Franklin Gritts
During World War II, he served on the USS Franklin (CV-13), the most damaged ship in the history of the U.S. Navy to return to port.
His mother was Rachel Gritts (née Duck), a full-blood Cherokee who is also listed in the Dawes Roll.
This association was a divergent of the Original Keetoowah Society, a religious and cultural traditionist group with roots going back to the 1850s.
The Eastern Emigrant and Western Cherokee Association held one of its meetings at George Gritts’ farm over several days in August 1920, with people arriving on foot, horseback, in wagons, and a few in cars.
Rachel and George were not eager to send their only child to school in Vian, as they had lost several children through miscarriages and early childhood death.
He readily accepted and spent two years at Bacone College, where Indian art was an important part of the curriculum.
This was a big leap to contemplate, from being part of a small, comfortable college close to home to tackling the huge and overwhelming state university.
[4] This was quite an advancement for Gritts, since Haskell was a prominent American Indian school, attracting students from many different tribes and numerous states.
He was commissioned to do an oil portrait of Peter Graves, a noted Red Lake Ojibwe chief, to be placed in a US Navy ship.
They spent a cold night on the raft, drifting away from the stricken ship and, as the sun set, saw it disappear on the horizon, listing badly.
Finally arriving in Hawaii, Gritts was able to call home just as the news of the Franklin disaster was announced, after a long period of censorship.
In Hawaii, he received his first extensive medical treatment, which revealed that an infection had set in the tibia bone of his left leg, and he had lost a toe on that foot.
Gritts faced more medical treatment at the Great Lakes Hospital in Chicago as the infection in the tibia continued to drain and would not heal.
To pass the time during his hospital stay, he developed a style of modern illustration and cartoons for the amusement of his fellow patients.
The nation was still in the process of rebuilding after WWII, when home construction and civilian manufacturing had been converted to the production of war materials of all kinds.
He spent one summer at the Art Institute of Chicago and took after-school classes at the University of Kansas to attain state teaching certification.
Years later in 1968, Adam Fortunate Eagle was named by the FBI as the principal organizer of the Indian occupation of Alcatraz after it ceased being used as a prison by the federal government.
Established in 1886, The Sporting News was a newspaper distributed nationwide and was the outstanding baseball weekly of enthusiastic fans.
Gritts painted a large mural on four walls gracing the entrance to the auditorium at Haskell Indian Nations University.
He illustrated the back cover of Grant Foreman's The Five Civilized Tribes: a Brief History and a Century of Progress, published in 1948.
His 1950, "Stomp Dance" was included in C. Szwedzicki's "The North American Indian Works" which is a collection of 364 images and six texts.
The publications were edited by American scholars Oscar Brousse Jacobson, Hartley Burr Alexander and Kenneth M. Chapman.
In 2009, Gritts' Indian Woman Grinding Corn (1936, Tempera, Courtesy of Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, the University of Oklahoma, Norman, Oklahoma: Museum purchase, 1937) was on display in Cotonou, Benin in West Africa as part of the program Art in Embassies.
