitchell Barnett. We’ve been married for thirty-one years. You know, I was raised around traditional people, and I still carry that on in my home.
DELLINGER: Yes.
BARNETT: When I can go out and I mix with different people, I’m, you know, traveled and everything, but when I come home, we live in a very traditional home. We still live by what we were told, what I was told when I was growing up. [00:10:00] I still live by the traditions. I attend church and the grounds both. I feel like I’m in a full circle when I
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do both. I know about both. So I tell people I draw the bridge up when I come into my yard, and I’m raising three grandkids. I’m raising three grandkids now, and they’re starting to—I tell them all the little things that I was told, you know, to make them—to know what they are. I teach them their clan. I teach them their ceremonial ground. And my father, he was a Eufaula Canadian, and he was a second chief to Eufaula Canadian. So I was raised traditionally all the way around at the grounds. [00:11:00] And so my daughters, they still participate. They still—they participate in all ways. They go to church. They go to the grounds. They all do the shell shaking. They all—you know, they participate in ribbon dances, buffalo dances, and they all—my daughters are traditional too. I’m raising them just the way I was raised.
DELLINGER: That’s fantastic, Rebecca. You mentioned church. Well, I tell you what, before we get to that, I want to ask you, would you like to mention the names of your daughters and even your eight grandchildren? I think names are important.
BARNETT: Yeah, well, I have a oldest daughter named Lanita Gray. She used to be [00:12:00] Barnett. And then there’s Lori Givens. She was Lori Barnett. And then I have a Mitcha Barnett. And my grandkids are Aleah. She just graduated last year, and she is at the Muscogee (Creek) Nation College now.
DELLINGER: Oh, great.
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BARNETT: And I have—that’s the oldest one’s daughter. And then she’s got two sons. One is Dominic Gray and Xavier Gray. And my middle daughter, Lori, and her husband, Sonny, they have two boys, which is Evitan, and that’s Native spelled backwards.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: His name is Evitan. And then she’s got a younger one named Christopher. And then my youngest daughter, she has three kids. Her oldest one is [00:13:00] KayleAnn Holden, and she has Melaina Holden, which, Melaina, her real name is Melena, but the school calls her Melaina. And the third one is a little boy. And his name is Jagube, Jagube Holden, but they called him Jacobe in school, but he’s named after my grandpa because when the Dawes Roll came in they changed Sekomahe to Jacob. But then the Creeks, they couldn’t speak English, I guess. They were calling him Jagube, so that’s what my youngest grandson is named, Jagube.
DELLINGER: Okay, very interesting. That’s very interesting. So it sounds like you are a very tightknit family. You want to talk about that a little bit? [00:14:00]
BARNETT: We were tightknit. My mother raised her youngest brother, which was my Uncle, Mickey Smith, and she had a older brother named Foster. And the youngest one, he was a change-of-life baby. So my mother kind of raised him as her own, and so when her and my dad got married, they took him on as their son, and they actually thought he was my brother, but he’s not. He’s my uncle, but he was a medicine man. And so we
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were all—I remember being at my grandma’s place all the time. We’d all get together. We’d always get together. And we did that all our lives, and then my oldest uncle passed, Foster. My other uncle, Mickey, he passed, and my mom was the only one left. [00:15:00] You know, everybody was gone but her, but she had us. And she told me before she died, about a month or two before she died, she said, “You keep the family together. You keep these girls together.” She said, “Y’all stay together, and y’all get together, and raise them to be close.”
And they are. They are close, even the grandkids, they are all close. So we have always been a close-knit family. My mother kept my grandmother when she got up there in age. And my father and my mother, they took care of my mother’s father when he was old. And he was probably—gosh, he was in his late nineties when he passed. And then my mother took over taking care of her mother. So when my mother got up there [00:16:00] in age, I took care of her. She lived with us about thirteen years. And my husband, she took my husband in as her son, and we were real close-knit. We always got together, even if it was just to eat together. She would gather us up on Sundays, Sunday afternoons, and she would say, okay, I want to teach the girls how to cook traditional foods. And that’s what she did to me when I was growing up. She would teach me how, so I know how to cook every traditional food.
DELLINGER: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s great though.
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BARNETT: Yeah, it is, and you know, she taught us little legends, and she told us stories.
DELLINGER: Oh my gosh.
BARNETT: And so did my grandmother. We would sit around, and of course there wasn’t computers or cell phones, or you know, we had a TV, but she wasn’t into that because she grew up without it. She grew up in, like, a—out in the country. [00:17:00] So you know, she would just sit around and tell us stories, little legends, little stories, little things that, you know, or even predict the future. She would tell us, well, the elders used to say this, and the elders used to say that. And even my mother did that to us. And she taught my daughters how to cook traditional food so they know how to cook traditional foods.
DELLINGER: Gosh.
BARNETT: She was a teacher every day. She was a teacher every day. She never remarried after my father died, and she was forty when my father died. And she never remarried. She just kept us on her own, and then when the grandkids—she was there when every grandchild was born. Her great-grandchildren, and she was the first to hold them when they were born.
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DELLINGER: Wow. [00:18:00] Yeah, these are amazing things that you’re telling me. And I feel like I could just sit here and just listen to you and not ask any more questions, but I have a feeling, like, just some of the things you’ve already told me that I may need
to interview you again, you know, on a different topic. Of course, we’re going to start focusing here in a little bit on the pandemic, but, yeah, these are some amazing things that you’re telling me. I did want to ask you, so what church do you attend?
BARNETT: Well, I was baptized at Sand Creek, Sand Creek Church at Wetumka. But my husband went to Okfuskee in Eufaula. And my mother told me that, you know, her, the way she grew up, that the man was a leader of the family, so she said you’re going to have to—if he goes to Okfuskee to his church, that’s [00:19:00] where you need to be. So that’s where we go. That’s where we go. When we do go, that’s where we go.
DELLINGER: Okay. And how involved are you with community activities?
BARNETT: Oh, the community, we’re going tonight. They’re going to have a Halloween party tonight for the kids.
DELLINGER: Oh, that’s good.
BARNETT: So I’m going to go down there and help. We go to meetings, and at one time I was a chairman there. And there was a bunch of elders, a lot of elders that came, and now they’re all gone. Now it’s for us younger ones to step up, so that’s where I’m at.
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That’s where I’m at, and in Hanna, since I grew up here and a lot of people, like I said, their grandkids are going to school with my grandkids, we still participate in, like, the little watermelon festival. We entered our grand—our daughters, our three daughters in the little [00:20:00] parade, little kiddy parade they have. Now my grandkids are carrying it on. So we’re pretty involved. We go to the basketball games. Actually, we try to support, you know—in fact, we went to their fall festival and spent as much as we did at the fair. (laughter) This time it was for the grandkids and me and my husband are the go to.
When anybody, anybody, I don’t care who it is, like Thanksgiving’s coming up, we cook a lot of food because there’s some people that doesn’t have anywhere to go or they don’t have family, they come over here. And my daughters know that because my mother told
me that if anybody comes over, you feed them, even if it’s just bread and [00:21:00] water, because they could be hungry. And when she was alive, I did the cooking, and she’d be the coach sitting there in the chair coaching me. She would say—you know, she’d tell me, you know, “That’s not how you do it. That’s not how you do it,” you know, and I’m like, “Okay, okay,” you know. And she was eighty-seven when she passed. So she would sit there and watch me, but she would invite people. I don’t care who they were. She would invite people. So this thanksgiving I’m asking my daughters, okay, you all going to bring somebody? And they say, we’re not sure, but probably so. So I never know how many we’re going to invite, but at one time we’ve had thirty-five people here.
DELLINGER: Wow, that’s a good gathering.
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BARNETT: And some of them I didn’t even know they were my daughter’s friends, you know, that they meant that they didn’t have nowhere to go, so they would come over here. So we’re kind of the go-to people. And even in this [00:22:00] community in Hanna, we’ll invite people. You know, come over and eat. Come over and eat.
DELLINGER: Right. That’s great. I want to ask you, we’re going to switch gears here just a little bit. When did you begin working for the Muscogee Nation?
BARNETT: Oh, gosh, back in the ’90s. I started at the Eufaula Dormitory back in the ’90s as a cook. Yeah, I was a cook. Of course, I knew how to cook, so when they needed a cook, I went over there and applied for the job, and I got it. And so I stayed there for probably fifteen years, and then I had to resign due to some health issues that I had. So I resigned, and then I started—and of course I knew [00:23:00] the language. And I had started going to school to perfect and study the language. So and then my illness interrupted that. Then I went back to the dorm after I was off for about a year, and I was still having health issues, so I just resigned my position, and then I went into teaching. I went into teaching. So I’ve been at—I think I’ve been at the language department maybe six, seven, eight years. I don’t even remember. I’ve been there a while. I’ve been in the Nation for a while.
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DELLINGER: Yeah, you know, the fact that you can’t remember how long you’ve been in the language department is a good thing, I think, that to me that means you’re enjoying what you’re doing.
BARNETT: Language is my passion.
DELLINGER: Yeah, I was going to ask you to talk a little bit about that.
BARNETT: Well, [00:24:00] my family being all speakers, and I didn’t realize this until maybe about eleven, twelve years ago. I did a speech for the council. And I spoke all in the language. I never spoke English. My mom used to tell me, you know, you keep speaking. You keep speaking because one day this language is going to disappear, one day. Teach your kids. So I went to this council meeting, and I spoke all—I did probably a thirty-minute speech all in the language.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: And I asked them who understood me, and there was a lot of people in the audience, and two people raised their hands.
DELLINGER: Gosh.
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BARNETT: And when I saw that I realized [00:25:00] where this language stood. So I thought, you know what? And then when I got a chance to teach, and when I started teaching, I seen that some people were interested in it. And language is something that’s kind of boring to some people, unless you want to learn it. So I started teaching, and then I went back to school at the Muscogee Nation to get certified as a speaker. And I was always fluent anyway, but, you know, I learned so much in there, and the language became a passion for me. I started studying in-depth studying on it. I would stay up 2:00, 3:00 in the morning studying the language and go to work the next day to be at school at 8:00.
DELLINGER: Oh, gosh.
BARNETT: It just got [00:26:00] interesting to me because some of the things that I was discovering about the language I never knew when I was growing up, and I was speaking something that we supposed to speak, but then when I started realizing that there’s more to this language than I thought, it made me—I had a, like, an obsession about it. And I’m still going at it now.
DELLINGER: Right. It sounds like you came to the realization that our Muscogee language is not just words. It had so much more meaning.
BARNETT: It’s who we are. It’s an identification. You know, we’re not, as a people, when they say Muscogee (Creek) people, that’s the only thing that identifies us as the
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Muscogee people. [00:27:00] For one thing, you know, there’s a lot of people that has our color, has our hair texture, same color as we are. But the language is what identifies us as Muscogees.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: So I take that, that that’s what supposed to be the identity of who we are.
