Ohitika Woman Read online

  My oldest living relative is Great-uncle Bernard Flood. He was born in 1900 and is ninety-two years old now. His mother died when he was only six months old. He never knew her, doesn’t even have a picture of her. His father was already gone. So he was an orphan, living out at a camp near the Little White River in a tipi with his grandma, his brother, John, and his sister, Louise.

  When Uncle Bernard was old enough, he went to school in St. Francis until he was about sixteen and the school burned down. Then he went to school in Haskell, in northern Kansas. At this time Indians going to high school went either to Haskell or to Carlysle, Pennsylvania, where my grandma went in 1911. Haskell was run like an army barracks. The boys had to wear uniforms and stiff collars that chafed their necks. The worst were the stiff, heavy, ankle-high shoes. He was not used to wearing them. Otherwise, the school was all right. In St. Francis, Uncle Bernard had played in the marching band for about three years. At Haskell he played the tuba in the Indian band. He was there for a couple of years, from 1916 to 1918. And then at age seventeen, he enlisted in the navy and was shipped to the Great Lakes Naval Station in Illinois. The U.S. was fighting in World War I, so nobody cared that he was only seventeen. He served two years there and during that time he was the only Indian on the base except for a Chippewa from Wisconsin. They had a big band there and, again, he played the tuba. He had it pretty easy being a musician, and it kept him out of combat.

  In 1922 he went back to St. Francis, on the Rosebud Reservation, married a woman called Little Money, and worked on a farm. Life was rough on the reservation. People had to build their own houses, mostly cabins. They got rations of beef, a little flour, and wood. They didn’t have commodities, government food handouts, in those days, although the government people gave you clothes for your kids to go to school in, shoes and stuff. They didn’t have the regular school built until 1930. There were just two denominations, Catholics and Episcopalians. They got along pretty good, civilizing us, as they said.

  Uncle Bernard had been all over in his younger days, from Canada to Window Rock, Arizona, on the Navajo reservation. Once, they wouldn’t let him travel in a regular train compartment with the white folks, because he was an Indian. They made him ride in the baggage car. But that’s a long time ago.

  During World War II, he worked for the air force at their academy in Denver. Then he worked for the navy, as a production specialist, making forty-millimeter antiaircraft guns. Later, he was elected to the tribal council. Most of what they did was negotiate with the BIA, the bureau, for getting federal funds for the Rosebud Tribe. He went to Washington twice on tribal problems. But they never got enough money to work with, so they couldn’t do much. He told me:

  “Now my roaming days are over. I just look at the clouds, the birds, a young frisky pony running about. I’m ninety-two years old now. I’d like to live to see a new century starting. I would be a hundred years old if I make it.”

  Mom’s oldest brother died when he was eighteen. Her last surviving brother, Richard Brave Bird, died a couple of years ago of cirrhosis of the liver. He was a rodeo man, and a great one with horses. He worked for a rancher and sometimes brought horses back with him for us kids to ride. He’d drink a lot and go off to do his bulldogging. He won many prizes but broke his back three times in the process. He always went back to his bronc busting though. He and my uncle Clifford Broken Leg were old-time cowboys. Their sons carried it on. June Leader Charge, Clifford’s son and my cousin, is still a rodeo rider. He’s got a whole remuda of horses and herds cattle. I loved to go to the all-Indian rodeos. The one on the Fourth of July is always the greatest. After the main events are over, they have a wild-horse race, in which they ride bareback, old style. That is really exciting. Some of those Indian cowboys become great riders at a very young age, and you can see which ones are going to be world champions. There’s an old saying that we Sioux can ride before we can walk. The girls are great, too, doing their barrel races at a full gallop, with their whips clenched between their teeth. I wasn’t too bad myself

