Roger Wiley, Interview
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Created: Tuesday, May 9, 2023 - 13:00 |
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Summary:
An interview with Muscogee (Creek) Nation Judge Roger Wiley.Description:
An interview with Muscogee (Creek) Nation Judge Roger Wiley. A downloadable transcript may be found by link: Roger Wiley. 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: Mr. Roger Wiley
Interview by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
Date: November 23, 2023
Transcription: The Audio Transcription Company
Edited by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
MIDGE DELLINGER: [00:00:00] This is Midge Dellinger, oral historian for Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Today is November 23, 2022 and I am in Okmulgee, Oklahoma interviewing Muscogee citizen and Chief District Judge for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation District Court, Mr. Roger Wiley. I’m performing this interview on behalf of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Historic & 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.”
Judge Wiley, thank you so much for taking time today to do this interview with me. We’re going to start with some questions about your life and your personal background. I want to start with where were you born?
JUDGE ROGER WILEY: I was born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: And do you remember the hospital?
WILEY: It was called Curry Hospital. There were two hospitals in Sapulpa, and I was born in the smaller one, right on [00:01:00] Main Street.
DELLINGER: Now where did you grow up? In Sapulpa?
WILEY: I did grow up in Sapulpa, lived there until 1969 when I was fourteen years old. My dad had gotten a job, he went to night school, took him twelve years at Tulsa University to get a degree. He used his veteran’s benefits from the war for that, and once
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he got that degree he found steady employment. Before that it was factory work here and there, a lot of layoffs. He wasn’t permanently employed, but after he got his degree he was. Then he got a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Back in those days, I think the Bureau had a policy of not—I don’t know if they didn’t allow it, they certainly didn’t encourage tribal members to work with their own tribe.
He wanted to work in Okmulgee and commute from Sapulpa, but [00:02:00] they required him to locate with another tribe, so we moved up to Miami and I ended up attending high school freshman through senior year in Miami, Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: What is your father’s name?
WILEY: Harmon Wiley.
DELLINGER: Where did the Wileys come from?
WILEY: Well, my father’s family, my father was born in the Dustin area just north of Dustin on a little hill out there by our family cemetery. All his brothers came from that area. My grandmother came from the Henryetta area, and my grandfather came from the Dustin area. Before that, the Wileys came from Hanna, that Hanna/Dustin area. That’s where we came from after removal, of course.
DELLINGER: Do you know what your [00:03:00] tribal town and clan are?
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WILEY: Well, it would be through my grandmother. My dad’s full-blood Creek. My mother is non-Indian. She’s German, Irish and English, so we don’t inherit a clan through her. It would be through my grandmother. I guess purists would say you don’t really have a clan if your mother is not a member of a clan. But anyway, my grandmother’s clan, if we go that way, or town, would be New Tulsa, and her clan was Fuswv (Bird Clan).
DELLINGER: What else would you like to share about your father?
WILEY: He was a good man, quiet, hardworking, raised us well by example. He didn’t do a lot of talking and telling us how it should be. He really set an example for how to live a good life. He had a lot of respect, people loved him. He was quiet, like I said, [00:04:00] non-confrontational. When he passed away, by then we had moved back—my parents after they both retired, moved back from Miami to Sapulpa, where they both grew up. My dad’s father passed away when he was nine years old.
They left Dustin and my dad attended Yuchi Mission and graduated from Sapulpa High School like the rest of his family did, and so did my mother. When my dad had his funeral in Sapulpa, the church was packed. I thought that showed just the kind of respect that he had earned through a life of good living.
DELLINGER: That’s fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about your mother. What’s your mother’s name and share a little bit about her.
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WILEY: My mother’s name was Anna Lee Snider. She was born in Keifer, which is three miles from Sapulpa. She was born in 1924. My dad was eight years older than my mom. My mom grew up, [00:05:00] she was in high school when the war started. She was from a hardworking family. My grandfather had a store in Keifer. During the oil boom days it was great. When the bust hit, he lost everything. Back then, they bought groceries on credit. I even remember that when I was a child. The grocer would have a box full of little receipt books and each one would have a name on it. The family would pay their bill when they had the money.
Well, they left town and ended up not paying my grandfather, so he had to find another line of work. He became the postmaster in Keifer. Eventually he became the court clerk in Creek County and held that office for twenty-eight years, I believe. Never lost an election there. He was well liked, too. My mom was from that family. My mom was real intelligent, but she didn’t have [00:06:00] the opportunities that a lot of women have now for scholarships. She was valedictorian of her class. She was extremely bright. Ended up, after we moved up to Miami when I was in high school we ended up, my mom got an opportunity to go to college because there’s a little junior college in Miami, Northeastern A&M.
She always wanted to go to college. She was forty-five years old, I think, at the time, so she got to go to college. She went there and excelled and won all the awards in math and science. I’m real proud of my mom, too.
DELLINGER: Do you have siblings?
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WILEY: I do. I have two sisters and a brother.
DELLINGER: Will you talk just a little bit about each one of them?
WILEY: Yeah, I’m the youngest in my family. My oldest sister is Grace, and she is—I won’t say ages, but anyway, she’s the oldest. A year behind her [00:07:00] in age is my brother, David. Then two years behind David, five years ahead of me, is my sister, Laura. We had a close relationship growing up. They still live in Oklahoma. My sister, Laura, passed away a little over a year ago, non-COVID related. She had cancer. We really miss her. I was very close to my sister, Laura, in particular.
DELLINGER: I want to go back, you have briefly touched on some of your grandparents, but I want to ask you if you would share a little bit about your grandparents on both your father and mother’s side.
WILEY: Well, I didn’t know my father’s father. He passed away when my dad was nine years old, and that’s when the family moved up to Sapulpa, so I didn’t get to know him. I knew my father’s mother. Her name was [00:08:00] Melissa Kennard and then became Melissa Wiley when she married my grandfather. She raised four children by herself. My grandfather passed away in 1925, and her oldest child was, I think, ten or twelve years old. My dad was about nine, and he was the second-oldest. She did that by herself and she spoke no English. That must’ve been very difficult. On a side note, my grandmother’s cousin was Elizabeth Sapulpa, who started the Rock Creek Indian Church
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in Sapulpa. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that church. It burned down many years ago, but fairly well known in the area.
It was an Indian church and she’s the one who encouraged my grandmother to bring the kids up to Sapulpa and put them in Yuchi Mission and get them into school. [00:09:00] That is how they ended up there. I was real close to my Grandma Wiley. We went to her house a lot. She didn’t have electricity when I was really young. I remember going to the cukuce outside to go to the bathroom, and it was scary to me, I remember. I was afraid I’d fall in. My dad was afraid, too, because he’d stand right there with me.
DELLINGER: What was her name again?
WILEY: Her name was Melissa Kennard Wiley. She was quite a woman, though, real strong and really missed her.
DELLINGER: So your father attended Yuchi Mission School?
WILEY: He did, and so did my aunt and my two uncles. They all attended Yuchi. At some point they transferred over to the public schools. I’m not sure when that happened. They actually graduated from Sapulpa High School, but I’m not sure what grade that happened in. [00:10:00] You want to know about my mother’s parents, too?
DELLINGER: Yes, please.
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WILEY: My grandfather Snider, his name was Henry Lee Snider, he came from Arkansas, a place called Natural Dam, Arkansas, which is just directly east across the border from right about where Stillwell is. Now it’s a national forest, it’s a beautiful area. But he was a really good man, honest man, well liked. He was a 32nd-degree mason, whichever the one is where you have to be elected. It’s the highest level. Like I said, he was a court clerk for twenty-eight years in Creek County and never lost the elections there. Was really a powerful local political figure, but quiet and humble. None of my family really stepped out and made a lot of noise. He was that way, too.
My Grandma Snider, her name was Anna Katherine Bäcker [00:11:00] Snider. My mother’s parents, they’re mostly German heritage and you can tell by their German names. Bäcker means baker in German and Snider means tailor. So they have German surnames. My mother was over half German. She came from Pennsylvania. Her family was a farming family. One of those deals, I think this was about in 1910 maybe, but the oil boom was just starting in Oklahoma. About that time, their barn burned down. This was in Warren County, Pennsylvania, which is extremely Northwest Pennsylvania, about 110 miles north of Pittsburgh, really cold up there.
But that’s where their family farm was. Their family had immigrated through New York into Northern Pennsylvania. When the barn burned down, of course the oil industry had already been big in Pennsylvania at the time, [00:12:00] and my grandfather found out there was work in Oklahoma. So they came down to Drumright, Oklahoma, and that’s where they lived. Somehow my grandparents got together in Keifer and the rest is history.
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DELLINGER: And here we are today, and here you are today.
WILEY: And here I am.
DELLINGER: Did you already say that you were in Miami and that’s where you went to school, so is that where you graduated from high school?
WILEY: I did, yes.
DELLINGER: And what year was that?
WILEY: 1973.
DELLINGER: What was your high school experience?
WILEY: Oh, high school is hard for kids. I had my good moments and my bad moments, I got to admit. I was a real shy kid, introverted. I had some good times. I wasn’t a serious student, I was not a good student. I regret that. I feel like I wasted a lot of time in high school, if you want to know the truth, and didn’t really catch my [00:13:00] stride until I got into college. My high school experience was a little weird like most high school kids’ experience. Teenage years can be a really tough time. I’m just glad we didn’t have the social media that we have now, because that must put an extreme amount of pressure on children. We didn’t put up with that. It was bad enough when you had extension phones
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in the house, getting calls. I guess you could say my high school experience was probably typical. I was involved in sports.
