Legacies of the Land

You You You This program is made possible in part by a grant from the Texas Committee for the Humanities

A state program of the National Endowment for the Humanities and by the subscribers to KERA Dallas-Fort Worth. This is the vastness, power and promise of the land that lies at the heart of the Texas

myth. A state whose physical size and resources were legendary long before it became a center of commerce and population whose endless horizons offered seemingly unlimited opportunity. The struggle with the Saul, the vision of empire that clashes over control and use of the land all shaped the course of Texas history. You know my folks came here to this hill country part of Texas more than 150 years ago. Still part of Mexico and it's pretty much been our stomping grounds ever since then. It came to get land and they got it and they started trying to scratch your living out of it. According to them, it was mighty, hard scratching. Today we're still waging battle with for the land, transforming it with skyscrapers,

airports, highways and suburbs. This is our new frontier. Our quality of life, the amount of green space in our cities, the survival of our neighborhood depend on values rooted in myths about the land. You know myths are our ways of explaining and giving order to our world. They represent the common wisdom and experience of a people, the culture's fears, achievements, and aspiration. This program is about these beliefs and values, textbooks may recount names, dates and places, but folk traditions and myths reflect Texas' real heart and soul. Texas covers more area than the largest country in Western Europe.

It's an immense territory where the continents' diverse geography, vegetation and wildlife converge to create a meeting place for different cultures. The car was hunting grounds once extended across the high plains into the panhandle of Texas. To them, the land was sacred. Through his fruit making and morning ritual prayer, car will tribe member Joe Bigbow preserves the myths and traditions of his people. It is a respectful plume, something that has been hidden down by the grace of God that the great spirit gave them the talents to carry on this way.

In my young day, when I was a young man, in my great grandfather, I followed my great grandfather as a footstep and God had tell me things about what Indian culture. It's a blessing in this fruit, the old sage, and one to give talent to Indian and one to treat, never die, see this, that's the Indian, we respect this tree because it's a great tree. This is the way to get them below. These symbols found on rock walls in West Texas were carved and drawn by some of the many Native American cultures who made Texas home. Though the Native cultures were diverse, most shared myths which depicted the winds,

the rains, the earth, and all living creatures as interrelated. While Indians were not conservationists in the sense that we use the word today, they believed nature was something to live with and respect, not conquer. In 1528, a new wave of myths and values washed up on the Texas shores with the arrival of the first European, Kabeza Devaka. It was on the Gulf Coast near Galveston Island, where Devaka and other members of the ill-fated expedition to claim land for Spain were shipwrecked. It took Devaka eight years to cross Texas and reach Mexico. When he arrived, he told wondrous tales he had heard of cities made of gold. Devaka was Texas' first real estate promoter. He sat in motion the great myth of Texas' enormous wealth and potential, and he touched off a land grab.

The Spanish attempted to conquer Texas as they had Mexico, securing their myth that God intended the natives to be subdued, Christianized, and made useful in Spanish fields and minds. But the Comanches, the Patches, and others who had a different view of God's will successfully defended their land. In 1821, Spain's empire had declined. Texas was part of a new independent Mexico. It became a destination for Americans looking westward for land. His anglosures lived by a set of myths at sanctioned domination rather than stewardship over the land. My object, the sole and only desire of my ambition since I first saw Texas, was to redeem it from the wilderness, to settle it with intelligent, honorable, and enterprising people. But even if Austin, who might be called Texas' first major Anglo-real estate developer,

sold the myth of opportunity and abundance in Texas, he offered huge amounts of land and easy credit. Texas land promoters didn't have much trouble attracting land-hungry settlers, among them Jude Hart's ancestors. Here in the big thicket region of East Texas, Jude Hart still subscribes to the myths that brought his ancestors to Texas. I still like doing things the old-fashioned way. Now they seem like people want to sit down and keep the Sunday church clothes on old time and never sweat.

