Onyleen Zapata, Miss Potawatomi 2014

Onyleen Zapata, also known as "Ony," is a truly amazing and active young Native American girl of just 14 who, together with her family, lives just north of Athens, near the Potawatomi Reservation.

At age 13, Onyleen was honored with the title of "Miss Potawatomi," as chosen from the 9 bands of Potawatomis throughout Canada and the United States. Miss Potawatomi is chosen annually at the Gathering of the Potawatomi Nations, hosted by a different band each year. This year, the Gun Lake Tribe will be hosting the event.

Onyleen told me she has had a dream about winning this contest ever since 2009, when she was just 8 years old, and it inspired her for the next five years to prepare for this contest last August. 

In her competition with an older Native from New Mexico, both were asked to introduce themselves in their native language, explain their specialty dance, tell what their regalia signified and also say if they had any participation in its making.

If any part of their regalia or beadwork, feathers, etc. falls off during their dance, that contestant would be automatically disqualified. (This also applies when dancing in a Pow Wow contest.)

Onyleen was wearing her fancy dance outfit when I went to her home, and I was extremely impressed, especially by a fancy crown with pictures and words on it which she was awarded for the contest. She is very pleased that she will get to keep the crown even after she will be succeeded by the next Miss Potawatomi in August.

Speaking of her replacement, Onyleen's younger sister, O'felia, has been inspired by her sister's exciting success and plans to enter the next contest this coming August.

The girls’ parents and grandparents have been very active in Native events for many years. 

Her grandpa, Terry A. Chivis, has been singing with a drum for over 35 years, and her dad, Arthur, is the lead singer for the family’s Southern Straight Singers. Even her younger brother Owyn, who is just 11, sometimes leads at the drum, and the rest of the family either dances or sings.

Onyleen's mother, Mon-ee, has a job with the tribe as a cultural associate and has top seniority within the tribe. 

Though her dad grew up in Marshall and says there was some prejudice back when he was in school, everyone in the family seems to have a positive attitude and certainly tries not to allow themselves to be affected by anything negative.

The three Zapata children go to Athens Public School and though there are about 300 students there, only a dozen are Native Americans. They are all three very active students, for both sisters play the clarinet in the school band, and all three are also involved in a number of sports, including football, softball, basketball, volleyball, and track.

Because Onyleen seems much older that 14, I felt comfortable asking her about her future. She said she hopes to go to Michigan State, but she doesn't know what her major will be. After that she has thought about going into the Army, or she might do professional photography.

Whatever Onyleen finally takes up after college, I feel sure that she will be successful and happy with life, and I also feel sure that you'll be hearing more about her in the future.

My Musical Memories

Did you know that as a baby you could remember music experienced when you were still in your mother’s womb?

I feel sure that in my mother’s womb I heard more music than most babies, for my mother was a terrific piano player who loved to play by ear and played all of the time. I can still remember her going to the piano even for five minutes when our dad wasn’t home yet from work and dinner was cooking. She wasn’t practicing but rather just playing by ear for simple joy.

I must have loved hearing her play, probably even from her womb, for I started trying to play the piano with my small hands when I was just three years old.

Though my mother was impressed with my love for the piano by ear, she decided that I should learn to play properly. That plan was an especially good one, for that was where I was encouraged, because of my good ear, to play violin as well as piano.

There’s a very interesting book by Daniel J. Levitin called “This Is Your Brain on Music,” where he explains that we all heard and sometimes even remembered all sorts of interesting sounds while still in the womb, including, of course, our mother’s heartbeat and various voices.

But perhaps one of the most significant sounds, he says, was music, for it had an influence in our taste for music after we were born--and sometimes for our whole lives.

Levitin explains in his book that Professor Alexandra Lamont of Keele University in England studied this subject intensely and developed an experiment of having a group of mothers play a single piece of music for their unborn babies over their last three months before birth.

After the babies were born, the mothers were not allowed to play or sing that piece at all until their babies were one year old.

At that point, Professor Lamont played the very music the babies heard in the womb along with one other piece. She set up two loudspeakers, one on each side of the baby, and alternated the two tunes, one familiar and one not familiar.

The babies was placed between those speakers, and they would invariably turn their faces toward the speaker playing the familiar music from before they were born.

Professor Lamont had another control group of babies who had not heard a particular piece of music in the womb. Those babies showed no preference for one piece of music over another.

For me, the best aspect of my hearing music constantly by my mother from even before I was born is that I have always been passionate about music--especially playing by ear. I have been playing, mostly on violin but also on piano, for virtually my whole life, and I surely hope to keep playing for many more years to come.

I’m of course tremendously thankful to my mother for her musical influence, but I’m also grateful that at nearly 75, my fingers, hands, arms and shoulders don’t suffer from any arthritis or other problems from which other music friends have suffered.

I finally retired from the Battle Creek Symphony after 31 years, but these days I play more than ever with the Olde Tyme Music group six or more times each month, at my church each Sunday, and for many other events as well.

My sweetheart Andrew and I will be marrying on my 100th birthday, and I definitely plan to play my violin for the event.

A Remarkable Man Tells of a Remarkable Girl

Dr. Oliver Sacks’s popular book, “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat and Other Clinical Tales,” is full of accounts of fascinating patients with highly unusual mental, psychological and physical problems, I could have chosen a fascinating subject for my column from most any one of 24 patients described in the book.

