Interviewee: Deacon Turner (Oklahoma & New College 1991) [hereafter ‘DT’]
Moderator: Jamie Byron Geller [hereafter ‘JBG’]
Date of interview: 17 October, 2023
JBG: This is Jamie Byron Geller on behalf of the Rhodes Trust. I am here in Boston with Deacon Turner (Oklahoma & New College 1991) to record Deacon’s oral history interview. And this will help us to launch the first ever Rhodes Trust Oral History Project, so thank you so much for your participation in that, Deacon. Before we begin, just a few formalities. Would you mind saying your full name for the recording, please?
DT: Darreld Ray Turner II, although I go by Deacon Turner.
JBG: And do we have your permission to record this interview?
DT: Yes, you have my permission.
JBG: Wonderful. Thank you. And Deacon, where do you currently call home?
DT: Well, I split my time between Denver, Colorado and Boston, Massachusetts. I recently married a woman who lives in Belmont, which is a suburb of Boston.
JBG: And where are we doing this interview from today?
DT: We’re doing this interview in my firm’s offices. I work for AllianceBernstein, which is a global investment management firm, in our Boston offices, actually overlooking the harbour.
JBG: Thank you. Great. And when and where were you born.
DT: I was born 13 January 1969, in Miami, Oklahoma, which now you could actually call the Miami Indian reservation.
JBG: And would you mind telling me a little bit about your childhood?
DT: Yes. I grew up in unusual circumstances, I think, for most Rhodes Scholars. So, I grew up in a family that was in deep poverty, with a lot of substance abuse. I grew up with my mother’s side of my family. They were mostly from southern Arkansas, with a big component of migration during the Dust Bowl and the Depression to California. They were folks who had been migrant fruit pickers, vegetable pickers, loggers, etc., and in transit back to family roots in Arkansas had stopped off to visit a relative, who had married a Cherokee man. My grandma’s sister had married a Cherokee man, who lived in north-eastern Oklahoma, and they ended up staying, which is where they met my dad’s family. My dad’s family has been in Oklahoma since Cherokee removal, or removal of Cherokee nation citizens. My mom and dad got together as teenagers, had me, divorced when I was one, and my dad was actually in prison for most of that year, and then I grew up with my mom’s side of family. Now, later on in life, I really developed a deep relationship with my dad’s side of my family. What’s interesting is, on my mom’s side of the family, her brother married into another Indian family, Maui County in north-eastern Oklahoma. The County itself abuts Missouri, and it’s nearly Arkansas as well, so it’s right in the corner. It was the location for the removal of nine tribes from around America, and so it’s a very complex mix of tribes that live in that county. My cousins are Seneca-Cayugas, originally from upstate New York, who were relocated there in the 1830s, and they’re all intermarried with Shawnees, Wyandottes and the like. I grew up with them, and so I grew up regularly at Native American functions and ceremonies with that side of my life. So, even though I’m Cherokee, I also have strong affinity and connections to my Seneca cousins. For instance, my aunt was a long-time member of the business board of the Tribal Council. Her brother was Chief for multiple terms. So, it’s an interesting background and mix.
JBG: And do you have siblings?
DT: I have two younger half-brothers on my dad’s side. And then, when I was-, well, three years ago, I found out the location of my sister that my mom had given up for adoption when I was three.
DT: I grew up in unusual circumstances. I mean, I was in high school. My mom and two of my uncles went to prison for drug-dealing, and my mom did not get out until I was a freshman at Harvard. So I had to live with my grandparents at that time.
JBG: Okay. And would you mind sharing a little about your education experience, your primary and high school education?
DT: Sure. So, one thing I was really fortunate with is, from kindergarten through fourth grade, my mom and I lived in Norman, Oklahoma, which is where the University of Oklahoma is. And I most of the time went to Madison Elementary, which was really the primary school for graduate student housing. So, at the time, in the early and mid-’70s, here I am in a classroom of students who were all kids of international parents. So, you know, we had kids from Nigeria, the Middle East, Europe, etc., which was very unusual in Oklahoma, as you could imagine. And everybody’s parents, a lot of them, were doing graduate work, PhDs, etc., at OU, which made for an interesting classroom, right? And the teachers were often tied to or motivated by what was happening on an advanced level too. Like, my third grade teacher was getting her PhD in education. And so, it was an exceptional grounding, an exceptional environment to get launched. And then, in fifth grade we moved to Miami, Oklahoma, and I was fortunate to have a number of really good teachers then. I always have felt that I’ve been able to find or get attached to really great mentors and teachers. I would say the high school I went to, though I care about it, wasn’t particularly academically that strong, though we had some good elements, particularly in speech and debate. But we didn’t have APs. There were no-, I mean, we didn’t even have calculus. The thing that really saved me or gave me outlets in high school was science fair and then speech and debate, and I was fortunate that we had a woman who was an English teacher, but she was the speech and debate leader, who was truly national in caliber and built a national class programme. She later became three-term head of the Oklahoma Education Association, which is, kind of, an indication of her capacity. And she took me under her wing when my mom went to prison and really helped me stay focused on higher things and is the one who challenged me to apply to elite schools. Nobody in my family had really gone to college, and I had no idea about what was possible, and I was even dissuaded from looking beyond, say, Oklahoma or the military by my high school counsellors. And Barbara Smith is the one who said, ‘No, you have what it takes to go to the Ivies or wherever you want, and you’re going to apply,’ and even helped me get the fee waivers. I couldn’t have paid the $50 at the time, the application fee. And so, she is the reason I applied to, kind of, that elite caliber school and was successful in going on.
JBG: And so, you mentioned previously that you went to Harvard, and so you moved from Oklahoma to Cambridge for college.
JBG: And would you mind sharing a little bit about that experience at Harvard?
