Who Is
I am an enrolled member of the Otoe-Missouria tribe of Oklahoma. BrokenClaw is the name I use for most of my online activity, as a tribute to my native American ancestry. My paternal grandfather called me, along with my siblings, an Indian name in his native Chiwere language. The name he called me is He’na, the traditional name meaning second son. My grandfather lived his entire life on the Otoe-Missouria reservation in Noble County, Oklahoma. Our ancestry is the the Eagle clan. I use images of the eagle and eagle feathers on my website to honor my ancestors.
My father grew up on the reservation and attended several different schools, but mostly the Indian boarding school at Pawnee, OK, and then he graduated from Haskell Institute in Lawrence, Kansas, which later became Haskell Indian Nations University. As the second son, it would be customary for me to have an additional name associated with some part of the eagle, such as a wing, feather, claw, etc. In this tradition I use the name Broken Claw. I am grateful for the work of Jimm G. Good Tracks, who has spent years studying and preserving the native language. I thank him for his personal assistance to me in interpreting Broken Claw back into Chiwere. In the native language, this name would likely be rendered as Xra-sa’ge-gi-xu’ge, to signify an eagle’s fractured claw. It is not my real Indian name, because it was not given to me by the clan elder.
The Website
This website has undergone multiple changes and updates over the years. We have been online since 1998, and then we started our own domain in 2000 as www.brokenclaw.com. Originally I posted my family information as simple webpages as part of the main website. In 2005 I changed the domain to BrokenClaw.net, and I separated the native American content into its own subdomain at http://native.BrokenClaw.net.
Since then I have also updated the software which serves the webpages. Most recently in January 2008 I imported all of the content into Wordpress. Wordpress started as a blogging software package, but it works on a variety of levels and now touts itself as a “personal publishing platform”. I use it because it automates a lot of website maintenance, such as navigation and indexing, while making it easy to add and edit content — the actual articles.
Since this website is not a blog, the date function is generally irrelevant. I arbitrarily set the dates back to January 2007, so that I could transfer some of the comments which had been posted on my blog during the preceding year. However, some of the articles were originally written and posted online several years earlier.
All BrokenClaw.net websites conform to standards for educational sites suitable for all ages.
