by David Treuer
Even before the flood, life had been hard for David and his family. Their house on Birch Creek didn’t have electricity or running water. Their father—a tank commander in the Korean War and a recipient of three Bronze Stars, a United Nations Peacekeepers Medal, a National Defense Service Medal, and the Korean Service Medal—was maniacally hard on his family. David wonders if it was the war or the life or both that made his father into what he was. “Our dad brought us up hard. Treated us like we were in the military. He practically raised himself. He was kind of booted out of his house by his stepfather. Raised by his aunts since he was four. I don’t think he ever got over that. I remember when he’d come home drunk, raving and ranting, hating women. We didn’t understand that.” His father made the children stand at attention “and listen to his war stories till he went to sleep or got laid out. Sometimes it’d be daylight. We’d have to stand at attention till he was done. We’d stand there in our old shorts. Stand at attention! My two sisters would stand there in their nightgowns. At attention! We had to listen to that shit all night long. It was crazy. It was a hard life. They call that child abuse now. We had to do that for years. We got the blunt end of that.”
Whether it was the flood that took their home and their neighbors or the rage of their father that swept comfort and care away in its own torrent, life was a precarious thing. So when the opportunity came for the Schildts to move to Los Angeles as part of the relocation program, the family enrolled. Perhaps because of his war service, David’s father was admitted to a vocational program that would teach him to be a diesel mechanic, even though he’d attended school only through the sixth grade. In 1968, David, his parents, and ten other siblings piled into two cars and headed down to Los Angeles.
Upon their arrival in Los Angeles, the relocation program housed them in Compton. “When we come down to L.A. it was something we couldn’t even believe. You see—we never seen a black person before in our lives! So they put us in Compton in a hotel when we first got there. It had a twenty-foot wire fence around it, and it was right beside the freeway. You’d see rivers of black people coming across. And we’d run to the fence and say, ‘Man! Look! Look at those people!’ We couldn’t believe there were so many black people in the world. They kept us there in that fenced-in motel. We didn’t leave. It’s Compton in 1968 and all hell is breaking loose. We were there for a month or a month and a half.” Next, the relocation program found a place for the Schildts in Burbank. “The high school was the John Burroughs High School. The John Burroughs Indians! How do you like that?” It does seem rather fitting that some of the Schildts would be attending a school named after the famous naturalist. David was in junior high school and attended the Luther Burbank Middle School, named for the horticulturist Luther Burbank, famous for breeding the Shasta daisy but mostly for developing the Russet Burbank potato, a blight-resistant variety meant to revive Ireland’s leading crop after the devastating Irish Potato Famine. “I didn’t know a soul when I got there,” David recalls. After his one-room schoolhouse back in Montana, he says, “I was in the blind, socially and academically. We had a real limited education in Los Angeles. I flunked everything. But they still let me play basketball and track and field because they probably felt sorry for me. I had to learn to adjust, learn how to interact with other people. Learn to communicate with people who couldn’t understand me. I had this friend who was a soccer player. Latino. He was interested in me because we were the same skin color. Initially we communicated through sign language. Somehow I got it across to him that I was Indian. He’s like, ‘Oh, Indio!’ He was my friend for most of that year.” Another friend gave him a bike. They biked to the Hollywood Bowl and snuck into a concert featuring Bob Dylan, George Harrison, Ravi Shankar, and Janis Joplin. “We crawled clear over the top of that Griffith Park mountain. I remember how it was like to crawl through the brush and that tall grass.”
They lasted a year. “My dad couldn’t do nothing down there. He didn’t know nothing about math. He couldn’t last. The only background he had was he was a tank commander. He could kill people. That was his only skill.” And so back to Browning they went. A job opened up for his mother in Columbia Falls, but David was sixteen, and he had had it by then. “My dad, drunk one time, said to me, ‘You gonna be seventeen someday and you’re gonna be a man and you’re gonna be on your own or you’ll be in the army.’” Rather than live with his father or move to yet another new place, David asked if he could go to Flandreau Indian School in Flandreau, South Dakota.
