HITCHITA!

THE DOCUMENTED STORY OF THE GREGG SEVIER HOMICIDE
by Jerry Thomas 

All Proceeds Go to Gregg Sevier's Survivors 
Published by PEER PRESS 12-447 Laau Loke Street,Kchena,Pahoa,Hawaii 96778
1992 Gerald P. Thomas ISBN
Published in the United States of America

Any and all net proceeds resulting from the sale of this First
Edition are willingly contributed to:
The Gregory A. Sevier Memorial Fund:  First National Bank
900 Massachusetts Street Lawrence, Kansas 66044
By buying this book you have already contributed.
Thank you!

WARNING: This book contains offensive language, racial slurs,
and detailed descriptions of horrible bloody violence.

HITCHITA is more than just the name of this book, and the name
of a rural village in the Creek Nation in Oklahoma. In Creek, or
Mesquakie, or Muskogee Language, HITCHITA is a verb. Like this book,
that verb is in the Imperative Mood.  In the White man's
language, "HITCHITA!"  says' "LOOK!" "BEHOLD!"

Dedicated to the living Soaring Spirit and to the gentle loving family
of GREGORY ALLEN SEVIER and to the people of Lawrence Kansas' in
the HEART of the USA

Contents
Preface: Personal History
Part I: Hitchita!
Part II: "Shot In The Heart," by Bruce Rodgers
Part III: The Road to Nicodemus
Part IV: Racists Anonymous

Appendix A: "All I know is just what I read in the papers"
Appendix B: Transcript of a City Commission Meeting
Appendix C: Transcript of the Coroner's Inquest, with Exhibits
Appendix D: The Letters of Cynthia Butler

"All I know is just what I read in the papers or what I see as I prowl from
hither to thither." William Adair "Will" Rogers, the Cherokee
Indian, Cowboy philosopher.

