Gaining an understanding of that culture also means accepting sharp contrasts. “It’s an example of the complexity and sophistication of Indian culture,” he said. We’re just not used to listening at that micro level.” You take a recording and slow it down, “the quavering of their voices meshes with the drumbeat. And, Gelo explained, to the uninitiated ear, the wailing of a Comanche song seems disconnected from the drumbeat that accompanies it. He noted that the so-called “nonsense syllables” that Indians pronounce when singing their songs, properly called vocables, actually conform to strict grammatical rules. In the text he writes: “Plains Indian people are not defined only by their heritage and history, but also in the ways they have continued to live as a distinctive part of American and Canadian society into the 21st-century.”Īsked about details of Indian culture that surprise students, Gelo mentioned music. And, as he reminds his students, the Plains Indians are not a people frozen in time. In writing the book, Gelo wanted to take his students beyond the stereotypical images that many of them held about Plains Indians, like the image of the noble, almost superhuman mystic, or in contrast, the whooping, torturing savage. The textbook became more a project for nights and weekends.” But the main reason it took so long is that, just as I signed the book contract, I also went into full-time administration. I felt I had to publish some other things during that time. “It turned out to be, I’m sorry to say, about nine years. “I thought it would take three years,” he said, laughing. From these materials, he decided, it would be easy to write his own textbook.īut few things are simple, let alone the creation of a new book. The lecture notes evolved into what looked like a textbook outline-13 chapters that corresponded neatly with the standard 15-week semester. He began writing highly detailed lectures to fill in the blanks. “There was a pretty good book, but it was written in the 1950s and hadn’t really been updated,” Gelo said. As he taught the popular undergraduate course, however, he became dissatisfied with the available textbooks. So when Gelo was recruited by UTSA as an assistant professor of anthropology in 1988, he was naturally asked to teach a course titled Indians of the Great Plains. And he was invited to write the Comanche entry in the Human Relations Area File at Yale University, the premier reference resource for world ethnography. His research branched out to include other tribes, including the Kiowa, Cheyenne, Wichita, Alabama-Coushatta, Kickapoo, and Tigua. He also translated an 1865 Spanish-Comanche dictionary and collaborated on a book of reservation-era photos owned by novelist Larry McMurtry. Over the years, Gelo, now Dean of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts, drew on these experiences to publish books and articles on such subjects as Comanche music and mythology, historical photographs, and Indian geographical knowledge of Texas. In 1989 he was inducted into Esa Rosa, a warrior society named for Comanche leader White Wolf, and in 1998 he was named Ambassador to the Comanche Nation by the tribal chairman. He gathered tribal stories, tended horses, learned to sing and dance in the Comanche style, attended ceremonies, and gained some grasp of the fast-fading native language. He returned almost every summer, then during other times of the year, usually living in a Comanche household. When the matriarch of Gelo’s first host family, a revered medicine woman, adopted him as a grandson, his immersion in Comanche culture intensified. “They were very welcoming-some of the most genuine and good-humored people I’ve ever spent time with,” Gelo said. Powers had advised that, while there was already much literature about the Sioux, the Comanches were not yet well studied. Powers, a noted scholar of the Sioux culture. He had traveled to Oklahoma at the suggestion of his mentor at Rutgers University, William K. I drove around knocking on doors until somebody said, ‘Oh, yeah, they live down this road and around that corner,’” Gelo explained. I was told that they lived ‘east of Cyril,’ so I found Cyril on the map and drove down from New Jersey. “The first Comanches I met lived near Cyril, Oklahoma. Gelo’s new book, Indians of the Great Plains, is a major milestone on what has become a 30-year journey to document some of the world’s most colorful tribal cultures. His destination was an isolated Native American community that would prove, decades later, to set the foundation for a rewarding academic career. Turning onto a remote gravel road in rural Oklahoma in the summer of 1982, Dan Gelo had no idea where it would eventually lead. He goes because he wants to discover his limits.
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