DELLINGER: Right. And so, Mrs. Barnett, I want to ask you this, in your position as a language speaker and teacher, you know and I know, we know that our language is dwindling. And you know, you guys in the language department, I mean, this is the responsibility that you’ve taken on to protect something [00:28:00] that’s so critical to the nation. So what is that like for you, just with your day-to-day work as—I know you’re passionate about this and you enjoy it, but how stressful? I’m just curious about how stressful this responsibility—
BARNETT: Very stressful.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Very stressful. Based on the fact that my biggest fear is one day somebody says there’s no speakers left. And I got to pass this on because when I go, it’s going to go with me. And I’m trying to leave something. I’m trying to leave it with these young kids,
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with my grandkids, with my daughters, because it’s stressful. You know, [00:29:00] it’s stressful because—and more fear, more a fear saying that one day I’m afraid the nation’s going to say we have no speakers left. That’s my fear, and that’s where stress comes in. But of course, you know, I teach Monday and Wednesdays. I teach Head Start, Eufaula and Checotah, and then Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays I teach by Zoom. I teach by Zoom. And the last count, I haven’t asked here, the very beginning of it, we had over 300 people participated. And they’re from all over. We got some from England.
DELLINGER: Wow. Well, that sounds really good.
BARNETT: Well, [00:30:00] to me that’s something, you know, to—I think there’s interest.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: Yes, there’s interest.
DELLINGER: Right, and then the hope is probably that those 300-and-some people will learn the language, and then they’ll want to teach it to somebody.
BARNETT: Yes, let’s carry it on. Somebody’s got to carry this torch. It’s like I’m passing this torch to somebody else.
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DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: For them to learn. And I want somebody to learn, and I got two students that, during the pandemic now, during the pandemic when Creek Nation was closed down, I had two former students that was over my house at least three times a week studying the language with me. They would come over with paper and pencil, and they would just—they would ask questions and questions. And I would [00:31:00] answer it, and they would write and write and write and write asking me where does this word come from? How do you use this word? They would set there with me. I never was isolated during the pandemic because those two boys, young boys, they would come over, and we would set down, and we’d eat. We’d have tea, Kool-Aid, pop. We would sit there and talk about the language, and they would sit there. Now, those two boys I have hope for. I have a feeling they’re the ones that are going to carry on this language.
DELLINGER: Well, that has to be so encouraging. That’s encouraging to me just hearing you say that.
BARNETT: They’d asked me, do you mind? I said no. Everything is closed. Nation’s closed. There’s nobody going anywhere. [00:32:00] Why not learn? That’s what that one boy said. He said, “Why not learn?” We can’t go to the movies. We can’t go shopping. We can’t go to the grounds. We can’t go to here. We can’t go there. We can’t go to anywhere. Why not learn? So they were at my house at least three times a week. And I was so proud, and I was glad to do it.
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DELLINGER: Yeah, I bet you were proud. And they knew exactly where to go. What ages are these boys?
BARNETT: Okay, one’s out of high school, and one’s—okay, can I tell you their names?
DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: They won’t mind. Yeah, Darrell Proctor, Jr.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Darrel Proctor Jr. is one of them. He’s already graduated. And he’s in school. The other one is Jay Fife. He’s Jeff Fife, Jr. And he’s at Yale [00:33:00] University right now, and he told me. He said, “When I get out of there, I’m going to come back and help you.”
DELLINGER: Aw, yeah. Yeah, I know Jay. I don’t know him personally, but I know who you’re talking about. He’s a character, I think, Jay is.
BARNETT: Oh, yeah, he is, but you know what? Both of them can get down and get serious. And I mean, they bring their papers over, their pencils over, and, you know, of
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course there was total silence and no TV. We’d sit there. And they’d ask me stories, and I’d tell them stories, and sometimes we got in Jay’s truck, and we’d go to different places in Hanna where there used to be grounds, and I would show them where the grounds used to be. We’d ride around. Then we’d come home, and then we’d start talking language again. You know, so because there was a lot of grounds down here that no longer, you know, are [00:34:00] active anymore. So we would drive around, and I would show them where the inactive grounds used to be. You know, like my mother told me where they were at, and so I would show them.
DELLINGER: That’s great, yeah, the passage of knowledge is so importance to us. That’s great. So I’m going to ask you one more question about your personal life before we start talking about the pandemic. I’d like to know, you know, when you’re not at work or teaching, do you have any interests or hobbies? You know, and of course you have your family. I think probably I already know what the answer to this question’s going to be, but what do you like to do in your free time?
BARNETT: In my free time? You know, my mother [00:35:00] showed me—she taught me how to sew quilts. She showed me how to embroidery. She showed me how to crochet when I was growing up, and I have never forgotten them. I’ll start something like crochet. I’ll crochet something, start it, and I’ll put it aside. Then I’ll start on a quilt. Start on it, and then I’ll sew a little bit on that. And then I’ll embroidery like pillowcases, and I’ll start on that, put that aside. I go back and forth, but my biggest passion is reading. I love to read. I’ll read anything. I love to read, so I’ll go to garage sales, or [00:36:00]
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there’s one Goodwill in Tulsa that is full of books. And I’ll go up there and (laughs) and buy books, and I can stay in there for hours. So when me and my husband goes up there, he’ll say let’s go early in the morning because you’ll be out of there—if it opens at 9:00
he says you’ll be out of there by 1:00. (laughter) But yeah, I love reading, but I like being out in the yard too. I went out there here about four or five days ago, four days ago, raked, and it didn’t do no good. (laughter) Same way. That wind blew it all up.
DELLINGER: Yeah, we’re at that time of the year where you go out and you do that, and it’s kind of like a gerbil on a wheel. You don’t get anywhere. I have the same problem here.
BARNETT: We don’t get anywhere.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: But I’m an outdoorsy person, [00:37:00] so I just I do—I got all kinds of interests. I mean, not just one but I just do all kinds of things.
DELLINGER: Well, yeah, you sound like you are a very busy lady.
BARNETT: I am. I’m very busy. I’m a busy woman, but you know what? That’s what keeps me going.
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DELLINGER: Yes, it’s important. Okay. Well, I’ll tell you what, I am going to go ahead now, and we’ll transition here and start talking about the pandemic. And so you know, here in the United States I think we’re about twenty-two months into this COVID-19 pandemic. And I want to ask, do you remember when in 2020 you first heard about COVID-19?
BARNETT: I’m going to tell you when I first heard about the COVID-19. DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: About [00:38:00] six months before my mother passed. Sometimes me and my mother would just set around and talk, and she would tell me stories. And she said the elders had predicted that there will be an illness that will hit the country. And she said it’s going to take a lot of people. And she said, “You probably won’t see it, but your grandkids will.”
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And I thought. And I asked her, “What kind of illness?” You know, she said the elders didn’t know. She said, “But it was passed down to me that there’ll be something that kills a lot of people.” And when this pandemic hit, this and, [00:39:00] you know, she’s been gone seven years this past July, I told my husband. I said, “I think she was talking about this.”
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DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: And I’m seeing it. She didn’t think I would. I said, “I’m seeing it, and so are my grandkids.” I said all our grandkids are seeing it too. I said I think this is what she was talking about.
DELLINGER: But she was talking about it seven years ago.
BARNETT: Um-hm.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Yeah.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: But it seems like she just told me yesterday, you know. And then when it first hit, China and all this, I didn’t think too much of it because it hadn’t hit the states yet. But I believe before it even hit, you know, before it was even told [00:40:00] that it had hit the States, that it killed some Creek people because I have a cousin that died, and they didn’t know what it was. They put him on a ventilator, and they said he’s on his
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own. It’s up to him. Well, he passed, but the symptoms that they told, I think it was COVID.
DELLINGER: Now, would that have been in 2019?
BARNETT: Uh-huh, yeah.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Yes, ma’am, it sure was. And I said until this day I still believe that he had COVID because they said he was coughing and coughing, and he was having a hard time breathing, and they took him to the hospital, and then they transferred him to Tulsa, and the doctors didn’t know what it was. But he was on the ventilator.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: So I heard about it in 2019, February, in fact. [00:41:00] DELLINGER: Oh, so earl in 2019.
BARNETT: Uh-huh, yeah.
DELLINGER: So almost a year before it actually came into the States.
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BARNETT: Yeah, you know, reported being in the States, yeah.
DELLINGER: Right, yeah, reported being in the states.
BARNETT: Yeah, um-hm, yeah.
DELLINGER: Was there any point, though at the beginning of 2020 when, you know, I mean, you realized that it was—that COVID was in the States? I mean, at that point were you concerned about it coming into Oklahoma and the Muscogee Nation?
BARNETT: Yes. I was because I was going back to what my mother said, and she said it was going to kill a lot of Indians. She said it’s going to kill a lot of stecate. And then I started thinking, this is it. I’m starting to see this. But then when it got [00:42:00] reported they’re saying it was in the States, I told my kids. I told my kids and the older grandkids. I said be careful. Be careful because, I said, I think your grandmother and your great-grandmother was talking about this. And my oldest daughter, she was working on the frontlines. She was the, like the respiratory therapist. And her whole unit got it.
DELLINGER: Oh gosh.
BARNETT: And oh my gosh, it was scary. And I kept telling her, “Baby, don’t—be careful. Be careful.” I said, “Keep your safety precautions. Keep it up,” and she would
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come to her home, change clothes in the garage, go take a shower, put her clothes in the washer, spray her shoes down with Lysol, [00:43:00] and then hug her kids. And I said, “Keep it up. Keep it up. Don’t you let your guard down,” you know. And we lived like that. We lived in a very safe world. I had my grandkids, and of course the school got let out. And the Creek, the Creek Nation shut down. And I knew it was serious then.
DELLINGER: Yeah, so that’s what made you realize the severity of it, when things started shutting down?
BARNETT: Yeah, shutting down, um-hm. And you know, one day we had to go to a grocery store. And the shelves were bare. And what me and my husband did, we left the kids, we would go shop for them. We would tell them to stay in. And we would be the one that went to Walmart. And this is when Walmart was just open certain times. [00:44:00] And the shelves were bare. And you know, you couldn’t find meat. We couldn’t find bread. And I said, oh my gosh, this is hitting. This is really hitting now, you know. And we were traveling back home on the Indian Nation Turnpike. On the way home, we passed two cars. I still remember that. We passed two cars going north while we were going south.
DELLINGER: Yeah, normally that’s a very busy turnpike.
BARNETT: Yeah, that’s a busy road, especially on Saturdays and Sunday. And this was, you know, we passed two cars. I said, “Mitchell, this looks like that movie,” where the
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world was coming into an end. I said, “This [00:45:00] is what it looks like. This is what it reminds me of.” And we kept going, you know, and it was like two cars. It was nobody, but yet those shelves at Walmart were empty.
DELLINGER: What town was that Walmart in?
BARNETT: In Okmulgee. Because we stopped at Henryetta first, and there was nothing there, so we went to Okmulgee.
DELLINGER: Yeah the pandemic, it affected everyone.
BARNETT: Yeah, it did.
DELLINGER: You know, it affected folks in major cities, and it affected folks like you living in rural areas too.
BARNETT: And you know, I didn’t think we would ever get to that point. I’ve seen them when the ice storm hit, when the ice storm was going to hit. I’ve seen that, but they always had a few things left. This was totally different world. [00:46:00] This was a totally different world.
DELLINGER: Where does your daughter work?
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BARNETT: She works in a care unit for disabled children, my oldest one. She works with disabled children, and they started catching it. And she’s the one that reads their oxygen levels and stuff like that, so she was the only one that could do that, and she was working twelve-hour shifts, sometimes over. Sometimes she’d work, she’d go in 11:00 at night, and she’d stay there until 11:00 the next night.
