Rocky

by Donna Schoenkopf

We are all sitting at long tables in the Citizen Potawatomi North Extension Meeting Room. There is an easel with a large map propped on it of Pottawatomie County with various sections of it in different colors.

(Did you notice the different spellings of “Potawatomi”? The White Man’s spelling and the Tribal spelling. Most tribes here in Oklahoma differentiate the spelling of their tribes’ names from the Anglicized version.)

At the back of the room are long tables of Italian food from San Remo Restaurant. Salad, rolls, spaghetti with huge meatballs, at least a dozen pizzas with different toppings and cheese cake—strawberry and chocolate. And iced tea. Iced tea is kind of the official drink in Oklahoma.

Rocky Barrett (all photos: www.potawatomi.org)

Rocky Barrett stands at the front of the room. His hair is completely white now and he wears glasses, but he’s the same Rocky I knew in high school. He has piercing blue eyes, has a stocky build, is wearing a suit. He’s got a strong face. People are taking his picture with their cell phone cameras.

He is a celebrity. A loved celebrity. And he is very, very powerful.

Rocky is my old Shawnee High School friend from back in the ’60s. He was always charismatic, kind, funny, and everybody liked him, including my brother, Johnny. High school was not Johnny’s favorite time or place. But Rocky liked Johnny. Called him “Cotton” for his white-blond hair. Johnny said Rocky was one of the few really nice people in school.

Rocky’s dad was an oil man and his mom was a Potawatomi Indian. He has a beautiful sister, Loretta, who is a nationally known chef. Rocky was married to my dear and lovely friend, Nancy. He has two sons, grown, who look just like him and have his outgoing, friendly personality.

Rocky is arguably now the most powerful man in Pottawatomie County because Rocky is the Chairman of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation. (The term “chief” is long gone.) And a better person to be in that position there could not be. Think of him as the Obama of Pottawatomie County.

A little history:

The Potawatomis who have their tribal land in Pottawatomie County, Oklahoma (there are other Potawatomis in Wisconsin and Indiana, etc.) came to Oklahoma from Kansas some time ago, having been displaced from their Kansas home by encroaching White Folks and given Oklahoma Indian Territory land. (We won’t go into the criminal acts of federal agents that followed.)

Their name means “the place of fire,” a name acquired through their origins in the Algonquin Tribe, and things in these parts are named “FireLake” because the tribe built a cool golf course with a lake on it and named it FireLake Golf Course. There are other enterprises—the FireLake Discount Food Store, the FireLake Grocery Express, the FireLake Casino, to name only a few. If you see the name FireLake, you know it’s owned by the Potawatomis. They have a website where you can see their evolution into a really amazing entity.

But this preamble is the lead-up to a story of vision and environmental awareness and a consciousness of the interconnection of things and how Rocky is building this vision by doing good, thinking smart, and being ahead of his time.

(Personally, I think it’s because he is a child of the ’60s and sees The Big Picture. Or maybe it’s genetic. Or maybe it’s because he‘s a Potawatomi.)

So there I was, at the meeting of the Rural Water District #3, having gotten my invitation through the mail. I was invited because I am a member of the RWD#3.

I joined the water district a year ago when I built my little housie and decided I did NOT want to drink the well water in the area because cancer clusters are found around well water in agricultural areas. What you put ON the earth goes INTO the earth and then into the aquifers. And Oklahoma is pretty much all agricultural.

So a year and a half ago I called the RWD#3 to join up and was told to bring a deposit and connection fee money to Wanette, a small (and I mean SMALL) town way out in the middle of nowhere. I was helped by Geri, a really nice woman, all friendly and real, who told me that Rocky was buying RWD#3 in a few weeks and when Geri asked him if there was anything she should do especially, he told her to be ... good to everybody.

He tells all his employees this.

I know this because I asked a checker at FireLake Discount Foods if I could set up a voter registration table outside the store and she said that Rocky told them all that they should be good to everybody, but that she thought there was some kind of rule against it from the police department.

So I called Rocky and he said SURE, absolutely, set up your table and did I have any extra registration forms? He wanted to give them to all the people who worked for the Tribe who hadn’t registered to vote.

I dropped off a whole bunch.

That’s Rocky for you. It’s part of his nature.

And here’s another interesting fact. An aside, if you will. An Oklahoma twist involving the interconnectedness of things.