DT: Yes, well, the initial experience was quite a shock. I mean, I had never seen any of the schools I applied to, for the most part. I didn’t know anybody within, I guess, what, 1600 miles of the place. And ultimately, I picked Harvard because I figured it was maybe going to be the most Darwinian environment. I figured it had the biggest name. And it was at a time before the internet, so there was no way to do serious due diligence beyond some school guidebook. And I figured it had to have a reason to be such a figure in the national mind, and I wanted to see if I could make it. And I grew up in a house that didn’t really have functional plumbing, regularly no phone, we had wood heat. And to go from that to Harvard-, I can remember all of my roommates. We were in the newest dorm in Harvard Yard, Canaday, and my roommates were complaining that we’d got none of the traditional dorms. And I’m, like, ‘We have functioning heat and a shower and, like, hot water and all these things,’ and I was, you know, over the moon. And especially, you know, we had such good dining facilities and everything else. It was really astonishing to me, and a big culture shift. It was also a culture shift to realise that essentially nobody that I was around had any understanding of the world I had come from, whether it was Native American, or poverty, or what have you. I mean, you can imagine meeting all of your roommates when you get there, and everybody’s parents are helping them move in and people ask me about my family and I’m, like, ‘Well, my mom is in prison for selling drugs.’
So, that was, I think, eye-opening for them as well, and ultimately, I would say that the first year and a half or so were a challenging fit, to try to figure out how to navigate that. And I think I carried a lot of, whether it’s survivors’ guilt or what have you, about realising I’m going through this transition and I’m leaving where I’m from, and now I’m in an environment that’s utterly different, and [10:00] learning to come to terms with that was hard. You know, most of my peers had really substantial means and I did not. Now, I worked a lot at school, and actually, by the time I was a senior, I was sending money home. I did well financially through my jobs. But it was real, kind of, eye-opening to me to see what wealth was really out there. Because even the upper middle-class kids in Miami didn’t have the kind of economic resources that my peers at Harvard had. That was an interesting thing to see and experience, like, when people could think about, ‘Well, let’s casually zip off to Bermuda for the weekend,’ and, you know, that was beyond my scope of conception. What was also really astounding was to finally be around a large collection of people who were interested in ideas, and who were really interested in things beyond, you know, basic necessities or finding a good job, or what was right in front of them, but to really think through the life of the mind, and to think about higher level things. People who loved learning, like, naturally intellectually curious, and not just a couple of them, but loads and loads of them. And that was really wonderful, and I think, once I learned to settle into Harvard, it really blossomed for me, in terms of utilising the resources then and being able to do so many different things and be so active.
Actually, one thing that came up in my Rhodes interview was, they asked how they could justify giving somebody with my grade-point average, which was not stellar, a Rhodes Scholarship. And I said, ‘First of all, if we were going to reduce everyone to a set of numbers, we wouldn’t be sitting here having these interviews.’ And then the second thing that I said was, ‘I never looked at what I was doing at Harvard as bound by the classroom. The opportunity set was far beyond the classroom,’ and that what I chose to maximise there was that life beyond the classroom, not just socially, but in the service organisations I was involved in and the jobs that I did, which were unusual and carry forward to today what I do today, and in the intramural sports and things that I play. And that my life was so much richer because of realising that I wasn’t there to just get a classroom education that I could get at any accredited university. And I have always felt the better for making that choice. I’ll give you an example of the kind of job I’m talking about. So, I was an intern for Jo Kalt and Stephen Cornell at a time when they were just starting the Harvard project on Native American economic development at the Kennedy School. And it’s there that I really got perspective on just how important tribal sovereignty was and tribes taking control of their own destiny and developing economically. And my entire life, I’ve worked in some capacity for Cherokee Nation. The last 13 years, I’ve been on the board of the tribe’s businesses, and I can say without question that that perspective on sovereignty has helped ground me in what I’m doing. And if you look at the fluorescence of Cherokee Nation and our businesses, it’s because we’re exercising sovereignty. And I think I was unusual at that time in my perspective, because I had that grounding. And so, even in my mid-20s, after I got back from Oxford, I was a treaty negotiator for the tribe on helping negotiate a Master Compact on motor fuel taxation distribution between the tribes and the state of Oklahoma. And I had, you know, a deep understanding of sovereignty and Indian law because of the Harvard project. I would have never gotten that in the classroom.
JBG: Yes. What was your field of study at Harvard? Was your external work related to it?
JBG: Formally, what was your major?
DT: It was a fair question from the Rhodes committee! I did American history, although I did substantial amounts of African history, and I took enough archaeology courses that, if we had minors or something like that, I could have actually switched to being an archaeology major. And, you know, if I had to go back and do it again, I would probably do earth and planetary sciences. It was like a cornucopia of so many opportunities. But after I won the Rhodes Scholarship, I realised I was about to embark on probably a graduate degree, and I chose not to write my honours thesis at Harvard, and so, I graduated Cum Laude in General Studies which-, you know, nobody cares what your senior thesis was in anyway. I often find that the schools pressurise kids on that too much, and quite frankly, I wanted to go deep-sea fishing in Cancun, rather than write my thesis.
JBG: Very fair. And you mentioned the work you did with Jo Kalt?
DT: Joseph Kalt and Stephen Cornell. So, they were some of the first academics early to understand the impact of exercising sovereignty on tribal development. And the Harvard project is still going on today. I mean, it’s been a really powerful influence around sovereignty and the formal study of it, and its economic impacts. And, you know, it was my work study job, and it was just amazing. I also worked as a recruiter for the admissions office, I did other things besides that. But that one example, I think, is a proof statement about what I found I could do at a university that lay beyond a classroom. I’ve never been that oriented on formal education, and it’s really because I think, probably like a lot of Rhodes, I can read and teach myself faster than a course is going to get there, right? By the way, I abused the hell out of that during college, in that I could teach myself a course in two weeks of reading period if I had been goofing off all fall. But formal education is not what I care about. I care much more about the actual learning.