DELLINGER: Mm, gosh. Well, you know, I’m just going to say I appreciate her and all of our medical frontline people because especially in the beginning that was so scary [00:47:00] because those folks were getting it. Doctors were getting it. You know, they were dying too.
BARNETT: Yeah, they were. And I was so afraid for my daughter, and she did take precautions, but she did catch it.
DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: She did catch it.
DELLINGER: Did she go through a rough time with it?
BARNETT: Well, now, see, she’s got the three kids, you know, so they all caught it. But what was strange was her husband didn’t catch it. But her and the three kids caught it, and she brought it back, you know, from where she was working at. And so this time last
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year, I mean a year ago, the Thanksgiving, they couldn’t come over. So me and my other daughter, they came over, which, they didn’t go nowhere, and of course we were shut down. So I went ahead and cooked Thanksgiving [00:48:00] dinner. And that was one year that we didn’t have nobody over here except family, just my two daughters and their kids and me and my husband. So what we did was we boxed up—we got some to-go trays, foil, plastic, whatever we could find. We made food for them and set on their porch.
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And we didn’t get to see them that year. We didn’t get to—because they were catching it one by one. My daughter caught it first, and then her son, oldest son caught it. Then her daughter caught it. Then the youngest son caught it. But the husband didn’t catch it.
DELLINGER: Yeah, that’s what’s been so interesting about COVID. BARNETT: Yeah, that was strange to me.
DELLINGER: Right. Now—
BARNETT: He was in the— Go ahead.
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DELLINGER: Oh, no, go ahead.
BARNETT: Well, he was in the middle of three of [00:49:00] those, and he didn’t catch it. It was the weirdest virus, and I always told my family. I said that virus has its own brain.
DELLINGER: Mm, well, I think that’s an interesting way to look at it and probably a valid way to look at it. So now, have you had any family members or friends—did you or your husband contract it?
BARNETT: No, we didn’t, but we went into quarantine. My little grand—my oldest granddaughter that lives with me, she was nine or eight at the time. She tested positive, so my daughter called back, and she said, “Mom, she tested positive, don’t you go anywhere.” We tried to keep other people safe too, you know. We just didn’t think about us, but we went into quarantine. I think I was off work about a month because I had to, you know, [00:50:00] I never caught it. I had taught my kids that, I said you keep your face mask on because they were still in school. I said you keep your face mask on, and you stay six feet apart. You stay six feet. And I showed them how to cough if they accidentally coughed or whatever, just coughing. I taught them all that before they went to school. Well, she kept her distance. She kept her face mask on while she was at home, and when she went to the bathroom, she sprayed down with Lysol. She would keep her hands clean. She stayed away from us. And her siblings didn’t catch it either.
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DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: Her two siblings didn’t catch it, and none of us caught it. Okay, well, here we go again. They went floating down the Illinois when the pandemic was like, they said it was in control and everything. [00:51:00] Okay, well, then my oldest daughter caught it. I mean, I don’t know, my youngest daughter caught it. Her sister caught it. Their kids caught it.
DELLINGER: Well, are you talking—are we still in 2020, or are we 2021 now? BARNETT: Yeah.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: In 2020, yeah. They caught it, and they had to stay, and my middle daughter lives in Henryetta. They all quarantined over there. But my middle daughter Lori, her husband didn’t catch it, and these two kids didn’t catch it. And they would go test, you know. They would go test, but my youngest daughter caught it, and my middle daughter caught it. It was strange. I mean, it was strange enough. My daughter said I don’t like it over here. I need to come home. And I said, “Oh, no you’re not, because (laughter) you’re dad and I are here, you’re not bringing it [00:52:00] back,” so they stayed quarantined too. They had to quarantine. So we kind of experienced all this, you know, that people were going through, we experienced it.
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DELLINGER: Well, yeah, definitely from what you’re saying, you had several rounds of it—
BARNETT: Yeah.
DELLINGER: —that you experienced with your large family. And I’m glad that no one had to go through a horrible experience with it, it sounds like, necessarily. So I’d like for you—one of the questions I have been asking folks is I would like for you to give your explanation of, you know, based on your understanding of COVID-19, as far as what it does to the human body, once someone contracts it, what are some of the [00:53:00] symptoms?
BARNETT: Well, what I heard, now my youngest daughter told me when she caught it, like, her nose was burning, and she had a cough and a bad headache. My oldest daughter said all she got was she couldn’t taste, and she couldn’t smell. That’s what her family caught. But I had some cousins that said it was bad. They couldn’t breathe. You know, they couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t smell. They couldn’t taste. And you know, I believe that this COVID—now, this is just me, just from what I’ve experienced and what I’ve heard people talk about and stuff, it attacks one organ, and if that organ fights it back, it [00:54:00] attacks another one. It attacks your weaknesses in your body. Luckily, my grandkids and my daughters, they’re pretty healthy. They’re pretty healthy. So, you know, they fought it off, but that wasn’t for everybody. I lost a cousin. He was diabetic,
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and he caught COVID. Eleven days later his wife died of it. And they were speakers. They were speakers. But it was like, you know, I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but you know, from my point of view, and this is just my thinking, that [00:55:00] our ancestors or my elders, they went through something like this before. But this was—I think this was a rougher one. And I think it was something that no one—I don’t think any of the doctors knew how to treat that. So I believe it was made in a laboratory.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: It came from the laboratory.
DELLINGER: Okay. I want to talk to you a little bit about how the pandemic affected your work, especially last year. So when the Muscogee Nation shut down last March, did the language department shut down? Was everybody sheltering in place [00:56:00] at home?
BARNETT: Well, when it completely shut down, yes, it did. But when we went back to work and then we came back to work, and then they said people with underlying conditions had to stay off, so there’s seven of us in that office. It ended up with three of us in there, the clerk, me, and the media person, which is Brandon Barnett, me, and Jordan. We were the only three. Well, we kept it going. And so the calendar was supposed to went out. Three of us put 3,000 calendars together and mailed—put them together manually and mailed them out to everybody.
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DELLINGER: Oh my gosh.
BARNETT: Yeah, he would do the printing, and then he would help me put it together, and I’d put it together. And then [00:57:00] when I got caught up after he got caught up, then we’d go in there and help her put them in envelopes and stuff, and we were mailing them out.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: Yeah, we did that, and you know, and then if somebody needed to translate, we were there to answer the phone. You know, we were there because we did get phone calls, you know, and I was there to do the translations, and she was there to take the notes. And Brandon was over there printing things off, and we were—we got it done. We got it done. But there was three of us left in there. We were a skeleton crew. And at the time it was stressful, and we was, like, nonstop. We were nonstop. There were times we went without lunch. Or we would take turns doing lunch, or one would go get the lunch and bring it back. But, you know, after all that, it was [00:58:00] stressful, but then thinking about it, it wasn’t that hard.
DELLINGER: In hindsight.
BARNETT: (laughs) Yes.
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DELLINGER: You can say that now because you survived it?
BARNETT: Yes, uh-huh. We survived it, and then we thought, well, you know, it wasn’t that bad, but at that time, we couldn’t think because we didn’t have time to think. We were like robots, doing what we supposed to do to get them out.
DELLINGER: Well, I know that calendar is so important to so many people. So I know, you know, it was greatly appreciated that you guys still were able to get that calendar out.
BARNETT: Yeah, we got it out. I mean it got hectic. And sometimes we fell behind little bit, but, boy, we’d get together, and we’d catch up. (laughs) COVID, it was—and now thinking about it though, we could do it again. [00:59:00]
DELLINGER: That’s good. (laughter) I hope you don’t have to.
BARNETT: I hope we don’t have to, but we could.
DELLINGER: Yeah. So I want to ask you too, because of the pandemic, how has the pandemic changed the way you teach?
BARNETT: It’s more important now. Because during that pandemic we lost a lot of speakers. Seemed like every time there was a death it was a speaker.
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DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: And we were counting them for a while, and we stopped because there was, like, two or three speakers at one time dying. Every week seemed like we were burying a speaker. But we had recorded them too.
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: We had recorded the elders, and we still got them alive. DELLINGER: Yes. [01:00:00]
BARNETT: We kept them alive.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: Through the recordings and stuff, but, you know, and they just, like I said, just here about three or four weeks ago they buried one, and it was because of COVID. She contacted it, and she passed away, and she was probably—me and her, there was two speakers left down here, I believe. There was three left, and she passed, so there’s two speakers left now. I’m one of them.
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DELLINGER: So because of the pandemic, I don’t know, have you observed that more people are wanting to learn the language, or have less people been involved?
BARNETT: Well, from just the Zoom classes I’d say people are interested, and I can’t say it was because of [01:01:00] the pandemic, you know, but I did make that point, that the pandemic took a lot of our speakers, took it from the grounds, took it from the churches, took the grounds chief. You know, I was like, oh my gosh. Every time I heard somebody that passed from the COVID, they were speakers.
DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: And I don’t know if that has any effect on people that are taking it, taking the classes or, you know, just the interest in it. But seem like—and I’m glad people are interested in learning. And I always try to stress that, that that’s their identity. You know, we’re just regular citizens without the language.
DELLINGER: Yes.
BARNETT: We wouldn’t be a nation [01:02:00] without the language because that’s a tribal nation. It’s a Native nation. It’s a Muscogee Nation. And without the language, we’re not a nation. We might as well just be regular citizens. We wouldn’t be unique people.
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DELLINGER: Yeah. Okay. Mrs. Barnett, I want to ask you, have you been vaccinated against COVID-19?
BARNETT: Yes, I have.
DELLINGER: And will you share just a little bit why it was important to you to get vaccinated?
BARNETT: Well, one thing was I had my grandkids, and the second thing was somebody’s got to care about our people. You know, our whole office is vaccinated, and we even went and got the booster. [01:03:00] And who knows? In 10 years we may be on that commercial that says if you took this vaccine—(laughs) But that was a risk that we take even with children’s vaccine, the measles and everything like that. We take that risk to keep people safe. And it got to the point where I thought, you know, what if I had it and I passed it to an elder, and that elder didn’t make it? I would feel responsible.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: And with me, you know, and you can still catch it. But me and my husband until this day still wear masks when we go into stores, and we still use sanitizer. We haven’t let our guard down because there’s people that we care about. My husband lost a sister to it. [01:04:00] We sat out in the parking lot until they told us that she passed.
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DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And setting out in the parking lot in the hospital, we couldn’t be there with her, because our people are used to being with their sick.
DELLINGER: Yes.
BARNETT: I was there when my mother passed. She died in my arms. I was there, and I was very young, but I was at the hospital. My mom and her two brothers were right there when my dad passed. And most Creeks, and I’m going to say every, probably every Indian person, they’re there with their family when they’re going. So they won’t go by themselves. But we sat out in the parking lot until his sister passed.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Holding her hand, you know, and they pass by themselves, and that was hard to [01:05:00] do. That was hard to do. Otherwise we would have been in that room with his sister.
DELLINGER: Absolutely.
BARNETT: Talking to her until she passed, but we was out in the parking lot.
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DELLINGER: Yeah. So what vaccine did you receive?
BARNETT: I took the Pfizer.
DELLINGER: And what were your side effects?
