by Peter Razor
While the Locust Slept
More Praise for
While the Locust Slept
“A septuagenarian member of the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwa tells a harrowing tale of mistreatment and racial prejudice as he movingly recalls his years as a ward of the state and indentured laborer in Minnesota during the 1930s…. Though he exposes the reality of a system that essentially legalized child abuse, Razor somehow manages to control his justifiable anger. A perfectly pitched memoir.”
Kirkus Reviews
“[A] stirring bittersweet memoir of growing up…. Written with great emotion and without self-pity.”
PAUL INGRAM,
Prairie Lights Books
“Razor speaks in the achingly honest voice of a young man grown old beyond his years…. [He] is the locust who slept before finally flying and, like the locust, his story teaches much about the cycle of destruction and endurance.”
The Circle
“Peter Razor’s coming-of-age story is a shocking revelation and succeeds where most other Native American autobiographies have failed. While the Locust Slept never confuses honesty with the truth, never descends into racial blaming, and refuses to use Ojibwe culture as a mirror in which the travesties of modern times are reflected. Instead, in a voice as simple and innocent as our childhood should be, he lets his experiences as an orphan at the State Public School in Owatonna and, later, those as a farm placement worker in Houston, Minnesota, tell the harrowing story of a lost generation of Indian children. While the Locust Slept is a treasure.”
DAVID TREUER,
author of Little and The Hiawatha
“Peter Razor spins an intense and endearing tale of an American Indian youth abandoned to the cruel mercy of the state. As memoir, his voice is amazingly unique—giving us a cultural story of human survival. As history, his work informs us of an almost hidden, dark time in our past.”
MARK ANTHONY ROLO (Bad River Ojibwe),
former editor, The Circle
Photo: Lewis Koch
About the Author
PETER RAZOR is an enrolled member of the Fond du Lac Band of Ojibwa and great-grandson of Mrs. Frank Razer of the White Earth Reservation, whose famous beadwork was studied by Frances Densmore in Chippewa Customs (Minnesota Historical Society Press). As an adult, Razor researched his past and his culture and began dancing in powwows and learning to make traditional garments. In recent years he has received acclaim for his instrument-making, including hand drums, rattles, and jingles, thus returning to the ways of his grandmother. While the Locust Slept is his first book.
N A T I V E V O I C E S
Native peoples telling their stories, writing their history
The Everlasting Sky: Voices of the Anishinabe People
Gerald Vizenor
Living Our Language: Ojibwe Tales and Oral Histories
Anton Treuer, editor
The Man Who Heard the Land: A Novel
Diane Glancy
The Manitous: The Spiritual World of the Ojibway
Basil Johnston
Night Flying Woman: An Ojibway Narrative
Ignatia Broker
Crazy Dave
Basil Johnston
Sister Nations: Native American Women Writers on Community
Heid E. Erdrich and Laura Tohe, editors
While the Locust
Slept
Peter Razor
MINNESOTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY PRESS
Native Voices
Native peoples telling their stories, writing their history
To embody the principles set forth by the series, all Native Voices books are emblazoned with a bird glyph adapted from the Jeffers Petroglyphs site in southern Minnesota. The rock art there represents one of the first recorded voices of Native Americans in the Upper Midwest. This symbol stands as a reminder of the enduring presence of Native Voices on the American landscape.
Publication of Natives Voices
is supported in part by a grant
from The St. Paul Companies.
© 2001 by the Minnesota Historical Society. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, write to the Minnesota Historical Society Press, 345 Kellogg Blvd. W.,
St. Paul, MN 55102-1906.
www.mhspress.org
Manufactured in Canada
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence for Printed Library materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984.
International Standard Book Number
ISBN 13 978-0-87351-439-2 (paper)
ISBN 10 0-87351-439-4 (paper)
Library of Congress
Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Razor, J. Peter.
While the locust slept : a memoir /
J. Peter Razor.
p. cm.—(Native Voices)
ISBN 0-87351-401-7 (cloth ed. : alk. paper)
ISBN 0-87351-439-4 (paper ed. : alk. paper)
Ebook ISBN: 978-0-87351-707-2
1. Razor, J. Peter.
2. Minnesota. State Public School.
3. Child abuse—Minnesota.
4. Abused children—Minnesota—Biography.
5. Ojibwa children—Abuse of—Minnesota.
6. Ojibwa Indians—Biography.
I. Title.
II. Series
HV6626.53.M6 R39 2001
362.768092 B 21 00-69719
For all the children in the cemetery at the Owatonna State School and for all those who survived but in silence.
From the Records of the State of Minnesota, County of Ramsey,
District Court, Juvenile Division, April 19, 1930,
hearing on abandoned children:
Miss Wittman: This child, Peter, has been in a boarding home since October 1929.
