Rachel Perryman — Go For Good Travel

As I look back on my life, I see that there have been guiding lights for me to start this blog on “Women of Courage and Commitment in the World.”

Women are the water carriers, women are the weavers, and women are the creators and sustainers of life for future generations. Rachel Perryman, my great grandmother, was this guiding light for me.

On a personal level, my work is deeply connected to Rachel, and arises from her memory, spirit, and courage. Reconnecting with her spirit gives me the strength and wisdom to continue on this journey. Her spirit guides me in finding threads of connection all over the world and weaving them together to create a tapestry of inspiring and caring people.

In this spirit, I am moved to begin collecting these stories and share them through this “Tapestry.” “Tapestry” is my offering of story to the web of stories that keep us, as humans, connected and in harmony with our ancestors and with each other.

It wasn’t until the recent loss of my family and childhood home, the Perryman Ranch, in Jenks, Oklahoma, that I realized how present in my life Rachel’s light has always been. The Ranch, my childhood home, was also Rachel’s family home. It was always a symbol for our family’s enduring legacy, and I believed it would remain as a beacon that kept us connected to where we come from.

But in the sorrow of this physical loss, I remember that the stories are those that keep us connected to who we are - to our roots, our pasts, and our futures. Our stories are stronger than houses - our stories are our home. Writing our stories can keep us connected, and sharing this story is my way of re-illuminating Rachel’s guiding light.

It was within that old farmhouse that my dreams and visions were nurtured and gave me the perseverance and the fortitude to move into the winds of change and, later in my life, to seek out travel to remote parts of the world. It was the curiosity of a young child of four that set this story into motion, when my mother bought that set of encyclopedias from the traveling salesman who came to the door of our farmhouse. The set of Lands and Peoples books that came as a bonus for buying the encyclopedias was the lightning rod that caught my imagination at such a young age in my life. It was the presence of the books and the magical energy that sprung from the photos that changed my life that day as I sat on the floor of my living room and began to dream. I knew with deep and clear certainty that I was going to connect to the people I saw in those far away places. Rachel’s spirit was whispering to me then, as it does now, but I was far too young to know about her presence in my life.

When I sat on the floor of that farmhouse at four years old I didn’t know that my great grandmother Rachel was there with me. That was her house after she and her family survived the long forced march along the Trails of Tears from Alabama to Oklahoma in the 1830s. She was a child at that time. Her father had been a Chief of the Muscogee Creek Nation in Alabama where they had farms, grew crops and had legally deeded land of their own. They intermarried with the settlers, the Scottish, Irish, the French and English, and Africans who had escaped from slavery and were taken in by Creek towns. Many Muscogee families took European names, as our family did, with the hope that with these new names, they could hold on to their land. But the brutality of genocide in 19th century only increased with the decree of Andrew Jackson in 1830 to remove all remaining indigenous people of the Southeast. As their farms were taken and given to the settlers, the people Native to the Southeastern United States were held in concentration camps and forced to walk over several states on the “Trails of Tears” to arrive in a designated “Indian Territory” (present day Oklahoma). The land was dry and arid and they could grow very little on it. If they had survived the freezing cold on the long, deadly walk along the months on the trail, they now faced starvation in their new home. But my ancestors were survivors. Rachel’s father opened the first postal station and pony express in that part of Indian Territory. He named it Tulsi Town. That was the founding of Tulsa, which would become a major city after Oklahoma statehood. But Oklahoma statehood also forcibly “enrolled” citizens and allotted land based on racist, corrupt, and discriminatory measures; statehood also meant the disenfranchisement of the Nation and a series of blows to the sovereignty of all tribes in Indian Territory. The sovereign Creek Nation, led by several of the Perryman--one of Tulsa’s founding families--would be destroyed by Oklahoma Statehood, not to be reinstated until nearly a century later, in the 1990s.

That old farmhouse where I grew up burned down and was rebuilt many times over the years. But it was here that Rachel married and had four children. Her husband died on a cattle drive. She raised her children in that house. By the late1800’s, oil had been discovered in Oklahoma. With the drilling of oil came a new source of income for many but this also brought many serious and deadly accidents at the oil sites. Many children of the oil workers were left orphaned.

These orphaned children were mostly Native American, African-American, and Hispanic children. Rachel took these orphaned children into her farmhouse and fostered them until she found homes in the Native American communities for the children to go to. Over Rachel’s life she fostered more than 30 children in Tulsa. Her home was always open for people traveling through and for children who lost their families.

Click here to learn more about Rachel Perryman

My great grandmother Rachel died in the 1933. Almost a century later, in 2014, Rachel was inducted into the Tulsa Historical Society Hall of Fame as one of the founding women of leadership in the history of Tulsa and of Oklahoma history. I did not learn about her life and her life-saving work in that old farmhouse I grew up in until 80+ years after her death. I now understand that the energy and inspiration I was feeling was Rachel’s spirit. I knew when I saw those photos of people in other lands and places that I wanted to learn as much about the world as I could, and to know as many people in the world as I could know. I just didn’t know as a little girl, and wouldn’t learn until many many years later that it was her courage to save children, pave a path for a future for her people, to open her home to one and all, and to ultimately provide a sanctuary for so many, that this was the very thing creating and inspiring a direction for my own life. This direction that I have chosen has led me to discover and meet and befriend many women of courage and commitment as I journeyed to many distant lands in my own work. I hope that with this blog I can tell the stories of so many heroic and committed women to making a difference in the world and offer a channel to tell many stories that otherwise might never be told or heard or known about.

And so it begins…Women of Courage and Commitment in the World….

Mvto,

Aunt Rachel and Women of Courage & Commitment in the World