Memory's Meshes: Ardmore, Oklahoma and the Echoes of Time

Elara stood on B Street NE, the railroad tracks humming faintly behind her like an unfinished sentence, their metallic groan vibrating through the parched earth. The house loomed small, weathered wood buckling under time's relentless weight, its faded clapboards splintering like cracked porcelain. Dust swirled in the drought-stricken air, coating her tongue with a gritty, forgotten taste. "Memory is just erasure," she murmured to herself, echoing Derrida's trace—the present always haunted by what's absent, each recollection a deferral of meaning. She touched the peeling doorframe, rough flakes catching under her nails, and the scene dissolved into haze.

Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025

Inside, butterflies pinned under glass caught the slanting light, their iridescent wings frozen in eternal flight, remnants from Aunt Jorena's collection. Snapdragons drooped in a forgotten vase, their petals curling like brittle paper. On the side of the house, the fig tree bowed heavy in summer's haze, ripe fruits splitting open under the sun's merciless glare, purple skins weeping sweet, sticky juice that dripped onto the cracked soil below. The air thickened with their overripe scent—cloying, almost fermented, mingling with the faint rot of fallen leaves. "Those figs were abundance itself," Grandmother's voice echoed in her mind, a whisper carried on the wind, "but time devours them, like Baudrillard's simulacrum—the real fruit gone, only the hyperreal memory lingers, sweeter in absence." Elara reached out, imagining the soft give of the skin under her fingers, the burst of warm pulp on her tongue, a fleeting sweetness that masked the underlying decay. The backyard garden stretched as a faded Eden, zinnias wilting in the heat, periwinkles nodding under dust, their colors muted like old film stock.

She wandered to the detached garage, dim and musty, shadows pooling in corners heavy with the smell of oil and aged wood. There, the old agitator washing machine squatted like a mechanical beast, its enamel chipped and cold to the touch. Beside it, the hand-cranked wringer gleamed dangerously, rollers slick with residue, ready to catch fingers in their merciless, grinding grip—a vise of steel and rubber that promised pain. "Technology reveals the world," Elara whispered, invoking Heidegger's essence of techne, "but it endangers us, enframing our hands in its gears—nothing safe, everything a standing-reserve for harm, reducing life to calculable resources." Grandmother had warned her once, her voice sharp over the machine's rhythmic churn: "Turn that crank slow, child, or it'll claim your flesh, pull you into the mechanism of the everyday." The danger was existential, a 20th-century peril hidden in domestic tools, power lurking in the hum of progress, the air buzzing with latent threat.

Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025

In Antonioni's lingering gaze, the world unfolded slowly—alienation in every empty space. She wandered to the Depot District, streets eerily silent under the relentless sun, the pavement radiating heat that shimmered like a mirage. Boutiques with Tuesday-Saturday signs stared blankly through grimy windows, their displays frozen in contrived charm. A lone festival banner fluttered listlessly, fabric whispering against the breeze. "This revitalization is hyperreality," Elara said aloud to a passing shadow, channeling Baudrillard again, her words swallowed by the void. "Oil booms in 1913, trolleys clanging through dust-choked air—now it's all cute facades over abandonment, a simulation of life where commerce once pulsed." An old man on a bench nodded, or maybe he didn't, his face weathered like the cracked sidewalks. "Power erases the archive," he grumbled, Foucauldian wisdom in his drawl, cigarette smoke curling acrid into the stillness. "Segregated streets, Colored Town across the tracks. Chickasaw freedmen turned sharecroppers, their stories buried under interstates, voices silenced in the roar of engines."