Judge: What do you recommend?
Miss Wittman: Commitment to Owatonna.
Judge: The Court being advised in the premises, finds that the said Peter Razor is a dependent child and in need of guardianship, education, care, and control.
While the Locust Slept
1
From high in the trees along the shady avenue, past Cottage Fifteen, a creature sang incessantly, and loudest on sweltering summer days. “Locust,” the boys of C-15 whispered, when they heard the frantic solo. They were cicadas outside my window, preaching from the trees, but my child-self still hears their whirring and murmurs, locust, locust.
I walked through weeds on the playground to see grasshoppers of all sizes leap and fly. When they settled, I watched them watching me. One, I learned, the one the boys called locust, slept seventeen years in darkness before soaring into the summer light.
…
It was overcast, almost dreary that day, the third Saturday of September 1944. I wore a soiled T-shirt and denims, and the slapping of my bare feet on the masonry floor echoed through the quiet halls of the Main Building. I rounded a bend and came to an abrupt stop. Miss Borsch stood talking to a middle-aged couple sitting on a hall bench. She smiled while pointing my way, but I sidled past them along the far wall looking straight ahead at the floor. I entered an office and placed papers on the desk but, when I turned to leave, Miss Borsch blocked the doorway.
“Peter, we’ve been looking for you,” Miss Borsch said. “Miss Lewis said you would be running errands here. You must go to the cottage right now, get your things, and return here. Those folks in the hall have come to take you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. They live over a hundred miles away and need to return home in tim
e for chores.”
“What clothes should I take?” I asked.
“That’s all taken care of. Just bring your personal things.”
“I have no personal things,” I replied and shrugged.
“Miss Lewis seems to think you have a pocket Bible and rosary,” Miss Borsch said.
“Yeah, those,” I said. “How much time do I get?”
“Can you take a bath, dress, and be back in an hour?” she asked. “Miss Lewis has clean clothes ready for you. The Schaulses will buy you dinner on the way.”
“Schauls?” I murmured. “I’ll try.”
My thoughts danced between hope for a good life and dark omens as I showered and dressed. The rosary and pocket Bible in hand, I waited in the living room for Miss Lewis to sign me out of the cottage—for the last time. The matron said little, just drew a line through my name on the register, and my final departure from the cottage was of no more note than were I going out for chores.
Back at the Main Building, I was clean with combed hair, dark blue dress pants, and a light blue shirt. My Sunday suit and winter clothes were already in the car when I delivered the papers to the office. Miss Borsch stood beside me, and we faced the couple.
“John and Emma Schauls,” she said, motioning toward them.
John stood, staring at me without smiling. Instinctively, I looked down, and we shook hands. His grasp was aggressive. I glanced up but his unblinking stare made me uneasy—like a strange chill had seeped into the room. He was only a bit taller than me but much larger, and his gray hair fringed a bald pate, prematurely for a man I was told was in his late thirties. Emma stood, forced an awkward smile, and laid her hand in mine, as she mumbled a greeting. She was close to forty and nearly cross-eyed so she wore thick glasses.
Miss Borsch’s smile never faltered and she bantered nonstop about weather and farming.
“Peter has been with us all his life,” Miss Borsch explained. “Now, he’s ready to try farming.”
I remained silent and stared at the floor.
My family fell apart shortly after I was born. The United Christian Charities of St. Paul was housing my parents and two older brothers at the time and helping my father search for work. He was from the Fond du Lac band of Minnesota Chippewas, named Ningoos at birth, and baptized Wilbur. He served with the expeditionary forces in France during the First World War and did not work much after marrying my mother in 1925.
My mother, Mary Razor, was quiet, given to depression. My father drank and was of little help nurturing the children. One of my brothers, Leonard, was hydrocephalic and retarded, and the other, Arnold, was still young. When the state social services ruled that my mother suffered from “confusion,” they sent her along with Leonard to an asylum at St. Peter. Some of my relatives from Michigan came to take Arnold home with them, but they did not take me. They thought my head looked too large for my body and feared I would turn out like Leonard. So I stayed with my father. He was supposed to look after me while he continued searching for a job. Instead he went to Milwaukee. I was ten months old when he abandoned me.
The state placed me temporarily in the Christian Boarding Home for Children in St. Paul, where two months later a psychologist tested me and recorded: Peter Razor is of Indian heritage. He is of average intelligence and underweight. I was taken to Ramsey County court and declared a ward of the state, at which point I was ordered committed to the State Public School at Owatonna. My placement was delayed by a measles epidemic, but on April 30, 1930, I arrived in the State School nursery. I was seventeen months old.
