Jerry and Shirley Lowman as the Valentine Couple in the 2015 Choctaw Nation calendar. Photo by Pollaro Video
Spotlight on Elders with Jerry and Shirley Lowman
By Zach Maxwell
Choctaw Nation
Smithville, Okla. - Jerry and Shirley Lowman have dedicated much of their lives to Choctaw traditional music, dancing and artistry.
Some of this happened by chance and some by design. Both were raised in isolated, woodland communities in northern McCurtain County, mostly after World War II. Both spoke only Choctaw until entering nearby grade schools.
They met in high school, married soon thereafter and built a hardscrabble existence in the Smithville area. The isolation kept families – and long-standing traditional life ways – intact in the wooded hills near the Arkansas border.
As young adults in the 1970s, they could see some of the activities that made a distinctive Choctaw culture were fading from the Oklahoma landscape. As other native nations enjoyed a cultural renaissance in the wake of “Wounded Knee ’73,” the Lowmans joined a determined group of Choctaws in keeping tribal music and dancing alive.
Both also participate in various forms of native expression. For Shirley, it’s in the form of beadwork. And for Jerry, his work as a silversmith allows him to create rings and key chains in themes both ancient (such as stickball) and modern (such as the OKC Thunder logo).
The Lowmans’ special contribution to Choctaw chanting and dancing goes back more than 40 years with some trips to learn from our Mississippi kin. These efforts earned them an invitation to lead tribal dances on the capitol grounds at Tvshka Homma this past Labor Day.
“When (Choctaw language instructor Terri Billy) asked us to chant at Tvshka Homma, we felt so honored,” Shirley said. This honored couple was featured as February “Choctaw valentines” in the 2015 calendar, in a photo of them in full traditional attire from the same event.
The Lowmans will celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary this June.
Jerry grew up in the Watson and Buffalo areas, as well as several years in western Oklahoma before returning home at age 18 upon the passing of his grandmother. Shirley was born “at home” into the Ludlow family in the community of the same name.
Both describe an upbringing of hard work, rural isolation and a struggle to adapt to English-speaking classmates and teachers. Shirley’s parents, including mother Minnie (Bonds) Ludlow from Bethel, had 11 children but no electricity until Shirley was grown.
Jerry’s mother was a member of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, but his vivid memories of childhood centered on his grandparents. “(Grandma) used to wear an apron all the time,” he said. “And she would go barefooted. She would never wear shows. Maybe when she went to church but when she went to town, she went barefooted.”
Jerry worked at a pallet company, chicken processing plant and U.S. Mortar but settled on working the nearby “log woods” until 1998. Shirley and her family would travel to Texas to “pull cotton” or, closer to home they would find work “peeling poles.”
This work involved stripping small trees of their bark with a draw knife so they could be made into fence posts. Jerry called it a “running thing” in the 1950s, with post yards all over the piney hills of far southeastern Oklahoma.
“A machine does it now,” Shirley said of the post work. “Dad used to tell us, you better get an education because a machine will take this over in the future.”
Wages were low and indeed, peeling poles became a thing of the past. Once the Lowman’s daughter reached schooling age, Shirley applied to work as a teacher’s aide in the Johnson O’Malley program. She retired a few years ago after 35 years as an aide and bus driver for Smithville schools.
In the early 1970s, the Lowmans were part of a large group who joined Pastors Gene Wilson and John Bohanan on a journey to eastern Mississippi to visit the Choctaw Reservation at Pearl River.
“Gene was in charge of Christian education and he wanted to do cultural things for the Choctaws here,” Shirley said. “He wrote a proposal and received a grant. For me, culture was something I never thought about: Who we were, where we came from.”
They visited Nvnih Waiya, even as local Choctaws warned them not to go inside the cave. “They said, ‘Something is going to grab you,’” Jerry said.
“I was kind of afraid but I followed the trail and made it to look at the real Nvnih Waiya,” he said. “You see the big mound out there and say, ‘How did people build something like that?’ It is something to see Nvnih Waiya out there.”
They also experienced first-hand the racism of the Deep South in the wake of the Civil Rights era – something they said was absent from rural Oklahoma at the time. The Lowmans shared stories with Terri Billy about their Mississippi visit, where white business owners refused to let them do laundry and others denied them shelter at a church after their car broke down.
And it took a few visits to the Mississippi Choctaw Indian Fair, but soon the Lowmans were in contact with people like Tony Bell and Prentiss and Amy Jackson – keepers of the time-honored dances and chants of the Choctaws.
“If a person wants to learn, he’s going to have to be really dedicated to want to learn it,” Jerry said of the chanting. “My goal was to chant, to learn. We practiced just about every week and finally got it down the way it’s supposed to be done.”
They speak of three dance styles: Social dancing, animal dances and the War Dance. Over the years, the Lowmans were at the head of a group that took the dances to fairs, festivals and parades across the Choctaw Nation.
Jerry said the animal dances honor the contributions that various creatures made to the Choctaws. Dances honoring turtles, ducks and of course the rattlesnake are meant to show appreciation to these creatures for providing food or protecting crops from nuisances.
Jerry also spoke of the rarely seen Ribbon Woman Dance that honors the four directions and offers a chance for a historian to tell the Choctaw story while a couple chants in very low tones. The Lowmans said their group employed this dance but they know of no pictures or videos of this particular dance.
Like the language, there are subtle differences between Oklahoma Choctaw dancing and the Mississippi style. But both are flourishing in recent years thanks to a new generation of Choctaws on both sides of the river following in the footsteps of honored elders such as Jerry and Shirley Lowman.
Watch the interview here.