Dr. Steve Forsythe of Lampasas, retired agriscience instructor/FFA adviser and CTE coordinator, has continued working in agricultural education. He returned this week from mentoring ag teachers in West Texas and will supervise student-teachers in ag education for Texas Tech University this school year.

Forsythe spent two days in Big Lake, where he mentored first-year ag teacher Lauren Dickens at Reagan County High School. Forsythe will be working with Dickens and first-year ag educator Mayle Chambliss at Fort Davis, in four scheduled on-site visits and follow-up communications this school year.

Areas of support include budgets and finance, curriculum, FFA Program of Work, Leadership and Career Development Events, and Agricultural Advisory Committees and functions.

The Vocational Agriculture Teachers Association of

Texas Mentor Program is headquartered in Austin. This marks the second year the program has paired retired high school ag teachers with new instructors.

The effort is designed to support beginning teachers and help with ag teacher retention across the state of Texas. Statistics show that the first two or three years of teaching are critical to establishing a long-term career as an ag educator.

The VATAT Mentor Program includes 40 first-year teachers who were selected through an application process, and two of these new ag teachers are paired with one retired mentor.

In addition to mentoring these new ag teachers, Forsythe will continue to supervise college seniors doing their “practice teaching” at Texas Tech University. As a university supervisor for the Texas Tech Ag Education Program in Lubbock, Forsythe’s schedule for the

spring semester includes on-site visits and evaluations required of its future ag teachers. He is slated to work with student-teachers placed at Cedar Park, New Braunfels, Fredericksburg and Medina Valley high schools.

Local educator mentors ag teachers

Life2 LAMPASAS DISPATCH RECORD lampasasdispatchrecord.com TUESDAY, OCTOBER 2, 2018

Last chief of the Comanches

ALEXANDRIA RANDOLPH | DISPATCH RECORDLance Tahmahkera, a descendant of Quanah Parker, shows his audience a staff of eagle feathers that he received as a gift. Comanches are awarded eagle feathers after committing acts of great honor, he said.

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BY ALEXANDRIA RANDOLPHDISPATCH RECORD

In their native language, the Comanches call themselves Numunuu, which simply means, “the people.”

On Thursday evening, Burleson resident Lance Tahmahkera – a descendant of the famous chief Quanah Parker – visited the Lampasas Public Library to share stories of his people.

“The Comanches originally came from the Shoshone,” Tahmahkera said.

While no one knows the reason the Shoshones broke apart and became the Comanches, there are several versions told, he said.

The first story is that there was a sickness among the tribe’s people, and a wise chief divided the tribe into bands in the hopes that it would give them a better chance for survival.

The other story, Tahmahkera said, is “the Shoshones knew there were buffalo in the plains, and some wanted to hunt them because you would survive on the buffalo.

“Which story is true, I do not know,” he said.

The group of Shoshones that left the northern plains of Wyoming and traveled into the Texas plains became the Comanche. They are one of 573 federally recognized tribes that exist in the United States today.

The Comanche Nation is headquartered in Lawton, Oklahoma, and it issued the first dictionary of the Comanche language in 1995.

LORDS OF THE PLAINSTahmahkera said the Comanche

bands lived across the Texas plains but raided as far as central Mexico.

“The Spanish brought horses to America, and we stole their horses,” he said.

But that’s not all the Comanches stole frequently, he added.

“We went down and kidnaped the women and the children and took the captives back with us. The children were raised as Comanches. The women were bartered like property.”

As well as being a large part of their hunting culture, “the horses are what made the Comanches so dominant on the plains,” Tahmahkera said.

The Comanches developed ways

of firing arrows from underneath a horse’s neck while riding so they could use the animal as a shield during battle.

“Both girls and boys were riding by 2 years old and were expected to care for their own horse by the age of 4,” Tahmahkera said.

FAMILY HISTORYTahmahkera’s ancestor Cynthia

Ann Parker was one of the children who was kidnapped and raised as a Comanche in the middle of the 19th century.

In the spring of 1836, a group of white settlers built Fort Parker near the Navasota River.

“Their intention was to bring Christianity to the tribes, which was a noble goal,” Tahmahkera said. “But they built the fort past beyond the frontier line in Indian territory. There was no protection for them.”

The fort was raided by a Comanche band. Five were killed, and Cynthia and her brother John Parker were kidnapped.

“Cynthia was 5 years old; her brother John was 6,” Tahmahkera said.

After living with the Comanches for about a decade, the story goes that the Indians got tired of John, Tahmahkera said.

“They gave him back to the whites,” he said, but Parker must not have liked life among civilized American society, because he returned to the Comanches years later. He then served as a Confederate soldier in the Civil War and eventually settled in Mexico with a Mexican wife.

His sister, on the other hand, remained with the Comanches for 24 years, where Cynthia was a true tribeswoman. Older generations of Tahmahkera’s family said she was “Numunuu all the way.”

When she was recaptured in 1860 and taken to Fort Worth, the family story is that Cynthia was set up on a soapbox, and “people were charged a nickel to come see the little white girl who lived with the Comanches,” Tahmahkera said.

THE END OF PLAINS LIFECynthia Parker’s son, Quanah

Parker, became a chief and witnessed the end of life on the plains for the Comanches. Tahmahkera said his

ancestor was described as very tall for a Comanche: six-foot-one, with gray-blue eyes.

“Quanah Parker is my great-great-grandfather,” Tahmahkera said. “His leadership was incredible. I’ve heard people say that had he been born another race in another time, he still would have been an extraordinary leader.

“When the buffaloes were dying, he kept us [the Comanches] out on the plains for another eight years.”

The family story of Quanah Parker’s journey to the reservation, Tahmahkera said, is that he had led a band of warrior Comanches into West Texas, where they were evading a group of U.S. soldiers. At one point, when the soldiers were near to catching up with the tribesmen, Parker told his medicine man to take action.

“The medicine man took out his pipe and began to pray, and it began to snow,” Tahmahkera said. “The troops couldn’t see the [Comanches] anymore.”

While Parker’s band escaped that encounter, he received signs that it was time to concede.

“He saw a coyote on the horizon,” Tahmahkera said. “It looked at him, howled, and then turned and went northeast. Then he saw an eagle above him, and it turned and flew northeast, and he knew it was time to surrender. Fort Summerlin was to the northeast.”

When the time came to concede, Parker adopted the ways of the Anglo Americans.

“He knew if he took a child and raised them as Americans, they could fend for themselves,” Tahmahkera said.

In fact, Parker was a big proponent of the education of native peoples.

“If the government ever did anything right, they gave us schools,” Tahmahkera said.

Despite having neither the Comanche nation nor the United States government sign or ratify the Medicine Lodge Treaty of 1867, both sides abided by it, he added.

The Comanches went to live with the Kiowa and Apache people in a reservation in southern Oklahoma.

Burleson man tells stories of famed ancestor, Quanah Parker