HOME OF THE BRAVES

Motorists passing through Anadarko, Okla., see little more than a sleepy tourist trap of a town. What they are missing is what 20 lucky visitors (ages 6 and older) will see, starting July 6, when they join anthropologist Robert Vetter for a highly personal eight-day encounter with American Indians in the southwestern corner of the state. As he has for the past decade, in Journeys into American Indian Territory programs, Vetter will "bombard" participants with insightful interactions so they will learn about the culture of the Kiowa, Comanche, Apache, Wichita, Caddo, Delaware, Cheyenne and Arapaho people of this region. (This program costs $895 for adults and half as much for children.)

Journeyers will be "house" guests of craftswoman Celita Scarborough-Donaghey, spending nights in decorative teepees (each sleeps 10). They will eat native food like Apache posole (hominy and meat), learn craftmaking and native dances, listen to ancestral tales told by native storytellers and take a medicinal-herb walk. The family of Doc Tate Nevaquaya, the famed Comanche flutist, will show them how to make the wood instrument on which he played the unwritten, melodic music of his ancestors. At the Sac and Fox Powwow, members of Vetter's group will talk with representatives of tribes from all over North America. And if their native hosts deem it appropriate, they may even experience a sweat-lodge ceremony.

Buffalo will be grazing on the high grass of the Wichita Mountains when Vetter's vans roll in. The herds had been exterminated from this homeland, but were re-established in October 1907, when the Federal Government shipped some buffalo in on railroad cars from the Bronx Zoo. For centuries, Native Americans went to the Wichita Mountains on vision quests. The campers who join Vetter will understand why.

Journeys into American Indian Territory, 800-458-2632.