I think that's what makes you live for long, sweat a little bit. It's all right on that. We saw them down and crossed that goal. They didn't too easy, but we don't mind, we don't know their lives, these young boys didn't do it. Now they didn't. Now I'll pile them up a bunch of these loads, you see, you see, tomorrow the next day I'll take them to the sawmill, and I'm sold up and made rumbas. Come here, darling. You did it, that's it. Jude Hart has no use for city life, his pioneer heritage makes him a firm believer in the myth that taming the wilderness and making it productive is the most honest, healthy, and moral human enterprise. Among the first civilized people of some Texas, the Hartswoods, they come in here from Florida, Oxwagon.

In fact, the big and small, great, great aunt was born in the wagon in a diamondian sheepnetter. They come here and learn to earn their living a hard way, and a little bit, I guess, rubbed off on me, proud of it, you know, so far they ain't none of them in that hunts for fun of tension or other fun of tension, stand out of these damn cities and halfway ten of your own business. Do you think things are better now than they were back there, which when people lived like your folks did out of the earth, off their own produce by their own hands, or what's your feeling about the living now? Well, my feeling about it, I wish it was back from myself back like it was. I'm living better now and got a dollar, so put it, I used to now didn't have one dime nickel.

I was happy. You had plenty of eat, and if you run out of something or another, fly it up for you. If you're going to mail, go to your neighbors and get what you want, and just tell them. They always had it. The Anglo-American settlers' ability to organize and help each other survive on the frontier also enabled them to mobilize against Mexico for control of the land. Those from the Texas Revolution quickly took on mythic qualities. The Battle of the Alamo became a legend in its own time, and is still a sacred episode to many Texans. Through the modern medium of movies, myths surrounding the Alamo are preserved and embellished. In this 1960 version, Lawrence Harvey plays Colonel William Travis and John Wayne as David Croquet. The Republic is one of those words that makes me tight in the throat. Same tightness, a man gets when his baby takes his first step, or his first baby shaves,

makes his first sound like a man. The Battlecry, remember the Alamo, rallied not only Texan, but American Anglos who wanted to lay claim to the vast territory. While the term manifest destiny didn't come into vogue until the 1840s, the myth that the white race was morally superior and destined to rule the continent played a key role in the Texas Revolution. In a letter requesting aid from the United States, Stephen F. Austin wrote, a war of extermination is raging in Texas. A war of barbarism and despotic principles waged by the Mongrel-Spanish Indian and Negro race against civilization and the Anglo-American race. In 1845, Texas became the only independent nation ever to join the United States. Many Tejanos, that is, Texas Mexicans, viewed their homeland of 300 years as a occupied

country. During this period, Anglos viewed the legendary Texas Rangers as heroes who maintained law and order. Tejano folklore portrays them as ruthless protectors of the interests of Anglo-Ranchors and merchants. Tejano values and view of life in the borderlands have been passed down in Mexican folk songs called Corridos. 78-year-old Ignacio Montelongo still sings these Corridos to his family in Brownsville. The Corrido, called Los Sediciosos, the seditionist, commemorates the last major armed protest

of the Tejanos. The seditionist, Fardiar Men, raided ranches, derailed trains, and attacked U.S. Army units. The Corridos, the seditionist, commemorates the last major armed protest of the Tejanos of the Tejanos. The noted University of Texas folklorist, Americo Paredes, says that Texas Rangers, frustrated at not being able to capture the seditionist, killed hundreds of innocent farm workers. There's more fled to Mexico.

To quote Paredes, the results were that more land in South Texas was cleared of Mexicans so that it could be developed by Anglo-Newcomers in the 1920s. 50 years ago, when I first came out here to East Texas as a graduate student at the University of Texas collecting folklor, I was still able to find people who had actually been bonded slaves and collect their stories. Here in the Piney Woods and Rolling Hills, life was governed by powerful, deep-rooted Southern myths and traditions. 1960s slaves made up one-third or more of the region's population. Their spirituals, work songs and folk tales helped them to hold on to their values and

cultural myths, and provided a means of passing hidden messages of protest and escape. Songs such as Steel Away would include directions to freedom. The signposts Texas trees, hills and rivers. All the poems and stories handed down to Oceola Maes of Dallas reflect the black culture struggle to survive, and it's hoped for a better day. I put my hat down right here and come sit down. I'm delighted to get here at Longlass and get to meet you, I've heard of what a fine