JBG: And at what point during your journey at Harvard did you decide to pursue the Rhodes Scholarship, and what influenced that decision?
DT: Oh, I was heavily mentored into thinking about fellowships. So, again, kind of like applying to colleges like Harvard, I had no real conception that I was a candidate for something like this. And I would say my Senior Tutor, Donald Bacon and the Housemaster of Eliot House, Alan Heimert, were incredibly powerful influences beginning my sophomore year – that’s when you go to your specific residential house at Harvard – really powerful influences on getting me to think about applying for higher level fellowships. And I think it’s because they understood all the stuff I was doing. And so, early on, they really encouraged me to apply for the Truman Scholarship. So, I won a Truman in my sophomore year. And, you know, they counselled and coached me along during my entire time, and I would say that, again, mentors were really part of my process. And then when it came time, senior year, to be thinking about other things, along the way, both Heimert and Bacon had told me that I probably was a very strong candidate for a Rhodes and other fellowships that were out there, and that there were no guarantees, but that I needed to really take it seriously. At first, when Don specifically said, ‘We think you’re a Rhodes candidate,’ I was just, like, ‘You’ve got to be fucking kidding, because I know my transcript and everything else.’ And he was, like, ‘No. No, no. You’ve got the kind of things that they’re going to be looking for, because you’re not the bookworm. And you clearly have academic capability. That’s demonstrable in so many other ways. Whether you’re a dilettante or not is sometimes a different story.’ And I think it was because of the leadership positions that I had in so many organisations and the things that I did, they encouraged that. And so, I applied. I had already won a Rotary. I was going to New Guinea, actually, before I won the Rhodes. And so, I had to turn down the Rotary, and I was actively in several other finals. Never a Marshall. Shocker, right? But that’s how I got there. It was their mentoring. You know, I think a quarter of our senior class – so, there were 1600 in a class – 400 applied, which is, you know-, there’s a lot of Dunning Kruger at Harvard. And, you know, 400 people. There wouldn’t be 40 applicants at most state universities, right?
JBG: And you were selected from which district?
DT: Gulf Coast district. So, I went through Oklahoma. That was back at the time that you had college endorsement, you applied at your state, and then the state was in a bundled region with six other states, basically. So, it was Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, etc.
JBG: And you shared a little bit about your interview process [20:00]. Is there anything else that you’d like to share about that?
DT: Well, I can say this. I mean, this was back at a time when they had-, I don’t know how it runs anymore, I’ve not been involved in the process in a while, but we had a cocktail party the night before and then interviews the next day. And I can say that three of the four people who were selected from our district were openly, visibly, just themselves at the cocktail party. It was a long dinner. It ended up being a long drinking session, by the way. Two of the four, myself included, stayed with several of the committee members drinking whiskey for quite a while, okay? So, actually, I was not surprised when three of those others were selected, because of the, kind of, personality and vibrancy and other elements they had shown. It was really clear they were out there. So, that was one thing that was interesting. It was also interesting that it was still old-school days where you had all these people drinking with the applicants, which I thought was great, because it gave everybody a chance to actually let their hair down, and you couldn’t pretend. And I’m very clear that one of the gentlemen had been on the committee for decades, that’s exactly what he was doing. A very conscious effort. And then, the next day, I was the last interview before lunch. And, you know, there is no ceremony around these things. So, I finished my interview, and I had time to kill. I’m wearing a suit. And, you know, it was at Rice University in Houston and there was a wedding happening, and so, I went in and filed in with the wedding and watched the wedding, and then I went to the reception and had plenty of champagne, and then danced with some bridesmaids, and then came back to the announcement. And what was really interesting there is, you know, you’ve got the applicants there. They said it in no particular order, but just alphabetical, and when they started with the names, I basically knew that I’d won, because you know everybody’s name.
JBG: And what was that moment of finding out that you had won the Rhodes Scholarship like for you?
DT: Well, it was both, you know, extremely uplifting, because it’s just, like-, you know, I know people calculate for it now, and I find that really weird. But it was just so far beyond the pale of anything I would have ever have imagined, that I was given this opportunity. And there are two components to it. There’s the Scholarship and the accolade that comes with it, which is amazing. But for me, it was also this opportunity to now go into this completely different world in Oxford and the opportunities that it was going to open. You know, I would question, if Rhodes Scholar was a title you get, like Miss USA, how many would still vie for it, and I would say probably a lot. I would not give up going and living in New Guinea for a title like that. But the negative, I would say, what hit me in the weeks after, was a real realisation of just how separated I had become from my prior life, in so many ways. And I would say that I actually went through a period of depression that was real and caused me real academic problems. I was supposed to have finished a really important paper for an African seminar that I just found writer’s block and could not complete. And it was a real struggle for me to get through that time period, because I felt so unmoored and disconnected from everything else happening in my life. Like, here I have family in poverty, constantly in and out of jail, constantly struggling with things, and my life was going in this direction. And that sense of disconnection became so profound that I would say that it took me well into my time at Oxford, if not my time after Oxford, before I was able to really start reconciling. So, it was not purely wonderful. There was a lot of real, just, agony that came with it.
JBG: Thank you for sharing that. Did you return home from Harvard before heading off to Oxford?
DT: Yes, I did. So, I went home. You know, I didn’t just all stay at Harvard. I would go back and forth. I did work in D.C. a couple of different years, and in the summer after I got out of Harvard, I worked in Oklahoma City for the state Indian Affairs Commission. And then, halfway through the summer, I left that to basically-, we didn’t talk about this, but I used to be a chef, and I took a job basically as a breakfast cook at a local hotel restaurant in my own town, so I could turn my mind off, make decent money, and go basically hang at the creek with my friends in the afternoons. And then I spent every day cooking with my grandmother, because I expected to go overseas for three years and not come back, and I really wanted to master all of her recipes. So, I basically spent the second half of the summer cooking with Mamaw, you know, learning to master biscuits and gravy exactly like she made them, and all of her dishes. And for a number of those things, I am the repository now, for the family, that teaches everybody how to do it. But I wanted to do that, and that was worthwhile, very worthwhile. But I had no expectation to come home.