I was particularly fascinated, however, by a 19-year-old girl named Rebecca, for she was mentally very handicapped, and yet she was also both intelligent and insightful.

As he explained, Rebecca couldn’t find her way around the block; she couldn’t open a door with a key; she often put on her clothes inside out or backwards; she had a partial cleft palate which affected her speech; she couldn’t count change, and she could never learn to read or write.

When Rebecca was given IQ tests, she averaged just 60, which is, of course, considered a very retarded score. Even the very experienced, understanding Dr. Sacks, when he first met her in his office, described her as, “clumsy, uncouth, all-of-a-fumble---I saw her merely or wholly, as a casualty, a broken creature, whose neurological impairments I could pick out and dissect with precision.”

The second time he saw her, however, it was outdoors, before his office opened. She was sitting on a bench and smiled warmly, enjoying what he described as “not just a simple but a sacred view of nature.”

He had also just learned that she was active in the family’s Jewish Synagogue. As Dr. Sacks explained, “She loved going to the synagogue, where she too was loved (and seen as a child of God, a sort of innocent, a holy fool), and she fully understood the liturgy, the chants, the prayers, rites and symbols of which the Orthodox service consists.”

Rebecca’s parents had both died by the time she was three, and she had been raised by her grandmother. When Sacks next met her, a half-year after their first meeting, her grandmother had died suddenly, and her grief was deep. He had gone to see her as soon as he heard the news, and she was, as he put it, “frozen with grief.” When she was able to speak, however, she said touchingly,  “Grannie’s all right. She’s gone to her long home.” And she said, “It is winter. I feel dead. But I know the spring will come again.”

After her grandmother’s death, Rebecca was put into various workshops and classes, but she quickly insisted that she did not want to go to any of them. “I’m like a sort of living carpet,” she insisted. “I come apart, I unravel, unless there’s a design.”

Dr. Sacks understood what she meant right away and enrolled her, instead, in a special theatre group which she loved from the first moment.

As he put it, “She became a complete person, poised, fluent, with style, in each role. And now if one sees Rebecca on stage, . . .  one would never even guess that she was mentally defective.”

Music and drama, accord to Dr. Sacks, have the power to organize “when abstract or schematic forms of organization fail.”

I especially liked his comment about his approach to all of the people in the book: ”I’m equally drawn to the scientific and the romantic and continually see both in the human condition.”

Dr. Sacks’ books are about such interesting people and are so well written that it’s hard for a columnist like me not to keep mining. I would urge you to read his books, but I hope you’ll read my columns about him as well.

Friend's March to Selma with Martin Luther King

I taught English at Spelman College, a black women’s college in Atlanta, Georgia back in 1964-5, while I was a graduate student at Emory University.

I was very liberal, even back then, and I sure hoped to help make black students feel happier and more respected. I felt that my first teaching job there was extremely demanding, for I had four different classes to teach each semester.

A close friend of mine from undergraduate days, Bill Charland, was teaching at another black school, Clark College, just across the street from Spelman. Bill was also very liberal and I’m sure very busy, too, but he was much more active in helping blacks than I was.

On March 7th of 1965, he heard about an aborted civil rights march from Selma, Alabama to Montgomery, the capital. The march had been broken up by the Southern whites who had violently attacked the marchers.

Bill says he vividly remembers hearing that young black John Lewis, now a U. S. Congressman from Georgia, was lying on the ground with his skull fractured by a billy club and with blood streaming down his face. As soon as Bill heard about poor Lewis and others who had been attacked, he decided immediately that he simply had to go to Alabama for the cause. He and a friend took an early flight to Montgomery, where they were met by a middle-aged black woman for a short drive to Selma. Bill says he still remembers her saying to them several times, “Now, if we make it through this next stretch, I think we’ll be all right.”

Once they arrived in Selma, they gathered in a church where Dr. Martin Luther King himself gave them strict orders. They were to form four columns, whites on the outside and blacks--many of them local teenagers--on the inside, and they were commanded to walk together peacefully for just over 50 miles to Montgomery. As they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge, high above the Alabama River, Bill became aware of the deep anger in the crowd. “Those kids were up for a fight,” he says, “But the non-violent organization held.”

Once they got across the bridge, everything became immediately more scary, for a large group of white men, probably members of the Ku Klux Klan, wielded heavy sticks, from ax handles to baseball bats. The group Bill was a part of halted, and the two groups simply glared at each other for quite some time. “It occurred to me that I might die,” Bill says.

Just then a murmur went through the crowd as an elderly white lady walked up alongside the marchers, with King and an associate on either side. She was the wife of the liberal Illinois Senator, Paul Douglas, and her presence miraculously stopped an inevitable attack in its tracks.

Finally, over a week later, a third march made it all the way from Selma to Montgomery. The protest had succeeded, despite all of the anger and hatred.

I feel proud of my brave friend Bill, and wish I had been more active back in those days. I was probably just sitting in my office at Spelman grading papers while he was risking his life.

It’s a real pleasure to write a column about an old, loyal friend like Bill. He and I have stayed in close touch for nearly 60 years, and I just hope this story will make you want get back in touch with worthy old friends of yours.