Online Submission Form for The New York Times "Overlooked" Project
Written by Cathy Shuffield and Kurt Anderson, Ph.D.
Who should we write about, and why? And what is your relationship to this person?
I respectfully submit for your consideration Dr. Angie Debo (1890-1988)—a bold activist for Native Americans and Native Alaskans and a prolific, award-winning author who is touted as “Oklahoma’s Greatest Historian.” She defied gender norms of her day, remaining single, earning a PhD, and choosing the life of a scholar and activist rather than what was expected of a woman at the time. Despite a stellar academic pedigree and publication record, she was repeatedly denied tenure-track faculty positions at universities—her one disqualification being her gender. Nevertheless, she flourished as a freelance writer and became a lauded historian and scholar, even serving as a book reviewer for The New York Times from 1952-1961.
Historians are virtually unanimous in their recognition of Angie Debo as the first practitioner of what is known today as the New Indian History. Consider, for example, Western historian Richard White’s assessment of her legacy: “In a real sense, she invented the ‘new’ Indian history long before there was a name for it. She gave Indians a history that was more than victimization. In her books, Indians were creative and resilient people engaged in a struggle to control their own lives and destinies” (The Journal of American History 76, December 1989). Noted Pottawatomi scholar Terry P. Wilson, author of Teaching American Indian History (1993), concluded that while “largely disregarded at the time, Debo’s work nonetheless foreshadowed the new Indian history of the postwar period.”
Perhaps the most heartfelt tribute to the life and career of Angie Debo comes from the pen of Larry McMurtry, son of a West Texas cowboy and cattle rancher, and author of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning epic masterpiece of the American West, Lonesome Dove. In two thoughtful essays, McMurtry revealed the depth of his admiration for Angie Debo both as a woman who persevered against great odds throughout her life and as an accomplished historian of the American West. In an article titled, “How the West Was Won or Lost,” in the October 22, 1990 issue of The New Republic, McMurtry wrote: “Debo began her labors long before women were welcome in history departments, or in any departments for that matter. Her work on Indian removal and dispersal, especially The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (1934) and The Road to Disappearance (1941) (the latter a history of the Creek Confederacy and its ruin), is excellent, as is the biography of Geronimo that she delivered in 1976, when she was eighty-six. Debo had the ability, uncommon in an American historian, to deal with tragic subjects movingly but unsentimentally, with a kind of Roman measure: grief but no hair-pulling, as opposed to hair-pulling but no grief, which is what one frequently finds in books about the destruction of the American Indian.”
In a second essay, “A Heroine of the Prairies,” written eleven years later and included in a collection of his essays, titled Sacagawea’s Nickname: Essays on the American West (2001), McMurtry offers a piercing analysis of Angie Debo’s life and work. But McMurtry’s appreciation of Angie Debo is much deeper – and more personal – than merely an academic appraisal of her scholarship. As a ten-year-old boy accompanying his father to a cattle auction in West Texas, he stumbled across a weathered copy of “The Road to Disappearance” which had apparently fallen out of some rancher’s pickup and landed in the parking lot. It soon became one of his most treasured possessions, although it would be many years before he was able to appreciate it. He writes, “I kept The Road to Disappearance and, by considering it and occasionally reading a few of Angie Debo’s sinewy sentences, gradually arrived at a great notion, which was that it might be possible to organize one’s life around literature – not write it, I didn’t aspire to that, but just read it and, in some way, live with it. The notion that one could organize one’s life around literature might seem simple, but if you grow up where there are no books and where no writer is ever mentioned, it isn’t. I could look off the porch of our ranch house, straight up the length of the Great Plains, all the way into Canada, but the only evidence I had that there were such things as writers in all that stretch of land was this book I had found in a parking lot, by a woman from Oklahoma. I didn’t know about Willa Cather or Mari Sandoz; Gass and Woiwode had yet to peep above the grass of the Dakotas. And yet, a woman from Oklahoma had somehow ordered her life around books and study. Having that fact to contemplate was, in context, an inestimable gift.”