JBG: And so, you set off for Oxford in the fall of 1991. And what was that experience of arriving in Oxford like?
DT: Well, a couple of things I would point out. First of all, three of the Rhodes classmates from my year were from my house at Harvard. So, one of them was my best friend. So, he had graduated a year ahead of me. His name was Scott Merriner (Alaska & New College 1991). He and I had talked each other into applying for the Rhodes on a fishing trip in Alaska in the prior summer. And this was before internet, really. We both knew we were applying. We both knew we won. But we didn’t communicate. At that point, there was no really easy way to decide this, what house [college] we were going to pick. We both ended up in New College, which was awesome. And then, Ed Pallesen (Nebraska & Magdalen 1991), who was also from Eliot in my year, went to Magdalen. So, first of all, here I am-, there are 32 Rhodes in the US. Three of them are from Eliot House, which actually has more Rhodes Scholars, I believe, than Yale.
DT: Like, Eliot House had a machine for many years, under Heimert and the prior Master, of creating candidates for the Rhodes. And now, looking back, I can say the cultivation that began with Bacon and Heimert when I was a sophomore was designed to make me a polished candidate. It’s like watching game film, right? Which is a whole interesting other line of discussion that may be beyond the scope of this interview, but it was clearly occurring.
DT: So, the other thing was, by this point, I’m fully emmeshed in Harvard and able to embrace it. So, again, it was less of a culture shock to go from an Indian reservation to Harvard than it was to go from Harvard to Oxford. Far less of a culture shock.
JBG: From Harvard to Oxford?
DT: Oh, yes. I mean, the way I would look at it is, Harvard thinks it’s the oldest, biggest, baddest. Harvard wouldn’t even be a mediocre old college in Oxford. It’s one of the new kids on the block, right? So, Harvard was founded by Oxford grads, and the great-great-grandchildren of Oxford grads. So, I look at it as, you know, it was, kind of, like, from This Is Spinal Tap, the idea that this amplifier goes to 11. That’s what going to Oxford was like. It just took my life to 11. Knew how to navigate the system, which I had spent a year and a half learning how to do at Harvard. Already knew how to do that. Knew how to embrace all the resources of a university. Poured myself into social life and athletics, which was fantastic. Poured myself into my degree programme. And there again, it was one where I butted with my tutor all the time [30:00], because, he was used to professional grad student archaeologists who were going to be professors, and I’m, like, ‘I’m doing this purely out of personal interest’, right? Ray Inskeep was my tutor. That was hard for him, but I loved it. I mean, I played three sports for college. We were very good. I had such a blast, and unlike Harvard, had full access to a kitchen. We cooked the vast majority of our food. I was regularly cooking for groups up to 20 people, which is something I love. And I didn’t have to work, right? I had a Rhodes stipend, and I had support from certain folks in America who were helping me out, which was great. My mentor, who was a former Rhodes Scholar, helped organise that and it made a giant difference for me. And so, something that I actually want to talk to the Warden about, I’m open for the Warden’s discretionary fund, because there needs to be that kind of extra top-up for people in my kind of circumstance.
And then, you know, I got into the DPhil programme, and the summer between first year and second year, I went to southern Africa to help run a large dig in the Kingdom of Lesotho, for the University. Peter Mitchell was the postdoc then. He’s now the Chair of African Archaeology in Oxford, at St Hugh’s, and he and I are still very close. I just saw him when I was in Oxford, had dinner with him. And it was an exceptional time in life. I mean, to get to live in southern Africa at that time, which was in a state of flux. Mandela had been released but not yet elected. Everything was in change. I had a deep grounding in South African history from my time at Harvard, and then, to be looking at it through the lens of-, here’s another society that had formed largely at the same time that the American west did. I mean, if you think about, the Oregon Trail starts in 1833, the Boer trek, the Great Trek from the Cape into what became, kind of, the Orange Free State and Transvaal, same time period. And contacting a non-technological or less technologically capable population. The difference between north America and southern Africa? For the most part, the southern African population shared the same disease pool, so they didn’t die off. So, you had this much more violent, much more challenging minority control. Whereas here, you know, disease wiped out most of the people, not guns and ammo. And so, that made for very different development, societally, and it was really interesting to see it. So, after a year and a half of being England, to arrive in Johannesburg airport and to see ads for guns and off-road vehicles and, like, their version of men’s magazines, which you hadn’t seen at all, anywhere in Europe. And it was, like, some simulacrum of being in the US. It was wild. Very strange. Very strange.
JBG: And you said that was a year and a half into your Rhodes experience?
DT: Yes, pretty much. A year, yes.
JBG: I would love to talk more about that. First, just jumping back to your time in Oxford, I know you shared with me previously about how special the New College experience was to you and I was wondering if you could share a little bit about that.
DT: Yes. And I see my peers, who were there at the same time, and I have, with several of my friends who were in New College, we have incredibly deep connections to New College itself. So I know a lot of Rhodes have more connections to the Rhodes community. I feel much more deeply rooted to the New College community, which actually has a number of Rhodes in it. But my peer network, my friends, the people I’m involved with, have stayed much more focused on New College, and I think in part because the Warden was such an exceptional individual. His name was Harvey McGregor, famous for the book McGregor on Torts, which is in every basic law school programme. It’s why he had extra money to flop around. But, like, Harvey was a super-active Warden of college, who was a member of our secret drinking society, and, like, encouraged the grad students to really be engaged in the life of the college and not be off somewhere else. And I think there were a number of us-, like, we were the first Americans who had been allowed into New College in a number of years, because there had been some bad actor Rhodes Americans, and New College said, ‘We’re not taking any of those guys back.’ So, we were in. There were some Australian Rhodes and a few others. And as grad students, we were all really active in sports. So, we were on the undergrad teams with the undergrads, playing rugby, playing soccer, rowing, etc. And that made for a connection with them that I don’t think a lot of people had in the same way. And New College is an exceptional college, right? And we had really exceptional, like, intellects, that were at the SCR. And again, McGregor was regularly inviting grad students, like, making sure people were making these connections. And so, all of that just made such a vibrant life that I was able to experience, and I’ve stayed with that to this day. I mean, I went to my last gaudy. I was the only American who made it to the gaudy at the time. When I think about who my really close friends are, it’s a number of undergrads as well. And so, it’s been really wonderful. After we graduated, for almost ten years straight, before everybody started having little kids and all of that, we would regularly get together once or twice a year to ski or play poker or do whatever, somewhere in the world, that community.