DELLINGER: What was your sport?
WILEY: Well, I played football for a couple years. I wrestled, and that was pretty much it. I did run track a little bit. Like I said, I didn’t make the most of my opportunities, I don’t feel like, and learned a valuable lesson from that as I became an adult about making the most of opportunities. [00:14:00] So I did learn something out of the experience.
DELLINGER: That’s the important thing.
WILEY: It is.
DELLINGER: So after high school, where did life take you in your pursuits of higher education?
WILEY: Well, I started out at, back then they called it Central State University. It was in Edmond. My sisters had gone to school there. My brother had just returned from Vietnam a couple of years before that, and he was up there. I thought well, I’ll go up there and I’ve
got family close by and that will be good. I didn’t enjoy it at Central. It was a suitcase college and I was living in the dorm. It was just not a typical college experience that I was looking for, wasn’t real happy there. So after a year I moved back to Miami and
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worked. I got a job at Safeway and I sacked groceries and rolled them out to the people’s cars and helped them, [00:15:00] they called them courtesy clerks, but that was a job I did.
I worked in a boat factory briefly, just long enough to know that I wanted to go back to college so I never had to work in a boat factory again. So that’s what I did, and I decided I wanted to go to OU. I thought that I wasn’t smart enough to go to OU. I thought that only the smartest kids went there, and like I said, I didn’t think my grades were indicative of my intelligence from high school, but I still didn’t think I – I didn’t have the confidence to go there. But I decided to do it one day and I got a lot of encouragement from my parents, and that’s what I did. Everything turned out all right. I graduated from OU in 1978, so took the year off. It took four years, plus I took the year off. The college experience stretched, I was on the five-year learning program in college.
DELLINGER: When you finished in 1978, what was your degree?
WILEY: History. I got a degree in what I was really interested in. I loved going to history class, [00:16:00] and I loved—I had some great professors at OU. Western history professors, European history professors, it was a great experience.
DELLINGER: And then where did life take you after OU?
WILEY: Well, I met a guy, well, he was my professor, actually, my last semester at college, and he was a great influence on me. His name was Phil Lujan. I don’t remember
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the class he taught, but he eventually became director of the first Native American Studies program at OU, if I remember right. That all happened after I graduated. He was just a professor at the time, and he had only been there for one semester. I took him my last semester at college and he taught us about Indian law. He was a graduate of the University of New Mexico Law School.
He had run the American Indian Law Center at UNM for a few years before he came to OU, and he was from Oklahoma. He grew up in the Rainy Mountain area. He’s Kiowa and Taos Indian. [00:17:00] He was a great professor. The first time I’d ever learned about sovereignty, inherent sovereignty. The Worcester case, it was the first time I had ever studied about any of those things. I didn’t know the first thing about it before then, and it just turned something on inside of me. When I graduated, he encouraged me to go out to New Mexico and go to law school there.
I thought well, I don’t know. I hadn’t even applied to go to law school out there, but at one point I just decided I had lived in Oklahoma my entire life, I’m ready for an adventure. So that fall after I graduated, I moved to Albuquerque, and as fate would have it, I got a job at the Albuquerque Indian School as a tutor, so I worked evenings tutoring the kids. They lived in their dorms and that’s where I ended up after I graduated. I went to Albuquerque, and then after a year the school moved up to [00:18:00] Sante Fe and they took over the old IAIA campus, Institute of American Indian Arts up in Sante Fe. So I worked there for a couple more years and then went to law school.
DELLINGER: So what year was it when you finished with your law degree?
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WILEY: 1985, I graduated from the University of New Mexico Law School. DELLINGER: Will you share a little bit about your family life? Wife and children?
WILEY: I married a woman named Ryan Pierce. I met her at the Sante Fe Indian School. We got married after my first semester of law school. It’s kind of a weird time to get married, I guess, but—
DELLINGER: People do it. Medical students do it, too.
WILEY: Yeah, I guess you’re right. They’ve got to go on living. But that’s what we did. [00:19:00] We have two children, one Adam, we call him Cebon. My dad started calling him Cebon when he was little and he went all through high school. Everybody who knows him and grew up with him calls him Cebon. He’s a lawyer in the San Francisco area now. He went to Stanford and graduated from undergraduate school there and graduated from law school at UCLA. He and his wife, Krystal, have a child, our first grandchild and only grandchild. His name is Leo, Leandro. He was born on April 9th of this year, 2022. That’s our one son.
We have a daughter, Carmen. Carmen lives in Camarillo, California and she works in Thousand Oaks. My wife’s from California originally. The kids grew up going out there a lot, and I think they just kinda, I don’t know, migrated. That’s the word I’m looking for, made their way. [00:20:00] Carmen is working her way through management with a major department store out there and doing real well. Both the kids are doing real
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well. They both grew up in McAlester, where I live now still. I moved to McAlester after I graduated from law school.
DELLINGER: Wow, so how many years have you been in McAlester then?
WILEY: Thirty-seven would make it, plus thirty-seven. It’ll be thirty-eight, I think, in May next year, thirty-eight. Took a twenty-month respite to Taos, so I went out there in about 1990 when my son was a baby, to become Assistant District Attorney in Taos County. We really missed New Mexico when we first came to Oklahoma. The weather was killing us. The humidity was so bad. People talk about how hot it is in New Mexico, but of course, that’s dry heat and they have the cool nights. There were a lot of things about New Mexico that we really missed.
But when we got [00:21:00] out there, I don’t know, I just didn’t like working in New Mexico professionally. I didn’t like the experience. I like the judges here better. I thought the lawyers, I won’t say they’re better. I just think that it was a different experience and it sat well with me to practice law in Oklahoma. Plus my wife would not have to work and she could stay home with our son, and so we decided after twenty months to come back to Oklahoma and just move back to McAlester in the house we’d moved out of, hadn’t sold it. Got my old job back and there I was.
DELLINGER: So now Ryan, your wife, you said you all met at the Albuquerque Indian School. What was her occupation?
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WILEY: She was a teacher there. She taught Special Ed for many, many years. Graduated from the University of New Mexico with a Special Ed degree, and taught a lot of Indian kids over her career. [00:22:00]
DELLINGER: Now I feel like I can’t do this interview with you without at least touching on McGirt v. Oklahoma. I would like for you, if you would, to just share what this case was about and why the decision made against the State of Oklahoma by the Supreme Court is so significant.
WILEY: Well, the case is about jurisdiction, and whether or not the state was going to eventually have promises it made, and the United States government’s promises made, whether those promises would be enforced. The case involved a—it was a criminal matter of a heinous crime, terrible crime committed by an Indian person against another Indian person within the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) [00:23:00] Nation. It’s significant because the case is a recognition of the Creek Nation’s jurisdiction over its reservation and over Indian people within its reservation. And that case is a recognition of that authority that was never extinguished, going back to there are several treaties, the 1866 Treaty, but the big one is the Enabling Act in the Oklahoma Constitution, where the State of Oklahoma promised that to become a state within the United States, it would not assert authority or jurisdiction over the Indian reservations. So it gave us what was promised.
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DELLINGER: I want to back up because I just realized that we really didn’t [00:24:00] get too much in depth about your law career. You said you came back to Oklahoma from working in New Mexico. You have spent time here at the Muscogee Nation. Will you just talk about that a little bit? What your job titles have been and responsibilities here at the Nation?
WILEY: Well, I practiced law for about twenty years in private practice, working for a big law firm. Then I ran my own office, had my own law firm. As I said, I was an Assistant District Attorney for a couple years in Taos, New Mexico. Then someone contacted me about the possibility of being the Attorney General here at the Nation. I thought about it and—well, let me go back before that. I’ll go back to the Supreme Court. I was actually in private practice and had been for ten years. I had my own law office, and I was [00:25:00] contacted by someone about being on the Supreme Court.
Bill Fife was the chief at the time, and he had a nomination pending, and they were looking for someone. I told them I would be interested, and in March of 1995 I went through the process, went through the interviews with the council. I was approved and I served on the Supreme Court here at the Nation from 1995 to 2005. Then in 2005, Chief AD Ellis approached me about being the Attorney General here. I decided I would do that. Then I became the Attorney General, served about five years as Attorney General.
Then went back to private practice, then came back again about two years later, served another term as Attorney General, then left again for four years, and then came back again two years ago in [00:26:00] 2000, January 1, 2000, as Attorney General. Served two years as Attorney General and Chief David Hill approached me about being
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the District Judge here in late 2021. I thought it over and decided that I’d really like the chance to work in the court system because I hadn’t really spent much time here, and when I did it was in the Supreme Court, which is a different type. It’s appellate work and not trial work. My interest really has been in trial work. I did a lot of that when I was in private practice and working for the big firm. I feel like my experience fits well here as the District Judge.
DELLINGER: Now I’m going to go back to McGirt. Once the Supreme Court decision was made in favor of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and as you just mentioned you were the Attorney General at that time, [00:27:00] what impact did that decision have on you as the Attorney General, and the staff in your office?