BARNETT: Oh, that first one, my arm, I couldn’t move it. And it felt like a rag arm. I couldn’t move it at all. I couldn’t move it at all. And then but the next day, I mean, that day I took it, that evening, I could not move it. It was so sore. That’s about the only effects I had. The second one, my arm didn’t get sore. I took it on a Thursday, [01:06:00] and I went to work on a Friday. My arm wasn’t sore, but when I got home, I was fatigued. Like, I couldn’t even get out of the chair, so fatigued. And I thought, this is not normal, you know. I get tired but not this tired. But, you know, I was just fatigued. And then it was gone. You know, and the booster I took, I didn’t have no soreness, no nothing. I went through it okay. You know, but it was better to go through that than probably catch the virus.
DELLINGER: Yeah, that’s the tradeoff, right?
BARNETT: Um-hm, yeah.
DELLINGER: Yeah. Okay, well, I’m glad you didn’t have a horrible vaccine experience.
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BARNETT: Now, some people did.
DELLINGER: Right, yeah, some people have, you know, had other [01:07:00] issues with the vaccine, and you know, I’ve heard people tell their vaccine stories, and I’ve read people’s vaccine stories, and you know, everybody has the same attitude, that they would do it again. You know, they would go through those things again to know that they’re vaccinated, so all right. Let me ask you this, how do you think the Muscogee Nation as a whole has been handling the pandemic, you know, especially our tribal administration? How do you think we’ve been doing with the pandemic?
BARNETT: I think we did good, considering. I thought we did good, like when it got to the point that they said let’s shut down, we did. And then people with underlying conditions. That was being safe. That was so we wouldn’t lose anymore [01:08:00] people. And if they did catch it, it was probably from being exposed somewhere or something other than the Nation, but I think that it was handled well. And I mean I know the Nation, there was, like, some programs like our program, that couldn’t help people. But in the long run, we did help people. There was another side to it. You see what I’m saying?
DELLINGER: Um-hm, yeah.
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BARNETT: There was another side. You know, there was a two-side, you know, my mother used to tell me there’s the good and bad go hand in hand. And I think this was hand in hand, even though we couldn’t do a lot of things or we couldn’t be open or we couldn’t help people, yet it was good on another hand.
DELLINGER: Right, right.
BARNETT: You know, it [01:09:00] kept our people and our employees safe.
DELLINGER: Yes, how do you think, along these same lines, what do you think about the job that our health department has been doing?
BARNETT: Well, they did good because I know when I went, I have regular checkups, so when I went, that doctor told me. She said, “You going to get vaccinated today.” (laughs) “You need to get vaccinated.” And I said, “Okay, do I need to set an appointment?” She goes, “Let me call over there, and I’ll get you in today.” So I think they’re okay, but I think we need doctors, you know, not PAs but doctors.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: But we survive with that. We’re surviving with that, and I think that, you know, this knew hospital with the infusion, that’s a step. That’s a step. [01:10:00]
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DELLINGER: Right, yeah, you’re right.
BARNETT: You know, with the infusion treatment that they had. I know one girl told me she caught it, and she said if I hadn’t been up there and got that infusion, she goes I don’t know if I would have made it.
DELLINGER: Wow, wow.
BARNETT: So yeah, I think we done the best we can, you know, considering what was going on in the world.
DELLINGER: Well, what are your thoughts about how, again, the Muscogee Nation and then even thinking about the others of the five tribes, how do you think they’ve handled the pandemic in comparison to the state of Oklahoma?
BARNETT: We kept our people safe. We did what we had to do. And you know, I don’t know. I went into Walmart, and there’d be non-Indian people without [01:11:00] masks on, but you saw a Native person, they had their mask on. And I think the rest of the tribes
handled it real well. I think they were thinking about their people because I know like Cherokee Nation said we want speakers to get vaccinated because they know that’s the important thing is their speakers. So they got their speakers vaccinated. They wanted their people to get—I think they handled it well. I think all tribes did.
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DELLINGER: You mean throughout the country?
BARNETT: No.
DELLINGER: But here in Oklahoma, the five tribes?
BARNETT: But our five, yeah, uh-huh, yeah. I think they were keeping their people as safe as they could. I think they did try, and I think they might, just like we did, we lost people. But it wasn’t like back then. We lost thousands of Creeks due to measles, [01:12:00] smallpox. We didn’t hit that mark. And I think that was a step forward in how things changed, and our medical has come forward because when I was growing up, they didn’t have clinics. They didn’t have hospitals at Creek Nation. And now we can go to a clinic if nothing else, you know, and go to a hospital. Because when I was growing up we didn’t have that.
DELLINGER: Okay. Well, we’re down to our last question. And so with this question, I want you to think about our future generations of Muscogee and, you know, who may, I hope not, but who may find themselves in a similar situation as what we’ve been in here with the COVID pandemic, [01:13:00] so in thinking about those things, what words of wisdom or advice can you give to them about how to live through and survive a pandemic such as COVID-19?
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BARNETT: Be ready for it. They always told us, well, just like my mother used to say, be ready for anything. Be ready for anything. So she used to tell me buy extra food. Keep things that’s going to last, you know. Be stocked up on stuff because you never know. You never know. And you know, these young people today, they don’t have the advice that we had. So you know, during the pandemic, the only thing we really ran out of was, like, white bread, but I could make biscuits. [01:14:00] And there’s a family, there’s a girl, woman down here. She’s a speaker too. She said, “Becky, do you need anything?” Help each other. Care about each other. Love each other. That’s the one thing, vnokeckv. Este etv vketece, care about other people. Have love for them. Long as that love’s around, my mother—my grandmother used to tell me, “vnokeckv vcake te we.”
She used to tell me that love was the most precious thing. And she said long as you have that for people, you’ll make it through anything. But you got to have that. [01:15:00] And she used to tell me, you know, she was a traditional woman raised at the grounds, and she told me, “vnokeckv ocet ce nowat, Hesaketvmese ocet ce tos.” She used to tell me, if you got love, you have God. That’s what they need to know. You got love, you have God.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Carry this love with you. Carry it with you and love everybody. You can make it through anything, she’d say.
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DELLINGER: Well, that is absolutely important and wise. Those are wise words absolutely. [01:16:00] And so thank you for that. And in closing, I do want to ask you, is there anything else, possibly anything that maybe I have missed that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to say or share about your experiences with the pandemic?
BARNETT: Goes back to love. Think about the other person. Wear your mask. Use that sanitizer. In this pandemic, be careful. You need to be careful. Take care of yourself. Stay clean. You know, my grandma used to tell me, she used to say never be dirty, in mind, in
heart, in body. And she said, [01:17:00] she told me, she said, never let your clothes be dirty. She said if there’s a creek, never be dirty. If there’s a pond, never be dirty. And there’s ways, you know, to get through pandemics. There’s ways to get through this. There’s always a way. It’s just taking a little bit of thinking. Think about it. She used to tell me there’s always ways. And she used to tell me there’s always a solution to a problem. She said “naket emvyetv oce te we.” She said there’s something going on. There’s always a way to tackle that problem, but if—look for it. Used to say look for it. [01:18:00] So, when these young people, if they get a problem, there’s a solution to it. But you’re the one that’s got to look for it. It may not be easy, but it’s there. It’s there.
DELLINGER: Okay. Mrs. Barnett, thank you so much again for taking time out of your day. This has been an amazing interview.
BARNETT: I hope so. I hope so.
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DELLINGER: It absolutely has been. I’ve learned so much from you here today, and so mvto, and you take care and keep staying safe.
BARNETT: Cemeyo, you too. Cemeyo. Yehikvtecet. Vnokeckv ocet. You take care of yourself, watch yourself, and above all, have love.
DELLINGER: Mvto. [01:19:00]
BARNETT: Um-hm.
END OF INTERVIEW
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Historic and Cultural Preservation Department Oral History Program
“A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Against Covid-19”
As Remembered by: Mrs. Rebecca Barnett
Interview by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
Date: 10/30/2021
Transcription: The Audio Transcription Company
Edited by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
MIDGE DELLINGER: This is Midge Dellinger, oral historian for the Muscogee Nation. Today is October 30, 2021. I’m at my home in Tulsa, Oklahoma interviewing Muscogee citizen Mrs. Rebecca Barnett who is also at her home in Hanna, Oklahoma. This interview is being performed remotely and over the phone due to the continuing COVID 19 pandemic. I’m performing this interview on behalf of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Historic and Cultural Preservation Department for the oral history project titled “A Twenty-First Century Pandemic in Indian Country: The Resilience of the Muscogee Creek Nation Against COVID-19.” Mrs. Barnett, thank you so much for taking time out of your Saturday morning to be here with me and to participate in this project. And I just want to ask you first, do you agree to this interview?
REBECCA BARNETT: Yes, I do.
DELLINGER: Thank you very much. So [00:01:00] what we’re going to do, I’m going to start out asking you some questions about your personal life and your background, and so I’m going to begin with what is your tribal town and clan?
BARNETT: Okay, my tribal town is Tvkvpvce, and my clan is Wotkvlke, racoon.
DELLINGER: Okay. And you know, I should have already said this, if at any time during this interview you would like to speak in your language, Muscogee language, please feel free to do so.
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BARNETT: Okay, I sure will.
DELLINGER: Okay. All right, so Mrs. Barnett, where were you born, and where did you grow up?
BARNETT: Well, I was born in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, but I grew up in Hanna, in Hanna, Oklahoma. And I’m still here.
DELLINGER: Oh. (laughs) And where is Hanna? If somebody didn’t know where Hanna was, where would you tell them it’s located?
BARNETT: Well, we’re [00:02:00] on—we’re west of Eufaula. Oh, yeah, west of Eufaula in a very small town. There’s a post office and a nutrition center and a school. That’s all there is in Hanna. And it used to be a booming town at one time when my mother was growing up here. She grew up here too. So it was a booming town. There was banks and everything. And a tornado hit it.
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And it tore everything up in Hanna, and it never has rebuilt. So but we’ve been here. My mother and her family grew—they all were here. And I left for a while, and I came back. But we’re a very small town, but we’re just of Indian Nation Turnpike on number nine highway.
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DELLINGER: Okay. And will you talk a little bit about what life was like, you know, as a child growing up in Hanna? [00:03:00]
BARNETT: Well, there was—I started school at a new country school called West Liberty. And it was a one-room school. And the building’s gone now. And then after that shut down we were transferred to Hanna, Hanna School, and I was probably in the second grade when I transferred there. There was a lot of American Indians, a lot of Creeks. I think our school was like 97 percent Native American. So it was—we all spoke Creek too. We all spoke in the language.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: And it was a little different, you know, but then there was post office, and there were stores, two little gas stations there, post office, of course, and the school. There was a lot of children there. And some people that had moved [00:04:00] off came back, but it was a rough little town. They only took care of themselves, and they all— everybody knew each other. And lot of people were afraid to come to Hanna. But we grew up here, so it was nothing for us to be, you know, in—to grow up here. But now a lot of people heard lot of bad things about it, I guess, and it was because they took care of each other, even the non-Indians, and then they all just kind of looked after each other. Now, my grandkids are going to school with the kids that I went to school with’s grandkids.
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DELLINGER: Wow. That’s really cool though.