point you are. How many poems you remember? Oh yes, I remember those poems a lot of them. My mother taught me, said, don't you forget them, say go when I'm gone, we may do you something good. They never were written down? No, nothing I know of. She's loitering me a thing, she said don't forget it, remember these things, as you go out again and again I had to sit down there on the floor and let her teach to me. I wonder if you do one of your poems that you learned before you were ten years old, been carrying in your mind all these years. Tell me, statesman, I am pleading to defend the black men's cause. Will you give me the protection to outline your laws? Will you lawyers plead my case within your court? I'm not a lawyer, but I'm a citizen. Will you recognize my votes, ruling power of this nation? Will you give me justice now?

I prepared your wedding supper and I dug your father's grave. I did everything you asked me just because I was your slave. I helped to build your great bridges and I laid your railroads still, or I bent a mighty power in your great financial field, ruling power of this nation. Will you give me justice now, or America, or America, and I call you now tomorrow maybe late, unless you were returned to God, said, said, would be your fate. I remember those things I had, I had some type of brain that made me remember whatever. Uh huh, recall things from your childhood. Oh yeah. You know a song, heaven, heaven, everybody talk about heaven and go in there, heaven. And I remember that singing song, I got shoes, I got shoes, oh God. Oh God, you got shoes, and when I get the heaven going to put on my shoes, walk all over

God, heaven, heaven, heaven, everybody talk about heaven and go in there, heaven. Oh my God. That was a good line. I always loved it. All those old myths, something, all those myths, all myths, all myths, something, when you used to, yeah, you used to be in a cotton field years ago, they were saying for one cotton mill to another one, but to see the bolster there, and there was cream. Where's supposed to talk? What did you say? And they're saying, and there ought to be saying, they'd be throwing out hints at one of them and let you know, just keep on living, it's going to be something good coming. One of these days, right and fair, I hit you on my wings and try the Al, and they just tell letting you know that they was going to, well, it's going to be a slayer all the way, they're going to put on some wings to fly away, hit you on my wings and try the Al.

With the Civil War over, Westward expansion, again picked up steam, it was the Guilty Days, the age of Mark Twain, the gold rush, robber barons, homesteaders, gunslingers, and the Ku Klux Klan. Out of this era, the great myths of the American West were born. It's most enduring symbol, the cowboy. The myths reflected in dime novels, Wild West shows, later in movies and television, made the cowboy the national symbol of rugged individualism, action and strength. Cowboys were portrayed as the civilizing force.

The backbone of the cattle industry which made the Western wilderness productive and profitable. The life of the working cowboy, yesterday is it is today, there's little resemblance to the romanticized versions. Cowboys are hard hands who work long, grueling hours for low wages. While Hollywood cowboys are almost always Anglo, nearly one-third of the working cowboys were either Mexican or black, America's mythic native son is actually the descendant of the Mexican mercadero who developed the cowboy's basic skills, gear and vocabulary. Farmers, railroad workers, and loggers are all part of the lower of the taming of the

West, but it was the image of the cowboy that captured the public's imagination and came to represent the unlimited possibilities of the West. There's 362,000 acres in the ranch, 555 section, and I guess you could say it's about 400 square miles. Pretty good size right here. It's something I just wanted to do and always love to do, around stock and horses. Marion and Julia Tredaway grew up with the myths of the West. Today, these myths guide their lives. It's hard work. You work from daylight to dark, but if you enjoy it, you don't mind. There's so many jobs that you work at that you like the income, the money that you're

making, but you don't like the job, and you stick with it. It's hard to find a job nowadays, well, it is for us to we came out here, that you enjoyed what you were doing, you know, you really enjoyed it. As far as this old country, it's something that a lot of people will most everybody, you either like it or you don't like it. There's not much in between. Of course, of all the cactus and the prickly pear, and they say everything out here will either bite your sticky. Well, this old country's part of the Chihuahua and Southwest Desert, but there's live water, there's pranks, usually where you see a big old cottonwood tree setting up somewhere that's water pretty close. This is one of our favorite campgrounds, when we're over here on the roundup, we camp at this spring.