PREFACE "PERSONAL HISTORY

   This book is a matter of life and death.
   It came to life in the mourning after the death of
Gregg Sevier. It represents a spiritual awakening for its
writer. It attempts to describe a serious social problem in
Lawrence,  Kansas.  It offers an effective ongoing sustained
low-cost solution to that problem.  It contains an idea that
might splash like a benevolent bombshell into the center of
a sea of troubles, making waves that could wash through and
from the Heart of America. 
   Perhaps its readers will be blessed with a similar
spiritual awakening when Spring comes again to warm the cold
heart of Lawrence, Kansas. When I was a boy in Kansas my
favorite season was spring and my least favorite was winter.  In
winter, in the fertile fantasies of my boyhood daydreams, I used
to picture myself living alone in undisturbed peace on a
tropical island.
   My present home, isolated in a rural area
between a black sand beach and a violent voluptuous volcano on
the Island of Hawaii, is the realization of those dreams.  To a
retired widowed recluse writer, a former Jayhawk, the gentle
Hawaiian climate is like eternal spring.  During my long absence
from Kansas, the disagreeable, undesirable Kansas Winter became
nothing more than a bad memory buried in the dim distant
past. In the present, however, spending November and December
of 1991 in Lawrence, Kansas, I was able to share an
exceptionally mild winter with the Lawrence Community.  It is
now past the middle of December, and the winter, though cold, is
by no means at its worst stage.  This Kansas Winter is nowhere
near as bad as the winters I had remembered. 
   I live on the edge of a volcano.  Kilauea pours its unceasing
flow of molten lava into the Pacific Ocean some five miles from my
peaceful neighborhood.  It's exciting to live on the edge of a
volcano in a land of eternal spring.
   Nothing less than a matter of vital importance would offer
sufficient challenge to yank me out of my paradise and drag me
back to Kansas in winter. Assigning myself the task of producing
"Hitchita!" provided that challenge.  Feeling a mixture of
enthusiasm and reluctance, bundling my shivering body in warm
wool sweaters provided by a newfound Chippewa friend, I armed
myself to accept the challenge of assembling "Hitchita!" and
conquered my fear of facing the formidable Kansas Winter.
   For more than forty years I have
avoided Kansas in winter.  As the decades flew by, I moved,
gypsy like, from Galena to Guam via Estes Park and Glacier Park,
from Phoenix to Kenosha, from Guam to Buenos Aires to Colorado
to Taiwan via Caracas and Mexico City, and most recently I
settled in Hawaii.  In the past six years I have spent many
happy hours lying on the beach, shaded by coconut trees, lulled
by the rhythmic surf of the eighty degree Pacific sea water,
watching the white foam sink into the black sand, content to let
the world go by, rarely remembering Kansas and winter.
   While dwelling in faraway places, meeting other races, my
private mental picture of Kansas in winter grew alarmingly
awesome, taking on chillingly negative characteristics.  I would
truly have been satisfied to avoid the Kansas Winter for the
rest of my humdrum life.
   A variety of adventurous careers has
occupied my time during the past four decades.  As a Dale
Carnegie Course Instructor and as a student of Human Relations,
Interpersonal Communication, Linguistics, Speech, and Rhetoric,
I learned the importance of self determination and the inherent
effects of language on human thought and human behavior.
   I enjoyed, and survived, eight years, eight months, and eight days
as Dispatcher and Supervisor of Communications in the Fort
Collins, Colorado Police Department.  "We're the people who tell
the cops where to go," my colleagues were fond of saying.  We
were Public Safety Communicators, but we looked like cops on
account of the clothes we wore when working.  I was pleased when
the Training Sergeant invited me to conduct a training program
for patrolmen and other police personnel.
   I exchanged ideas about love and life with my young Chinese
students and other Chinese friends during the period when I
taught communications skills in Providence College, Taiwan's
only women's college, in Taichung.  [Translation: "Centerville,"
or "Middletown"] I was at a loss for words there one day when a 
bright student asked me how we White Americans see the Chinese
people. "Do you think of us as you think of the niggers?" she
asked.  God knows where she got that idea.  Or that word.
I lived through and benefited from two good marriages, each of 
them more than fifteen years in duration.  My granddaughter,
with whom I am very pleased, is growing up in a state where
racism is almost unknown.  My two sons also are free from the
affliction, and I'm glad about that.  Perhaps living in foreign
countries was what made racism foreign to their way of being.
Somehow, somewhere along the way, I discovered to my dismay that
I'm an alcoholic. Until age 35 I drank a lot more than my share.
But a lifesaving blessing came to me when I found and joined 
Alcoholics Anonymous in 1965.  I have, thank God, been
relatively sober ever since.
   Throughout my adult life I have always been pleased with my
success at avoiding Kansas in winter. 
A longtime friend, a resident of Lawrence, persuaded me to be
his house guest in July, 1991.  From him I learned of the
current social unrest in the Heart of America, and I made a
decision to add some of my own verbosity to the flood of words
that continue to be written on the subject.  Ideas generate
words, and words affect behavior.  Maybe I could make a
difference. 
   The beauty of Lawrence, Kansas is easier for me to appreciate 
in Spring and Summer than in Winter.  That beauty was marred
last spring when I learned of the demise of Gregg Sevier.
The ugliness of his death was overburdened by an even greater
ugliness that transcends the tragic event itself.
   My exploration of the events surrounding his passing has
occupied my being ever since. I feel an imperative,
irrepressible, urgent need to help Gregg Sevier's death take on
the deep meaning that it deserves.
   My search for information and inspiration has been immensely
rewarding.  Historic, geographic, and psychoanalytic, it took me
to the heart of the American Indian Community of Lawrence,
Kansas, where a warm welcome helped me withstand winter.  It
took me to the Indian Nations in the Oklahoma hills, and it
flung me back into my own forgotten past.  It has involved
inspection and introspection.  "The only time I go through
introspection is when I'm to run for reelection," Wilma
Man killer said recently.  Ms Man killer (Dutch Irish/Cherokee) has
been Chief of the Cherokee Indian Nation 100,000 strong since
1987.  Learning of that leading lady's existence and her
brilliant career was a part of the serendipity.  She has been
called a Tribal Leader, Trailblazer, Peacemaker, Historian, and
Role Model as she skillfully fights for the rights of American
Indians.  And of American Women.  "We need to make sure we don't
sit and watch our Future go down the drain," she
said.
   My personal odyssey has opened doors to the
Future that I never knew existed and doors to a past unseen
before.  Exciting, enlightening, and stimulating, it has shown
me a vast, rich, new field of interest, and it has exposed a
pile of problems that beg for sustained solutions.
   Looking for a clear definition of the problem and its real causes,
seeking solutions, I read my way through a huge heap of
newspaper clippings, police reports, and news releases.  I read
letters to public officials and their replies.  I watched
videotapes of TV newscasts and public meetings.  I typed a
complete transcript of all the words spoken by community
representatives pleading with their government and their fellow
citizens for a revision of perceived racist attitudes and
procedures, and I thoughtfully considered the significance of
those words.  Some spoke in that meeting of the effects of
certain attitudes on battered women and their children; others
spoke of the effects of those attitudes on citizens of the Black
Community and their children, and on citizens of the
Native American Community and their children.
   I made a detailed study of the fifty eight thousand three hundred
thirty two words in the Transcript of the Coroner's Inquest into
the Death of Gregg Sevier and its accompanying Exhibits.