WILEY: Well, it had a tremendous impact. It was an emotional impact. When that case was decided—now the case before McGirt was Murphy, if you’ll recall. It was the very same issue, involving Patrick Murphy and whether one Indian committing a crime against another Indian, who has jurisdiction, if it’s on the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation? That question was the same, it was just not decided. I was not the Attorney General when that case was decided. Kevin Dellinger was during that phase. When I came in in 2000, six, seven months later, July 9, 2020, the McGirt case was decided. I remember being told that when Murphy was not decided, it was the big buildup and then a letdown because the court was deadlocked 4:4. [00:28:00]
In July of 2020, the McGirt case was actually decided because Justice Gorsuch, who had served on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals during the Patrick Murphy case and
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had to recuse himself when it came to the Supreme Court, was actually able to participate in the McGirt case. So his vote was the difference and it was 5:4 in our favor. I just remember the office being emotional. I remember talking to the AG Kevin Dellinger, and I give him credit because he was the AG when the cases came up and the Nation got involved. If he had not made that decision, we wouldn’t be celebrating that today.
We could’ve said we don’t want to be involved because we might not win the case. There were a lot of tribes that were hesitant to jump into the McGirt case [00:29:00] because of what was at stake. Well, if we win we’ve got all this jurisdiction that was promised us, but if we lose, look how much we lose. We’re not a reservation anymore, what are we? Are we a social club? What are we? So there was a lot at stake. That was a decision I give a lot of credit to Kevin for because had he not done that, we wouldn’t have been involved in the McGirt case.
He did and found a great lawyer, Riyaz Kanji up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Riyaz’s firm handled that case so well. I’m just really proud of the work he did and it reflected well on the Nation. But I just remember the emotions at the time, and I remember feeling a sense of I wish my dad were alive and I wish my grandmother were alive to know what this is about. Because my grandmother was alive and my grandfather was alive during allotment. They were teenagers, [00:30:00] so they saw their Nation greatly changed during their lifetime. I just thought of them a lot.
DELLINGER: Where does the McGirt decision stand today? We’re past the two-year point since that decision?
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WILEY: Well, there are a lot of fine-line nuances being adjusted. The state and several of the local governments have been very aggressive in challenging the Nation’s jurisdiction and all tribes’ jurisdictions. They still don’t want to give it up. They still don’t want to recognize the promises that their forebears made at the time of statehood. I think it’s despicable, quite frankly. I think we should be able to work these differences out. Now there are some local county, state, [00:31:00] I don’t want to paint a broad-brush picture, but those in control are definitely against tribal jurisdiction. They’ve made that clear.
And they’ve spent millions of dollars to challenge it, but that’s where we stand. We have to stand at the ready every moment because they’re going to try to take it away first chance they get. We can’t let down our guard at all, because too many people fought too hard to get to this point. That’s where we are today. We’re on guard.
DELLINGER: Thank you for sharing these things about that decision. How do you spend time away from the courtroom and your office?
WILEY: Well, I like to work out. I haven’t done as much of that lately. COVID had something to do with that, too. But the Choctaw Nation has a wellness center. I wish I could say the name in Choctaw, but I’m not even going to try. [00:32:00] But they have a wellness center and it’s in McAlester where I live. If you’re an Indian person, you don’t even have to be a member of the tribe, then you can sign up and you’re in. You don’t ever have to pay for it, and they have a great facility. They have great equipment. I like to go up there and exercise when I can. I have an office there where I like to go in and write.
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I do tribal court assessments with other courts. I work with another attorney on that, and every now and then we’ll go to different courts. She’ll invite me to go with her group to do assessments, they call them, of other courts around the country and make recommendations, try to help them get funding to improve and expand their court system, get them caught up maybe with electronic filing systems or whatever they may need, increased enhanced security. [00:33:00] I like to do that. I like to listen to music, and I like to watch old Westerns. That’s kinda fun, too. I don’t really have that much time because my drive from here to home is about an hour each way, so I do a lot of driving, a lot of sitting. Your day is gone before you know it.
DELLINGER: Is there anything else that you’d like to share about your life, your family, before we move onto the next part of our interview here?
WILEY: I can’t think of anything right away.
DELLINGER: Well, then we will go ahead and I’m going to ask you some questions now about your experiences with COVID-19 and the pandemic. The first thing that I’d like to ask is do you remember when and how, so going back to 2020, [00:34:00] do you remember when and how you first heard about the COVID-19 virus?
WILEY: I don’t remember when I heard about it. I just remember it was somewhere else and it didn’t affect us. I remember there was a lot of talk about this pandemic. I can’t recall a pandemic. I was around during the polio phase, polio vaccines and serums were
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just invented when I was a young child. That was all in the ‘50s, but I wasn’t old enough to know what was going on. I don’t even know if you call polio a pandemic. I’m not sure what scientists would define that as. But I remember hearing about it and it was in China.
I don’t even know if it had made it to New York by the time I first heard about it, but I just knew it was out there. That had happened, I think, in late 2019.
DELLINGER: So when you did first start hearing about it, [00:35:00] what were your thoughts? Were you concerned or not about it making its way into Oklahoma and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation?
WILEY: I don’t remember being particularly concerned. I remember the thought that it was going to be everywhere at some point, but I had no idea what that was going to involve at the time.
DELLINGER: Do you remember what some of the initial conversations were that you had with your family, friends, even coworkers about the virus?
WILEY: I don’t. I really don’t remember much about COVID and thinking much about COVID until everything shut down. There was kind of a buildup to it, and I remember thinking more and more about it. [00:36:00] We had, I don’t know if you’ll recall, but in early 2000, eight Indian nations filed suit against Governor Kevin Stitt because he was trying to terminate all of our gaming compacts. That’s another example of him taking on the tribes. But we sued him and that case was filed in federal court in the Western District
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of Oklahoma, up in Oklahoma City. The judge ordered the parties to engage in mediation, which is common in federal court. They make you go through a settlement process.
We engaged in mediation, we hired a mediator. The mediator came down to Oklahoma City. I think he had been in New York. I remember at the time, this was in early March of 2020, things had not been shut down but they were [00:37:00] picking up. We had eight tribes represented by their leadership and their attorneys, and we probably had fifty people in a huge conference room. This was in early March. Nobody was wearing a mask. We didn’t even know about masks then. I remember having huge bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere. That was our COVID protection. We knew about it because COVID had shown up in New York by then, and there was travel between New York and Oklahoma among the people in that room.
I remember starting to be concerned about that point, wondering just what was going on and how do we avoid it. I don’t remember people talking about masks at that time, and I don’t remember anybody in that room that day wearing a mask. I think things shut down probably within the week after that.
DELLINGER: Did you know after that if any of the folks who were at that meeting, [00:38:00] did any of them contract COVID?
WILEY: I don’t recall any of them contracting COVID. I don’t think COVID had made it to Oklahoma or been reported in Oklahoma by that point.
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DELLINGER: So when you first heard the words lockdown and shelter in place, which of course, are words that most of us have never heard before, what emotions did hearing these words make you feel?
WILEY: Well, I remember feeling a little worried and scared, scared for my family. Didn’t know how to handle any of this because never been through it before. But I just remember being a little worried about it and didn’t know how do you get through a pandemic? How do you get through a lockdown? But I was concerned, no doubt about it. [00:39:00]
DELLINGER: Do you remember there being anything specific that either happened or maybe you saw something in the media that made you realize the severity of the virus?
WILEY: Yeah, I remember specifically. We were running low on toilet paper, ironically. This was in March of 2020, and I was going to go down and get some toilet paper before I went to work. I went to Walmart, and this is probably about 6:30 in the morning, but Walmart was open twenty-four hours a day at that time. I think they’ve stopped since then at our local one. But when I pulled into the parking lot it was packed. It looked like a Saturday afternoon at 6:30 in the morning on a Wednesday, I think. I said what is this? I walk into Walmart and it’s like Black Friday. People were everywhere. I saw a police officer who I knew pretty well. I said what’s going on here? [00:40:00] He said it’s COVID.
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He said I hope you don’t need toilet paper, and that’s exactly what I went there for. So I said yeah, that’s why I’m here. Toilet paper aisle had been completely cleaned out. As you’ll recall, people went toilet paper crazy, so I didn’t get any toilet paper that day. That’s when it really hit me that this is serious.
DELLINGER: At that time, when the local and state orders were coming down about shelter in place, were you and your wife both able to shelter in place? Were you able to stay home at that time?
WILEY: Yes. Our accommodations here at the Nation were really great. My wife was retired. She had retired from teaching by then, so she was able to stay home. The Nation accommodated us well, and I give a lot of credit to the administration and the health system, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation [00:41:00] health system for protecting us.
DELLINGER: What was it like for you and your wife, having your children and a grandchild—I guess you didn’t have the grandchild when COVID first started—but having your children removed, way off in California? What was that like?
WILEY: Well, I was worried about them. Actually my daughter was in New Zealand at the time. She lived in New Zealand. She was on an adventure and went out to New Zealand and lived and worked for—the plan was to work a work visa for a year. I think she ended up coming back after nine or ten months. As it turns out, she’d have been safer in New Zealand because they had an extremely low rate and ours was much higher in the
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United States. She came back home. But I was worried about them. If you’re talking about when it first came out, I was really worried. They were both in areas where I thought there was more respect for [00:42:00] the dangerousness of COVID and the seriousness of COVID than what we were seeing here in Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: Will you talk a little bit about how, and again, especially in the early days of the pandemic, how it impacted your daily life? Some of the activities you weren’t able to do because of the pandemic?