DT: And we have kept it active since. So, when I was just back in England, I had dinner in somewhere-or-other with, let’s say, five of eight of those people. And it’s just constantly ongoing. We stay in touch. And I was just looking at our college donor board. It was really weird that several of us Americans are kind of in that top echelon of donors to the college. England doesn’t have the same kind of, you know, arm-twisting that American universities have excelled at for decades. But it is unusual to see that the major donors are from that timeframe, right? In the early 1990s in the college. I think it was, just, we lucked out, right? There was a special chemistry and a group of people where that connection was fostered and it matured and developed, and for whatever reason, that became my lasting tie.
JBG: And you mentioned, Deacon, a theme of mentorship in your life, from elementary school, and then at Harvard. It sounds like perhaps the Warden of New College served at least in some capacity as a mentor or a fundamental figure in your Oxford experience. Who are the other people who come to mind?
DT: Yes, and I would actually have to put the Warden of Rhodes House at the time, Anthony Kenny, who I think often has a reputation for being seen as a gruff curmudgeon, or something like that. But his son and I had interned for David Boren, who was a senator for Oklahoma, before I ever won the Rhodes. So, I had a connection to him. And I don’t know if he saw me as some kind of exotic experiment, or what, because I was the first Rhodes to ever do archaeology for instance, I think. Certainly Stone Age African archaeology. So, Kenny always, like included me in things, or he made sure that I had stipends for certain things from, his discretionary fund. Like, he heavily funded my trip to South Africa. I had no personal means, but he heavily funded that so I could make sure to go do that and spend time at Cape Town. You know, he helped massage the department to accept that I was doing my work at the University of Cape Town while I was down there for an extra term. Then, even after I lost my research venue in South Africa – a long, complicated story we probably don’t need to get into – I was looking for another alternate venue in Alaska and he made sure the Rhodes Trust gave me money to go see if the Eskimo communities in south-west Alaska were a place where I could do that research. So, I spent 29 days on a jet bet, going up and down the Nanushuk River, ultimately caribou and salmon fishing, but in southern Yupik Eskimo communities out there to see what was possible.
DT: So, I would have to say, the Warden was a big deal. And then, my department chairs were leading lights. What was crazy was how small it was. We had coffee every morning at 10, and we had tea every day at 4 [40:00], and I might not go to a lecture, but I never missed coffee.
JBG: That was with your department chairs? Coffee?
DT: And my department had some very famous people in it, but I would say most importantly Ray Inskeep. Ray has to be seen as one of the fathers of modern archaeology, and when he was in southern Africa, and also through his English career, he developed a number of students who developed the experimental, multi-disciplinary approach to modern archaeology. And so, to be learning directly from him, taskmaster though he was, was unbelievable. Unbelievable. And that was exceptional, right?
JBG: Wow. So, before the second part of your Rhodes experience in South Africa, when you reflect on your time in Oxford, is there anything else that you’d like to share about, any experiences that felt particular to that time in your life?
DT: I mean, for me, it was just so wide open. Wide open intellectually, wide open physically, because of so much sport. And it was a time when I was also, because I was so occupied that I wasn’t having to deal with some of the challenges that I had inside myself and what I talked about with the disconnection before, I was able to look past it. And that was, kind of, a moment in time where it’s almost, like, you know, the golden filter that a photographer puts on when it’s the warm and fuzzy feelings, right? And, ‘We’re going to make sure it’s soft focus and smear Vaseline on the camera’? I would say that year was that. And I would describe it as, you know, all the benefits of piracy with none of the violence or bodily harm.
JBG: And when in your Rhodes experience did you decide that you would be going to South Africa? When did that become apparent?
DT: Well-, so, I originally got in for PPE, and between getting accepted and realising, ‘Wait a second, I’m not going to do PPE. Everybody does that. I want to go to Africa’-, so, one of the reasons that I got my way out of where I was at as a kid is, my childhood heroes were Louis Leakey, Diane Fossey, Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, and anybody else on a National Geographic special. That was my view, that the world could be that, not what I was living in. You know, and I can still see images of Louis Leakey and Mary Leakey in Olduvai Gorge, even as a little, bitty kid, and I was thinking, ‘That’s how I’m going to get to Africa’. And so, I decided I was going to switch to archaeology, And I didn’t want to do Arch and Anth. I didn’t want to do another undergrad, because, again, I’m going to go and do fieldwork. If I’m going to do fieldwork, it would have been in southern England or something like that. I wanted to get to Africa. So, I went to the Stone Age department, and as I was going into the Stone Age department, literally the day I walked in, Peter Mitchell had come in from the field. He had a whole bunch of stuff he was carrying around and I helped him carry it in. He introduced himself, and he literally said to me, ‘You want to go to Africa?’ And I was, like, ‘Well, that’s kismet. Sign me up.’ And so, even though technically I didn’t have a prior degree, I had so much archaeology, and I was able to get one of my archaeology professors from Harvard to write me a letter of recommendation, that they accepted me into the master’s programme.