Although I had never before met an Indian family I was
privileged to get acquainted with the surviving Seviers and was
warmly welcomed into their horror haunted home.  The second time
Chase Gudenkauf, 5, Gregg's nephew, ever saw me, as I entered
the Sevier home on a Saturday afternoon in early November, he
ran to me from across the room and greeted me by hugging my
knees, looking up at me, his face filled with a friendly grin.
He and his little sister, Sarah, 3, are members of a gentle
loving family.  The Seviers make it easy for a stranger to feel
comfortable in their home.  They aroused in me an intense
interest in the history of the Creek and Choctaw Indians.
   I traveled to Tahlequah and I went to Okmulgee and Muskogee.
There I met Dub West, one of Oklahoma's most prolific and
enthusiastic historical writers.  He showed me hard evidence
that the Creek Indians had been fleeing the White man's
dominance since Cortez arrived in Mexico in 1519.
   I visited the Five Civilized Tribes Museum and I saw there
among the artifacts an ancient wooden spoon for stirring sofkee,
just like the sofkee that Willie and Orene Sevier had prepared
and served to me in their kitchen in Lawrence.  That wooden spoon was
carved in the Creek Nation somewhere near the Chattahoochee
River some two hundred years ago and was carried as a part of
the meager baggage transported in misery along the Trail of
Tears.  
   I asked Julie Kidde, a young blonde blue eyed
(Cherokee, nonetheless) volunteer Hostess at the Museum, to
select and sell to me her favorite cassette from the
array of Indian music for sale to Museum visitors.  Julie chose
"Visions: American Indian Flute Music." 
   Sometimes now, in the still of the night, I stop looking and
listen to that music. I envision myself as a miserable member of
the ill clad footsore tribes trudging along that long bitter
Trail of Tears, resting from the weariness of one more long day
of walking, camped for the winter night, huddled heartsick and
homesick, shivering in the light of a faintly flickering
campfire, drenched by the freezing drizzling rain, hearing the
trembling haunting lullaby of the mournful flute's liquid tones,
too weary to weep, too sad to cry, the well of tears drained
dry.  
   Sometimes I'm able to feel their insufferable suffering as if it
were my own. At the Veterans' Hospital next door to the Museum I
visited with Chaplain Schwaarz, a recent arrival from Chicago.
Unlike many Muskogeeans, the Chaplain had not heard of the Gregg Sevier
shooting.  "It's a common occurrence in America nowadays," he
said with his German accent and a dismissing wave of his hand.
Our brief visit was cut short when his beeper beeped.  "Excuse
me," said Chaplain Schwaarz.  "I have to attend to another
death." 
   I met Frankie Sue Gilliam, who publishes "Twin
Territories" nine times a year, cramming each issue with
articles of lasting interest about the history of Indian
Territory and Oklahoma Territory.  She and her daughter Julie
are Cherokee women.  They helped me to see the American Indians'
Past and they gave me a glimpse of their Present.  Frankie Sue
concentrates on history and avoids the Present in her writing
and publishing.  "Current events are too depressing," she said.
It's like beating your head against a stone wall."
   In Lawrence, Kansas I felt a disturbing atmosphere that reeks of
racial injustice.  A persistent, annoying, ongoing Community wide
domestic disturbance.  I sensed the intensity of the pain and
frustration expressed in the faces and body language of the
Mayor and the City Commissioners as they tried desperately and
sincerely, but vainly, to uphold their sworn duty to serve the
people by solving a problem that they did not seem to
understand.
   Then I recognized their pain and frustration
as my own.
   I made a decision to do something about it.  To
ease the pain.  What happens in the Heart of America is
important to me.  When America hurts, I hurt.  As we move
swiftly toward the five hundredth anniversary of the "discovery"
of America I discover that America in 1992 is not the country
that I want it to be.  Racism is running down our country.  I
made a decision to muster all available resources and to join
the growing group that is striving to make its voice
heard.
   "Maybe I'll write a an Editorial, or a Letter To The
Editor," I said, in the beginning.  But I abandoned that plan
