Invisible Indians: Mary Kay's Story

We was reading your letter to the editor concerning the invisible Natives. I always talk about the government taking many things from the Indian people including the Indian names and giving our ancestors English names.

I married a Muskogee Creek who was taken from his mother when he was in kindergarten and placed him in a BIA boarding school. He stayed there until he graduated in 1964 and his sister was also placed in a BIA school.

He remembers speaking Creek but he got into trouble because he was speaking his language. Then they made him stop speaking his language and he never did go home even during the summer. I met his mother before she died and she only spoke the Creek langauage. Then in 1996, he finally met a brother that he never knew about and he only speaks Creek. We helped him get his birth certificate by getting petitions by the elders.

Now Imogene Leitka tried to enroll into the Muskogee Creek Nation and she was told to get her birth certificate only to find out that there is no birth certificate for Imogene Leitka. The spelling of the Letka family according to his father and the court is Letka but sometime during the school years it was changed to Leitka.

When we was at Oklahoma City we went to the Department of Vital Statistics for Johnny Leitka birth certificate and found out that on the birth certicate it is spelled Leitka which was wrong. The only birth certificate that they have is for Mary John and on a different birth date than Imogene Leitka. So they told her that she is Mary John and that was her mothers name.

She tried to change her name to Imogene Leitka but the Bureau of Vital Statistics would not accept it. On that birth certificate it has baby girl infant and hand written is Mary. Johnny found out that the Social worker Galela Walkingstick is still living. The application of the Admission to Boarding school papers that Imogene Leitka has is signed by Mr. WD Roberts, Agency Superintendent, A.B. Caldwell, Area Education Officer, and Charles S. Wallace, M.D.

But still they people are insisting that she is Mary John and there is no Imogene Leitka. She does need all the help that she can get.

It really makes me angry about the way that the Indian people became institutionalized in the boarding schools, not only losing their identity, culture, heritage, and self-esteem. Our people is still paying for this today, we are no different from the Nazi camps and I was reading a book that Hitler said he used the methods that the Government used on the Indian people. I think that I could go into alot of different areas about our Indian people. If we are invisible today we will be forgotten in the future. I am a cultural teacher and I learn from the elders.

I would like to ask anyone that knows of Imogene Letka and Johnny Letka to please write because we need to provide documentation for Imogene's birth certificate and her father's parental status.

MaLaHo, Mary Kay Leitka

Through letters, essays, photographs and documents, New Tribal Dawn is documenting the life stories of full- and mixed-blood Native Americans who have had difficulty proving their ancestry, belong to unrecognized tribes, have felt it necessary to pass as non-Indian or have otherwise been "invisible" to the rest of America. Write us if you have something to offer.
 
The Muscogee Nation is a Native American tribe, also known as the Creeks. Originally from the Southeast, the U.S. Army forcibly relocated them to Oklahoma in the 1830's.
 
Read Sail of Tears in our October 1999 issue for more about the Muscogees.