DT: And that was at a time when most Rhodes were doing undergrad, and I got into the master’s programme and then, from there, jumped to DPhil. It was a one-year master’s and then I went to DPhil. But literally, the first day I walked into the department was when I knew I was going to Africa. And in between times, I helped run a dig that the University had long been connected to on the island of Majorca, which was one of the founding digs, founding field projects, of Earthwatch, which is an organisation that supports scientists in the field. Bill Waldren, was another highly unusual person. Never went to college, had skated with Sonja Henie’s national skating tour after World War II, had been in the 10th Mountain Division, was a sculptor and painter and hung out with Jasper Johns in Paris. And his buddy Robert Graves talked him into moving to Majorca in the ’50s. Lo and behold, he’d run his own digs and come up with one of the longest examples of evolution of an animal through time, with this animal called the Myotragus, which is, kind of, a mountain goat-type animal that was living on the old, and pitched up in Oxford one day with all of his finds, and they didn’t know what to do with him, so they gave him a DPhil. And anyway, he founded Earthwatch and, like, he had multiple National Geographic articles about this dig in Deià, from the ’60s and ’70s, and he got me and some other students from Oxford to come down and be his grad students on the dig when all the Earthwatch volunteers came in, in the holidays of ’91, ’92.
DT: Yes. That was wild. I mean, there was, like, gourmet food, wine. I had a Land Cruiser, a Vespa. It was, like, the opposite of running a Stone Age dig in the High Drakensberg.
JBG: Wow. So, would this have been the summer after your second year that you went to Africa?
DT: Yes. I went down in June. I literally left the day after I completed my Finals.
JBG: And you started to share a little bit about that experience before we jumped back to Oxford, but I would love to know more about where you lived at that time, if you were living at a university down there, if you were living in the field, what that was like.
DT: Yes. So, basically, I arrived in South Africa. There was a small conference in Cape Town and then, in a rented Isuzu pickup, we basically took our gear in and drove across South Africa and into Lesotho. Our rented Isuzu bakkie, from ‘Rentabakke’ was illegally in the country of Lesotho, because no insurance or anything like that. And our information turned out to be bad. We thought there were improved roads to the area we were going to dig. No. I mean, it was basically, like, overlanding, to get to where we needed to be. So, we ended up living in a rock shelter in tents, I think 6000 feet-, and the way I would describe the area, it would be like living in the Four Corners of the United States, like, the Colorado-Utah border, Mesa-type country, in the dead of winter. And so most nights, our water froze, because we were there during winter. The place we were excavating is an extremely famous southern African rock art site called Sehonghong. It’s famous because it’s one of the few places to ever be interpreted by a living painter of rock art. And a test pit had been put in in 1971 and we did the first formal dig there, and we also did a survey of the area. So, we were there five months, and it was so remote, we ended up having to be re-supplied by air, and they could land on a strip 1500 feet above us and then have to pack everything down. You know, this is a place where most people get around by foot, or on a horse or a mule. Very, very remote, and fourth world. I mean, truly, truly bad. And at that time, and still today, massively devastated by HIV. You know, big migrant labour area, so men gone, women around, older people, lots of HIV. And no real services or anything like that. So, pretty wild conditions. And, you know, we were basically just living in tents all the time.
JBG: And you said five months?
DT: Yes, better part. Four and a half, five months. And then, from there, we delivered finds all around southern Africa to various labs: Pretoria, Johannesburg, Pietermaritzburg, UCT, the University of Cape Town. So, I got to see a great deal of South Africa. And then, I lived in a suburb of Cape Town, Rondebosch, which is right there at University of Cape Town, and I was attached to the archaeology and anthropology department there.
JBG: And how long were you there?
DT: Until December. And what’s interesting is that originally, I was looking to stay there and switch. I know Rhodes have done that since, but I was looking to do it, because I’d found a track, what I was going to do. And I was actually going to go and spend [50:00] December and January driving around in Namibia with a friend of mine from the states. And I had not been home, the whole time I’d been gone. And he got a job in Russia right before we were going to go. And his mom said, ‘If you go back to Oxford, I’ll buy you a ticket to the US.’ So, I went back to Oxford and then went back to the US, for the first time. And when I got home, my mom was in really bad shape, strung out again, and in a bad marriage. And what I realised is, I probably needed to go back. She was on a downward spiral. And so, kind of, at the same time, the instability in South Africa cost me my research venue. And so, what I realised was, like, ‘I’m not going to be a pro. I can go back.’ And so ultimately, I went back in the summer of ’93.
DT: Back to Oklahoma. And, you know, look, this was a weird, hard time, because almost everybody had gone through recruiting. They all had jobs. What is it? 99.9% of them all went to work for McKinsey. So, I ended up working in the Senate, but I worked back in Oklahoma, because I needed to be-, I felt, and actually, in hindsight, I think about it and don’t exactly know what impact I had, but I felt that I needed to give back, because of what was happening with my mom, who’s basically been still a drug addict, today. And so, it was one of those circumstances, though, where I thought she was really going to finally just kill herself.
DT: Thank you. So, I worked in the Senate, and then I briefly started a company to help manage money for Indian tribes and my tribe basically came and said, ‘You need to do national service. We need help on these things,’ and so, I spent a couple of years at Cherokee Nation. That’s where I was treaty negotiator. And then, in 1998, I came to work at Bernstein and, basically, always did it from Oklahoma, so I could be close to the tribe and raise my kids connected to the tribe.
JBG: Would you like to share a little bit about your family, speaking of your kids?
DT: Sure. I have two sons, Emerson and Guthrie, 23 and 20. Both live in Colorado. Emerson is soon to graduate and is actually going to work-, He originally went to Dartmouth, but switched to Colorado after COVID, after the pandemic. He wasn’t particularly happy with Dartmouth. And he’s been finance-oriented his whole life. He’s worked for a serious hedge fund, like, full time during his off year during college, and he is going to go work for our tribe, tribal businesses, full time. He works there now, but when he graduates, he’ll be going back to Oklahoma to work directly, basically, for the CEO.