when I learned that many such letters had already been written,
and mailed to the local newspaper, and never printed.  Nobody in
a position of power and influence, not even the Editor of the
Lawrence Journal-World, wants to stir up Trouble in Lawrence,
Kansas.  [Please see Appendix A]
   "Maybe I'll write a magazine article," I said, but Bruce
Rodgers beat me to it with the comprehensive story he told 
in the New Times.  [Please see Part III]
   Then I said, "Maybe I'll write a book." 
   I began making notes and doing research and talking to people and
reading more and more background material.  The motivation was
strong, and the challenge felt almost but not quite over well.
Then I began hearing my own voice saying, "I'm writing a
book." 
   Righteous indignation obsessed me, but my quest for
truth and justice was interrupted by a previous engagement.  In
September I joined a very dear friend, a young Chinese
businessman, on an extensive two man tour of Mainland China.
   For a month, visiting Fuzhou, Hangzhou, and Beijing I
experienced, very personally, the feelings of being a racial
minority.  Through their Oriental eyes thousands of the billion
people in China stared at me and pointed at me and laughed at me
wherever we went.  I wanted to say to them, "I know the shape of
my face is different from yours and the color of my skin is
different, too.  In your eyes I'm a curiosity, but in my heart
I'm a human being very much like you.  I'm admiring your
beautiful country.  I hope you can come and see mine!" I smiled
a lot.  I heard my Chinese friend telling his friends, "He's
writing a book!" 
   "What's the book about?" some of them asked
me. 
   "I think it's about Indians in America," I said.
   With the inscrutably serious expression typical of his race
a Chinese man in Tienanmen Square said to me, "The rest of the
world knows a lot about Indians in America." By the dawn's early
light I watched the CBS Evening News on the TV in my Hong Kong hotel
room.  I saw an advertisement that spoke to me of how others see
us.  It was a commercial for the brand new 1992 Seven Passenger
Toyota Van.  Fourteen Chinese actors performed, divided into two
separate groups, distinguishable not by race but by the clothing
they wore.  Seven of them, wearing blankets, feathers in their
hair and paint on their faces, were clearly the
"Indians." Seven others the "Cowboys" wore wide brimmed sombreros
and bandannas.  The mounted Chinese Cowboys pursued the fleeing
unarmed Chinese "American" Indians, terrifying them by firing
their life-threatening handguns.  Fortunately, the "Indians"
happened upon a brand new 1992 Seven Passenger Toyota Van and
escaped.  And they all lived happily ever after. 
   In early November I returned to Lawrence.
   Downed by depression and anger, filled with fear and foreboding,
feeling grossly inadequate, I faced the Kansas winter and the
gruesome prospect of stirring up Trouble and placing myself in a
vulnerable position.  I could be labeled an "Outside Agitator." A target
for the mythical serial killer.  An anonymous assassin's bullet
could find me.  My bloated battered body could be found
floating, "drowned" in the muddy water of the icy Kansas River
in the spring or damaged by an phantom hit-and-run vehicle or
dumped in a ditch on a rural route only to be probed by puzzled,
perplexed police personnel. 
   Reassurance came with the realization that recent victims of
such deadly violence were not investigative journalists or
outside agitators.  Their only crime was being Indians.  Drunk
Indians.  Intoxicated Native Americans.  Inebriated Indigenous
People. 
   Why should I worry? I'm White.  And I don't drink.
   The temperature rose and the sun came out and my deep depression
dwindled.  I reviewed the facts that were available to me, and 
suddenly I realized that there was really no need for me to
write a book: The most important ingredients of the book had
already been written. They only needed to be assembled and laid 
out before the judgment seat of decency and morality.
   In his magazine article, Bruce Rodgers told the story as well as
it can be told. Eager to share the story with as many readers as
possible, Bruce gave me permission to publish it again. 
   Cynthia Butler's solitary and courageous crusade accurately 
assessed attitudes of government officials.  She supplied me
