City of Lawton Invites Native Culture to "The Big Read"

At 10 a.m. on Saturday, November 5, The Museum of the Great Plains held The Big Read featuring “There There” by Tommy Orange.

The Big Read, which was put on by the City of Lawton for Native American Heritage Month, is centered around one book for the community.

Speakers at the event included Comanche Nation Elder Bill Shoemate and Chairman of McMahon Auditorium Authority Max Sasseen.

Comanche Nation Princes Michelle Nevaquaya and Jr. Princess Bluesky Toesee were also in attendance.

According to Jason Pourdrier, Arts and Humanities Administrator for the City of Lawton, the city received a National Endowment for the Arts grant to celebrate the month.

“Events like The Big Read, it's centered on the humanities and the arts, and I think the humanities and arts, is really what brings us all together,” he said. “It's part of life, it's part of culture, and I think that's one of the things that with basically every person that I've met that is affiliated with some kind of some tribe or some nation is that they talk about this interwoven connection between arts and culture, and so I think so many times modern western society likes to separate the two and so an event like this brings them together and just really shows how culture is arts and humanities and how it's part of life and there's so much to come out of each other.”

Poudrier said the book is based off of characters exploring their identities and dealing with serotypes.

“You know, I think oftentimes people get enough they get stereotypes because they look a certain way, and so people think like, ‘Oh, you know about this because of how you look,’ and so this book kind of dispels those myths,” he said. “But at the same time…it really helps us to explore ‘Well what is my identity?’…‘What is my heritage?’ and ‘What can I learn from that?’”

He said coming to events such as The Big Read is one way people can become more involved with the arts and humanities, but there are other ways as well.

“It's really going to the places it's coming to the Museum of the Great Plains; it's going to the National Comanche Nation Museum, which is right behind the auditorium. It's calling up the arts and humanities office and saying, ‘Hey, what do you have going on?’ because I think sometimes, especially with our social media circles, if we don't look outside of those, we aren't aware of what's going on so, we have to be willing to go outside of our circles, maybe go to someplace that we're unfamiliar with and just ask hey what's going on and you'd be surprised at how many things are going on not just because humanities not just within our office but the different tribes the different powwows Fort Sill there's so much going on in the community it just takes reaching out”

Events such as The Big Read are important to Poudrier, who is an Iraq war veteran and was also wounded in action, because literature has helped him cope with trauma and self-examination.

“I relate a lot of things to my military experience and trauma,” he said. “What helped me through that trauma was actually the humanities was a lot of poetry writing poetry learning about poetry greeting other authors who had been through experiences similar to mine. Going back to the world wars and even old English and even some Native American scholars and authors and really realizing that although each one of our experiences are unique to ourselves, chances are there's somebody who's been through a similar situation, and we can learn to learn about their experiences and how they went through it by reading by working into the humanities. And so, events like this, especially one that's focused on the book ‘There There’ by Tommy Orange, it's opening my eyes up to a culture that I wasn't aware of but didn't have much of an understanding of and ‘There There’ is a fictional story but based off of real characters real lives you get an idea of the introspection and what the human plight is of people other than your just yourself.”

He said it’s getting us out of our own heads and being able to look at something from somebody else’s perspective.

At 8 p.m. on Friday, November 18, there will be a play for 49 at McMahon Memorial Auditorium in Lawton, Oklahoma.