DT: And then my younger son, Guthrie, graduated high school during COVID which was, you know, a really challenging period for kids, and just went through freshman year at CU and is now taking time off to figure out what he wants to do. He wants to, like, decompress.
DT: And we moved to Colorado several years ago, because I realised it was mission accomplished in terms of making sure they’re connected to the tribe. They both work for the tribe. They do things for the tribe. And – this was prior to my divorce – we just love the outdoor lifestyle, so we hunt, fish, ski. You know, if it’s outside, we do it. And, you know, a hell of a lot easier in Colorado than having to fly from Oklahoma to go do that.
JBG: And I believe you shared previously that you had lived for a time in Washington and Tulsa?
DT: Yes. So, I worked in D.C. When I came to Bernstein, at first, we lived in Dallas, and then, a few years into that, moved to Oklahoma full time, because my business was there. I basically told the firm, ‘Look, I like working here and I’m very, very successful, and I hope you’ll let me move to Oklahoma, but I’m moving to Oklahoma, and I’d like to stay working here.’ And it worked out, and it really allowed me to do a lot of the other things that I do, and, you know, now, I basically have a global job for the firm, and I split my time between Denver and Boston, which works out really well for me.
JBG: Great. And in our last conversation, you shared a little bit about the fact that you focused much of your time on community oriented work and community driven work, and I was wondering if you would mind sharing a bit about those experiences.
DT: Yes. I think that there are a couple of ways I think about community work. Obviously, I’ve had a for-profit professional career on Wall Street, and I work for one of the large global investment firms, and I’ve been very successful here. But I probably would have had more success in this vein of my life if I had been at a different firm or I’d chosen to just focus on this firm. But I’ve devoted enormous amounts of my time-, It’s kind of analogous to not caring as much about the classroom as what was outside it. I’ve focused my time on things that I thought were really important to the communities in which I live, or that I do live. And so, I’ve always spent a great deal of my time volunteering for organisations that I think have an inordinate impact within a community. And it doesn’t have to just be a local community. So, I think it’s pretty clear that-, you know, I did public service jobs for my tribe, but I’ve been on the board of our education foundation, our heritage centre. And then beyond that, I’ve been a long-time trustee of the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, which I think is one of the most important museums and archives in the United States, in some capacities is equal to the Smithsonian in certain veins. I was a trustee at the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian. Any number of organisations that I volunteer for and participate in, and have, over the course of my life. I was Chairman of the Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center in Austin, Texas, which is really devoted to native ecosystems, right? It’s more than just a collection of flowers. And so, I’ve always felt that, even in poverty, I benefited from institutions and entities that help shape a world for the positive in ways that lay outside of money, and they need money, but they lay outside of that and reached down and affected me, right? Whether that’s libraries or what have you. And I’ve always believed that the only way you can ever pay back that kind of gift is to immerse yourself in that same kind of behaviour, whether that’s mentoring, whether that’s spending your time in treasure to support organisations and institutions. And so, I’ve always felt it was my obligation to do that. And one of the things that I think is a challenge in society is that there is such an orientation-, – and always, it’s always there. It’s not like today is a special moment. But it’s always there for people to just maximise themselves and focus on generating a pile of wealth. And what I realise is, because I also work in an environment where I deal with some of the richest people anywhere in the world for my day job, I see varying levels of satisfaction, accomplishment and understanding among those people about what they have, whether they inherited it or created it. And so, it’s an object lesson that in and of itself, it’s not something to be pursued, not for me. And basically, I wouldn’t say I do my job part time, but I’ve chosen to split my time, so that so many of the other things that I find inherently interesting and valuable, I can also pursue.
JBG: And you touched on this in that response, but I’m curious: if you had to answer the question of what motivates and inspires you today, how you would respond to that.
DT: Well, I would say that I’m always struggling with balancing satisfying an abiding curiosity about the world [1:00:00] with a need to make things better. And by that, what I mean is, it would be interesting to run off and be a permanent learning machine or a pure academic, but you have to ask what impact you’re having if that occurs. Or, if you just focus on impact or making things happen, and what are you missing, in terms of the change, that you could be doing better? And so, I’m constantly trying to balance the desire to learn and the desire to change things. And I would say how it affects the organisations I’m in is that I think I’m probably pretty good at getting things started, or getting things from zero to one. So, I’m the start-up or idea creator. And then I get bored, and then I’m also not the person to carry it as a mature, developing concept.
JBG: Okay. And what impact, upon reflection, did the Rhodes Scholarship have on your life?
DT: It’s nearly impossible to describe. And I would start by saying that the depths of friendships that I developed within my community has been enormously powerful for grounding me at challenging moments in my life, and for exposing me to new ideas and giving me a sense of community that is often lacking in the modern world. And we are peers and brothers to this day. That is much more important than the Rhodes itself. I would say that, obviously, the one thing that a Rhodes carries is that people are going to, at least initially, listen to you. You have to keep following it up, but it’s going to open doors or minds to be receptive to you. And, you know, it’s always sad when you see people leading with it, or something like that, wearing it like a merit badge. But nonetheless, in my position, especially when people find out about it and that I did not tell them, it’s like a secret whammy, right? They’re, like, ‘What? Wait a second, why didn’t you tell us that?’ I’m, like, ‘You can Google me’, right? And I think that it has been a leg-up in my career. Certainly a leg-up, I think, at times in my tribal community, because I had positions of enormous authority at a ridiculous age when I had no right having that authority, right? They’re, like, ‘Well, he’s a Rhodes Scholar. Let him figure it out’, right? And so that got me really, seriously up the learning curve, because I was suddenly thrust into wildly complicated situations where sometimes, I was the youngest person by more than half the age of everybody else, all the time. And where people are horse-trading on legislation and, ‘How are we going to cut this deal?’, or whatever, and you’re seeing how the sausage gets made, and that was vastly beneficial for me, being an advisor in complex situations, because I was in the most complex situations you could possibly be in, and we didn’t have the resources to have a management consulting firm helping out. You just had to figure it out. And so, I would say the Rhodes was the ticket that got me into that situation, and so, things came from that, because we were successful. That was a big part of it. I would say, aside from my friends, I haven’t been especially tied to the Rhodes community in a long time, because I think the Rhodes community-, I don’t know if it’s been able to find a way to define itself very well, particularly here in the US, as a common group. I think there are some pockets. And so, there’s not really an active thing-, I haven’t seen, besides sailing luncheon. That’s why I’m so excited about some of the developments at Rhodes House, specifically, because I think you’ve got a chance to start fostering that kind of a community identity, which would also get the Americans out of their own navel.
