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ENID, Okla. — The fact that he was born in Bison, Okla., comes as no surprise to Freddie Mack, who even years later finds it hard to describe the depths of the connection he feels toward Native Americans and the animal considered sacred to them — the buffalo.
It was simply meant to be, the location of his childhood, like all the other times that Mack has found himself pulled to a Native American artifact at an estate sale or a thrift store. Some might call it coincidence, but he believes it’s fate.
“You know, I was always intrigued,” he said, walking through his Enid-area, countryside home filled with Native American paintings and artwork, arrowheads, jewelry, weapons, beads and crafts. “When I was a little kid, I was intrigued by Indians and chiefs and all that.”
He has amassed quite a Native American collection, including original pieces and copies of artwork from unknown artists to the Enid area’s own Harold Holden.
Mack is proud of the “Keeper of the Plains” artwork he found in a local thrift store that now hangs in his home. Holden created the original artwork and sculpted the life-sized Native American monument, which stands on the Garfield County Court House lawn, through a Security National Bank commission.
It’s a symbol of this country’s heritage, Mack said, and a reminder, especially during this weekend’s celebration of Enid’s founding, that the Native Americans played a huge role in this country and in the settling of the Cherokee Outlet 130 years ago.
“They are a huge part of America,” Mack said.
He believes America would have been much stronger nation if Native Americans had been treated as individuals, and he says the Native heritage is just as strong in Northwest Oklahoma as the pioneers’ heritage.
Growing up in southern Garfield County, Mack is the youngest of Robert and Carleen Mack’s nine children. His great-great-grandmother, Francis Fannie Parsons Rudd, and her family operated a Native American school in Iowa, where they were descended from a Sioux chief, Mack said. She made the Land Run of 1893 and settled northeast of Bison, where his family still owns the homestead. She died in the mid-1890s.
Mack graduated from Waukomis High School in 1985, attended Northwestern Oklahoma State University and has worked with Enid Public Schools in freight/delivery for more than 30 years.
He said he always has been told stories of Native Americans, having himself his father’s Sioux heritage as well as Cherokee heritage, on his mother’s side. Though his father never placed the family on the Native American rolls — Mack believes he was too proud of his German heritage to register — he listened to the tales from relatives at family reunions of his ancestor, Chief Rudd, a Sioux leader, whose tribe placed him in a wagon upon his death, cremated it during a ceremony and spread his ashes around a mountain in homage.
Mack has visited the monument for Geronimo and remembers his father taking him to Anadarko and seeing the teepees and ceremonies and purchasing him a Native American belt.
“There wasn’t a whole lot of money. But I begged Dad …” Mack remembers.
Throughout the years Mack continued to be drawn to his heritage and to finding Native American artifacts to which he believes he was led, and he’s experienced situations that were spiritual in nature. He remembers being surrounded by a herd of buffalo in his car while driving through Southwest Oklahoma near Lawton and feeling a connection with one that came close to his vehicle.
It was afterward that he chose the name Chief White Buffalo, Loved By the Buffalo for himself to honor that affection and connection.
He has so many tales to share — once he was going home after a day of garage sales, but he found one more. He arrived and the Native American woman at the home was so joyful to see him and send him home with the last item, a ceremonial feather, that will be buried with him someday.
Connections like that have been following him his whole life, he said, and are heart-felt.
“It’s time,” he said, “to give them the respect they deserve.”
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