BARNETT: Yeah, it is because we all know each other. And of course, now there’s not very many. We’ve lost a lot of Native people, you know. So there’s not very many here, [00:05:00] as far as Native Americans go.
DELLINGER: Right, and when you say we’ve lost a lot of—you know, you’ve lost a lot of the people there in the town, why is that?
BARNETT: Well, lot of it, we just buried one here about three weeks ago, maybe a month ago, due to COVID.
DELLINGER: Um-hm.
BARNETT: We’ve probably lost about three or four to COVID, maybe even five down here, and they were Native.
DELLINGER: Yeah, and that’s a lot when you’re considering the size of your town.
BARNETT: Yeah, there’s only maybe—now, this is what I heard. They say there’s about 300 people that still live here, you know, that still reside here, and out of that, there was, like, five Creeks, Muscogee (Creeks) that died to the COVID.
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DELLINGER: Okay. Well, let’s go back to your childhood. [00:06:00] I want you to talk a little bit about who your parents are and if you have any siblings or, you know, even your grandparents, will you talk a little bit about your family?
BARNETT: Yeah, my grandparents, my grandmother was Sallie Narchaby. And she grew up in Ulan, and she was a speaker. She didn’t know English. But she was a fluent speaker of the Choctaw language and of the Muscogee (Creek) language. And my grandfather was Sekomahe Smith, Sekomahe Smith. And Sekomahe means barely there or hardly there. He was born as a premature baby that could fit in your hand.
DELLINGER: Oh my gosh.
BARNETT: And his mother died at birth. So medicine men raised him. [00:07:00] Because it was extraordinary then, it wasn’t ordinary for a baby to be born like that so he was special to them. So medicine men, all men raised him, no women. And they said they would go to a neighbor, and they would get goat’s milk from this neighbor, and that’s how they raised him. Well, he became the chief of Hillabee Ceremonial Ground until he was about ninety years old, maybe even more. And so when he got to where he wasn’t able, well, then somebody else took over, and the ground’s still going now. But then my parents, is Yahdeka Byrd. He was Seminole/Creek. And he was raised in Eufaula area. And my mother, of course, was Dixie Smith Byrd. And she [00:08:00] was raised in
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Hanna all her life. She went to Hanna School, and she said Hanna School at one time was a two-story building.
And that building is still standing, it’s just a lower level now. But they were both speakers. My whole family were speakers. I had one aunt and two uncles. And they were all speakers. And so then my mother, my grandmother not to be able to speak English, we had to communicate with her, so that’s all she speak to us was in the Muscogee language. And so I have a brother. His name is Yahdeka Byrd, Jr. And there’s just two of us. And my father passed away when I was seven years old. And my mother raised us by herself in Hanna. And she built a home close to her mother, and our family cemetery [00:09:00] is there, and they’re all buried out there. And she was the last one to be buried there about seven years ago. I lost my mother about seven years ago. So but my brother lives in Glenpool, and I’m still down here. I left for about nine years, and I came back. And I’ve been here since. I raised my girls here. I have three daughters. I have eight grandkids. And I’m married to Mitchell Barnett. We’ve been married for thirty-one years. You know, I was raised around traditional people, and I still carry that on in my home.
DELLINGER: Yes.
BARNETT: When I can go out and I mix with different people, I’m, you know, traveled and everything, but when I come home, we live in a very traditional home. We still live by what we were told, what I was told when I was growing up. [00:10:00] I still live by the traditions. I attend church and the grounds both. I feel like I’m in a full circle when I
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do both. I know about both. So I tell people I draw the bridge up when I come into my yard, and I’m raising three grandkids. I’m raising three grandkids now, and they’re starting to—I tell them all the little things that I was told, you know, to make them—to know what they are. I teach them their clan. I teach them their ceremonial ground. And my father, he was a Eufaula Canadian, and he was a second chief to Eufaula Canadian. So I was raised traditionally all the way around at the grounds. [00:11:00] And so my daughters, they still participate. They still—they participate in all ways. They go to church. They go to the grounds. They all do the shell shaking. They all—you know, they participate in ribbon dances, buffalo dances, and they all—my daughters are traditional too. I’m raising them just the way I was raised.
DELLINGER: That’s fantastic, Rebecca. You mentioned church. Well, I tell you what, before we get to that, I want to ask you, would you like to mention the names of your daughters and even your eight grandchildren? I think names are important.
BARNETT: Yeah, well, I have a oldest daughter named Lanita Gray. She used to be [00:12:00] Barnett. And then there’s Lori Givens. She was Lori Barnett. And then I have a Mitcha Barnett. And my grandkids are Aleah. She just graduated last year, and she is at the Muscogee (Creek) Nation College now.
DELLINGER: Oh, great.
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BARNETT: And I have—that’s the oldest one’s daughter. And then she’s got two sons. One is Dominic Gray and Xavier Gray. And my middle daughter, Lori, and her husband, Sonny, they have two boys, which is Evitan, and that’s Native spelled backwards.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: His name is Evitan. And then she’s got a younger one named Christopher. And then my youngest daughter, she has three kids. Her oldest one is [00:13:00] KayleAnn Holden, and she has Melaina Holden, which, Melaina, her real name is Melena, but the school calls her Melaina. And the third one is a little boy. And his name is Jagube, Jagube Holden, but they called him Jacobe in school, but he’s named after my grandpa because when the Dawes Roll came in they changed Sekomahe to Jacob. But then the Creeks, they couldn’t speak English, I guess. They were calling him Jagube, so that’s what my youngest grandson is named, Jagube.
DELLINGER: Okay, very interesting. That’s very interesting. So it sounds like you are a very tightknit family. You want to talk about that a little bit? [00:14:00]
BARNETT: We were tightknit. My mother raised her youngest brother, which was my Uncle, Mickey Smith, and she had a older brother named Foster. And the youngest one, he was a change-of-life baby. So my mother kind of raised him as her own, and so when her and my dad got married, they took him on as their son, and they actually thought he was my brother, but he’s not. He’s my uncle, but he was a medicine man. And so we
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were all—I remember being at my grandma’s place all the time. We’d all get together. We’d always get together. And we did that all our lives, and then my oldest uncle passed, Foster. My other uncle, Mickey, he passed, and my mom was the only one left. [00:15:00] You know, everybody was gone but her, but she had us. And she told me before she died, about a month or two before she died, she said, “You keep the family together. You keep these girls together.” She said, “Y’all stay together, and y’all get together, and raise them to be close.”
And they are. They are close, even the grandkids, they are all close. So we have always been a close-knit family. My mother kept my grandmother when she got up there in age. And my father and my mother, they took care of my mother’s father when he was old. And he was probably—gosh, he was in his late nineties when he passed. And then my mother took over taking care of her mother. So when my mother got up there [00:16:00] in age, I took care of her. She lived with us about thirteen years. And my husband, she took my husband in as her son, and we were real close-knit. We always got together, even if it was just to eat together. She would gather us up on Sundays, Sunday afternoons, and she would say, okay, I want to teach the girls how to cook traditional foods. And that’s what she did to me when I was growing up. She would teach me how, so I know how to cook every traditional food.
DELLINGER: Wow, that’s amazing. That’s great though.
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BARNETT: Yeah, it is, and you know, she taught us little legends, and she told us stories.
DELLINGER: Oh my gosh.
BARNETT: And so did my grandmother. We would sit around, and of course there wasn’t computers or cell phones, or you know, we had a TV, but she wasn’t into that because she grew up without it. She grew up in, like, a—out in the country. [00:17:00] So you know, she would just sit around and tell us stories, little legends, little stories, little things that, you know, or even predict the future. She would tell us, well, the elders used to say this, and the elders used to say that. And even my mother did that to us. And she taught my daughters how to cook traditional food so they know how to cook traditional foods.
DELLINGER: Gosh.
BARNETT: She was a teacher every day. She was a teacher every day. She never remarried after my father died, and she was forty when my father died. And she never remarried. She just kept us on her own, and then when the grandkids—she was there when every grandchild was born. Her great-grandchildren, and she was the first to hold them when they were born.
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DELLINGER: Wow. [00:18:00] Yeah, these are amazing things that you’re telling me. And I feel like I could just sit here and just listen to you and not ask any more questions, but I have a feeling, like, just some of the things you’ve already told me that I may need
to interview you again, you know, on a different topic. Of course, we’re going to start focusing here in a little bit on the pandemic, but, yeah, these are some amazing things that you’re telling me. I did want to ask you, so what church do you attend?
BARNETT: Well, I was baptized at Sand Creek, Sand Creek Church at Wetumka. But my husband went to Okfuskee in Eufaula. And my mother told me that, you know, her, the way she grew up, that the man was a leader of the family, so she said you’re going to have to—if he goes to Okfuskee to his church, that’s [00:19:00] where you need to be. So that’s where we go. That’s where we go. When we do go, that’s where we go.
DELLINGER: Okay. And how involved are you with community activities?
BARNETT: Oh, the community, we’re going tonight. They’re going to have a Halloween party tonight for the kids.
DELLINGER: Oh, that’s good.
BARNETT: So I’m going to go down there and help. We go to meetings, and at one time I was a chairman there. And there was a bunch of elders, a lot of elders that came, and now they’re all gone. Now it’s for us younger ones to step up, so that’s where I’m at.
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That’s where I’m at, and in Hanna, since I grew up here and a lot of people, like I said, their grandkids are going to school with my grandkids, we still participate in, like, the little watermelon festival. We entered our grand—our daughters, our three daughters in the little [00:20:00] parade, little kiddy parade they have. Now my grandkids are carrying it on. So we’re pretty involved. We go to the basketball games. Actually, we try to support, you know—in fact, we went to their fall festival and spent as much as we did at the fair. (laughter) This time it was for the grandkids and me and my husband are the go to.
When anybody, anybody, I don’t care who it is, like Thanksgiving’s coming up, we cook a lot of food because there’s some people that doesn’t have anywhere to go or they don’t have family, they come over here. And my daughters know that because my mother told
me that if anybody comes over, you feed them, even if it’s just bread and [00:21:00] water, because they could be hungry. And when she was alive, I did the cooking, and she’d be the coach sitting there in the chair coaching me. She would say—you know, she’d tell me, you know, “That’s not how you do it. That’s not how you do it,” you know, and I’m like, “Okay, okay,” you know. And she was eighty-seven when she passed. So she would sit there and watch me, but she would invite people. I don’t care who they were. She would invite people. So this thanksgiving I’m asking my daughters, okay, you all going to bring somebody? And they say, we’re not sure, but probably so. So I never know how many we’re going to invite, but at one time we’ve had thirty-five people here.
DELLINGER: Wow, that’s a good gathering.
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BARNETT: And some of them I didn’t even know they were my daughter’s friends, you know, that they meant that they didn’t have nowhere to go, so they would come over here. So we’re kind of the go-to people. And even in this [00:22:00] community in Hanna, we’ll invite people. You know, come over and eat. Come over and eat.
DELLINGER: Right. That’s great. I want to ask you, we’re going to switch gears here just a little bit. When did you begin working for the Muscogee Nation?