WILEY: I was getting regular therapeutic massages because I’ve had back issues for years, and I stopped doing that. Stopped going to the wellness center and working out. Those were two big issues. That’s one big impact it had. I noticed that when I did come up to work—we were working a skeleton crew in the Attorney General’s office where we would have half the crew one day, we rotated them in and out. That was the plan that we were following at the time. In the Attorney General’s [00:43:00] office, the work didn’t stop. Just like at the court, just like for Lighthorse, just like for health, Children and Family Services. There are certain departments within the Nation that could not just shut down. We had to still offer services, so we had to come to work.
I remember the drive to work was lonely. I came up the Indian Nation Turnpike to come to the Nation from McAlester and I might see two or three cars on the sixty-mile drive. That was kinda nice, actually. That was one of the few good things about COVID. There was a lot less traffic then. But things had changed quite a bit.
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DELLINGER: During the first year of the pandemic, while the scientists and the medical profession were trying to figure out how to combat COVID-19, what were your personal safety measures to stay free from the virus, both at home and when you came into the office? Or really anywhere in public?
WILEY: Well, I constantly was washing my hands. [00:44:00] I wore a mask. I was a judge in the city of Krebs, Oklahoma during that time, and I remember the city was able to get a lot of the N-95 masks, so I was able to get access to those and started wearing those. Washed my hands a lot, tried to stay away from people, especially people who didn’t wear masks. Let’s see, what else did I do? I didn’t go out to eat. When I went to the gas station, even the pump made me paranoid, so I would get right back in my car and I kept a bottle of hand sanitizer in my car. I still have it in my car, and of course I would wipe down real good after I touched anything like that.
Another thing we did, when we did go to Walmart, [00:45:00] we would wipe down everything. This was before they were offering the online services where you can buy your groceries and pick them up, before that what we did was we came back and we had those little sanitary wipes. We would wipe down the outside of the bread, anything anybody had touched. A lot of people would think it was extreme, but neither my wife nor I got COVID, so it must’ve worked.
DELLINGER: Will you please share what is your knowledge and understanding about the COVID-19 virus, its effect on the human body if contracted?
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WILEY: I don’t know as much about it as a lot of people, thank God, because I never had it. I didn’t experience it, but I know it’s debilitating. I know that even if you survive it, I know that you have a lot better chance of surviving it if you’ve been vaccinated, and that if you [00:46:00] are hooked up to the breathing machines, intubated and hooked up to the breathing machines, that your chances of survival aren’t nearly as high. Some people do survive that. I know from reading articles and talking to people that if you survive COVID, you can experience what’s called long COVID, and that affects your memory, it affects your lungs, it affects your heart. It can affect your internal organs and infect your musculoskeletal system. It can do all sorts of debilitating damage to you long after you’ve gotten over actual COVID itself.
DELLINGER: So you’ve mentioned a couple times here that neither you nor your wife have had COVID. Your children haven’t had COVID, correct? [00:47:00]
WILEY: No, they did not.
DELLINGER: Have you had any extended family or friends?
WILEY: Yeah, I have. Now extended family, no. I’m not aware of any of my siblings getting COVID. Now their children, maybe, but I don’t know. I have a lot of friends and coworkers who’ve gotten COVID.
DELLINGER: Have you been vaccinated and boostered?
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WILEY: Four times. I think four. As many as you can be is how many times I’ve been, and I’ll go back for a fifth one if it takes one. I suspect it’ll be every year. Okay, I’ve had five vaccines.
DELLINGER: Why has it been important to you to get vaccinated?
WILEY: Well, because I believe in the science and I think that these people who study their whole lives, study infectious diseases, know more about it than I do or some bozo on the internet who’s living by memes and GIFs [00:48:00] and they get all their information from cute little phrases and funny photos. I’m listening to the scientists because I think they know more.
DELLINGER: Which vaccine did you receive?
WILEY: I got Moderna.
DELLINGER: Did you have any side effects?
WILEY: I had a sore arm when I got the first one, fairly sore. When I lifted my arm in the shower the next morning, I felt like I’d had a real strenuous workout. The others no, but the last time I got one, my fifth booster, the day after I felt real tired. I don’t know if that
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was affiliated with the booster, but that might be the only side effect. A little fatigue and a sore arm, and I think that’s a fair trade.
DELLINGER: You’ve touched on this a little bit. I’m going to ask you again, though. What are your thoughts about how the Muscogee (Creek) Nation leadership [00:49:00] has handled the pandemic in comparison to the State of Oklahoma?
WILEY: Oh, I think far superior on the Nation’s side. That’s evidenced by the fact that, I was real proud of our health department. They offered vaccines and boosters to everybody. You didn’t have to be a citizen of the Nation. We took care of our own first, obviously. But the health department opened it up to everyone, all teachers, all daycare workers. It didn’t matter. People were coming from all over. I remember when the health division ran that vaccine program at the Expo Center in Tulsa. People were coming from Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, it didn’t matter. They were coming from all over, and they were non-Indian people, a lot of them, mostly probably. The health department was [00:50:00] there ready to go, ready to serve them.
I remember there were positive reports coming out of that, reflecting well on the Nation. I think if the state had something to offer at the time and other states had something to offer at the time, they wouldn’t have been driving down from Missouri to get those vaccines, to come to the Muscogee Nation. That demonstrated to me that our healthcare system did a better job of addressing COVID than the Oklahoma Healthcare Department and probably most of the surrounding states where these people were coming from. They may have had vaccines, but they weren’t being distributed in the same way
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ours were. They weren’t as readily available as ours were. I’m really proud of the health department and the administration for handling it the way they did.
DELLINGER: What are your thoughts about COVID-19 ever completely going away?
WILEY: I think there will be variations of COVID-19 in the years to come, and I think it’ll be a lot like flu. [00:51:00] It’ll get to a point, I was stubborn about taking a flu shot until about five or six years ago. I was sicker, extremely sick, maybe as sick as I’ve ever been in my life, for two weeks. My wife and I both got really ill, and from that point on we started getting flu vaccines and haven’t been sick like that before. I think COVID is going to be the same way. I think we’re going to see various strains of COVID from here on out. Like the flu vaccine, they’re going to try to adjust the shots, the immunizations to whatever they’re predicting that strain is going to be. I think people are still going to get COVID. I think if you’re vaccinated against COVID, like the flu, you won’t be as ill as you might be otherwise. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a doctor. I’m talking from a layperson’s perspective, and those are my thoughts.
DELLINGER: At this [00:52:00] time are you engaging in a life that is more similar to what your life was like before the start of the COVID pandemic?
WILEY: Yes. Yes, I am.
DELLINGER: How so?
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WILEY: I don’t wear a mask really. I’m not proud of that. I just don’t do it anymore. I got tired of it. I wore one for two years plus and then started backing off as the numbers started decreasing. I don’t do that. I’ve gone back to working out, not as regularly as I should, but I’m not afraid to go back and work out anymore. They keep that place pretty clean, too. I have gone out to eat several times since then. My life is slowly adjusting back to what it was, not completely. I don’t go to big concerts or football games. I was kinda phasing out of that anyway. I’m getting to where I don’t like to be around a lot of big crowds.
DELLINGER: We’re down to [00:53:00] to our last two questions. For future generations of Muscogee who may find themselves trying to survive a global health and economic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, what words of advice or wisdom do you have for them about surviving and living with such a catastrophic event?
WILEY: Well, my words of advice to them would be don’t be afraid of the doctors and the scientists and what they tell you. Be smart about who you listen to. Listen to the people who know what they’re talking about. They’re experts for a reason. You are not going to go to a plumber for legal advice, so don’t go to a plumber for COVID advice. Go to the people who know and have the experience and have the medical degrees and the science degrees and know what they’re talking about. That would be my advice. Listen to the ones who know, and lot of times [00:54:00] you’re going to find out the ones who don’t know talk the loudest.
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That was my experience with COVID. From what I’ve seen, those are the ones who’ve suffered and died. Not everyone who got COVID was anti-vaccine, but a huge majority of those who passed away were anti-vaccine. I think that might be a different ending had they just listened to the experts.
DELLINGER: Excellent advice, thank you for that. In closing, is there anything else that you would like to share about your experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic?
WILEY: I don’t think I have anything else, nothing comes to mind. I know that it’s affected a lot, every phase of my life and most anyone else’s, I think. But I’m just fortunate that I haven’t contracted it or experienced it like some of the others. I don’t know why that is. I’ve been around people who’ve had it, [00:55:00] several people who had it, before they knew they had it, and I didn’t get it. I don’t know if I have whatever that gene is that people supposedly have a lower percentage or lower possibility of getting it. I sometimes wonder that I didn’t get it and my kids didn’t get it, and I don’t think my siblings got it. Sometimes I wonder maybe if we have that special anti-COVID gene where it’s a little harder for us to get it. I don’t know. I hope I never find out.
DELLINGER: We will wrap things up for today. Mvto. Thank you so much Judge Wiley for taking the time to do this and you continue to take care.
WILEY: Thank you very much, Midge. Thank you for your time.
