Te Ata

Te Ata was born Mary Frances Thompson on December 3, 1895, at Emet in the Chickasaw Nation, Indian Territory. Her father, T. B. Thompson, was the last treasurer of the Chickasaw Nation, and her uncle Douglas H. Johnston was its last governor before Oklahoma statehood. She attended Bloomfield Academy and high school in Tishomingo, then the Oklahoma College for Women in Chickasha, graduating in 1919; a drama teacher there encouraged her toward the stage. After a year at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, she performed under the name Te Ata, usually translated as “bearer of the morning.”

Her performing life began on the Chautauqua circuit, touring the country after college. In New York she worked in the theater, but the one-woman programs she built from Chickasaw and other Native stories, songs and chants, presented in buckskin dress with drums and rattles, became her life's work. She performed at summer camps in New York and New England through the 1930s and toured abroad, including England and Scandinavia. In 1933 she married Clyde Fisher, a naturalist and astronomer at the American Museum of Natural History, and the two traveled widely together. She kept performing into the late 1970s.

Eleanor Roosevelt became a close friend. In 1932, while her husband was governor of New York, she proposed naming a lake in Harriman State Park, near Bear Mountain, for Te Ata, who had entertained children at camps there; Lake Te Ata was christened that July. On April 22, 1933, Te Ata performed at the first state dinner of Franklin Roosevelt's presidency, given for British Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald. In June 1939 she performed for the Roosevelts and their guests, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth, at the Roosevelt home in Hyde Park, New York.

Oklahoma inducted her into its Hall of Fame in 1957 and in 1987 named her the state's first State Treasure; the Chickasaw Nation Hall of Fame followed in 1990. She died in Oklahoma City on October 26, 1995, at ninety-nine. The Chickasaw Nation produced a feature film about her life, Te Ata, starring Q'orianka Kilcher, first screened in 2016 and released in theaters in 2017. The portrait behind this painting, from about 1920, shows her in performance dress with a headband and single feather. Its photographer is not recorded, and the source print has not been traced to a specific archive.