The State Public School occupied hundreds of acres on the west side of Owatonna. Farm buildings, gardens, and croplands were west, and the campus east—next to the city. Most cottages, facilities, and the Main Building were on a central mound that created an impressive, almost medieval, skyline. The Main Building, a large T-shaped, castle-like structure, faced a street bordered by trimmed shrubs, imposing flower beds, and large, well-kept lawns. Visitors were greeted inside in ornate offices with a posh visitors’ lounge and teams of smiling civil servants.
A private children’s hospital had recovery and isolation wards and an operating room for general surgery, such as removing a child’s tonsils or appendix. The hospital admitted all patients needing bed rest, including those with headaches or minor fevers. Cottages, numbered one to sixteen, separately housed boys and girls who transferred, as they grew, to cottages for older children.
In the cottages, away from public view, white-uniformed matrons reigned supreme. They lived full-time in apartments in the cottage and were called house mothers by the office. Assistants to the matrons wore colored uniforms specific to their positions and worked twenty-four hours on, then had twenty-four hours off. While on duty, they ate with the children and slept in small private rooms.
The school is closed now. Little remains but these buildings, and a cemetery at the southwest corner of the former campus. Nearly two hundred children who died of disease, accident, or other causes lie there. Those three years old or younger suffered a higher death rate than the older children—death from general debility or simply wasted away, the records say. Those without family were buried without ceremony. Children died on farm indenture and other placements, too. According to mortality statistics over one ten-year period, as many children died on placement as those on the school grounds.
State officials disagreed about how the school would affect children. About 1900, one officially recorded his concern: I fear we have created a penal institution for innocent children. But there were few advocates for children then, and their voices were lost in the din of politics. To pacify their critics, state social services declared they would keep a child no longer than three months. It will be a way station for children, until we place them into loving homes, they wrote.
For the good of the child, a family that had a child taken away lost all rights except visitation. If the child ran away from the institution and returned home, the family was obliged, under penalty of law, to return their son or daughter to the state.
Families selecting children would review office files and be guided by staff before meeting a child. Adoption and procedures for taking foster children required more than one visit, but I did not meet my farmer before he came to get me. I had no choice, was told nothing of how to act, nor what to expect. In an early discussion about my suitability for farm placement, Miss Borsch said flatly, Peter can take care of himself. Staff commented often how Dale and I ran away at age fourteen, were gone over a week, and that seemed to set the stage to hand us over to farmers.
Most adoptive couples looked at race, intelligence, character, and their perception of physical perfection. Most farmers were interested in docility and durability. The bottom line of my last physical, which John Schauls would have seen, read, Peter Razor is a sturdy very athletic 15 year old. At the time I was five feet six inches tall and weighed 130 pounds.
An institutional state ward for fifteen years, I would now be a farm-indentured state ward. The state would not be responsible any more for my room, board, or clothing. Now they would only pay for major medical expenses or burial costs.
Midwinter 1944 at the State Public School, Dr. Yager, child psychologist at the school, posed a very strange question to me, “Do you think you could call anyone Mother or Father?”
I mumbled, “I wouldn’t know what to do in a family.”
“It’s hard to find a family for an Indian boy, and we have no Indian families listed,” Dr. Yager continued. “And you’ve been here a long time.”
“How long?” I asked, without really caring.
“Fifteen years,” Dr. Yager replied.
For the first fourteen years of my life, I knew Dr. Yager only as the one who sat blandly behind a desk pointing at tests with assurances that no matter how I did on them, was all right. I worked the tests at another table while he remained at his desk. Dr. Yager loved climbing into the minds of children. It was more than his job, it was his life. Every child
had to be somewhere in his text book or he became obsessed with exposing their peculiarity. He recorded that I was very quiet and, before the age of twelve, basically untestable. He might have suspected that cottage life was at least partially responsible for, what he wrote, my sullen and withdrawn demeanor, but probably knew little of my experiences with a few employees.
Weeks or a month after Dr. Yager’s strange questions about family life, I was interviewed by Mr. Doleman, a social worker under Superintendent Vevle.
“You told Dr. Yager that you would not feel comfortable in a regular family,” Mr. Doleman said.
“Well … I said maybe I didn’t know what it meant to be in a family.”
“Perhaps that was it,” Mr. Doleman said. “Do you think you would like to work on a farm?”
“The work might be all right,” I replied, then mumbled, “Heard it was dangerous. Being on a farm, I mean.” Shifting uneasily on my chair, I glanced at documents on the wall, which said collectively that Mr. Doleman was very wise, indeed. I knew he stared at me, into me, and, uneasy, I looked around at the floor.