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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: Mr. Roger Wiley
Interview by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
Date: November 23, 2023
Transcription: The Audio Transcription Company
Edited by: Ms. Midge Dellinger
MIDGE DELLINGER: [00:00:00] This is Midge Dellinger, oral historian for Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Today is November 23, 2022 and I am in Okmulgee, Oklahoma interviewing Muscogee citizen and Chief District Judge for the Muscogee (Creek) Nation District Court, Mr. Roger Wiley. I’m performing this interview on behalf of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation Historic & 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.”
Judge Wiley, thank you so much for taking time today to do this interview with me. We’re going to start with some questions about your life and your personal background. I want to start with where were you born?
JUDGE ROGER WILEY: I was born in Sapulpa, Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: And do you remember the hospital?
WILEY: It was called Curry Hospital. There were two hospitals in Sapulpa, and I was born in the smaller one, right on [00:01:00] Main Street.
DELLINGER: Now where did you grow up? In Sapulpa?
WILEY: I did grow up in Sapulpa, lived there until 1969 when I was fourteen years old. My dad had gotten a job, he went to night school, took him twelve years at Tulsa University to get a degree. He used his veteran’s benefits from the war for that, and once
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he got that degree he found steady employment. Before that it was factory work here and there, a lot of layoffs. He wasn’t permanently employed, but after he got his degree he was. Then he got a job with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Back in those days, I think the Bureau had a policy of not—I don’t know if they didn’t allow it, they certainly didn’t encourage tribal members to work with their own tribe.
He wanted to work in Okmulgee and commute from Sapulpa, but [00:02:00] they required him to locate with another tribe, so we moved up to Miami and I ended up attending high school freshman through senior year in Miami, Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: What is your father’s name?
WILEY: Harmon Wiley.
DELLINGER: Where did the Wileys come from?
WILEY: Well, my father’s family, my father was born in the Dustin area just north of Dustin on a little hill out there by our family cemetery. All his brothers came from that area. My grandmother came from the Henryetta area, and my grandfather came from the Dustin area. Before that, the Wileys came from Hanna, that Hanna/Dustin area. That’s where we came from after removal, of course.
DELLINGER: Do you know what your [00:03:00] tribal town and clan are?
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WILEY: Well, it would be through my grandmother. My dad’s full-blood Creek. My mother is non-Indian. She’s German, Irish and English, so we don’t inherit a clan through her. It would be through my grandmother. I guess purists would say you don’t really have a clan if your mother is not a member of a clan. But anyway, my grandmother’s clan, if we go that way, or town, would be New Tulsa, and her clan was Fuswv (Bird Clan).
DELLINGER: What else would you like to share about your father?
WILEY: He was a good man, quiet, hardworking, raised us well by example. He didn’t do a lot of talking and telling us how it should be. He really set an example for how to live a good life. He had a lot of respect, people loved him. He was quiet, like I said, [00:04:00] non-confrontational. When he passed away, by then we had moved back—my parents after they both retired, moved back from Miami to Sapulpa, where they both grew up. My dad’s father passed away when he was nine years old.
They left Dustin and my dad attended Yuchi Mission and graduated from Sapulpa High School like the rest of his family did, and so did my mother. When my dad had his funeral in Sapulpa, the church was packed. I thought that showed just the kind of respect that he had earned through a life of good living.
DELLINGER: That’s fantastic. Let’s talk a little bit about your mother. What’s your mother’s name and share a little bit about her.
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WILEY: My mother’s name was Anna Lee Snider. She was born in Keifer, which is three miles from Sapulpa. She was born in 1924. My dad was eight years older than my mom. My mom grew up, [00:05:00] she was in high school when the war started. She was from a hardworking family. My grandfather had a store in Keifer. During the oil boom days it was great. When the bust hit, he lost everything. Back then, they bought groceries on credit. I even remember that when I was a child. The grocer would have a box full of little receipt books and each one would have a name on it. The family would pay their bill when they had the money.
Well, they left town and ended up not paying my grandfather, so he had to find another line of work. He became the postmaster in Keifer. Eventually he became the court clerk in Creek County and held that office for twenty-eight years, I believe. Never lost an election there. He was well liked, too. My mom was from that family. My mom was real intelligent, but she didn’t have [00:06:00] the opportunities that a lot of women have now for scholarships. She was valedictorian of her class. She was extremely bright. Ended up, after we moved up to Miami when I was in high school we ended up, my mom got an opportunity to go to college because there’s a little junior college in Miami, Northeastern A&M.
She always wanted to go to college. She was forty-five years old, I think, at the time, so she got to go to college. She went there and excelled and won all the awards in math and science. I’m real proud of my mom, too.
DELLINGER: Do you have siblings?
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WILEY: I do. I have two sisters and a brother.
DELLINGER: Will you talk just a little bit about each one of them?
WILEY: Yeah, I’m the youngest in my family. My oldest sister is Grace, and she is—I won’t say ages, but anyway, she’s the oldest. A year behind her [00:07:00] in age is my brother, David. Then two years behind David, five years ahead of me, is my sister, Laura. We had a close relationship growing up. They still live in Oklahoma. My sister, Laura, passed away a little over a year ago, non-COVID related. She had cancer. We really miss her. I was very close to my sister, Laura, in particular.
DELLINGER: I want to go back, you have briefly touched on some of your grandparents, but I want to ask you if you would share a little bit about your grandparents on both your father and mother’s side.
WILEY: Well, I didn’t know my father’s father. He passed away when my dad was nine years old, and that’s when the family moved up to Sapulpa, so I didn’t get to know him. I knew my father’s mother. Her name was [00:08:00] Melissa Kennard and then became Melissa Wiley when she married my grandfather. She raised four children by herself. My grandfather passed away in 1925, and her oldest child was, I think, ten or twelve years old. My dad was about nine, and he was the second-oldest. She did that by herself and she spoke no English. That must’ve been very difficult. On a side note, my grandmother’s cousin was Elizabeth Sapulpa, who started the Rock Creek Indian Church
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in Sapulpa. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that church. It burned down many years ago, but fairly well known in the area.
It was an Indian church and she’s the one who encouraged my grandmother to bring the kids up to Sapulpa and put them in Yuchi Mission and get them into school. [00:09:00] That is how they ended up there. I was real close to my Grandma Wiley. We went to her house a lot. She didn’t have electricity when I was really young. I remember going to the cukuce outside to go to the bathroom, and it was scary to me, I remember. I was afraid I’d fall in. My dad was afraid, too, because he’d stand right there with me.
DELLINGER: What was her name again?
WILEY: Her name was Melissa Kennard Wiley. She was quite a woman, though, real strong and really missed her.
DELLINGER: So your father attended Yuchi Mission School?
WILEY: He did, and so did my aunt and my two uncles. They all attended Yuchi. At some point they transferred over to the public schools. I’m not sure when that happened. They actually graduated from Sapulpa High School, but I’m not sure what grade that happened in. [00:10:00] You want to know about my mother’s parents, too?
DELLINGER: Yes, please.
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WILEY: My grandfather Snider, his name was Henry Lee Snider, he came from Arkansas, a place called Natural Dam, Arkansas, which is just directly east across the border from right about where Stillwell is. Now it’s a national forest, it’s a beautiful area. But he was a really good man, honest man, well liked. He was a 32nd-degree mason, whichever the one is where you have to be elected. It’s the highest level. Like I said, he was a court clerk for twenty-eight years in Creek County and never lost the elections there. Was really a powerful local political figure, but quiet and humble. None of my family really stepped out and made a lot of noise. He was that way, too.
My Grandma Snider, her name was Anna Katherine Bäcker [00:11:00] Snider. My mother’s parents, they’re mostly German heritage and you can tell by their German names. Bäcker means baker in German and Snider means tailor. So they have German surnames. My mother was over half German. She came from Pennsylvania. Her family was a farming family. One of those deals, I think this was about in 1910 maybe, but the oil boom was just starting in Oklahoma. About that time, their barn burned down. This was in Warren County, Pennsylvania, which is extremely Northwest Pennsylvania, about 110 miles north of Pittsburgh, really cold up there.
But that’s where their family farm was. Their family had immigrated through New York into Northern Pennsylvania. When the barn burned down, of course the oil industry had already been big in Pennsylvania at the time, [00:12:00] and my grandfather found out there was work in Oklahoma. So they came down to Drumright, Oklahoma, and that’s where they lived. Somehow my grandparents got together in Keifer and the rest is history.
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DELLINGER: And here we are today, and here you are today.
WILEY: And here I am.
DELLINGER: Did you already say that you were in Miami and that’s where you went to school, so is that where you graduated from high school?
WILEY: I did, yes.
DELLINGER: And what year was that?
WILEY: 1973.
DELLINGER: What was your high school experience?
WILEY: Oh, high school is hard for kids. I had my good moments and my bad moments, I got to admit. I was a real shy kid, introverted. I had some good times. I wasn’t a serious student, I was not a good student. I regret that. I feel like I wasted a lot of time in high school, if you want to know the truth, and didn’t really catch my [00:13:00] stride until I got into college. My high school experience was a little weird like most high school kids’ experience. Teenage years can be a really tough time. I’m just glad we didn’t have the social media that we have now, because that must put an extreme amount of pressure on children. We didn’t put up with that. It was bad enough when you had extension phones
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in the house, getting calls. I guess you could say my high school experience was probably typical. I was involved in sports.
