Weegie Clark, a member of the Koweta Indian Community in Oklahoma, wants out of the National Museum of American History. She has had enough of art she thinks she could make herself, enough of the $22 lunches. What she wants right now is to find a piece of shade to people-watch. Perhaps find a good bench on the Mall, “if that is what you call it, but it really doesn’t look like a mall.”
Clark laughs.
“I’m a people person. At home, I can just go out to Wal-Mart and sit in my car and just watch people.”
Washington is slightly better than the Wal-Mart parking lot for people-watching.
Clark, 59, and Bob Davis, 73, chairman of the Koweta community, push on an exit door, but it doesn’t open. A guard points to another door that’s unlocked.
The pair spy a shade-covered bench on the Mall. Before crossing the street, they bump into another member of their tour group who has come on the bus with them from eastern Oklahoma. Jerri Hudson, 78, tells them she and her husband made it uptown to the National Zoo to see one of the pandas eat bamboo.
Clark and Davis are impressed.
“We took a taxi.”
Clark and Davis are more impressed.
“And the taxi driver jumps the meter up $3 when you get in and shut the door,” Hudson says. “It jumps up $2 more when you stop. And you can’t understand a word he’s saying. Then he rolled the window down, and it blew my hair.”
“So the panda saw you on a bad hair day?” Davis says.
Hudson laughs and pats her hair, blond curls now wrapped carefully in a white chiffon scarf.
* * *
Clark and 31 members of the Koweta Indian Community, part of the larger Muscogee (Creek) Nation, have arrived in Washington just this morning. This is the first time many have been to the nation’s capital.
In 38 hours, the group has covered 1,268 miles. They have slept overnight in Nashville and in Staunton, Va. They have stayed up late telling scary stories of mystical “little Indian people” who live in rocks and fields and love dancing but do not like being disturbed. If disturbed, they say, the little people might cast a spell over strangers, and then the strangers might lose their way.
“The little Indian people come out at nighttime, and they run around and play,” Clark whispered on the bus.
She paused for reaction.
“Indians see things other people don’t see,” she said.
Clark wondered what she would see in Washington as the tour bus crossed the line between what she considers two worlds: Indian Country, where history is viewed through the lens of the dominated, and a place where history is told by the victors.
“I’m proud to be American, but I know a lot of things happen to our people that people overlook,” Clark says.
When the bus crossed the Potomac for the first time, the city appeared breathtaking in its splendor, with its monuments carved from stone and gilded lions guarding bridges. Out your left window, their guide said, the South Lawn of the White House. To the right, the Jefferson Memorial. The bus parked outside the Smithsonian’s Castle, and the visitors poured out, eager to visit the National Museum of the American Indian. But that is saved for the third day of their stay.
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