It makes a good place together, too. We've got some longhorn cattle pinned in the pins here at the spring, waiting for a bar selection. It's a bad country to work cattle in. You work cattle just like we did 200 years ago. You round them up horseback, you move from one place to the other horseback, from the bottom end of the top to the sipping pandas, five days and four nights. You sleep out on the ground just like they did years ago, that's just part of it. It's a way of life with an attitude that this is what you want. This is where I belong. The annual Texas Cowboy reunion honors the region's pioneer cattle money women and pays tribute to the cowboy myth.

The rodeo is a link to the days of the frontier. The ceremony and contest symbolize the conquest of the west. In the grand entry, riders spread out over the dirt floor arena, as settlers spread out over the land more than a century ago. rodeo events pit individuals against animals, man against nature, reinforcing the mythic west reputation for adventure, danger and individualism. While the image of the lone horseman on the range prevails, survival required cooperation, neighbor helping neighbor. This close kinship is reflected at the memorial service.

Now, the way we do this, if any, you folks want to say anything about these deceased and you're not too emotional, we'd be glad to have you stand up and say something about it. The first time I ever saw a JN Bradshaw, he had an old bay horse up there, the neck broke right in. A JN and he wasn't my idea of care for him, mine, how I got food, he even wanted to settle down in here in the arena, I sure did like him. And he roped right up to the very end. In fact, he bought him an e-rope and horse just two or three months before he died, maybe four or five months, but he was game right up to the last. He left a good name and a good family. We appreciate it. He was a woman that lived by a word, did what she said. Many people didn't know her because she was so dedicated to the ranch that she only came to town about two or three times a year, the Stanford Reunion was one of the cases she did make.

She was a dandy, a fine, ever good man, you've got a good woman. She was a wonderful woman. Seems like those people that ask for my help, just like you folks here, they have the old Mesquite roots, they go down deep and when it gets dry and it gets tough, they just get a little tougher with it. I'd like to say it was a great privilege to have a friend like he was, and that you didn't have to know him very long to know which side he had on, he had a wide line between right and wrong. He lived his life like a boy, like a man, he died like a man. He was crazy. We broke them again, some better. Cowboys don't cry. The powerful image of the cowboys used to sell everything from products to politician. Teddy Roosevelt rode into the White House on his exploits with the celebrated rough

riders, his aggressive big stick farm policy and his attitude toward Native Americans were extensions of his cowboy ethic. I don't go as far as to think that the only good Indians are dead Indians, but I believe that nine out of the ten are, and I should not inquire too closely into the case of the American. One campaign memo quoted by Newsweek magazine read, leave Mondale in a position where a vote against Reagan is in some subliminal sense a vote against a mythic America. The era of the frontier cowboy lasted less than 30 years. By the turn of the century, the open range had been fenced and the great cattle drives

had ended. The industrial revolution had come to the West. Big time farming became profitable. In the Rio Grande Valley, landowners employed thousands of Mexicans to clear the dense brush and turn grazing land into rich irrigated fields. By 1920, a rigid class structure existed. The average Anglo who worked the land earned $3,750 a year, while the average Mexican made only $500. Despite the discrimination, Mexicans continued to migrate north, many fleeing the turmoil of the Mexican Revolution. In Mexico, land reform was the major issue. In 1910, 97 percent of the rural families owned no land. Many were enslaved by debt.

Revolutionary leader Emiliano Zapata sounded the peasants battle cry. La Tierra y libertad, land and liberty. The land Zapata Proclaim belongs to those who work here. The Mexican Revolution, I think, what we feel still from it, or what came what left in us and our parents and our hearts is that it was a struggle for control of the land. The Mexican Revolution of the Union, type of organizing that we're doing, it's towards the same goal.