Crossing the elevated road, tires thumping over seams, she met the sign head-on: "Colored Town," stark white letters on rusted metal, greeting those who dared pass over the rails—a literal decree, segregation etched in iron and paint, unyielding as the tracks below. Houses stood prouder on C Street, some boarded with plywood scarred by weather, but others defiant, larger than the white-side ruins, their porches creaking under invisible weight. Pit bulls barked from yards, chains rattling like distant thunder, the air sharp with the scent of wild brush and untamed earth. "Erasure is selective," Elara whispered, her breath fogging the car window. "Foucault would say power inscribes history on the land—east side crumbles slower because resilience was forged in exclusion, bodies marked by the divide." A woman on a porch waved, or perhaps it was the wind rustling faded curtains. "Milo's ghosts linger," the woman called, her voice carrying over the hum of a distant train. "Sharecroppers to landowners, but memory delays meaning—Derrida's différance. What you see differs from what was, each glance a postponement."

photo by Susan Smith Nash 2025

The Arbuckle Mountains rose in the distance, jagged limestone outcrops piercing the horizon, wind whipping cold across her skin like a indifferent caress. Elara stood at the panoramic edge, the void stretching endlessly, gravel crunching underfoot, the chill seeping into her bones. "Modern disconnection," she thought, Antonioni's ennui settling in like fog—figures isolated in vast landscapes, relationships fractured by silence. A train blocked the path below, its cars idle and monolithic, like memory's impasse, the air heavy with diesel fumes. "Would I live here, in parks' tranquility away from the tracks?" she asked the mountains, her words lost in the gusts. They echoed back faintly: "No. Memory erases itself, leaving squalor."

Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025

Back at the high school, Corinthian columns haunted since '97, she lingered in the shadow of their elegance, the stone cool and unyielding against her palm. The past constructed, deconstructed—erasure complete, the wind carrying only echoes.

Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025

Photo by Susan Smith Nash, 2025

#ardmoreOklahoma #oklahoma #history #constructivefiction #memory

Susan Smith Nash, Ph.D. 

The Courage to Speak: Zitkala-Sa and Native American Rights and Heritage

Zitkala-Sa, whose English name was Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, was a powerful voice for Native American rights and a pioneering Indigenous writer. Born in 1876 on the Yankton Indian Reservation in South Dakota, she was a member of the Yankton Dakota Sioux Nation. Her life's work centered on preserving Indigenous culture while advocating for the rights and citizenship of Native peoples during a time of intense pressure toward forced assimilation.

At age eight, Zitkala-Sa left her reservation to attend White's Manual Labor Institute, a Quaker missionary boarding school in Indiana. This experience profoundly shaped her perspective, and she later wrote candidly about the trauma of cultural erasure—the cutting of her hair, the prohibition of her language, and the deliberate attempt to strip away her Indigenous identity. These early essays, published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900, brought national attention to the realities of boarding school experiences.

Despite the challenges she faced, Zitkala-Sa excelled academically and musically. She became an accomplished violinist, performing with the Carlisle Indian School band and even playing at the Paris Exposition in 1900. She briefly taught at Carlisle but grew disillusioned with the school's assimilationist mission and resigned to pursue her own path.

Her literary accomplishments were groundbreaking. In 1901, she published Old Indian Legends, commissioned by Boston publisher, Ginn and Company, a collection of Dakota stories she learned as a child and gathered from various tribes. 

Her autobiographical essays were first published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1900. In 1921, she compiled these essays along with new work into American Indian Stories, which blended autobiography, traditional tales, and political commentary.  

She also co-wrote the libretto for The Sun Dance Opera (1913), one of the first operas written by a Native American. Her writing style was eloquent and accessible, making her work a bridge between Native and non-Native audiences. Zitkala-Sa's activism defined the latter half of her life. She worked as a community organizer, traveling to reservations to document the poor conditions and advocate for change. In 1926, she co-founded the National Council of American Indians and served as its president until her death. She lobbied Congress, fought for citizenship rights (achieved with the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924), and championed Indigenous self-determination.

Old Indian Legends, 1901

Throughout her life, Zitkala-Sa navigated the tension between two worlds without abandoning her heritage. She used the tools of Western education—writing, music, political organizing—to protect and honor Indigenous cultures. She passed away in 1938, leaving behind a legacy that continues to inspire Indigenous writers, activists, and artists today. Her work reminds us that cultural preservation and adaptation can coexist, and that one voice, raised persistently and eloquently, can create lasting change.

Oklahoma's Poor Rich Indians - 1924

Interview with Spencer Striker, History Adventures. Innovators in Education Series

 History can come alive online, especially in a gaming platform that allows the learners to immerse themselves not only in the time, but in the struggle to stay alive. Welcome to an interview with Spencer Striker, who has developed History Adventures, a unique educational that takes learners to the most intense times and places of history.