DELLINGER: What was your sport?
WILEY: Well, I played football for a couple years. I wrestled, and that was pretty much it. I did run track a little bit. Like I said, I didn’t make the most of my opportunities, I don’t feel like, and learned a valuable lesson from that as I became an adult about making the most of opportunities. [00:14:00] So I did learn something out of the experience.
DELLINGER: That’s the important thing.
WILEY: It is.
DELLINGER: So after high school, where did life take you in your pursuits of higher education?
WILEY: Well, I started out at, back then they called it Central State University. It was in Edmond. My sisters had gone to school there. My brother had just returned from Vietnam a couple of years before that, and he was up there. I thought well, I’ll go up there and I’ve
got family close by and that will be good. I didn’t enjoy it at Central. It was a suitcase college and I was living in the dorm. It was just not a typical college experience that I was looking for, wasn’t real happy there. So after a year I moved back to Miami and
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worked. I got a job at Safeway and I sacked groceries and rolled them out to the people’s cars and helped them, [00:15:00] they called them courtesy clerks, but that was a job I did.
I worked in a boat factory briefly, just long enough to know that I wanted to go back to college so I never had to work in a boat factory again. So that’s what I did, and I decided I wanted to go to OU. I thought that I wasn’t smart enough to go to OU. I thought that only the smartest kids went there, and like I said, I didn’t think my grades were indicative of my intelligence from high school, but I still didn’t think I – I didn’t have the confidence to go there. But I decided to do it one day and I got a lot of encouragement from my parents, and that’s what I did. Everything turned out all right. I graduated from OU in 1978, so took the year off. It took four years, plus I took the year off. The college experience stretched, I was on the five-year learning program in college.
DELLINGER: When you finished in 1978, what was your degree?
WILEY: History. I got a degree in what I was really interested in. I loved going to history class, [00:16:00] and I loved—I had some great professors at OU. Western history professors, European history professors, it was a great experience.
DELLINGER: And then where did life take you after OU?
WILEY: Well, I met a guy, well, he was my professor, actually, my last semester at college, and he was a great influence on me. His name was Phil Lujan. I don’t remember
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the class he taught, but he eventually became director of the first Native American Studies program at OU, if I remember right. That all happened after I graduated. He was just a professor at the time, and he had only been there for one semester. I took him my last semester at college and he taught us about Indian law. He was a graduate of the University of New Mexico Law School.
He had run the American Indian Law Center at UNM for a few years before he came to OU, and he was from Oklahoma. He grew up in the Rainy Mountain area. He’s Kiowa and Taos Indian. [00:17:00] He was a great professor. The first time I’d ever learned about sovereignty, inherent sovereignty. The Worcester case, it was the first time I had ever studied about any of those things. I didn’t know the first thing about it before then, and it just turned something on inside of me. When I graduated, he encouraged me to go out to New Mexico and go to law school there.
I thought well, I don’t know. I hadn’t even applied to go to law school out there, but at one point I just decided I had lived in Oklahoma my entire life, I’m ready for an adventure. So that fall after I graduated, I moved to Albuquerque, and as fate would have it, I got a job at the Albuquerque Indian School as a tutor, so I worked evenings tutoring the kids. They lived in their dorms and that’s where I ended up after I graduated. I went to Albuquerque, and then after a year the school moved up to [00:18:00] Sante Fe and they took over the old IAIA campus, Institute of American Indian Arts up in Sante Fe. So I worked there for a couple more years and then went to law school.
DELLINGER: So what year was it when you finished with your law degree?
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WILEY: 1985, I graduated from the University of New Mexico Law School. DELLINGER: Will you share a little bit about your family life? Wife and children?
WILEY: I married a woman named Ryan Pierce. I met her at the Sante Fe Indian School. We got married after my first semester of law school. It’s kind of a weird time to get married, I guess, but—
DELLINGER: People do it. Medical students do it, too.
WILEY: Yeah, I guess you’re right. They’ve got to go on living. But that’s what we did. [00:19:00] We have two children, one Adam, we call him Cebon. My dad started calling him Cebon when he was little and he went all through high school. Everybody who knows him and grew up with him calls him Cebon. He’s a lawyer in the San Francisco area now. He went to Stanford and graduated from undergraduate school there and graduated from law school at UCLA. He and his wife, Krystal, have a child, our first grandchild and only grandchild. His name is Leo, Leandro. He was born on April 9th of this year, 2022. That’s our one son.
We have a daughter, Carmen. Carmen lives in Camarillo, California and she works in Thousand Oaks. My wife’s from California originally. The kids grew up going out there a lot, and I think they just kinda, I don’t know, migrated. That’s the word I’m looking for, made their way. [00:20:00] Carmen is working her way through management with a major department store out there and doing real well. Both the kids are doing real
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well. They both grew up in McAlester, where I live now still. I moved to McAlester after I graduated from law school.
DELLINGER: Wow, so how many years have you been in McAlester then?
WILEY: Thirty-seven would make it, plus thirty-seven. It’ll be thirty-eight, I think, in May next year, thirty-eight. Took a twenty-month respite to Taos, so I went out there in about 1990 when my son was a baby, to become Assistant District Attorney in Taos County. We really missed New Mexico when we first came to Oklahoma. The weather was killing us. The humidity was so bad. People talk about how hot it is in New Mexico, but of course, that’s dry heat and they have the cool nights. There were a lot of things about New Mexico that we really missed.
But when we got [00:21:00] out there, I don’t know, I just didn’t like working in New Mexico professionally. I didn’t like the experience. I like the judges here better. I thought the lawyers, I won’t say they’re better. I just think that it was a different experience and it sat well with me to practice law in Oklahoma. Plus my wife would not have to work and she could stay home with our son, and so we decided after twenty months to come back to Oklahoma and just move back to McAlester in the house we’d moved out of, hadn’t sold it. Got my old job back and there I was.
DELLINGER: So now Ryan, your wife, you said you all met at the Albuquerque Indian School. What was her occupation?
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WILEY: She was a teacher there. She taught Special Ed for many, many years. Graduated from the University of New Mexico with a Special Ed degree, and taught a lot of Indian kids over her career. [00:22:00]
DELLINGER: Now I feel like I can’t do this interview with you without at least touching on McGirt v. Oklahoma. I would like for you, if you would, to just share what this case was about and why the decision made against the State of Oklahoma by the Supreme Court is so significant.
WILEY: Well, the case is about jurisdiction, and whether or not the state was going to eventually have promises it made, and the United States government’s promises made, whether those promises would be enforced. The case involved a—it was a criminal matter of a heinous crime, terrible crime committed by an Indian person against another Indian person within the boundaries of the Muscogee (Creek) [00:23:00] Nation. It’s significant because the case is a recognition of the Creek Nation’s jurisdiction over its reservation and over Indian people within its reservation. And that case is a recognition of that authority that was never extinguished, going back to there are several treaties, the 1866 Treaty, but the big one is the Enabling Act in the Oklahoma Constitution, where the State of Oklahoma promised that to become a state within the United States, it would not assert authority or jurisdiction over the Indian reservations. So it gave us what was promised.
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DELLINGER: I want to back up because I just realized that we really didn’t [00:24:00] get too much in depth about your law career. You said you came back to Oklahoma from working in New Mexico. You have spent time here at the Muscogee Nation. Will you just talk about that a little bit? What your job titles have been and responsibilities here at the Nation?
WILEY: Well, I practiced law for about twenty years in private practice, working for a big law firm. Then I ran my own office, had my own law firm. As I said, I was an Assistant District Attorney for a couple years in Taos, New Mexico. Then someone contacted me about the possibility of being the Attorney General here at the Nation. I thought about it and—well, let me go back before that. I’ll go back to the Supreme Court. I was actually in private practice and had been for ten years. I had my own law office, and I was [00:25:00] contacted by someone about being on the Supreme Court.
Bill Fife was the chief at the time, and he had a nomination pending, and they were looking for someone. I told them I would be interested, and in March of 1995 I went through the process, went through the interviews with the council. I was approved and I served on the Supreme Court here at the Nation from 1995 to 2005. Then in 2005, Chief AD Ellis approached me about being the Attorney General here. I decided I would do that. Then I became the Attorney General, served about five years as Attorney General.
Then went back to private practice, then came back again about two years later, served another term as Attorney General, then left again for four years, and then came back again two years ago in [00:26:00] 2000, January 1, 2000, as Attorney General. Served two years as Attorney General and Chief David Hill approached me about being
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the District Judge here in late 2021. I thought it over and decided that I’d really like the chance to work in the court system because I hadn’t really spent much time here, and when I did it was in the Supreme Court, which is a different type. It’s appellate work and not trial work. My interest really has been in trial work. I did a lot of that when I was in private practice and working for the big firm. I feel like my experience fits well here as the District Judge.
DELLINGER: Now I’m going to go back to McGirt. Once the Supreme Court decision was made in favor of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, and as you just mentioned you were the Attorney General at that time, [00:27:00] what impact did that decision have on you as the Attorney General, and the staff in your office?