As a farm worker, myself being a farm worker until the age of 18, and then as my father who's also a farm worker. I know the closeness and the appreciation that farm workers feel for the land. They care for it through good times and bad times. It's cold, it rains, it's muddy. It's a very special feeling that maybe being Mexican, Mexican-American and part of our Indian heritage that goes into these strong feelings for the land. They're out there and they're working every day and they cultivate and they take care of it. In that sense, we feel like farm workers are the true owners of that land. At the same time, it's sort of sad because you put in so many months of work into it and then some families, at the end of that long period of time, go home and don't have enough to feed their families.

Over the years, you just keep thinking about that and say, there's something not quite right here. Through the Union, we're just saying it's about time that we also and the fields have some justice and that the love we put into the land and what it produces, be shared on a more equal basis. It's a very special feeling that we're just saying it's about time that we also and the field have some justice and that the love we put into the land and what it produces, be shared on a more equal basis. We've got a lot of Mexico for you, those you know, have a lot of heart, you know, a lot of love and so the music is just another way of just telling the story, telling the struggle. In San Antonio, Mexican Americans celebrate their myths in a striking and traditional

fashion. The great Mexican artist Jose Clemente Orozco once said that of all painting, mural painting is the least selfish as it cannot be hidden for the benefit of a privileged few. It is for the people. It is for all. On the west side of San Antonio, the Mexican-American tenets of these public housing projects do not

own the land on which they live, but they've created a sense of community and ownership through the murals of their history, culture and myths. The struggle over land during the bitter times that followed the Civil War were powerful forces in shaping the black culture's myths about whites. The next slave named Anderson Willis bought this farm land near Fairfield during the late 1860s. However, before he died, Anderson Willis had lost most of this land, his descendants claimed that it was taken from him by white landowners and local officials through systematic fraud. Davis Willis, Anderson's grandson, has bought back some of the old farm. He and other members of the family have filed suit to reclaim the rest of the land.

Land lost during a time when the ex-slave was forbidden to enter the courthouse to check records and deeds. To the family, Anderson Willis's struggle and theirs is symbolic of the black culture's determination to survive and overcome. The attitudes of Shavus, his niece Jeanette Atkins, and many blacks living in East Texas are shaped by myths surrounding incidents of racial violence, threats, and intimidation. We're just like in here, just like a rabbit out here, a bunch of monkey greyhound. I have one jump, you have nothing to knock you up, nothing got you, and they'll tell you happen too. That's the way we was in. See, I'm being seen something that's done to my race, she's telling me a scene this. My father, he died as he was bedridden for about six years and he would always tell us,

don't give it up, get a lawyer to take it to court, and so you will get the land back. And it just instilled in us that we couldn't afford to give it up. It is all the roots we have. This is all we know about the Willis family is Freestone County. If we could have done something years ago, we would have. Even my father in his lifetime, he would have. If Anderson Willis, I'm sure when he bought the land, he bought it for him and his family, he would not have it taken if he could have done something about it. But he could not do any more than what he did was to try to remain alive. And this is where we are today. This is the reason that Anderson Willis descendants have gotten themselves together as a group of people determined, determined, and may I say that the third time we are determined

to get this land back. The struggle between Anglos and Indians for territory in Texas was rationalized by the white man's myth of manifest destiny, a myth that made land hunger noble. The Indians and the Buffalo were seen as barriers to progress. The great herds of bison, threatened agriculture and livestock and endangered railroad tracks and trains. The U.S. cavalry and Anglo settlers pushed the Texas Indians off their hunting grounds and slaughtered the Buffalo, the source of the plane's tribes' way of life. In 1873 alone, its estimated that five million of animals were slain, the stench of their rotting flesh fill the air, and the planes became littered with their bones. The commanches and the cowards, the great warriors of the South Plains, fought to protect

their land, giving rise to Anglo myths of Indians as bloodthirsty savages. General Philip Sheridan, source of the phrase, the only good Indian is a dead Indian, testified against the bill before the Texas legislature to protect the Buffalo. The sake of lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until they have exterminated the Buffalo. Then your prairies will be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy, who follows the hunter as the second forerunner of civilization. Ready? Fire! Anglos celebrate their history and success in settling the West with romantic recreations of life at a fort in Indian country. The Indian wars and slaughter of the Buffalo were part of the legendary winning of the West.