BARNETT: Oh, gosh, back in the ’90s. I started at the Eufaula Dormitory back in the ’90s as a cook. Yeah, I was a cook. Of course, I knew how to cook, so when they needed a cook, I went over there and applied for the job, and I got it. And so I stayed there for probably fifteen years, and then I had to resign due to some health issues that I had. So I resigned, and then I started—and of course I knew [00:23:00] the language. And I had started going to school to perfect and study the language. So and then my illness interrupted that. Then I went back to the dorm after I was off for about a year, and I was still having health issues, so I just resigned my position, and then I went into teaching. I went into teaching. So I’ve been at—I think I’ve been at the language department maybe six, seven, eight years. I don’t even remember. I’ve been there a while. I’ve been in the Nation for a while.
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DELLINGER: Yeah, you know, the fact that you can’t remember how long you’ve been in the language department is a good thing, I think, that to me that means you’re enjoying what you’re doing.
BARNETT: Language is my passion.
DELLINGER: Yeah, I was going to ask you to talk a little bit about that.
BARNETT: Well, [00:24:00] my family being all speakers, and I didn’t realize this until maybe about eleven, twelve years ago. I did a speech for the council. And I spoke all in the language. I never spoke English. My mom used to tell me, you know, you keep speaking. You keep speaking because one day this language is going to disappear, one day. Teach your kids. So I went to this council meeting, and I spoke all—I did probably a thirty-minute speech all in the language.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: And I asked them who understood me, and there was a lot of people in the audience, and two people raised their hands.
DELLINGER: Gosh.
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BARNETT: And when I saw that I realized [00:25:00] where this language stood. So I thought, you know what? And then when I got a chance to teach, and when I started teaching, I seen that some people were interested in it. And language is something that’s kind of boring to some people, unless you want to learn it. So I started teaching, and then I went back to school at the Muscogee Nation to get certified as a speaker. And I was always fluent anyway, but, you know, I learned so much in there, and the language became a passion for me. I started studying in-depth studying on it. I would stay up 2:00, 3:00 in the morning studying the language and go to work the next day to be at school at 8:00.
DELLINGER: Oh, gosh.
BARNETT: It just got [00:26:00] interesting to me because some of the things that I was discovering about the language I never knew when I was growing up, and I was speaking something that we supposed to speak, but then when I started realizing that there’s more to this language than I thought, it made me—I had a, like, an obsession about it. And I’m still going at it now.
DELLINGER: Right. It sounds like you came to the realization that our Muscogee language is not just words. It had so much more meaning.
BARNETT: It’s who we are. It’s an identification. You know, we’re not, as a people, when they say Muscogee (Creek) people, that’s the only thing that identifies us as the
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Muscogee people. [00:27:00] For one thing, you know, there’s a lot of people that has our color, has our hair texture, same color as we are. But the language is what identifies us as Muscogees.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: So I take that, that that’s what supposed to be the identity of who we are.
DELLINGER: Right. And so, Mrs. Barnett, I want to ask you this, in your position as a language speaker and teacher, you know and I know, we know that our language is dwindling. And you know, you guys in the language department, I mean, this is the responsibility that you’ve taken on to protect something [00:28:00] that’s so critical to the nation. So what is that like for you, just with your day-to-day work as—I know you’re passionate about this and you enjoy it, but how stressful? I’m just curious about how stressful this responsibility—
BARNETT: Very stressful.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Very stressful. Based on the fact that my biggest fear is one day somebody says there’s no speakers left. And I got to pass this on because when I go, it’s going to go with me. And I’m trying to leave something. I’m trying to leave it with these young kids,
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with my grandkids, with my daughters, because it’s stressful. You know, [00:29:00] it’s stressful because—and more fear, more a fear saying that one day I’m afraid the nation’s going to say we have no speakers left. That’s my fear, and that’s where stress comes in. But of course, you know, I teach Monday and Wednesdays. I teach Head Start, Eufaula and Checotah, and then Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays I teach by Zoom. I teach by Zoom. And the last count, I haven’t asked here, the very beginning of it, we had over 300 people participated. And they’re from all over. We got some from England.
DELLINGER: Wow. Well, that sounds really good.
BARNETT: Well, [00:30:00] to me that’s something, you know, to—I think there’s interest.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: Yes, there’s interest.
DELLINGER: Right, and then the hope is probably that those 300-and-some people will learn the language, and then they’ll want to teach it to somebody.
BARNETT: Yes, let’s carry it on. Somebody’s got to carry this torch. It’s like I’m passing this torch to somebody else.
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DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: For them to learn. And I want somebody to learn, and I got two students that, during the pandemic now, during the pandemic when Creek Nation was closed down, I had two former students that was over my house at least three times a week studying the language with me. They would come over with paper and pencil, and they would just—they would ask questions and questions. And I would [00:31:00] answer it, and they would write and write and write and write asking me where does this word come from? How do you use this word? They would set there with me. I never was isolated during the pandemic because those two boys, young boys, they would come over, and we would set down, and we’d eat. We’d have tea, Kool-Aid, pop. We would sit there and talk about the language, and they would sit there. Now, those two boys I have hope for. I have a feeling they’re the ones that are going to carry on this language.
DELLINGER: Well, that has to be so encouraging. That’s encouraging to me just hearing you say that.
BARNETT: They’d asked me, do you mind? I said no. Everything is closed. Nation’s closed. There’s nobody going anywhere. [00:32:00] Why not learn? That’s what that one boy said. He said, “Why not learn?” We can’t go to the movies. We can’t go shopping. We can’t go to the grounds. We can’t go to here. We can’t go there. We can’t go to anywhere. Why not learn? So they were at my house at least three times a week. And I was so proud, and I was glad to do it.
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DELLINGER: Yeah, I bet you were proud. And they knew exactly where to go. What ages are these boys?
BARNETT: Okay, one’s out of high school, and one’s—okay, can I tell you their names?
DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: They won’t mind. Yeah, Darrell Proctor, Jr.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Darrel Proctor Jr. is one of them. He’s already graduated. And he’s in school. The other one is Jay Fife. He’s Jeff Fife, Jr. And he’s at Yale [00:33:00] University right now, and he told me. He said, “When I get out of there, I’m going to come back and help you.”
DELLINGER: Aw, yeah. Yeah, I know Jay. I don’t know him personally, but I know who you’re talking about. He’s a character, I think, Jay is.
BARNETT: Oh, yeah, he is, but you know what? Both of them can get down and get serious. And I mean, they bring their papers over, their pencils over, and, you know, of
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course there was total silence and no TV. We’d sit there. And they’d ask me stories, and I’d tell them stories, and sometimes we got in Jay’s truck, and we’d go to different places in Hanna where there used to be grounds, and I would show them where the grounds used to be. We’d ride around. Then we’d come home, and then we’d start talking language again. You know, so because there was a lot of grounds down here that no longer, you know, are [00:34:00] active anymore. So we would drive around, and I would show them where the inactive grounds used to be. You know, like my mother told me where they were at, and so I would show them.
DELLINGER: That’s great, yeah, the passage of knowledge is so importance to us. That’s great. So I’m going to ask you one more question about your personal life before we start talking about the pandemic. I’d like to know, you know, when you’re not at work or teaching, do you have any interests or hobbies? You know, and of course you have your family. I think probably I already know what the answer to this question’s going to be, but what do you like to do in your free time?
BARNETT: In my free time? You know, my mother [00:35:00] showed me—she taught me how to sew quilts. She showed me how to embroidery. She showed me how to crochet when I was growing up, and I have never forgotten them. I’ll start something like crochet. I’ll crochet something, start it, and I’ll put it aside. Then I’ll start on a quilt. Start on it, and then I’ll sew a little bit on that. And then I’ll embroidery like pillowcases, and I’ll start on that, put that aside. I go back and forth, but my biggest passion is reading. I love to read. I’ll read anything. I love to read, so I’ll go to garage sales, or [00:36:00]
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there’s one Goodwill in Tulsa that is full of books. And I’ll go up there and (laughs) and buy books, and I can stay in there for hours. So when me and my husband goes up there, he’ll say let’s go early in the morning because you’ll be out of there—if it opens at 9:00
he says you’ll be out of there by 1:00. (laughter) But yeah, I love reading, but I like being out in the yard too. I went out there here about four or five days ago, four days ago, raked, and it didn’t do no good. (laughter) Same way. That wind blew it all up.
DELLINGER: Yeah, we’re at that time of the year where you go out and you do that, and it’s kind of like a gerbil on a wheel. You don’t get anywhere. I have the same problem here.
BARNETT: We don’t get anywhere.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: But I’m an outdoorsy person, [00:37:00] so I just I do—I got all kinds of interests. I mean, not just one but I just do all kinds of things.
DELLINGER: Well, yeah, you sound like you are a very busy lady.
BARNETT: I am. I’m very busy. I’m a busy woman, but you know what? That’s what keeps me going.
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DELLINGER: Yes, it’s important. Okay. Well, I’ll tell you what, I am going to go ahead now, and we’ll transition here and start talking about the pandemic. And so you know, here in the United States I think we’re about twenty-two months into this COVID-19 pandemic. And I want to ask, do you remember when in 2020 you first heard about COVID-19?
BARNETT: I’m going to tell you when I first heard about the COVID-19. DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: About [00:38:00] six months before my mother passed. Sometimes me and my mother would just set around and talk, and she would tell me stories. And she said the elders had predicted that there will be an illness that will hit the country. And she said it’s going to take a lot of people. And she said, “You probably won’t see it, but your grandkids will.”
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And I thought. And I asked her, “What kind of illness?” You know, she said the elders didn’t know. She said, “But it was passed down to me that there’ll be something that kills a lot of people.” And when this pandemic hit, this and, [00:39:00] you know, she’s been gone seven years this past July, I told my husband. I said, “I think she was talking about this.”
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DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: And I’m seeing it. She didn’t think I would. I said, “I’m seeing it, and so are my grandkids.” I said all our grandkids are seeing it too. I said I think this is what she was talking about.
DELLINGER: But she was talking about it seven years ago.
BARNETT: Um-hm.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Yeah.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: But it seems like she just told me yesterday, you know. And then when it first hit, China and all this, I didn’t think too much of it because it hadn’t hit the states yet. But I believe before it even hit, you know, before it was even told [00:40:00] that it had hit the States, that it killed some Creek people because I have a cousin that died, and they didn’t know what it was. They put him on a ventilator, and they said he’s on his
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own. It’s up to him. Well, he passed, but the symptoms that they told, I think it was COVID.
DELLINGER: Now, would that have been in 2019?
BARNETT: Uh-huh, yeah.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Yes, ma’am, it sure was. And I said until this day I still believe that he had COVID because they said he was coughing and coughing, and he was having a hard time breathing, and they took him to the hospital, and then they transferred him to Tulsa, and the doctors didn’t know what it was. But he was on the ventilator.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: So I heard about it in 2019, February, in fact. [00:41:00] DELLINGER: Oh, so earl in 2019.
BARNETT: Uh-huh, yeah.
DELLINGER: So almost a year before it actually came into the States.
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BARNETT: Yeah, you know, reported being in the States, yeah.
DELLINGER: Right, yeah, reported being in the states.
BARNETT: Yeah, um-hm, yeah.
DELLINGER: Was there any point, though at the beginning of 2020 when, you know, I mean, you realized that it was—that COVID was in the States? I mean, at that point were you concerned about it coming into Oklahoma and the Muscogee Nation?