WILEY: Well, it had a tremendous impact. It was an emotional impact. When that case was decided—now the case before McGirt was Murphy, if you’ll recall. It was the very same issue, involving Patrick Murphy and whether one Indian committing a crime against another Indian, who has jurisdiction, if it’s on the Muscogee (Creek) Nation reservation? That question was the same, it was just not decided. I was not the Attorney General when that case was decided. Kevin Dellinger was during that phase. When I came in in 2000, six, seven months later, July 9, 2020, the McGirt case was decided. I remember being told that when Murphy was not decided, it was the big buildup and then a letdown because the court was deadlocked 4:4. [00:28:00]
In July of 2020, the McGirt case was actually decided because Justice Gorsuch, who had served on the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals during the Patrick Murphy case and
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had to recuse himself when it came to the Supreme Court, was actually able to participate in the McGirt case. So his vote was the difference and it was 5:4 in our favor. I just remember the office being emotional. I remember talking to the AG Kevin Dellinger, and I give him credit because he was the AG when the cases came up and the Nation got involved. If he had not made that decision, we wouldn’t be celebrating that today.
We could’ve said we don’t want to be involved because we might not win the case. There were a lot of tribes that were hesitant to jump into the McGirt case [00:29:00] because of what was at stake. Well, if we win we’ve got all this jurisdiction that was promised us, but if we lose, look how much we lose. We’re not a reservation anymore, what are we? Are we a social club? What are we? So there was a lot at stake. That was a decision I give a lot of credit to Kevin for because had he not done that, we wouldn’t have been involved in the McGirt case.
He did and found a great lawyer, Riyaz Kanji up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and Riyaz’s firm handled that case so well. I’m just really proud of the work he did and it reflected well on the Nation. But I just remember the emotions at the time, and I remember feeling a sense of I wish my dad were alive and I wish my grandmother were alive to know what this is about. Because my grandmother was alive and my grandfather was alive during allotment. They were teenagers, [00:30:00] so they saw their Nation greatly changed during their lifetime. I just thought of them a lot.
DELLINGER: Where does the McGirt decision stand today? We’re past the two-year point since that decision?
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WILEY: Well, there are a lot of fine-line nuances being adjusted. The state and several of the local governments have been very aggressive in challenging the Nation’s jurisdiction and all tribes’ jurisdictions. They still don’t want to give it up. They still don’t want to recognize the promises that their forebears made at the time of statehood. I think it’s despicable, quite frankly. I think we should be able to work these differences out. Now there are some local county, state, [00:31:00] I don’t want to paint a broad-brush picture, but those in control are definitely against tribal jurisdiction. They’ve made that clear.
And they’ve spent millions of dollars to challenge it, but that’s where we stand. We have to stand at the ready every moment because they’re going to try to take it away first chance they get. We can’t let down our guard at all, because too many people fought too hard to get to this point. That’s where we are today. We’re on guard.
DELLINGER: Thank you for sharing these things about that decision. How do you spend time away from the courtroom and your office?
WILEY: Well, I like to work out. I haven’t done as much of that lately. COVID had something to do with that, too. But the Choctaw Nation has a wellness center. I wish I could say the name in Choctaw, but I’m not even going to try. [00:32:00] But they have a wellness center and it’s in McAlester where I live. If you’re an Indian person, you don’t even have to be a member of the tribe, then you can sign up and you’re in. You don’t ever have to pay for it, and they have a great facility. They have great equipment. I like to go up there and exercise when I can. I have an office there where I like to go in and write.
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I do tribal court assessments with other courts. I work with another attorney on that, and every now and then we’ll go to different courts. She’ll invite me to go with her group to do assessments, they call them, of other courts around the country and make recommendations, try to help them get funding to improve and expand their court system, get them caught up maybe with electronic filing systems or whatever they may need, increased enhanced security. [00:33:00] I like to do that. I like to listen to music, and I like to watch old Westerns. That’s kinda fun, too. I don’t really have that much time because my drive from here to home is about an hour each way, so I do a lot of driving, a lot of sitting. Your day is gone before you know it.
DELLINGER: Is there anything else that you’d like to share about your life, your family, before we move onto the next part of our interview here?
WILEY: I can’t think of anything right away.
DELLINGER: Well, then we will go ahead and I’m going to ask you some questions now about your experiences with COVID-19 and the pandemic. The first thing that I’d like to ask is do you remember when and how, so going back to 2020, [00:34:00] do you remember when and how you first heard about the COVID-19 virus?
WILEY: I don’t remember when I heard about it. I just remember it was somewhere else and it didn’t affect us. I remember there was a lot of talk about this pandemic. I can’t recall a pandemic. I was around during the polio phase, polio vaccines and serums were
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just invented when I was a young child. That was all in the ‘50s, but I wasn’t old enough to know what was going on. I don’t even know if you call polio a pandemic. I’m not sure what scientists would define that as. But I remember hearing about it and it was in China.
I don’t even know if it had made it to New York by the time I first heard about it, but I just knew it was out there. That had happened, I think, in late 2019.
DELLINGER: So when you did first start hearing about it, [00:35:00] what were your thoughts? Were you concerned or not about it making its way into Oklahoma and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation?
WILEY: I don’t remember being particularly concerned. I remember the thought that it was going to be everywhere at some point, but I had no idea what that was going to involve at the time.
DELLINGER: Do you remember what some of the initial conversations were that you had with your family, friends, even coworkers about the virus?
WILEY: I don’t. I really don’t remember much about COVID and thinking much about COVID until everything shut down. There was kind of a buildup to it, and I remember thinking more and more about it. [00:36:00] We had, I don’t know if you’ll recall, but in early 2000, eight Indian nations filed suit against Governor Kevin Stitt because he was trying to terminate all of our gaming compacts. That’s another example of him taking on the tribes. But we sued him and that case was filed in federal court in the Western District
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of Oklahoma, up in Oklahoma City. The judge ordered the parties to engage in mediation, which is common in federal court. They make you go through a settlement process.
We engaged in mediation, we hired a mediator. The mediator came down to Oklahoma City. I think he had been in New York. I remember at the time, this was in early March of 2020, things had not been shut down but they were [00:37:00] picking up. We had eight tribes represented by their leadership and their attorneys, and we probably had fifty people in a huge conference room. This was in early March. Nobody was wearing a mask. We didn’t even know about masks then. I remember having huge bottles of hand sanitizer everywhere. That was our COVID protection. We knew about it because COVID had shown up in New York by then, and there was travel between New York and Oklahoma among the people in that room.
I remember starting to be concerned about that point, wondering just what was going on and how do we avoid it. I don’t remember people talking about masks at that time, and I don’t remember anybody in that room that day wearing a mask. I think things shut down probably within the week after that.
DELLINGER: Did you know after that if any of the folks who were at that meeting, [00:38:00] did any of them contract COVID?
WILEY: I don’t recall any of them contracting COVID. I don’t think COVID had made it to Oklahoma or been reported in Oklahoma by that point.
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DELLINGER: So when you first heard the words lockdown and shelter in place, which of course, are words that most of us have never heard before, what emotions did hearing these words make you feel?
WILEY: Well, I remember feeling a little worried and scared, scared for my family. Didn’t know how to handle any of this because never been through it before. But I just remember being a little worried about it and didn’t know how do you get through a pandemic? How do you get through a lockdown? But I was concerned, no doubt about it. [00:39:00]
DELLINGER: Do you remember there being anything specific that either happened or maybe you saw something in the media that made you realize the severity of the virus?
WILEY: Yeah, I remember specifically. We were running low on toilet paper, ironically. This was in March of 2020, and I was going to go down and get some toilet paper before I went to work. I went to Walmart, and this is probably about 6:30 in the morning, but Walmart was open twenty-four hours a day at that time. I think they’ve stopped since then at our local one. But when I pulled into the parking lot it was packed. It looked like a Saturday afternoon at 6:30 in the morning on a Wednesday, I think. I said what is this? I walk into Walmart and it’s like Black Friday. People were everywhere. I saw a police officer who I knew pretty well. I said what’s going on here? [00:40:00] He said it’s COVID.
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He said I hope you don’t need toilet paper, and that’s exactly what I went there for. So I said yeah, that’s why I’m here. Toilet paper aisle had been completely cleaned out. As you’ll recall, people went toilet paper crazy, so I didn’t get any toilet paper that day. That’s when it really hit me that this is serious.
DELLINGER: At that time, when the local and state orders were coming down about shelter in place, were you and your wife both able to shelter in place? Were you able to stay home at that time?
WILEY: Yes. Our accommodations here at the Nation were really great. My wife was retired. She had retired from teaching by then, so she was able to stay home. The Nation accommodated us well, and I give a lot of credit to the administration and the health system, the Muscogee (Creek) Nation [00:41:00] health system for protecting us.
DELLINGER: What was it like for you and your wife, having your children and a grandchild—I guess you didn’t have the grandchild when COVID first started—but having your children removed, way off in California? What was that like?
WILEY: Well, I was worried about them. Actually my daughter was in New Zealand at the time. She lived in New Zealand. She was on an adventure and went out to New Zealand and lived and worked for—the plan was to work a work visa for a year. I think she ended up coming back after nine or ten months. As it turns out, she’d have been safer in New Zealand because they had an extremely low rate and ours was much higher in the
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United States. She came back home. But I was worried about them. If you’re talking about when it first came out, I was really worried. They were both in areas where I thought there was more respect for [00:42:00] the dangerousness of COVID and the seriousness of COVID than what we were seeing here in Oklahoma.