It's not a real sharp and the reason why they did it when they got into the hacking end of it, the idea that you could not cut anybody with a sword, you do not slice people up for these things. You break bones with it and you poke holes in them with a sword, that's what a sword is for. Sholder arms. Fire by company, ready? History in general is taught from the point of view of the victors. How the West was lost is recorded in the words of Indian, who felt that they spoke not only for themselves, but on behalf of the earth. They beat all hell, hagyatunga, domaingaikaa, a long time ago, this land belonged to our grandfathers. Where I was born upon the prairie, the wind blew free and there was nothing to break the light of the sun.

But when I go up to the river, I see camps of soldiers on its banks. These soldiers cut down my timber. They kill my buffalo, and when I see that, my heart feels like bursting. The white man has the country of which we loved, and we only wish to wander on the prairie until we die. Here at Paladuro Canyon near Amarillo, the Comanches in the Kaya was fought their final battle to hold on to their plains culture. During the winter of 1874-75, soldiers from New Mexico, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas converged on this last stronghold. Ten years after the Civil War, the free tribes of the Texas plains and the buffalo were vanquished.

But the myths and values of Native Americans live on in the conservation movement. Out here in West Texas, the Rio Grande curves around the ruggedly beautiful country of the Big Bend National Park. This park was established after a 13-year campaign of lobbying and fundraising by Texans determined to save this remnant of the frontier. A letter written by conservationist and Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Wallace Stegner reflects the spiritual legacy of the American Indian. He will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed so that never again can we have the chance to see ourselves single, separate, vertical

and individual in the world, part of the environment of trees and rocks and soil, part of the natural world and competent to belong in it. Americans still have that chance, more than many peoples. For a while, we were demonstrating ourselves the most efficient and ruthless environment busters in history and slashing and burning and cutting our way through the wilderness continent. The wilderness was working on us. It remains in us as surely as Indian names remain on the land. If the abstract dream of human liberty and human dignity became in America something more than an abstract dream, mark it down at least partially to the fact that we were in subtle ways subdued by what we conquered. Big Ben still bears the scars of past abuse, over grazing, before the creation of the

park, turn these grasslands into a wasteland. The myth of Texas Unlimited Resources has led to the wasteful and destructive use of the land. The pro-growth values of the Texas Frontier still guide the state's development today. But how we use our land and natural resources to meet the needs of Texas growing population has become a major political battle. Nowhere is the conflict over growth more intense than in Austin, noted for its natural beauty, clean lakes, green belts and open spaces. Austin is seen as a refuge from the mythical urban eels of Houston and the materialism of Dallas. Its image is a healthy, pleasant, laid-back town is directly tied to its environment. Austin Springs is a symbol for many of the quality of life for which Austin is famous.

Here the icy clear waters of the Edwards Aquifer bubble up through the ground. A haven for comanches before the city was founded and Oasis falls tonight today. Bartons has great meaning to me personally, it has had most of my life because ever since I was a little boy almost, well well over a half a century ago to be truthful about it, our family has been coming out here a long time ago with camp up there all summer long. Like a lot of Austin families did, Bartons Springs was a way of life to all of us. But Austin is also one of the fastest growing boom towns in the nation. Its growth is fueled by the successful courting of the high tech electronics industries and the exploding real estate market. The irony is, the very qualities used to lure new growth Austin may be the qualities growth destroys.

The myth of prosperity through growth has run smack into the myth of the value of preservation and the conflict is creating new folklore. It's breaking my heart's strings, what's coming down Bartons Springs, making my tongue speak, what's planned for Barton Creek, filling the stream we know with development over flow. Bill Oliver carries on the long tradition of validiers who songs reflect the values and issues at times. Peyton, the green bell black with a sweep of the Moe path, spilling right through our hands.

Such a delicate ecosphere, but it's spilling right through our hands Like the spirit of the master play. Changing the town we know to a city of Grogro. Houston was once the epitome of the modern boom town myth with all its vitality and seemingly boundless opportunities. But today it's often cited as an example of the growth and prosperity myth going awry. That myth now knocks on the doors of the residents of the 4th Ward, home of the oldest black community in Houston. The message get out of the way. Originally called Friedman's Town because it was settled by farmer slaves, the community sits on prime real estate, sandwiched between downtown and affluent river Oaks. Most of the land now belongs to absentee landlords and speculators.