Angie Debo’s scholarly philosophy was straightforward: “I am sometimes asked to state my ‘goals and ambitions in writing.’ I suppose I have only one: to discover truth and publish it. My research is objective, but when I find all the truth on one side, as has sometimes happened in my study of Indian history, I have the same obligation to become involved as any other citizen.” One of Angie’s avenues for involvement was the Oklahoma Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. In 1977, this organization established the Angie Debo Civil Liberties Award to recognize those who have provided exceptional defense to the Bill of Rights throughout the year or throughout their lives. Because Angie was an exemplary, dedicated, and tireless champion for a fair, equitable, and just society throughout her life, her portrait hangs with great honor in the Oklahoma capitol alongside extraordinary Oklahomans such as Will Rogers, Sequoyah, and Jim Thorpe.
The following information chronicles her remarkable life, accomplishments, and honors:
Angie Elbertha Debo was born on January 30, 1890, to Edward and Lina Debo on their farm near Beattie, Kansas. In 1899, her father bought a farm near Marshall, Oklahoma Territory, and brought his family there in a covered wagon. After attending rural one-room schools in both Kansas and Oklahoma, Angie passed a territorial examination, earned her common school diploma in 1902 at the age of twelve, and finally received one year of high school – the only year available at that time in Marshall.
At the age of sixteen, Angie took yet another territorial examination, received her teacher’s certificate, and became a rural school teacher. Once Marshall offered four years of high school, she returned to school and graduated with the first class in 1913 at the age of twenty-three. After two more years of rural-school teaching, she entered the University of Oklahoma in 1915 and graduated three years later with a major in history. It was there that she first studied under Edward Everett Dale, a Harvard-trained scholar who remained her close friend and professional mentor for more than fifty years. Following her graduation, Angie served as village principal at North Enid for one year, and then taught history at Enid High School from 1919 to 1923.
Angie left Oklahoma in 1923 to attend the University of Chicago, where in 1924 she received her master’s degree and published her master’s thesis under the title, The Historical Background of the American Policy of Isolation (1924). From 1924 to 1933, she accepted an offer from the West Texas State Teachers College at Canyon, but “resented being required to teach in the training school while others with similar backgrounds moved up to the college faculty” (Always WT: West Texas A&M University Centennial Series, 2010). While at Canyon, Angie worked on her doctorate at the University of Oklahoma under Dale’s supervision, and eventually received her degree in 1933. She subsequently published her doctoral dissertation as The Rise and Fall of the Choctaw Republic (1934), which received the John H. Dunning Prize of the American Historical Association. In fact, the book was so well received that she knew from then on that working as a freelance writer would always be an option for her.
The years from 1934-1941 were some of Angie Debo’s most productive, but also some of her most frustrating. In 1934, she served as curator of the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum. With her doctorate in hand and an award-winning book on her resume, Angie began applying for faculty positions at a number of junior colleges and four-year universities. More qualified than most of the men she watched join the history faculties at a number of academic institutions, Angie often shared her disappointments with her friend and mentor, Edward Everett Dale. In the passage below, she wrote Dale about two of her more humiliating experiences:
“I wrote to Dr. Connor, and received most ungracious permission from a man in his office to fill an application blank. The tenor of his letter was to the effect that he did not desire my application, but if I insisted I could fill out the enclosed blanks. I filled them out carefully and returned them. I thought of sprinkling them with insect powder, but decided it would be more tactful to refrain. I also received letters from the Senators and Representatives to whom I had written, enclosing a carbon copy of the recommendations they wrote. Two of them [Congressmen] sent me the man’s [Dr. Conner’s] acknowledgment, which was more courteous than the letter to me, and which assured them my application would receive every consideration. I doubt it, though.”