JBG: And that, I think, leads beautifully into my next question. We just celebrated the 120th anniversary of the Scholarships, and I think it’s a natural time to think about what is next and, what does the next chapter look like? And I’m curious what your hopes for the future of the Scholarship are.
DT: Well, I would say a couple of things, and these are not, obviously, super-long, thought out. I think one of the things that’s always made the Scholarship powerful is that it is more than an academic scholarship. And I would say that one of the things that I have seen in some of the selection committees I have been on, and I’ve seen in general or talked to others about, is, for a period of time – and I don’t know if this is still true – there seemed to be an over-focus on academic credentials at the expense of the other things, the intangibles, that had often characterised – I wouldn’t say define, because I don’t know if you can define it, but characterised – who was a Rhodes. And I would hope that the future thinks about that wider-ranging personality profile rather than turning it into a Marshall, right? Marshall Scholars are very different. I think that’s important. I am really excited-, after all the questioning and ‘Tear down Rhodes’ and all of that, I’m really excited that the vision is, this is still about fighting the world’s fight, but that it may not be for the Anglo-American empire, right? The best of the old, and throw out the bad shit, I support that. But at the same time, don’t deny your history, right? So, I love the expansion of the Scholarships. I love the idea – look, this is one tiny example – that there is a service year if people do a one-year programme. I would have leapt at that. Instead of being a doctoral candidate, I would have done the service year, 100%. No question about it. And I think that that kind of innovation and the service and leadership mentoring-, because, look, Rhodes House didn’t really have a community when we were there. You had the Coming Up and Going Down Dinners. My interaction with the Kennys, separately, it was not great community that was fostered there. You can see it happening, and I think that makes it a different place. I think that gives the opportunity for the Rhodes community to grow into something it hasn’t been, which is mostly a bunch of people running off to, you know, particularly Australia, and running for Prime Minister. Labour, Liberal, they all came from Oxford. So, you know, how different are they really? I mean, they’re living up to the founder’s mission, but I think that just as much too many Rhodes became what I would call ‘Academics’ for a period of time, there was also that you had to go and immediately run off into politics. And I was fortunate that I exorcised that demon. I realised that I could do other things. And, you know, I think dedicating myself so long to my tribe and to Indian country, and being an advocate there, is how I found my mission. I mean, if I were to point to what is my highest and best thing I’ve done, besides my boys, it’s the work I’ve put into Cherokee Nation. And I think you’re going to see that in a lot of other Rhodes, and I would never denigrate anybody’s career path or career choice, but when I see people making what I would almost consider to be, like, stock plays out of central casting, I sometimes feel like, ‘Give us a miss’. How many more, you know, McKinsey partners does Rhodes House need?
JBG: And so, I think that leads really well to my last question, which is whether you would have any words of wisdom or advice for current Rhodes Scholars or future Rhodes Scholars, as they, perhaps, evaluate what the opportunity and the experience means to them?
DT: I think the most important thing I would advise everybody to do is to really take stock and to play their own game. I think Rhodes Scholars tend to be very high-achieving [1:10:00] people, who fall into the trap of playing to others’ tunes, right? ‘Get this merit badge’, ‘Get this degree’, ‘Do this degree programme’, ‘Have this job’, ‘This career track’. And I think too often, that means you get led down a path into being productive for others. And I would challenge them all to think very, very hard about, ‘What can you do that’s original?’ ‘What can you do that lays outside of that norm?’ That norm may be correct for you, but all too often, I don’t see people thinking about it. And that means, maybe you are going to be an entrepreneur, maybe you are going to run a social service programme, maybe you are going to be a minister. I don’t know what it is. But think about what your own game is, and define terms in its heart, because it’s lonely, right? If you choose to leave the well-trodden path, you’re off in the wilderness. But I would say that, even though it’s been exceptionally hard at times, the choices I made to be very different and to pursue different things meant that I had a very rewarding, highly differentiated life.
JBG: Thank you. Thank you for sharing that.
JBG: Is there anything else that you would like to share as a part of this oral history project.
DT: No, I just think that it’s interesting that you’re collecting them, and I hope that one thing you consider, after you get the initial scope done, is, what is your go-back-to plan, right? I have a perspective right now, as an almost 55-year-old American sitting here today. 20 years from now, or 25 years from now, when it’s the 150th, when I’m 77, 80, whatever the number is going to be, how will I think differently? I think you should think about capturing that, because I think, too often, we get a point in time. If you had come to me five years ago, this interview would be different, and I think that’s an important thing to think about in this oral history, because we’ll also have our perspective, of 20 or 25 years on, of the inflection point, I think, that’s happening right now within the Rhodes community. And I’m somebody who is raising my hand to re-embrace a Rhodes community that I’ve largely ignored.
JBG: Thank you for doing that. Thank you.
JBG: And thank you, Deacon, for being part of the oral history project. We’re really grateful.
DT: Well, there’s nothing like appealing to the ego of a Rhodes to go down in history in the annals, right? This is a layup, Jamie, come on!