with dozens of documents she had collected.
   News media, although labeled "reckless, inaccurate, and unfair"
by a former Lawrence Police Spokesman, did yield much valuable
information.  The Coroner's Inquest Transcript and its
accompanying Exhibits expose the self-evident truth.  The
Lawrence  Community needs to see the complete record,
with nothing "out of context."
   Spiritually awakened readers will see it and study it and 
understand it.  Blessed virtue moves in when deadly sins are 
understood and forgiven.
   Now when asked what the book is about, I can be
more specific and more honest.  Now I know that the book is
about me a Racist.
   As a product of the dominant White culture
in Kansas I can identify with the Racist attitudes of the
various "communities" that make up the Lawrence Community.
   A certain prominent local social leader of Kiowa/Creek/Scotch Irish
origin told me that as a child he was taught, "Never trust a
White man." "I had to overcome that teaching," he said to me
with a smile.  "Some of them are trustworthy."  
   A certain Mrs. White (not her real name), a lifelong resident
of Lawrence, told me she had asked a prominent local artist
who happened to be the only Indian among her guests if he would like some
"firewater," and that he had seemed offended.  "I don't know why
he was so sensitive," she said.  "There is no racial
discrimination in Lawrence that I'm aware of." 
   Maybe it takes one to know one. 
   To give my writing a semblance of scholarly research I wished to
God I could put my hands on interesting tidbits of the history
of Lawrence, Kansas.  My prayer was answered when Marsha Henry 
Goff walked in and handed me a book she had created: "The
Lawrence Chamber of Commerce 1878-1990." 
   Marsha Goff wrote of the optimism expressed by
the founders of that organization in 1878 when Lawrence was
bouncing back from Panic and Depression: "We are not dead.
Lawrence today has a brighter future before her than any other
town in the state.  We don't want any tears wept over our grave.
We are lively yet."
   I learned that in the Lawrence, Kansas of
1991 racism is rampant.  Then I looked back into my own past and
admitted that I, too, am a Racist.  But it's not my fault.  I
have been guilty of treating other people in ways that show my
unconscious but ingrained belief in the superiority of my race
and the inferiority of theirs.  I plead innocent by reason of
ignorance.  Intellectually I understand the Fallacy of Race and
I protest against my early training.  I don't want to be a
Racist and I don't like being Racist, but my cultural
environment molded me and made me become a Racist.  It takes
responsible concentrated individual effort, and help from the
outside, to overcome the attitudes I was taught as a
child. 
   By marrying my Alcoholism problem to my Racism
problem, with the help of a Higher Power, Racists Anonymous was
conceived.  I made the minimal effort required for paraphrasing
the Twelve Steps of AA.  I myself took the twelve steps toward
recovery from racism.
   Having had a spiritual awakening as
the result of these steps, I am trying to carry this message to
other Racists, and to practice the principles of recovery
in all my affairs.  
   I review the dream of a harmonious America
described by Martin Luther King on that day when he shouted time
after time, "I have a dream!" I place myself in the dream scene
that he described.  I see myself and my fellow Americans living,
enjoying, and benefiting from the reality of a free nation a
nation free from Racism.
   In a later section of this book I will give birth to the idea 
that God and I have conceived.  I trust in God.  I trust that
our idea His and mine will grow in the
hearts of others as it has grown in my own heart. 
   Abraham Lincoln, in his Second Inaugural Address, as the Civil 
War was ending, spoke of "binding up the Nation's wounds .. . with malice toward none, with charity for all."  The Creek Indians, in an 1874 parade in Muskogee, Oklahoma carried a
banner repeating the slogan, "Charity for all; Malice toward
none." 
   It is in that forgiving spirit that this work is
presented. 
   I hope the people of Lawrence will enjoy a new
beginning in the spring of 92.
   Hope springs eternal.
   Behold!  
   Hitchita!

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