Unable to obtain a university faculty position, but unwilling to waste her education and what she knew to be her undeniable talents for historical research and writing, Angie set out more determined than ever to succeed as a freelance writer. Nevertheless, her dream to join the history faculty of a major university reemerged whenever she felt there might be an opportunity. In one particularly poignant letter to Dale, she almost pleaded for a chance:
“I have been thinking that Dr. Wardell’s promotion and Dr. Thomas’s resignation might make it necessary for you to add another member to your department. I wonder if you have ever thought of me as a possible applicant for such a position. I may as well be frank about my one disqualification. I know that few women are employed on history faculties. I have been hoping, however, that my other qualifications might serve to balance this defect. Even at the risk of wearying you I am going to present them, for you have known me only as a student and have never come in contact with the work I have done outside your department. It is perhaps not necessary for me to mention scholarship except to remind you that I have only one ‘B’ (in mineralogy) on my entire undergraduate record, and that I was able to carry twenty hours in the graduate school of the University of Chicago with a straight ‘A’ record, and to write my master’s thesis at the same time. You know that John Spencer Bassett published this thesis in the Smith College Studies, and that it is still quoted by writers on American diplomacy. Of course you are familiar with my graduate work here, and you know that I have written another book since I received my degree. After all there are not many students at Oklahoma or elsewhere who win national recognition with their doctoral dissertations, and there is no doubt that I could bring distinction in the field of productive scholarship to any college that might employ me. I have hesitated to write this letter because it introduces a new element into the pleasantest relationship I have found in all my academic career. No action that you might take in the matter, however, would alter the fact that it is to your interest and encouragement that I owe whatever success I have achieved in historical studies. There is therefore no occasion for embarrassment if I have made one request that you do not care to grant.”
Although they remained close until Dale died, he did not grant Angie’s request, then or ever.
Beginning in 1934, she began writing what arguably became her most important work, And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes (1940). In 1937 she worked alongside Grant and Carolyn Foreman editing and conducting interviews for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Indian-Pioneer Papers. Between 1937 and 1939, she wrote the third installment of what Pulitzer-prize-winning Western author Larry McMurtry calls her Indian trilogy. Hoping to attract a wider audience for the book, she titled it The Road to Disappearance: A History of the Creek Indians (1941). Then from 1940 to 1941 she supervised the Federal Writers’ Project in Oklahoma, a frustrating experience for Debo which nevertheless yielded the well-received Oklahoma: A Guide to the Sooner State (1945).
In 1942, the Oklahoma City Chapter of Theta Sigma Phi named Angie Debo the state’s “Outstanding Woman.” That same year she received an Alfred A. Knopf Fellowship in history. A year later the University of Oklahoma Press published Debo’s Tulsa: From Creek Town to Oil Capital (1943). The following year, Angie published her only work of fiction which she based on the history of Marshall and surrounding towns and titled, Prairie City: The Story of an American Community (1944). In 1946, she became a Rockefeller Fellow at the University of Oklahoma. The year after, she secured an appointment as a member of the library staff, serving as curator of maps at Oklahoma A&M (later, Oklahoma State University), a position she held until her retirement in 1955.
In 1949, the University of Oklahoma Press published Angie Debo’s Oklahoma: Foot-loose and Fancy-free (1949). That same year, she surveyed social and economic conditions in the full blood settlements of Oklahoma’s Five Southeastern Tribes for the Indian Rights Association. She later published her work as “The Five Civilized Tribes of Oklahoma: Report on Social and Economic Conditions” (1951). In 1950, Debo was inducted into the Oklahoma Hall of Fame. Two years later, she began writing a column titled “This Week in Oklahoma History” for the Oklahoma City Times and became a book reviewer for The New York Times.
In 1953, Debo published her edited version of The Cowman’s Southwest: being the reminiscences of Oliver Nelson, freighter, camp cook, cowboy, frontiersman in Kansas, Indian Territory, Texas and Oklahoma, 1878-1893 (1953). Two years later, she became a member of the board of directors of the Association on American Indian Affairs, and under its auspices conducted a survey of the effects of the Relocation policy on Oklahoma’s Indians. As her time at newly-rechristened Oklahoma State University reached its end, she began editing the “Oklahoma Indian Newsletter” and celebrated Angie Debo Recognition Day in her hometown of Marshall.
The tumultuous decade of the 1960s found her as active as ever. In 1960, the Oklahoma Historical Society awarded Debo an honorary life membership. In 1962, she published her edited version of Horatio B. Cushman’s History of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Natchez Indians (1962). Three years later, Debo taught a summer course as an adjunct instructor at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In 1969, she participated in Marshall’s first annual Prairie City Days held in her honor. A trip that same year to Alaska inspired Debo to spend the next six years lobbying successfully for the land rights of that state’s Native peoples. Having been instrumental in the passage of the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, Angie next turned her energies toward lobbying in behalf of Havasupai land rights in the Grand Canyon and the Pima Indians’ water rights to the Colorado River.