Since both the city and the developers agree that the land should be put to a more profitable use, they are working together on a public-private partnership to clear the way for high-rise office buildings and condominiums. It will happen in one of two ways. Either it will happen in a haphazard fashion with the residents of the area being displaced a few at a time, or the city can get involved in the redevelopment. And we can assure that the needs of the residents are going to be taken care of. It is inevitable because the value of land, the assemblage of land, is such that it cannot be used for any other purpose. We are dealing with land now that is being priced in the range of $20 per square foot. That means that a shotgun house now sitting on a lot in that area, which is roughly 40 by 60 feet, is sitting on a lot that is worth approaching $100,000. And it is not reasonable to assume that the economics will permit that type of continued use of land.

It took the sweat, blood, and tears of freed slaves to settle this area. And we want to preserve it. Gladys House is president of the Freedman's Town Association. A neighborhood group founded upon the myth that a community has a value of its own. We're still citizens of the United States of America. We're still citizens of Houston, Texas, and we're still residents of Freedman's Town. And we're taxpayers, so I mean, are you saying that look, sure, you're a taxpayers, but still there's a double standard here. You all are just too poor to reside here. And I think it's unfortunate to tell a human being that land is much more valuable than here is of her life. And especially after all of the great contributions they've made to the growth of Houston.

The modern urban blues tradition was born of hard times and a rural past. Today, the blues continue to reflect the experiences, frustrations, hopes, and the myths of the black community. It's a wonderful thing I want to tell you. Sometimes, you have people that come out of this environment and they get a little above this. But it has come to a blues place where someone saying the blues,

it's my and plays back on things that have happened to you. It's something that you experience, you never forget. It's something that I could call my own. Ain't got a time. Ain't got a free. If I should ever get out of this room. It's a built-in state. My mother and father, they talked to me about the way it was in East Texas and Mississippi. I'm not giving anybody the blues.

It's a thing, man. A lot of people have never experienced it. The way I've experienced it, the experience is a different way. It still relates to the same thing they have to do. Your baby, if I should ever get out of this room. Your baby. Thank you. This inner tribe of Powwow and Grand Prairie just outside Dallas is the largest in Texas. Every fall, members of more than 30 different tribes come together to socialize and share traditions. The drum itself, it's kind of got a little magic in it.

It brings out the dancing and the people and it brings the people together. It's really, I guess, a sacred item. Kyle Indian, Hilton Queeton, and many other urban Native Americans find themselves a part of the melting pot myth. These regional dances and celebrations are important ways of preserving Indian myths. We're a people that is kind of divided between, you know, an old life and a new life. And we live in the urban areas and we work. We hold jobs just like everyone else. We have a lot of professional Indians and their doctors, lawyers. You know, we're just ordinary Americans in that respect. But we still have our cultural ties. We still believe in our Indian ways. We still have our songs and our stories and our legends. And we have our values that we carry forward. Our songs really are a tribute to our lives.

Our honor occurred. Our wild ponies and the buffalo. We have the equal dance, which is all a tribute to them. Today, these native peoples and their neighbors who hail from more than 30 different cultural groups are shaping Texas future. It has been projected that Texas will have more than 20 million people by the year 2000, second only to California. And its greater numbers of Asians, Central Americans and others make Texas home, new myths become part of the Texas tradition. A failure to understand the roots of our own myths and those of others can lead to fear, conflict and intolerance. Myths are mighty forces in our lives. But after all, we're the ones who create them, keep them alive.

And so it is we the people who have the final say over what become the legacies of our land. We are the ones who have the final say over what become the legacies of our land. We are the ones who have the final say over what become the legacies of our land. This program is made possible in part by a grant from the Texas Committee for the Humanities, a state program of the national endowment for the humanities. And by the subscribers to KERA Dallas Fordworth.

And by the subscribers to KERA Dallas Fordworth.