1. What is your name and your background? 
My name’s Spencer Striker. I’m a Digital Media Design professor at Northwestern University in Qatar. My background is a mixture of digital media production, digital learning design, and entrepreneurship—with an armchair passion for history. I grew up moving around a lot—mostly in New England, but also Los Angeles, San Diego, and Chicago. I was fortunate that I got to travel a lot as a kid because my mom loved to travel. She took us to Australia, Hawaii, and all over Western Europe—and this evoked a wanderlust in me as well as a fascination for different cultures and lived human experience. I finished high school in Chicago, then did my undergrad in History and Radio-TV-Film Production at the University of Texas. After that I tried my hand at writing novels for a while, while living abroad in Costa Rica, Honduras, and Brazil. That was an amazing adventure—but ultimately, I wound up broke in New York City, with some unpublished novels under my arm, and realized, as many people do in their mid-twenties, it was time to play the Get Out of Jail Free card and head to grad school!

After having tried old-school novel writing for a few years, I really missed collaborative media production. Writing novels is a lonely gig! I missed working with cross-disciplinary teams and all the technical/creative challenges of production/design. It was 2005, and I decided that interactive media was the future. I was fortunate to get into the New Media Design and Production Master’s Program at Indiana University. That’s where I really discovered my passion for building digital media projects and working with talented collaborators. At IU, I started a video game media studio called GameZombie TV, and scaled it up. That’s when I first saw how digital production technologies were colliding with entrepreneurial opportunities in totally unforeseen ways—and as we’ve seen over the past 15 years or so, digital media has disrupted how we do just about everything.

2.  How and when did you become interested in online learning?
Eventually, GameZombie TV came to a crossroads. Here was this online media production studio covering the video game industry that we’d built from scratch using the tools and resources available to grad students at Indiana University. We’d won Webbys, covered all the major game conferences, and achieved official partnerships with YouTube and Dailymotion. So at that point, I could try to make the project a professional organization—and achieve “escape velocity” from the university… or I could double-down on the education component of GameZombie TV—whereby this online production studio run by students at Indiana University had become a powerful way for students to learn all the different aspects of modern, team-based digital media production. Since digital learning design was my true passion, I decided to take this other route.

I got the opportunity to co-found the Media Arts and Game Development Program at the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, and meanwhile expand the GameZombie project to the new university, introducing it to a whole new cohort of undergrads interested in the intersection of the video game industry and online media production. Driven by my enthusiasm for the project, as well as its momentum, I got into the PhD Program in Digital Media (in the School of Education) at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, whereby I began to formally study the field of digital media and learning with some of the top experts in the world, including Kurt Squire, Constance Steinhuehler, Dawnene Hassett, and others. And at the same time that I was studying this cutting-edge field of digital media and learning, I was able to apply theory to practice in my day job as Lecturer/Co-Founder of the MAGD Program at UW-W.

3.  what have been some of your experiences in online learning? 
So I had this wonderfully intense experience in Wisconsin studying Digital Media & Learning at the doctorate level at Madison—while simultaneously working full time as Co-Founder of the MAGD program at Whitewater. Doing all this in combination with continuing to run GameZombie TV: the theory/practice of digital learning really got seared into me. Once I completed my PhD in the Fall of 2012, I wanted to try my hand at industry. I went out to Silicon Valley in January of 2013, and soon after that became Founding Creative Director for a games and learning startup called Galxyz, whereby we used a sci-fi narrative game design system to teach kids the Next Generation Science Standards. We managed to raise about $4 million dollars and build a fantastic little studio in Mountain View, CA. The cross-disciplinary team we assembled of educators, creative writers, animators, and game engineers was truly top-notch. After heading up creative and product for the company for two years, I was enthusiastic to return to academia, as I thought that would be the ideal environment in which to build my idea for a new digital product initiative, History Adventures.

4.  What is History Adventures?  
History Adventures is a tablet-based digital learning product that seeks to inspire curiosity for history by using various creative techniques, including character narratives, animation, 3D, interactive infographics, choose your own adventure, sound design, and original music. The idea is to bring history to life by exploring lived human experience through the lens of five amazing men and women who lived through extraordinary, gripping, and dramatic flashpoints in time.

5.  Why did you develop History Adventures, and what is the overall goal?
I developed History Adventures as a way to defeat this unfortunate notion some students hold that “history is boring.” I think the only reason students think that is because typical formal history education emphasizes all the most boring bits—and all the inherent action, drama, and emotional stakes get buried beneath long lists of kings, queens, facts, and dates. History Adventures foregrounds the power of story through the development of character narratives, intended to pull the reader/user into the emotional stakes of these people’s drama-filled experiences. At the same time, I’m using all the tools and tricks I have from digital entertainment product design, to make the product experience come to life and feel magical and fun.

6.  Please describe two or three History Adventures.
In this newest version of the product, History Adventures, World of Characters, Revolutions & Industrialization, 1750-1900, students will encounter five amazing men and women who have to work out where they stand in this age of dramatic, sweeping change.  In late 18th Century America, one unnamed slave turned spy, Agent 355, decides to risk everything for the cause of revolution and the principle of freedom. On the other side of the world in Australia, Jiemba of the Eora Nation, decides to fight for his traditions against British invaders intent on colonizing his ancestral homeland and trampling on his beliefs.

Half a century later, a Chinese trader, Fei Hong fights a different battle. Hong decides to smuggle British opium from India to China and loses everything as he goes from smuggler, to trafficker and finally addict before being caught. In 1890s Africa, Khari decides to oppose European trade and fight back against the Belgian exploitation of his ancient tribal lands along the Congo River. The Belgian’s murderous regime mercilessly extracts rubber using local labour and Khari refuses to let his tribe suffer any more. Resistance is the only choice. 150 years after Agent 355, a social reformer called Thomas Brown decides to disguise himself as a janitor and expose the truth about the infamous Chicago meat packing district. He uncovers a world of filth, corruption and reckless disdain for human life that leads him to question what the future will bring.

7.  What are your plans for the future?
Having just published the definitive version of History Adventures, World of Characters, Revolutions & Industrialization, 1750-1900, we’ve already begun development on the next product in the digital book series, Empires & Interconnections, 1450-1750. This new product will include enhanced interactive features, 3D designs, motion fx, and animation—as well as six fascinating new characters. A conquistador trekking through the treacherous jungles and mountains of 16th Century Peru, doomed to a dismal end in his quest for glory and riches. A woman in the Medieval court of Tokugawa Japan, trading in secrets and intrigue when the politics couldn’t be more high-stakes or ruthless. A man from Angola sold by Portuguese slave traders to the Jamestown colonists in 1619. A zamindar (tax collector) in Mughal India during the British conquest of the South Asian continent. A young woman of Turkish and Byzantine ancestry living through the traumatic 1453 Siege of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire. And finally, a Spanish alchemist living at the nexus of superstition, science, literacy, and the powerful Catholic Church, experiencing the Inquisition even as the Scientific Revolution is just gaining hold. The big picture goal of History Adventures, World of Characters is to spark enthusiasm for learning about the past… and bring the pages of history to life!

Pawnee Bill, The Wild West Show and the Ever-Changing American Identity

21st-century American identity and the 19th-century Wild West Shows are tied together in deep, often surprising ways. They persist and shape our cultural productions and even the way the world frames their political and economic discussions with and about the U.S. To understand why and how, it is useful to take a look at historical documents, artifacts, and reenactments. The Pawnee Bill Wild West Show is an example, and it takes place June 10-11, 2016, in Pawnee, Oklahoma.

The Pawnee Bill Ranch and Museum has arguably the world's most comprehensive collection of Wild West Show artifacts. It was the home and ranch of Pawnee Bill, whose Wild West Shows persisted in one form or another, always bigger and better, for more than 25 years, from the late 19th century through the early 20th century.

Pawnee Bill Ranch and Museum, Pawnee, Oklahoma

 The annual reenactment of the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show takes place each year the second week of June. It spans two days, and starts with a parade at the town square in Pawnee, Oklahoma, and ends up at the site of the Pawnee Bill Ranch, where there are permanent show grounds, as well as a museum and preserved mansion, barn, and other outbuildings. The site also contains a working ranch with American bison, horses, and cattle.

The importance of the Wild West Show as entertainment is indisputable. Wild West Shows were popular both in the major cities as well as in rural America. For the inhabitants of the urban areas, the Wild West Shows represented a dramatic spectacle that fascinated those who attended, and who held a complicated and complex notion of the American West, at once the great, vast frontier of boundless potential, while also representing the darkest recesses of the human psyche, where violence, lawlessness, unthwarted desire, and danger abounded.

Interview with Erin Brown, Curator of Collections, Pawnee Bill Ranch and Museum

 If America was the place of the "Great Re-Invention" as immigrants arrived with the idea of establishing not only new prosperous lives, but also new identities, then the "Wild West" was a place of absolute flux in terms of identities. It was a place where men wore hair as long as women, and ornamented themselves in silver, turquoise, and gold. It was a place where women stood on the back of horses and out-shot the men in accuracy and aplomb. 

It was also a place of caricatures and pernicious stereotypes, as commonly held and communicated ideas were routinely strip Native Americans, African Americans, Mexicans, Asians, and other groups of their humanity and even their lives.

The Wild West Show was, above all, a spectacle, with dramatic costumes, sharpshooting, rope tricks, stage coach robberies, horseback football, and other events.  Like a Las Vegas show a century later, the goal was to entertain the masses, and to have them arrive with dreams and stars in their eyes, all conveniently manufactured by the mass media of the day: dime novels, early moving pictures, handbills, daguerrotypes, ink prints, serialized stories in newspapers, costumes, and jewelry.

But, the question becomes, which came first: the dime novel or the Wild West Show? And, then, how did that shape the notion of American Identity?

The barrier between the two is miscible: think of the Wild West Show and the notion of American identity as fluids that constantly move back and forth, constantly mixing and changing.


Why does it matter?  Here are a few questions that are triggered by considering the Wild West Show and American identity:

* What part of "Wild West" shapes current ideas of identity?
* Where and when did the exploits of the "Wild West" merge into science fiction genres?
* Where does the Wild West Show show up in science fiction movies, television, and novels?
*What are the key characteristics of Wild West personae and the dramas depicted in the enactments of the show?

On the day of the show, many people come to Pawnee and role play their favorite Western characters (historical, cultural, or mythical). Here is the film / literature character from True Grit, Rooster Cogburn (enacted by Dr. Benes)

 Here are a few initial thoughts about characteristics of the Wild West Show and the archetypes / mythos that are generated and perpetuated:

    Clash between good and evil
    Showdowns and shoot-outs (duels, updated)
    "Cowboy" values: what do you stand for if you wear the white hat?
    "Outlaw" values:  what do you stand for if you wear the black hat?
    A place where anti-heroes prevail (the outsider, the outlaw, the disenfranchised, the outside-the-norm)
        Independent women (female ranchers)
        Tribes fighting to the death against the forces have sought to destroy them
        Counter-Christian beliefs
        The outlaw (of all kinds)
        The saloon girl / prostitute as a normalized female
        The Mexican wanderer / seeker
        The warrior who subjects himself to a "dark night of the soul"
        The vision quester
        Uncorsetted female
        The loner (often traumatized veteran)

May Lillie, of the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show

Perhaps all these questions and ruminations would be simply a pleasing anachronism, except that the ideas persist.

While some of the stereotypes are pernicious, others are very liberating and they encourage acceptance of individual difference. Further, they are constantly in flux, and form a part of a cultural mythos that is perhaps not as well understood as we need it to be, particularly as we live in a time of instant mass communication and rapid-fire meme generation. 

We need to know when we're responding to an image or a set of behaviors because we've been conditioned to do so by the socialization processes embodied in cultural myth and mythos.

Scenes from the Pawnee Bill Wild West Show, 2015
 

Blacksmith Adam

Chariot: Kevin Dibble

Drill Team Dibble

Mike Pahsetopah, Fancy Dancer

Contact information:  
Erin Brown / ebrown@okhistory.org
Ronny Brown / rbrown@okhistory.org