DELLINGER: Will you talk a little bit about how, and again, especially in the early days of the pandemic, how it impacted your daily life? Some of the activities you weren’t able to do because of the pandemic?
WILEY: I was getting regular therapeutic massages because I’ve had back issues for years, and I stopped doing that. Stopped going to the wellness center and working out. Those were two big issues. That’s one big impact it had. I noticed that when I did come up to work—we were working a skeleton crew in the Attorney General’s office where we would have half the crew one day, we rotated them in and out. That was the plan that we were following at the time. In the Attorney General’s [00:43:00] office, the work didn’t stop. Just like at the court, just like for Lighthorse, just like for health, Children and Family Services. There are certain departments within the Nation that could not just shut down. We had to still offer services, so we had to come to work.
I remember the drive to work was lonely. I came up the Indian Nation Turnpike to come to the Nation from McAlester and I might see two or three cars on the sixty-mile drive. That was kinda nice, actually. That was one of the few good things about COVID. There was a lot less traffic then. But things had changed quite a bit.
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DELLINGER: During the first year of the pandemic, while the scientists and the medical profession were trying to figure out how to combat COVID-19, what were your personal safety measures to stay free from the virus, both at home and when you came into the office? Or really anywhere in public?
WILEY: Well, I constantly was washing my hands. [00:44:00] I wore a mask. I was a judge in the city of Krebs, Oklahoma during that time, and I remember the city was able to get a lot of the N-95 masks, so I was able to get access to those and started wearing those. Washed my hands a lot, tried to stay away from people, especially people who didn’t wear masks. Let’s see, what else did I do? I didn’t go out to eat. When I went to the gas station, even the pump made me paranoid, so I would get right back in my car and I kept a bottle of hand sanitizer in my car. I still have it in my car, and of course I would wipe down real good after I touched anything like that.
Another thing we did, when we did go to Walmart, [00:45:00] we would wipe down everything. This was before they were offering the online services where you can buy your groceries and pick them up, before that what we did was we came back and we had those little sanitary wipes. We would wipe down the outside of the bread, anything anybody had touched. A lot of people would think it was extreme, but neither my wife nor I got COVID, so it must’ve worked.
DELLINGER: Will you please share what is your knowledge and understanding about the COVID-19 virus, its effect on the human body if contracted?
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WILEY: I don’t know as much about it as a lot of people, thank God, because I never had it. I didn’t experience it, but I know it’s debilitating. I know that even if you survive it, I know that you have a lot better chance of surviving it if you’ve been vaccinated, and that if you [00:46:00] are hooked up to the breathing machines, intubated and hooked up to the breathing machines, that your chances of survival aren’t nearly as high. Some people do survive that. I know from reading articles and talking to people that if you survive COVID, you can experience what’s called long COVID, and that affects your memory, it affects your lungs, it affects your heart. It can affect your internal organs and infect your musculoskeletal system. It can do all sorts of debilitating damage to you long after you’ve gotten over actual COVID itself.
DELLINGER: So you’ve mentioned a couple times here that neither you nor your wife have had COVID. Your children haven’t had COVID, correct? [00:47:00]
WILEY: No, they did not.
DELLINGER: Have you had any extended family or friends?
WILEY: Yeah, I have. Now extended family, no. I’m not aware of any of my siblings getting COVID. Now their children, maybe, but I don’t know. I have a lot of friends and coworkers who’ve gotten COVID.
DELLINGER: Have you been vaccinated and boostered?
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WILEY: Four times. I think four. As many as you can be is how many times I’ve been, and I’ll go back for a fifth one if it takes one. I suspect it’ll be every year. Okay, I’ve had five vaccines.
DELLINGER: Why has it been important to you to get vaccinated?
WILEY: Well, because I believe in the science and I think that these people who study their whole lives, study infectious diseases, know more about it than I do or some bozo on the internet who’s living by memes and GIFs [00:48:00] and they get all their information from cute little phrases and funny photos. I’m listening to the scientists because I think they know more.
DELLINGER: Which vaccine did you receive?
WILEY: I got Moderna.
DELLINGER: Did you have any side effects?
WILEY: I had a sore arm when I got the first one, fairly sore. When I lifted my arm in the shower the next morning, I felt like I’d had a real strenuous workout. The others no, but the last time I got one, my fifth booster, the day after I felt real tired. I don’t know if that
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was affiliated with the booster, but that might be the only side effect. A little fatigue and a sore arm, and I think that’s a fair trade.
DELLINGER: You’ve touched on this a little bit. I’m going to ask you again, though. What are your thoughts about how the Muscogee (Creek) Nation leadership [00:49:00] has handled the pandemic in comparison to the State of Oklahoma?
WILEY: Oh, I think far superior on the Nation’s side. That’s evidenced by the fact that, I was real proud of our health department. They offered vaccines and boosters to everybody. You didn’t have to be a citizen of the Nation. We took care of our own first, obviously. But the health department opened it up to everyone, all teachers, all daycare workers. It didn’t matter. People were coming from all over. I remember when the health division ran that vaccine program at the Expo Center in Tulsa. People were coming from Missouri, Kansas, Arkansas, Texas, it didn’t matter. They were coming from all over, and they were non-Indian people, a lot of them, mostly probably. The health department was [00:50:00] there ready to go, ready to serve them.
I remember there were positive reports coming out of that, reflecting well on the Nation. I think if the state had something to offer at the time and other states had something to offer at the time, they wouldn’t have been driving down from Missouri to get those vaccines, to come to the Muscogee Nation. That demonstrated to me that our healthcare system did a better job of addressing COVID than the Oklahoma Healthcare Department and probably most of the surrounding states where these people were coming from. They may have had vaccines, but they weren’t being distributed in the same way
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ours were. They weren’t as readily available as ours were. I’m really proud of the health department and the administration for handling it the way they did.
DELLINGER: What are your thoughts about COVID-19 ever completely going away?
WILEY: I think there will be variations of COVID-19 in the years to come, and I think it’ll be a lot like flu. [00:51:00] It’ll get to a point, I was stubborn about taking a flu shot until about five or six years ago. I was sicker, extremely sick, maybe as sick as I’ve ever been in my life, for two weeks. My wife and I both got really ill, and from that point on we started getting flu vaccines and haven’t been sick like that before. I think COVID is going to be the same way. I think we’re going to see various strains of COVID from here on out. Like the flu vaccine, they’re going to try to adjust the shots, the immunizations to whatever they’re predicting that strain is going to be. I think people are still going to get COVID. I think if you’re vaccinated against COVID, like the flu, you won’t be as ill as you might be otherwise. I’m not a scientist, I’m not a doctor. I’m talking from a layperson’s perspective, and those are my thoughts.
DELLINGER: At this [00:52:00] time are you engaging in a life that is more similar to what your life was like before the start of the COVID pandemic?
WILEY: Yes. Yes, I am.
DELLINGER: How so?
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WILEY: I don’t wear a mask really. I’m not proud of that. I just don’t do it anymore. I got tired of it. I wore one for two years plus and then started backing off as the numbers started decreasing. I don’t do that. I’ve gone back to working out, not as regularly as I should, but I’m not afraid to go back and work out anymore. They keep that place pretty clean, too. I have gone out to eat several times since then. My life is slowly adjusting back to what it was, not completely. I don’t go to big concerts or football games. I was kinda phasing out of that anyway. I’m getting to where I don’t like to be around a lot of big crowds.
DELLINGER: We’re down to [00:53:00] to our last two questions. For future generations of Muscogee who may find themselves trying to survive a global health and economic event such as the COVID-19 pandemic, what words of advice or wisdom do you have for them about surviving and living with such a catastrophic event?
WILEY: Well, my words of advice to them would be don’t be afraid of the doctors and the scientists and what they tell you. Be smart about who you listen to. Listen to the people who know what they’re talking about. They’re experts for a reason. You are not going to go to a plumber for legal advice, so don’t go to a plumber for COVID advice. Go to the people who know and have the experience and have the medical degrees and the science degrees and know what they’re talking about. That would be my advice. Listen to the ones who know, and lot of times [00:54:00] you’re going to find out the ones who don’t know talk the loudest.
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That was my experience with COVID. From what I’ve seen, those are the ones who’ve suffered and died. Not everyone who got COVID was anti-vaccine, but a huge majority of those who passed away were anti-vaccine. I think that might be a different ending had they just listened to the experts.
DELLINGER: Excellent advice, thank you for that. In closing, is there anything else that you would like to share about your experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic?
WILEY: I don’t think I have anything else, nothing comes to mind. I know that it’s affected a lot, every phase of my life and most anyone else’s, I think. But I’m just fortunate that I haven’t contracted it or experienced it like some of the others. I don’t know why that is. I’ve been around people who’ve had it, [00:55:00] several people who had it, before they knew they had it, and I didn’t get it. I don’t know if I have whatever that gene is that people supposedly have a lower percentage or lower possibility of getting it. I sometimes wonder that I didn’t get it and my kids didn’t get it, and I don’t think my siblings got it. Sometimes I wonder maybe if we have that special anti-COVID gene where it’s a little harder for us to get it. I don’t know. I hope I never find out.
DELLINGER: We will wrap things up for today. Mvto. Thank you so much Judge Wiley for taking the time to do this and you continue to take care.
WILEY: Thank you very much, Midge. Thank you for your time.
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END OF INTERVIEW
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