“It was the safest place I’d ever lived. Flandreau Indian boarding school. Safest place ever. Three squares a day. A roof over my head. Night matron. Day matron. School. Coaches. I had everything I needed to be secure. And I excelled. I’ll tell you what: when I was down there—we had a good time down there. I was in the rodeo club. I had a great time in sports. Athlete of the year. Set records. Triple jump. Went to state in pole vault. Big handful of medals.” His time there wasn’t without its bumps. “Forty or so of us got some alcohol and we all got kicked out of school, the day before graduation. And they told us since we got kicked out none of our credits count. I had to go back for another half year, but I didn’t mind. I liked it there.” But eventually Flandreau had to come to an end: he couldn’t stay there forever.
It’s hard, sometimes, to understand a life, to narrate it, when it doesn’t have a through line. David’s life feels this way to me. It has stops and starts, changes of altitude, different scenes come in and out of focus. After Flandreau he moved back to Browning. It was the only place he really knew, even if it didn’t suit him. “I went from Flandreau, being very happy, to moving back to the rez and being very, very sad. It was a different world, and I had to survive somehow. I had no one to lean on. I remember being basically on welfare. I didn’t have anyone I could lean on for a job.” He started to drink. “I thought, ‘This isn’t me. What the hell am I doing this for?’ I remember once I got drunk, stayed drunk for seven days straight. Bunch of us about the same age. Seventeen to twenty-one years old. I remember that one day just shaking, I was just so . . . saturated. I went back home to Birch Creek. And I thought, ‘I gotta get out of here. I’ve got to get out of here or I’ll die.’ People told me, ‘Life on the rez is tough and if you live till you’re thirty years old you’re gonna be lucky.’ I believed them. So I started trying to make plans to get out of there somehow. The only way I could see was riding bulls. Started riding bulls and bareback horses. I got into the rodeo business.” Life on the rez was so unsafe that climbing on top of a one-ton bull was better than living it out at Birch Creek.
And so David left. First, he went to college in Rapid City, mostly because he could ride on the rodeo team at the National College of Business located there. Or maybe he was in Billings first and later went to Rapid City. I’m not sure. The surer thing is to say that David spent the better part of the 1970s and 1980s hanging on the backs of bulls and, later, broncos. And it’s when he talks about riding that his eyes come alive and he smiles, really smiles. “I’ve done so many things in my life, struggling, trying to survive. The only time I ever had money: I graduated in 1987 from college. In 1988, my second time I was in school, I got this offer from Citibank: I could either have ten K in cash or I could take ten K on a credit card. I thought, ‘Shit—I’ll take the cash.’ I bought myself this little van, recorded my first album, and then spent the rest of it over the summer, rodeoing. Four of us were in this van. Two of us were rodeoing. One rolling party all summer long.”
One of them was Lakota, Ben, their de facto manager. He didn’t ride. The other non-rider was a musician, a white guy. “We had some rough wrecks that summer. I saw my buddy Byron get kicked clean out of his shirt. He was laying there in the arena. Lost his chaps. Lost his shirt. Hoofprints on his chest from getting stomped on! I asked Ben if we should call his wife, and Ben says, ‘Let’s wait to see if he’s alive.’ He walked out of there with just a cracked rib.” The four of them sat around and played musi
c a lot—David played the guitar and even got a couple of songs on the Pine Ridge radio station. They stayed at a KOA campground and lived on baloney sandwiches and small payments from a work settlement Ben had gotten for a cancer he’d developed while working with oil containers. “That’s how we survived all summer. Our goal initially was we were gonna sell my tapes and live off my music, but it turned into a running drunk all summer.”