Royalties from the publication of A History of the Indians of the United States (1970) at last afforded Debo the elusive financial security for which she had worked so hard. Debo’s final work, Geronimo: The Man, His Time, His Place (1976) was a remarkable achievement for which she received several new awards in recognition of her scholarship. The Border Regional Library Association honored her with its Southwest Book Award for Biography in 1977. One year later, she received both the Wrangler Award from the Western Heritage Association of the National Cowboy Hall of Fame and the Southwestern Library Association 1978 Book Award. Other tributes to her life and work included a life membership in the Oklahoma Writer’s Federation in 1974, the Henry G. Bennett Distinguished Service Award at Oklahoma State University in 1976, an Honorary Doctorate of Letters from Wake Forest University in 1978, and one year later the Award of Merit from the American Association for State and Local History.
Angie Debo’s last years capped her career with still other honors as well as a documentary film featuring highlights of her long and productive life. In 1980, Oklahoma State University held a reception in her honor. From 1981-1985, OSU faculty members Gloria Valencia-Weber and Glenna Matthews interviewed Angie for an oral history project which, in conjunction with those conducted by the Institute for Research in History from 1982-1986, provided the basis for an installment of the PBS American Experience Series titled “Indians, Outlaws, and Angie Debo.” In 1982, Oklahoma State University established the “Angie Debo Award for Oklahoma History,” and she received honorary life membership in the Payne County Historical Society. A year later, Angie was inducted into the National Cowgirl Hall of Fame, Hereford, Texas, and she received a Distinguished Service Citation from the University of Oklahoma Alumni Association.
In 1985, the Cherokee Nation designated her an Ambassador of Goodwill, and she received a Certificate of Recognition from the Muskogee (Creek) Nation. In what was perhaps her proudest moment, the State of Oklahoma hung her portrait in the rotunda of the State Capitol – the first woman so honored. But with her wry, self-deprecating sense of humor Angie often referred to that honor as her “public hanging.” The following year, she received the Achievement Award from the American Indian Historians Association. In 1987, the American Historical Association granted her its Award for Scholarly Distinction; and in January 1988, Oklahoma Governor Henry L. Bellmon presented it to her at a special ceremony at her home in Marshall. Angie Debo died peacefully in her sleep several weeks later on February 21, 1988, and was buried at North Cemetery in Marshall.
Angie Debo bequeathed her papers to the Oklahoma State University Archives in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Today, that city’s public library proudly includes the following passage on its website: “On November 18, 2010, the Library dedicated the only known statue of Oklahoma Historian, Angie Debo, on the front lawn. Dr. Debo was selected due to her international recognition for books on Oklahoma’s Native Americans, her work at the Oklahoma State University Library, and her home in nearby Marshall, Oklahoma. Surrounding the base of the statue are the 38 seals of Oklahoma’s federally recognized Native American tribes highlighting Dr. Debo’s commitment to fighting for the civil rights of American Indians.”
While all of the awards and accolades noted above are lasting tributes to a great and inspirational woman, I believe Dr. Angie Debo is truly deserving of the national recognition and honor that would result from her being featured in the remarkable Overlooked Obits series in The New York Times.
Regarding my relationship to Dr. Debo, I am the Dean of Libraries at Oklahoma State University. Dr. Debo was a former library employee, serving as curator of maps at the Oklahoma A&M College (OSU) Library. Dr. Debo bequeathed her papers, books, and literary rights to OSU. The Angie Debo Collection, housed in the Archives of the OSU Library, consists of her research materials, personal and business correspondence, memorabilia, diaries, articles, newspaper clippings, awards, books, maps, furniture, and photographs related to her writings and personal life. I would be glad to provide electronic copies of any materials of interest, should you decide to include Angie in your Overlooked Obits series.
Also, for a detailed account of the life and accomplishments of this extraordinary woman, please see “Dr. Angie Debo: ‘Oklahoma’s Greatest Historian’“. Thank you for your time and consideration of her nomination.
Sheila Grant Johnson, Dean of Libraries and Clerico Family Chair for Library Excellence, Oklahoma State University