  My mother, Emily, was raised the Indian way, way out on the river in a tent, isolated from the world beyond. But after her father, Brave Bird, died, she was taken to the St. Francis Mission School in Rosebud and she chose the white man’s road as her way of life. When I was six or seven, I was taken away from my grandparents and from then on was raised as a Catholic, in the white man’s way. I was not taught my own language because “speaking Indian would not be good for me.” As a teenager, I ran away to go back to the traditional Lakota ways. My mother has a shrine of Our Lady in her garden, surrounded by pretty flowers. She has an upright piano in her living room and plays the organ in church on Sundays. I go to peyote meetings, am a sun dancer, and pray to Wakan Tanka, the Great Spirit. So my mother and I are very different. We travel different roads. But we love and support each other even while we argue. As I once had harsh words to say about my mother’s attitude, I think it only fair to make it clear that in my time of troubles and drinking my mother stood by me, nursed me back to health after my accident, and took care of my kids while I was recuperating. And I have to admit that I must have been a sore trial to her during the days I spent in an alcoholic daze. Our life philosophies are different, but we love each other. And whenever I am in a bad way, I turn to her for help.

  After Grandpa Brave Bird’s death, an aunt took his widow back to Rosebud, and they took my mother with them. Like everybody else, she wound up in the St. Francis Mission boarding school, run by Jesuit priests and Franciscan monks and nuns. This was a great shock to my mother, as it was to all other Indian children, being forcefully taken from their families to be raised by strangers who must have seemed like alien beings from another planet, The kids were forced to stay there for a whole year and could not leave the mission even for holidays. So it was no wonder that my mother always cried when the wagon taking her there got to the junction where she could see the church steeple. The priests and nuns were very strict and meted out harsh treatment. These were the bad old days when they tried to “whitemanize” the kids with a strap. My mother told me: “The kids used to run away, and when they were caught they put them in little cells and shaved their heads. Some students froze to death hiding in haystacks while running away.”

  While I rebelled against the unbearable conditions at St. Francis, my mother saw the key to a better life in what she learned at the school. She always said that while she was there the kids got a quality education. “They made sure you learned, even if they had to beat the knowledge into you. Kids were often mistreated in that school, but I got a good education from the teachers.”

  So, while my mother complained about the abuses, she still always says: “I’m grateful for what the nuns gave me.” She was even taught some Latin and how to play the piano. So she put her Indianness aside and concentrated upon studying. It paid off for her, as she became, first, a registered nurse and later a school-teacher.

  Mom was baptized in the Catholic faith by Father Eugene Buechel, a German. At that time, all the priests and brothers at St. Francis were Germans. Buechel came to Rosebud as a young man, in 1902, and he spent the rest of his life on the reservation. He was a Jesuit and was quite a remarkable man. He founded a museum for Indian artifacts that he had collected. He gathered, cataloged, and described native healing herbs, photographed people on the res, and compiled a huge Sioux dictionary and grammar. My mother told me that through his books she not only learned English, but got a better understanding of her own Lakota language. Like other missionaries, he used to travel around in his horse and buggy, with a portable altar, to say mass in such tiny hamlets as He Dog, Upper Cut Meat, Soldier Creek, White River, Grass Mountain, or even isolated homesteads way out on the prairie. People liked him because he could speak Sioux flawlessly, ate whatever Indian food was put before him, and always had his pockets full of little gifts for the children.

  The other priests were not so popular because they took the strap to the kids and always spoke German, so it
was hard to understand them—men like Brother Hartman and Brother Joseph, who taught carpentry, and Father Shoemaker. That’s what they called him, but his real name was Hinderhofer. He taught boot making to the students and slapped them down hard if they didn’t obey. They tried to persuade Mom to become a nun, but, luckily, she didn’t go for that, though she is a staunch Catholic. While Mom wrestled with math and Latin, Grandma supported her by doing cleaning and washing for people—that’s how she made her living. She encouraged Mom in her studies, always telling her: “You’d better learn both ways, Indian and white man’s ways; then you’ll have a better life.”