Once a bull stepped on his arm, which landed him in the hospital in Browning. “I’ve broken so many things. Fourteen breaks in my arms. Elbows. Wrists. Elbows. Collarbones. I thought I could make a living at riding bulls. But riding for most guys lasts about fifteen years, between the ages of twenty and thirty-five. I didn’t quit riding bareback horses till I was in my forties. I finally got thrown out the back door in Palm Springs in 1990. I landed on my back and neck and couldn’t feel my legs. I’m fourteen hundred miles from home and I am lying in the dirt and I can’t move. I could hear the clown saying, ‘Are you all right?’ But after a while I started to feel tingling in my arms and legs. And I’m thinking, ‘This is enough. This is enough.’”
So David went back to Billings. His girlfriend was managing a horse ranch, and she let him work with the quarter horse colts and mares. He stacked hay, helped with the fencing and irrigating and basic ranch work. “When you’re in a state of survival, which I’ve been in most of my life, it changes every day. One day you’re teaching school, the next day you’re digging post holes. You go from a profession to a day job. Back and forth. Teacher’s aide, taught college. Ranching, rodeoing, getting into movie work. That didn’t work out.
“I even tried the music business. I was in Nashville. I recorded an album down there in 1994. For some reason I still don’t understand, I got to travel with Vince Gill and Patty Loveless in 1996. Friend of mine was a senior light coordinator and he called me and asked if I wanted to come out with him on a few shows. I flew down and went out on the road with them.” Back in Billings, his friend called him and told him that Vince was auditioning guitarists, and David’s name came up. But he didn’t have the funds to get to Nashville. “I’ve always been one of those guys who are in the wrong place at the wrong time. I was in the wrong place at the right time. But still it didn’t work out.”
Another time he got a call to audition for a singing cowboy part in a film in Virginia. “I said, ‘Hell, I’m trying out for a part in Last of the Mohicans.’” But he was bronc riding at Madison Square Garden and couldn’t get there in time, so the part went to Johnny Cash instead. “That’s who they got! I didn’t know at the time I was up against him!” An audition for another part, a stunt job, came through a cousin. “He says, ‘Here’s what you’re gonna do—you’re gonna go in there and wait for this guy to come and pick up a tomahawk and hit him.’” David hadn’t mentioned he had a broken shoulder from a rodeo injury when he got bucked. “I got hung up on the stirrups and I couldn’t get away and I got pulled underneath him and he just flailed me against the ground till it broke.” He could barely lift his arm. “And so the next day I was in there and the guy comes running and I go to lift the tomahawk and I couldn’t.” It was a year before he could ride again. “I did, though. I rode at the Cheyenne Frontier Days. I got to compete and they played my album over the PA while I was riding. It was a dream come true. And they got me interviewed and in the newspaper. And all that kind of stuff. I was forty years old and was gonna ride. I didn’t think it was that big of a deal. That horse bucked me off, he threw me so high I could see both sides of the arena. That old son of a gun bucked hard. If I could of got tapped on him that would have been ninety points. He bucked me good. And I went back to Billings and I thought, ‘I’m not gonna retire as a loser.’ So I started bareback riding. I got back in shape again. In ’ninety-seven, I got on a real good one in Birch Creek, Montana, Father’s Day rodeo. And I won it. And I thought, ‘This is as good a place as any to hang it up.’ And I haven’t been on one since. That’s where I started and that’s where I ended, after traveling over the whole goddamn U.S. and Canada. I’ve rode a whole lot of rodeos. National Indian Finals. Rode some big rank bastards in my life. And then I’ve had some horses buck me off too. It all evens out. Sooner or later you gotta let it go before it kills you. . . . The horses are always young and tough. The horses stay young and you get older. The horses get younger and you are getting older and there comes a time when you shouldn’t get on them. I’ve seen guys get killed in the arena. I’ve seen four guys get killed. It happens fast. When it happens it does something to your mind.”
Back and forth, up and down, holding on for dear life, getting bucked off but climbing back on: riding bulls and broncs was a bit like riding life for David. But he wasn’t alone. Or rather, he was alone but in good company. More and more Indians were being pulled away from their communities on reservations that disappeared from underneath them. By the time David was a teenager in Los Angeles, more than a hundred reservations—most of them in California and Oregon—had been terminated and the Indians who had belonged to them were, technically, Indians no longer. People who had been in America before America existed, whose homeland the wide country had once been, were now homeless immigrants headed to cities across the country, like the immigrants from China, Germany, Italy, Ireland, and England before them. They ran into many of the same difficulties: segregation in crowded ghettos or enclaves, lack of access to education, and lack of access to capital as redlining prevented them from joining the millions of Americans who were enjoying homeownership and admission to the middle class.
Termination was, by the 1960s, clearly a catastrophe. The gains tribes had made under the Indian Reorganization Act were wiped away. As flawed as the IRA was and as inadequate as tribal constitutions had been as a tool for tribal governance, they had created structural changes that pointed tribes in the right direction. And the “Indian New Deal” (as some have called the IRA), along with the New Deal itself, and then the postwar boom enjoyed by most Americans had been slowly changing the circumstances of hundreds of thousands of Indians in the form of tribal employment, housing, education, and hospitals. But no more. Under termination and relocation, unemployment skyrocketed and so did the number of Indians living under the poverty line. By 1970 half of all Indians lived in urban areas, the single largest demographic and cultural shift in Indian country in a century and arguably more pervasive and transformative than the reservation system established in the mid–nineteenth century. A total of 1,365,801 acres of land were removed from trust status during this period, and twelve thousand Indians lost their tribal affiliation.
President Lyndon Johnson shifted away from a policy of termination, but it wasn’t officially ended until 1970 by his successor Richard Nixon, a surprisingly good president as far as federal Indian policy was concerned. In 1970 in a special address to Congress he said:
This policy of forced termination is wrong, in my judgment, for a number of reasons. First, the premises on which it rests are wrong. . . . The second reason for rejecting forced termination is that the practical results have been clearly harmful in the few instances in which termination actually has been tried. . . . The third argument I would make against forced termination concerns the effect it has had upon the overwhelming majority of tribes which still enjoy a special relationship with the Federal government. . . . The recommendations of this Administration represent an historic step forward in Indian policy. We are proposing to break sharply with past approaches to Indian problems.
Many tribes fought long, hard legal battles to regain their federal recognition and to have their lands returned to tribal ownership. Some, like the Menominee, successfully fought to be reincorporated and have their treaty rights restored. Some are still fighting.
But still: many Indians found new life in cities. They endured the poor housing, the distance from their homelands; they learned to be diasporic. They learned to be Indians of America rather than simply Indians in America. And, as with David’s extended family
, relocation wasn’t necessarily a one-way street: Indians moved to the city and moved back to the reservation, or their children did. And while they were in cities they mixed not only with other races but with other tribes as well. Red Hall noted that the old tribal warfare, and the intertribal bigotry that marked tribal relations in the nineteenth century, faded away as Indians from vastly different tribes found themselves living as neighbors in the city. They found they had much more in common with one another: a shared historical experience if not shared cultures, the same class values, the same struggles. Networks among tribes—forged through marriage, school, city living, and service in the armed forces—were strengthened from 1940 to 1970.
Even David found this to be true, despite all the loss he’d experienced. “I’m a relocated Indian. I see myself as a classic example of what the government wants. The government wants you separated from your family, your home, your kids, your spiritual belief system, and they got you in the city, in white America. And now . . . you’re just a number. If you don’t tell people you’re Native, they just don’t know.” There were times when he didn’t see anyone, he recalls. “When I was in college, when Thanksgiving would come, or Christmas . . . I was working in the kitchen, the only guy left on campus, and I didn’t have any way to get home. So I’d just go downtown and drink. It was the only way to get through the misery of the holiday season. Until I realized: the holidays don’t mean anything, they are just another day.” These days, his girlfriend is “bringing me back around, making me human again.” He now works for China Camp State Park near San Rafael, California. “It’s a nice outdoors job working in that park. Worst thing that happens is the coyotes eat someone’s dog.” He still has most of his medals and buckles and spurs—proof of a life lived. And he has a kind of peace. “All I want to do is work, pay my bills, and go home and be happy. I don’t want anything else.”