Remember Peewee? My hero? Who built my house out of the wilderness and watched over me so that I got the best material and workmanship money could buy AT A DISCOUNT and where I now live happily ever after? THAT Peewee? Well, Peewee’s dad, Dr. Joe Taron, actually STARTED Rural Water District #3 in the 1960s. He weathered criticism and locked knees from the local citizenry and governmental entities to bring water to the boonies. He knew that Water is Life.

And now the Citizen Potawatomi Nation owns it.

A small world.

But I digress. Again.

Let’s STAY ON TRACK and watch Rocky in action.

Rocky opens the meeting by making it short. Not that he’s uneasy with a microphone in front of a group. He says he knows better than to keep people from their food. (It WAS beckoning to us.)

He tells us about how the Potawatomis have acquired the right to develop a continuation of RWD#3 that wasn’t already under other water districts’ purview. The map on the easel showed that a large part of the county still had no water district ... maybe close to half the county.

Let me reiterate. Rocky has acquired the rights to develop a water district in the remainder of the undeveloped areas of Pottawatomie County for Rural Water District #3.

(Just let that sink in. He didn‘t need special tax breaks from any governmental entity. He didn‘t need any special breaks at all, like the Robber Barons of the late 1800s who got federal land for next to nothing and reaped untold wealth, or the sports arena developers who have their hands out when they want to come to your city and trade their being there for tax breaks, or the mega corporations who want to do business in your state for a fee. Because of his long and smart leadership, the Potawatomis could just ... DO it.)

But that wasn’t all.

He tells us that there are a bunch of projects the tribe is involved in which are going on in our neck of the woods, the southern part of Pottawatomie County, which is poor and neglected and pretty much without many people in it.

One of the projects is to get Wi-Fi for our computers so that we won’t have to pay an arm and a leg for DSL. It will be 50 bucks a month.

(I pay $80+ for the slowest DSL service HughesNet has. HughesNet is the ONLY provider of DSL service out here in the boonies, and it is a big pain in the ass, and I swear it is screwing up my computer, but I MUST use it because how else am I going to send these little stories to you, O Gentle Reader?)

Rocky points to the Wi-Fi guy standing at the back of the room and tells us we could talk to him and get our reservations in. The guy waves back.

And now he tells us how the Potawatomis have fixed a bridge outside St. Louis, and how they are going to put in a grocery store in Wanette, AND a bank, which Wanette doesn’t have—it’s only a block long—and the people WHOOP when they hear the word bank.

And now he tells us how the Potawatomis are going to bring in phone towers so that phone reception will be decent out here in the boonies.

(At the present time I have to stand outside on a particular part of my property about 30 feet from my house on the edge of a hill to use my cell phone out here. It’s really shitty in the rain.)

But the primary focus for Rocky is water. He said nothing can happen unless there is water. He said he can SEE development in Asher and Wanette and St. Louis because ... there will be WATER.  These are small, depressed towns, in the middle of nowhere. They are dying. They began their descent in the 1930s when the Dust Bowl happened. (You should read The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan, an incredible book which describes the most awful, awful period of the dust bowl times in Oklahoma. It’s worse than you ever imagined. Just buy the book. It’s cheap on amazon.com.)

And lest you think, awwww crap, he’s going to ruin the beautiful countryside with housing tracts of ticky-tacky boxes all in a row, check this out.

He has, for YEARS, had a huge interest in the environment AND saving money. He got interested in geothermal years ago and has developed the largest geothermal system in the state of Oklahoma.

He has installed geothermal in the Tribe’s fabulous 36,000 square foot Cultural and Heritage Center and laid the pipe for it under the FireLake Golf Course, piping water to be cooled through the lake on the course.

He has built low-income tribal housing with geothermal heating and cooling, thereby lowering the utility bills of the folks who live in those houses. (Again, Rocky being good to people.)

He has put geothermal in his HUGE casino, which also uses a lovely large pond as its heat transfer area, and has miles and miles of pipes under the parking lot.

I swear to God, I heard angels singing while he was talking about the projects he had in the works through the Citizen Potawatomi Nation and how we would have things other people take for granted.

And then he ended by saying that the Potawatomis always look at projects with a twenty year vision. That they are prepared to back things for years to come in order for them to succeed.

Well, he’s been the Chairman for a lot of years now. And so far he’s meant every word.

Who KNEW HOW EXCITING a meeting at the Rural Water District #3 would be!

Rock on, Rocky. We all love you.

And we mean that.

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