  I have said harsh words about the mission school, because we were not allowed to talk Indian, or to pray the Indian way, or to go to native ceremonies. If we did, the nuns beat us, as I have described it in my first book. It is only fair to say that things have changed for the better at Rosebud and other reservations. St. Francis hasn’t been a missionary school since the 1970s, and while it’s still a boarding school, the staff is now Indian. It’s grown, and they have a big library now. They’re big on cultural education. For example, if there’s a funeral, a priest will do the burial, but if it’s a traditional family, they can also smoke the pipe, and sing with the drum, and sing for that person. The Christian and the traditional people get along pretty good. They come together for powwows and different activities. Now they have priests who take part in the sun dance and the sweat. My mother doesn’t like it. She says that it goes against what she believes, that “you don’t step into another church.” Sometimes she looks kind of wistful and says: “Maybe it would have been better if we’d stayed out on the fiats and lived the Indian life, and never went to mission school, because then, maybe, my children wouldn’t have ran away and joined AIM, and got into all that trouble.” She means Barb and myself, and Joe and Sandra, too.

  When the Depression came and everybody was poor, Mom didn’t notice it, because poverty was all she knew. There was sharing on the reservation. People helped each other. Mom vividly remembers one summer when Texas had a drought and the ranchers donated to the reservation the surplus cattle they couldn’t feed. They had them all penned up at Rosebud, real skinny animals, but every family got a cow. All along the creek women were butchering. There was no refrigeration, so they were drying the meat, making jerky. You had to know how, and do it right, or the meat would rot. For the most part, the people lived on rations. They got coffee, sugar, beets, and dried fruit. Somehow the family survived.

  Electricity came to Rosebud and Mission in the 1930s. The smaller hamlets had to wait until 1958. So, at that time, when the school at He Dog was being built, the people used kerosene lamps and coal stoves. Electricity was fine, but with it came TV, which was not so good. It made kids think and act the white man’s way and forget their own language.

  Mom says that when Myrl Smith, her present husband, married her, he made a good catch, and that is true. A damn good catch, in fact. But when she married her first husband, Bill Moore, she made a very bad catch. Bill was a handsome man with a good build on him. That’s the only favorable thing I can say about him. He is part Indian but pretends to be white. He once brought some things made of silk home from the Orient. I later swapped them for books. My mother divorced him when I was one year old. We were living in Denver at the time. One day Bill sold all the furniture in the house, stripped it clean, and used the money to go on a big drunk. He wound up in a bar, where he picked himself up another woman who, he said, was not so goddam strict and moral as my mom. That was the last straw. I saw him only three times after that. Once he came to Rosebud to borrow money from his dad. The second time he came to Rosebud for his brother’s funeral. He let everybody admire his brand-new, fancy cowboy boots and pretended not to notice me. I saw him for the third time only a few years ago. I was moving from city to city, and shelter to shelter, with all my kids and no money, desperately trying to find a place and some work. I had been in a shelter in Marshall, Minnesota, and from there took a bus to Sioux Falls, where things were even worse. In December, in the cold and snow, I struck out for Arizona, where I had friends and where it was warm. I had the kids with me—Pedro, Anwah, June Bug, and Jennifer, who was a little baby then. I still don’t know how I was able to handle it. We made it to Omaha, Nebraska, and stayed in a shelter there. I remembered hearing that my father had remarried and settled in Omaha, working as a trucker. I looked up his address in the phone book and went to see him. He was unpleasantly surprised. He told me: “I’d ask you in, but I have a family. You see how it is.” He did not even want to have a look at my kids, his grandchildren. He had washed his hands of us for good. I turned around and went to the homeless shelter. Next day I was on the road again.

  After Bill Moore had disappeared into the wild blue yonder, Mom had to earn a living. She did not want to live in the usual reservation way, on insufficient government handouts . . . not quite enough to live on, but just enough to keep you from dying. She wanted to be independent. To become a nurse she had to go to a school that was almost a hundred miles away in Pierre, the state capital. So my grandparents had to raise us children. I was tiny then. Whenever Mom came back from school I’d jump on her lap and hug her. When she had to go back to school I cried and didn’t want to let go of her. That was hard, very hard. Maybe that’s why I am what I am. Maybe it had an influence on shaping our personalities. But what choice did she have? We had to survive somehow.

  After becoming a nurse she worked three years at the hospital. Then Myrl came out from Minnesota to teach at the school in He Dog, where she lived. That’s how she met him. Mom had five children, and he had been a bachelor all his life. When he married her, he got himself a good wife. Mom switched from nursing to teaching, and now Myrl and my mother teach at the same school. In another year, I think, she’ll retire from the classroom, but not from working. She’ll instruct at our little tribal college, the Sinte Gleska College, named after Chief Spotted Tail. English is her subject. She’s an organist at two churches—St. Briget’s and St. Agnes’s—and plays whenever they have wakes. She never took lessons but taught herself. She does not accept money for this work.

  The matter of religion kept us apart for a while, but now we understand each other’s views about this. My sister Barb and I started seeking for our roots, for a faith, for a meaning of life. Mom now says that this was great; but she did not always think so. She does not go to ceremonies and is not interested in powwows. She does not know much about Indian religion. She must have known it as a child. Maybe she forgot, or wanted to forget, while I, and my sisters, went to Uncle Leslie Fool Bull to learn as much about our ancient beliefs as we could.

  Mom says: “I believe there is a power there, a mysterious power, but I don’t tamper with what I don’t know. If you kids want to go that way, that’s fine. If you live that way, and believe in it, that’s good. If you come out of there and get drunk, it’s not.”

  My mother now respects my beliefs, and I respect hers. I have matured, and become more tolerant. When you’re very young, there’s only one viewpoint—yours. Mom still uses an herb that grows wild where we live. She takes the root of this plant and boils it and uses it for sore eyes. And she makes tea out of the bark of chokecherry trees for chest colds. In spite of what Mom says, there’s still a lot of Indian in her, and much of the old Lakota wisdom. Well, that’s the story of my ancestors and relatives, living and dead, the story of my family, the Floods and the Brave Birds, a story that is not finished—yet.

  * * *

  *Coup is a French word meaning “strike” or “hit.” Counting coup meant performing a brave deed by which a young warrior could earn eagle feathers.

  CHAPTER THREE

  A Little Backtracking

  I have to backtrack a little bit. At the beginning of 1973 I was seventeen years old and pregnant, in my ninth month. The father was one of those young, good-looking radical warrior types. I was infatuated with him, but discovered soon that he was not the kind to have a solid relationship
with. I considered myself part of AIM—the American Indian Movement—and so after the movement took over Wounded Knee in February, I joined my friends who had occupied the historic site, determined to have my baby there. Call it a statement, or a gesture of defiance. My sister, Barb, and my brother, Joe, welcomed me. My baby was born on April 11, during a firefight, with bullets whizzing through the air. It lifted up everybody’s morale to have a new life born after Clearwater, an Indian from North Carolina, had been killed by the marshals. There was drumming and singing when my baby was shown to the people. I named my son Pedro, after a close friend, Pedro Bisonette, founder of the Oglala Sioux civil rights organization, who was later murdered by tribal police. He had been a great support and covered me with his body when we received fire from the feds.

  My mother sat at home, watching the evening news, fretting. Her kids were in the movement. She was not. She had two young daughters and a son inside Wounded Knee. My brother, who had been in Vietnam, had told Mom: “Those in the movement are going in there armed. It won’t only be the goons and the marshals who’ll have weapons. If they shoot at us, somebody might shoot back.” With a ring of fire around the Knee, all of us surrounded by trip-wire flares and armored cars, no wonder she was worried sick, not only about her three kids but also the little baby inside me. She didn’t even know if we were still alive.

  I went to jail when I came out of Wounded Knee with my little baby. The marshals had promised me that I would not be arrested or prosecuted just for having been part of the occupation, but I was grabbed as soon as I was outside the perimeter. That was the same day Buddy Lamont was killed inside the Knee by a marshal’s bullet. I came out of the Knee at the end of April, together with Kamook, Dennis Banks’s lady, and Buddy Lamont’s body. That was very sad. I kept thinking of those I had left behind inside, at the Knee.