BARNETT: Yes. I was because I was going back to what my mother said, and she said it was going to kill a lot of Indians. She said it’s going to kill a lot of stecate. And then I started thinking, this is it. I’m starting to see this. But then when it got [00:42:00] reported they’re saying it was in the States, I told my kids. I told my kids and the older grandkids. I said be careful. Be careful because, I said, I think your grandmother and your great-grandmother was talking about this. And my oldest daughter, she was working on the frontlines. She was the, like the respiratory therapist. And her whole unit got it.
DELLINGER: Oh gosh.
BARNETT: And oh my gosh, it was scary. And I kept telling her, “Baby, don’t—be careful. Be careful.” I said, “Keep your safety precautions. Keep it up,” and she would
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come to her home, change clothes in the garage, go take a shower, put her clothes in the washer, spray her shoes down with Lysol, [00:43:00] and then hug her kids. And I said, “Keep it up. Keep it up. Don’t you let your guard down,” you know. And we lived like that. We lived in a very safe world. I had my grandkids, and of course the school got let out. And the Creek, the Creek Nation shut down. And I knew it was serious then.
DELLINGER: Yeah, so that’s what made you realize the severity of it, when things started shutting down?
BARNETT: Yeah, shutting down, um-hm. And you know, one day we had to go to a grocery store. And the shelves were bare. And what me and my husband did, we left the kids, we would go shop for them. We would tell them to stay in. And we would be the one that went to Walmart. And this is when Walmart was just open certain times. [00:44:00] And the shelves were bare. And you know, you couldn’t find meat. We couldn’t find bread. And I said, oh my gosh, this is hitting. This is really hitting now, you know. And we were traveling back home on the Indian Nation Turnpike. On the way home, we passed two cars. I still remember that. We passed two cars going north while we were going south.
DELLINGER: Yeah, normally that’s a very busy turnpike.
BARNETT: Yeah, that’s a busy road, especially on Saturdays and Sunday. And this was, you know, we passed two cars. I said, “Mitchell, this looks like that movie,” where the
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world was coming into an end. I said, “This [00:45:00] is what it looks like. This is what it reminds me of.” And we kept going, you know, and it was like two cars. It was nobody, but yet those shelves at Walmart were empty.
DELLINGER: What town was that Walmart in?
BARNETT: In Okmulgee. Because we stopped at Henryetta first, and there was nothing there, so we went to Okmulgee.
DELLINGER: Yeah the pandemic, it affected everyone.
BARNETT: Yeah, it did.
DELLINGER: You know, it affected folks in major cities, and it affected folks like you living in rural areas too.
BARNETT: And you know, I didn’t think we would ever get to that point. I’ve seen them when the ice storm hit, when the ice storm was going to hit. I’ve seen that, but they always had a few things left. This was totally different world. [00:46:00] This was a totally different world.
DELLINGER: Where does your daughter work?
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BARNETT: She works in a care unit for disabled children, my oldest one. She works with disabled children, and they started catching it. And she’s the one that reads their oxygen levels and stuff like that, so she was the only one that could do that, and she was working twelve-hour shifts, sometimes over. Sometimes she’d work, she’d go in 11:00 at night, and she’d stay there until 11:00 the next night.
DELLINGER: Mm, gosh. Well, you know, I’m just going to say I appreciate her and all of our medical frontline people because especially in the beginning that was so scary [00:47:00] because those folks were getting it. Doctors were getting it. You know, they were dying too.
BARNETT: Yeah, they were. And I was so afraid for my daughter, and she did take precautions, but she did catch it.
DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: She did catch it.
DELLINGER: Did she go through a rough time with it?
BARNETT: Well, now, see, she’s got the three kids, you know, so they all caught it. But what was strange was her husband didn’t catch it. But her and the three kids caught it, and she brought it back, you know, from where she was working at. And so this time last
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year, I mean a year ago, the Thanksgiving, they couldn’t come over. So me and my other daughter, they came over, which, they didn’t go nowhere, and of course we were shut down. So I went ahead and cooked Thanksgiving [00:48:00] dinner. And that was one year that we didn’t have nobody over here except family, just my two daughters and their kids and me and my husband. So what we did was we boxed up—we got some to-go trays, foil, plastic, whatever we could find. We made food for them and set on their porch.
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And we didn’t get to see them that year. We didn’t get to—because they were catching it one by one. My daughter caught it first, and then her son, oldest son caught it. Then her daughter caught it. Then the youngest son caught it. But the husband didn’t catch it.
DELLINGER: Yeah, that’s what’s been so interesting about COVID. BARNETT: Yeah, that was strange to me.
DELLINGER: Right. Now—
BARNETT: He was in the— Go ahead.
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DELLINGER: Oh, no, go ahead.
BARNETT: Well, he was in the middle of three of [00:49:00] those, and he didn’t catch it. It was the weirdest virus, and I always told my family. I said that virus has its own brain.
DELLINGER: Mm, well, I think that’s an interesting way to look at it and probably a valid way to look at it. So now, have you had any family members or friends—did you or your husband contract it?
BARNETT: No, we didn’t, but we went into quarantine. My little grand—my oldest granddaughter that lives with me, she was nine or eight at the time. She tested positive, so my daughter called back, and she said, “Mom, she tested positive, don’t you go anywhere.” We tried to keep other people safe too, you know. We just didn’t think about us, but we went into quarantine. I think I was off work about a month because I had to, you know, [00:50:00] I never caught it. I had taught my kids that, I said you keep your face mask on because they were still in school. I said you keep your face mask on, and you stay six feet apart. You stay six feet. And I showed them how to cough if they accidentally coughed or whatever, just coughing. I taught them all that before they went to school. Well, she kept her distance. She kept her face mask on while she was at home, and when she went to the bathroom, she sprayed down with Lysol. She would keep her hands clean. She stayed away from us. And her siblings didn’t catch it either.
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DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: Her two siblings didn’t catch it, and none of us caught it. Okay, well, here we go again. They went floating down the Illinois when the pandemic was like, they said it was in control and everything. [00:51:00] Okay, well, then my oldest daughter caught it. I mean, I don’t know, my youngest daughter caught it. Her sister caught it. Their kids caught it.
DELLINGER: Well, are you talking—are we still in 2020, or are we 2021 now? BARNETT: Yeah.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: In 2020, yeah. They caught it, and they had to stay, and my middle daughter lives in Henryetta. They all quarantined over there. But my middle daughter Lori, her husband didn’t catch it, and these two kids didn’t catch it. And they would go test, you know. They would go test, but my youngest daughter caught it, and my middle daughter caught it. It was strange. I mean, it was strange enough. My daughter said I don’t like it over here. I need to come home. And I said, “Oh, no you’re not, because (laughter) you’re dad and I are here, you’re not bringing it [00:52:00] back,” so they stayed quarantined too. They had to quarantine. So we kind of experienced all this, you know, that people were going through, we experienced it.
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DELLINGER: Well, yeah, definitely from what you’re saying, you had several rounds of it—
BARNETT: Yeah.
DELLINGER: —that you experienced with your large family. And I’m glad that no one had to go through a horrible experience with it, it sounds like, necessarily. So I’d like for you—one of the questions I have been asking folks is I would like for you to give your explanation of, you know, based on your understanding of COVID-19, as far as what it does to the human body, once someone contracts it, what are some of the [00:53:00] symptoms?
BARNETT: Well, what I heard, now my youngest daughter told me when she caught it, like, her nose was burning, and she had a cough and a bad headache. My oldest daughter said all she got was she couldn’t taste, and she couldn’t smell. That’s what her family caught. But I had some cousins that said it was bad. They couldn’t breathe. You know, they couldn’t breathe. They couldn’t smell. They couldn’t taste. And you know, I believe that this COVID—now, this is just me, just from what I’ve experienced and what I’ve heard people talk about and stuff, it attacks one organ, and if that organ fights it back, it [00:54:00] attacks another one. It attacks your weaknesses in your body. Luckily, my grandkids and my daughters, they’re pretty healthy. They’re pretty healthy. So, you know, they fought it off, but that wasn’t for everybody. I lost a cousin. He was diabetic,
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and he caught COVID. Eleven days later his wife died of it. And they were speakers. They were speakers. But it was like, you know, I don’t know. I can’t explain it, but you know, from my point of view, and this is just my thinking, that [00:55:00] our ancestors or my elders, they went through something like this before. But this was—I think this was a rougher one. And I think it was something that no one—I don’t think any of the doctors knew how to treat that. So I believe it was made in a laboratory.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: It came from the laboratory.
DELLINGER: Okay. I want to talk to you a little bit about how the pandemic affected your work, especially last year. So when the Muscogee Nation shut down last March, did the language department shut down? Was everybody sheltering in place [00:56:00] at home?
BARNETT: Well, when it completely shut down, yes, it did. But when we went back to work and then we came back to work, and then they said people with underlying conditions had to stay off, so there’s seven of us in that office. It ended up with three of us in there, the clerk, me, and the media person, which is Brandon Barnett, me, and Jordan. We were the only three. Well, we kept it going. And so the calendar was supposed to went out. Three of us put 3,000 calendars together and mailed—put them together manually and mailed them out to everybody.
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DELLINGER: Oh my gosh.
BARNETT: Yeah, he would do the printing, and then he would help me put it together, and I’d put it together. And then [00:57:00] when I got caught up after he got caught up, then we’d go in there and help her put them in envelopes and stuff, and we were mailing them out.
DELLINGER: Wow.
BARNETT: Yeah, we did that, and you know, and then if somebody needed to translate, we were there to answer the phone. You know, we were there because we did get phone calls, you know, and I was there to do the translations, and she was there to take the notes. And Brandon was over there printing things off, and we were—we got it done. We got it done. But there was three of us left in there. We were a skeleton crew. And at the time it was stressful, and we was, like, nonstop. We were nonstop. There were times we went without lunch. Or we would take turns doing lunch, or one would go get the lunch and bring it back. But, you know, after all that, it was [00:58:00] stressful, but then thinking about it, it wasn’t that hard.
DELLINGER: In hindsight.
BARNETT: (laughs) Yes.
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DELLINGER: You can say that now because you survived it?
BARNETT: Yes, uh-huh. We survived it, and then we thought, well, you know, it wasn’t that bad, but at that time, we couldn’t think because we didn’t have time to think. We were like robots, doing what we supposed to do to get them out.
DELLINGER: Well, I know that calendar is so important to so many people. So I know, you know, it was greatly appreciated that you guys still were able to get that calendar out.
BARNETT: Yeah, we got it out. I mean it got hectic. And sometimes we fell behind little bit, but, boy, we’d get together, and we’d catch up. (laughs) COVID, it was—and now thinking about it though, we could do it again. [00:59:00]
DELLINGER: That’s good. (laughter) I hope you don’t have to.
BARNETT: I hope we don’t have to, but we could.
DELLINGER: Yeah. So I want to ask you too, because of the pandemic, how has the pandemic changed the way you teach?
BARNETT: It’s more important now. Because during that pandemic we lost a lot of speakers. Seemed like every time there was a death it was a speaker.
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DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: And we were counting them for a while, and we stopped because there was, like, two or three speakers at one time dying. Every week seemed like we were burying a speaker. But we had recorded them too.
DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: We had recorded the elders, and we still got them alive. DELLINGER: Yes. [01:00:00]
BARNETT: We kept them alive.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: Through the recordings and stuff, but, you know, and they just, like I said, just here about three or four weeks ago they buried one, and it was because of COVID. She contacted it, and she passed away, and she was probably—me and her, there was two speakers left down here, I believe. There was three left, and she passed, so there’s two speakers left now. I’m one of them.
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DELLINGER: So because of the pandemic, I don’t know, have you observed that more people are wanting to learn the language, or have less people been involved?
BARNETT: Well, from just the Zoom classes I’d say people are interested, and I can’t say it was because of [01:01:00] the pandemic, you know, but I did make that point, that the pandemic took a lot of our speakers, took it from the grounds, took it from the churches, took the grounds chief. You know, I was like, oh my gosh. Every time I heard somebody that passed from the COVID, they were speakers.
DELLINGER: Yeah.
BARNETT: And I don’t know if that has any effect on people that are taking it, taking the classes or, you know, just the interest in it. But seem like—and I’m glad people are interested in learning. And I always try to stress that, that that’s their identity. You know, we’re just regular citizens without the language.
DELLINGER: Yes.
BARNETT: We wouldn’t be a nation [01:02:00] without the language because that’s a tribal nation. It’s a Native nation. It’s a Muscogee Nation. And without the language, we’re not a nation. We might as well just be regular citizens. We wouldn’t be unique people.
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DELLINGER: Yeah. Okay. Mrs. Barnett, I want to ask you, have you been vaccinated against COVID-19?
BARNETT: Yes, I have.
DELLINGER: And will you share just a little bit why it was important to you to get vaccinated?
BARNETT: Well, one thing was I had my grandkids, and the second thing was somebody’s got to care about our people. You know, our whole office is vaccinated, and we even went and got the booster. [01:03:00] And who knows? In 10 years we may be on that commercial that says if you took this vaccine—(laughs) But that was a risk that we take even with children’s vaccine, the measles and everything like that. We take that risk to keep people safe. And it got to the point where I thought, you know, what if I had it and I passed it to an elder, and that elder didn’t make it? I would feel responsible.
DELLINGER: Right.
BARNETT: And with me, you know, and you can still catch it. But me and my husband until this day still wear masks when we go into stores, and we still use sanitizer. We haven’t let our guard down because there’s people that we care about. My husband lost a sister to it. [01:04:00] We sat out in the parking lot until they told us that she passed.
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DELLINGER: Oh.
BARNETT: And setting out in the parking lot in the hospital, we couldn’t be there with her, because our people are used to being with their sick.
DELLINGER: Yes.
BARNETT: I was there when my mother passed. She died in my arms. I was there, and I was very young, but I was at the hospital. My mom and her two brothers were right there when my dad passed. And most Creeks, and I’m going to say every, probably every Indian person, they’re there with their family when they’re going. So they won’t go by themselves. But we sat out in the parking lot until his sister passed.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Holding her hand, you know, and they pass by themselves, and that was hard to [01:05:00] do. That was hard to do. Otherwise we would have been in that room with his sister.
DELLINGER: Absolutely.
BARNETT: Talking to her until she passed, but we was out in the parking lot.
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DELLINGER: Yeah. So what vaccine did you receive?
BARNETT: I took the Pfizer.
DELLINGER: And what were your side effects?
BARNETT: Oh, that first one, my arm, I couldn’t move it. And it felt like a rag arm. I couldn’t move it at all. I couldn’t move it at all. And then but the next day, I mean, that day I took it, that evening, I could not move it. It was so sore. That’s about the only effects I had. The second one, my arm didn’t get sore. I took it on a Thursday, [01:06:00] and I went to work on a Friday. My arm wasn’t sore, but when I got home, I was fatigued. Like, I couldn’t even get out of the chair, so fatigued. And I thought, this is not normal, you know. I get tired but not this tired. But, you know, I was just fatigued. And then it was gone. You know, and the booster I took, I didn’t have no soreness, no nothing. I went through it okay. You know, but it was better to go through that than probably catch the virus.
DELLINGER: Yeah, that’s the tradeoff, right?
BARNETT: Um-hm, yeah.
DELLINGER: Yeah. Okay, well, I’m glad you didn’t have a horrible vaccine experience.
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BARNETT: Now, some people did.
DELLINGER: Right, yeah, some people have, you know, had other [01:07:00] issues with the vaccine, and you know, I’ve heard people tell their vaccine stories, and I’ve read people’s vaccine stories, and you know, everybody has the same attitude, that they would do it again. You know, they would go through those things again to know that they’re vaccinated, so all right. Let me ask you this, how do you think the Muscogee Nation as a whole has been handling the pandemic, you know, especially our tribal administration? How do you think we’ve been doing with the pandemic?
BARNETT: I think we did good, considering. I thought we did good, like when it got to the point that they said let’s shut down, we did. And then people with underlying conditions. That was being safe. That was so we wouldn’t lose anymore [01:08:00] people. And if they did catch it, it was probably from being exposed somewhere or something other than the Nation, but I think that it was handled well. And I mean I know the Nation, there was, like, some programs like our program, that couldn’t help people. But in the long run, we did help people. There was another side to it. You see what I’m saying?
DELLINGER: Um-hm, yeah.
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BARNETT: There was another side. You know, there was a two-side, you know, my mother used to tell me there’s the good and bad go hand in hand. And I think this was hand in hand, even though we couldn’t do a lot of things or we couldn’t be open or we couldn’t help people, yet it was good on another hand.
DELLINGER: Right, right.
BARNETT: You know, it [01:09:00] kept our people and our employees safe.
DELLINGER: Yes, how do you think, along these same lines, what do you think about the job that our health department has been doing?
BARNETT: Well, they did good because I know when I went, I have regular checkups, so when I went, that doctor told me. She said, “You going to get vaccinated today.” (laughs) “You need to get vaccinated.” And I said, “Okay, do I need to set an appointment?” She goes, “Let me call over there, and I’ll get you in today.” So I think they’re okay, but I think we need doctors, you know, not PAs but doctors.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: But we survive with that. We’re surviving with that, and I think that, you know, this knew hospital with the infusion, that’s a step. That’s a step. [01:10:00]
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DELLINGER: Right, yeah, you’re right.
BARNETT: You know, with the infusion treatment that they had. I know one girl told me she caught it, and she said if I hadn’t been up there and got that infusion, she goes I don’t know if I would have made it.
DELLINGER: Wow, wow.
BARNETT: So yeah, I think we done the best we can, you know, considering what was going on in the world.
DELLINGER: Well, what are your thoughts about how, again, the Muscogee Nation and then even thinking about the others of the five tribes, how do you think they’ve handled the pandemic in comparison to the state of Oklahoma?
BARNETT: We kept our people safe. We did what we had to do. And you know, I don’t know. I went into Walmart, and there’d be non-Indian people without [01:11:00] masks on, but you saw a Native person, they had their mask on. And I think the rest of the tribes
handled it real well. I think they were thinking about their people because I know like Cherokee Nation said we want speakers to get vaccinated because they know that’s the important thing is their speakers. So they got their speakers vaccinated. They wanted their people to get—I think they handled it well. I think all tribes did.
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DELLINGER: You mean throughout the country?
BARNETT: No.
DELLINGER: But here in Oklahoma, the five tribes?
BARNETT: But our five, yeah, uh-huh, yeah. I think they were keeping their people as safe as they could. I think they did try, and I think they might, just like we did, we lost people. But it wasn’t like back then. We lost thousands of Creeks due to measles, [01:12:00] smallpox. We didn’t hit that mark. And I think that was a step forward in how things changed, and our medical has come forward because when I was growing up, they didn’t have clinics. They didn’t have hospitals at Creek Nation. And now we can go to a clinic if nothing else, you know, and go to a hospital. Because when I was growing up we didn’t have that.
DELLINGER: Okay. Well, we’re down to our last question. And so with this question, I want you to think about our future generations of Muscogee and, you know, who may, I hope not, but who may find themselves in a similar situation as what we’ve been in here with the COVID pandemic, [01:13:00] so in thinking about those things, what words of wisdom or advice can you give to them about how to live through and survive a pandemic such as COVID-19?
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BARNETT: Be ready for it. They always told us, well, just like my mother used to say, be ready for anything. Be ready for anything. So she used to tell me buy extra food. Keep things that’s going to last, you know. Be stocked up on stuff because you never know. You never know. And you know, these young people today, they don’t have the advice that we had. So you know, during the pandemic, the only thing we really ran out of was, like, white bread, but I could make biscuits. [01:14:00] And there’s a family, there’s a girl, woman down here. She’s a speaker too. She said, “Becky, do you need anything?” Help each other. Care about each other. Love each other. That’s the one thing, vnokeckv. Este etv vketece, care about other people. Have love for them. Long as that love’s around, my mother—my grandmother used to tell me, “vnokeckv vcake te we.”
She used to tell me that love was the most precious thing. And she said long as you have that for people, you’ll make it through anything. But you got to have that. [01:15:00] And she used to tell me, you know, she was a traditional woman raised at the grounds, and she told me, “vnokeckv ocet ce nowat, Hesaketvmese ocet ce tos.” She used to tell me, if you got love, you have God. That’s what they need to know. You got love, you have God.
DELLINGER: Okay.
BARNETT: Carry this love with you. Carry it with you and love everybody. You can make it through anything, she’d say.
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DELLINGER: Well, that is absolutely important and wise. Those are wise words absolutely. [01:16:00] And so thank you for that. And in closing, I do want to ask you, is there anything else, possibly anything that maybe I have missed that I haven’t asked you about that you would like to say or share about your experiences with the pandemic?
BARNETT: Goes back to love. Think about the other person. Wear your mask. Use that sanitizer. In this pandemic, be careful. You need to be careful. Take care of yourself. Stay clean. You know, my grandma used to tell me, she used to say never be dirty, in mind, in
heart, in body. And she said, [01:17:00] she told me, she said, never let your clothes be dirty. She said if there’s a creek, never be dirty. If there’s a pond, never be dirty. And there’s ways, you know, to get through pandemics. There’s ways to get through this. There’s always a way. It’s just taking a little bit of thinking. Think about it. She used to tell me there’s always ways. And she used to tell me there’s always a solution to a problem. She said “naket emvyetv oce te we.” She said there’s something going on. There’s always a way to tackle that problem, but if—look for it. Used to say look for it. [01:18:00] So, when these young people, if they get a problem, there’s a solution to it. But you’re the one that’s got to look for it. It may not be easy, but it’s there. It’s there.
DELLINGER: Okay. Mrs. Barnett, thank you so much again for taking time out of your day. This has been an amazing interview.
BARNETT: I hope so. I hope so.
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DELLINGER: It absolutely has been. I’ve learned so much from you here today, and so mvto, and you take care and keep staying safe.
BARNETT: Cemeyo, you too. Cemeyo. Yehikvtecet. Vnokeckv ocet. You take care of yourself, watch yourself, and above all, have love.
DELLINGER: Mvto. [01:19:00]
BARNETT: Um-hm.
END OF INTERVIEW
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Original Date Description:
October 30, 2021Original Date:
2021 October 30thContributor:
Source:
Muscogee (Creek) Nation Library and ArchivesExternal Links:
Identifier:
2021MCN.15.006Type:
Format: