Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Born in 1879 in Oologah, Indian Territory, Will Rogers, a Cherokee, became an international celebrity before his death in 1935. His multifaceted career adds complexity to American Indian identities in the early twentieth century and ways that Rogers worked to subvert dominant representations of Natives.

Rogers is also Oklahoma’s Favorite Son. Despite the ways Oklahomans dote on him, however, most Americans do not recognize his name. While there are several explanations for this case of cultural amnesia, this paper focuses on the ways the state of Oklahoma and the Memorial Museum dedicated to his memory create a particular Rogers that is relegated to a past no longer relevant. What makes Will Rogers such a useful and suitable symbol for the image Oklahoma wants to convey? This paper uses this state-supported museum to elucidate Oklahoma’s Will Rogers.

I attempt to explain why Rogers’ mixed-race character is central to Oklahoma—based on an overarching reputation it builds for itself—and why such appropriation affects depictions of Rogers’ ethnicity and celebrity at local and national levels. By exploring Oklahoma culture and examining several striking details of the museum, it is possible to better understand the ways the construction of meaning for a particular place affects the ways ethnicity, history, celebrity, and power are represented in a museum setting and beyond.

Supporting Publications:
Supporting Document

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper argues that Williams's defense of toleration and respect for others resulted from his unrelenting religious convictions. It calls on the religious and non-religious to seek grounds for cooperation within their own and others' traditions.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: This paper considers a recent Canadian contractual dispute, between Rogers Communications and Bell Aliant. This dispute attracted considerable legal and linguistic attention because it seemed to hinge on the placement of the second comma in the following clause of the contract:

[T]his Agreement shall be effective from the date it is made and shall continue in force for a period of five… years from the date it is made, and thereafter for successive five… year terms, unless and until terminated by one year prior notice in writing by either party.

It was this comma that led the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC) to initially find in favor of Aliant, for whom the above clause permitted termination of the agreement at any time on one year’s notice. However, the CRTC ultimately found in favor of Rogers, for whom the contract could be cancelled only at the end of a five-year term, by appealing to the unambiguous French version of the contract.
We argue that two key expressions in the contract, "thereafter" and "prior", offered an equally reliable guide to its meaning; and that the contract has a coherent interpretation only once the times that these expressions relate to are specified. We show that "thereafter" relates the completed initial term to any subsequent term, this being the precondition of any continuation; while "prior" relates the time of notice to the end of the term. Since there is no other coherent temporal interpretation, our analysis supports Rogers’ position.

Publication Type: Internal Paper
Abstract: Indigenist and Internationalist, Native and American, Will Rogers during the 1920s was paradoxically both the archetypal American abroad and, coming as he did from the Cherokee Nation, its fiercest internal / international critic. In his comedic role as "America's Ambassador Abroad," Rogers lampooned American claims to colonial exceptionalism even as he celebrated American individualism and the American imaginary abroad. By focusing on such keywords as 'civilization' and 'progress,' Rogers critiqued the language of imperialism in a way that incorporated a new populism into the American lexicon. This populism – Cherokee, anti-imperialist and cooperative – articulated American values of individualism and pragmatism whilst bringing into the national imaginary images of connection between America and its international neighbors, particularly those nations, like the Cherokees themselves, under its neo-colonial thumb.

By focusing on common relations, Rogers encouraged his extensive audience to see the world as more like itself than different, and concomitantly as worthy of freedom from colonialism and American intervention, thus, through the sizeable mainstream organs of the time, turning his audience against, rather than for, overseas military interventions. Rogers, both Cherokee and American, confounds critics now looking for predecessors bereft of ambiguity, but points us to an example of articulate cultural critique gazing both inward and outward, both ahead of - and caught within - his time. For in articulating a position both critical and supportive of a larger American imaginary, Rogers precipitated both Native American and broader international anti-colonialist strategies to come. Reading Rogers' vast archive of daily and weekly writings, this presentation dramatizes the tensions of Native American cultural critique in a time when few people thought of Americans, let alone Native Americans, abroad.

This presentation draws on a book manuscript, "Dividing Canaan: Oklahoma Writers and the Multicultural Frontier." The book argues that with the full incorporation of Indian Territory into the United States, African-Americans and Native Americans crafted a rhetorical space to argue for an inclusive America based on their own terms and concepts. Thus throughout the twentieth century a tradition of populism and a rhetoric of multicultural relation melded through the artistic output of Oklahoma based and bred artists, even as this vision was tempered by the extreme violence and corruption of what was once Indian Territory. The project offers a new self-critical regionalism that could serve as a bridge between Native and American studies. Among the writers considered in the study are Will Rogers, John Joseph Mathews, Melvin Tolson, Ralph Ellison, Joy Harjo, Woody Guthrie, and Joe Brainard.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: Throughout 1926, Will Rogers telegrammed his “Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President” to the _Saturday Evening Post_ and the _New York Times_ from all over the world. While touring Europe for the _Post_, for example, he met with Benito Mussoulini, and in late 1926 he visited Russia. It was from there that Rogers published what has become his best-known quote: “I never met a man I didn’t like.” That the Cherokee political pundit wrote this about Leon Trotsky, however, has gone largely unnoticed by cultural historians.

This series of writings was not the first Rogers published on domestic and international situations. His earliest writings on international affairs come from his hometown newspaper, published while he toured with Texas Jack’s Wild West in South Africa, Australia, and New Zealand. And in 1922, while a star on Broadway and in film, he was hired by the McNaught Syndicate to publish daily articles that ran in newspapers across the country. By the time of his death in 1935, he toured the world several times, reporting back to the U.S. public the whole time. While his writing is at times sugarcoated with his Territory dialect and humor, they are at other times steeped in the complex realities and prejudices embedded with the Cherokee Nation’s past.

The numerous examples revealing Rogers’ understanding of himself as an American and an American Indian add complexity to a man whose overlooked ties to his tribe offer a new method for interrogating his writings on the United States’ roles in both American Indian and international affairs. Examining Rogers’ connection to his Cherokee roots and his encounters with U.S. governmental policies exposes not only transnational tribal borderlands extant within the United States, but also how these overlapping spaces affect our understanding of a broader U.S. national identity.

Will Rogers’ writings on U.S. international and domestic affairs place him alongside other Native intellectuals of the period who held that U.S. policies were shaped by the country’s ongoing struggles with Native Americans. Further, this presentation will show that his feelings toward U.S. governmental and militaristic intervention at home and abroad were filtered through a local—indeed Cherokee—perspective. Rogers’ maintained close ties to the Cherokee Nation, where he was born in 1879, and he followed affairs affecting all Native Americans throughout his life.

This presentation will do more than broaden scholarly understandings of Rogers: it will expand traditional notions of transnationalism. Rogers’ commentary connecting U.S.-Indian affairs to U.S. international policy opens an interrogative space in which to renew scholarly approaches to American Indian identities and the ways colonialism within the United States affects both American popular culture and governmental policy.