Ohitika Woman

by Mary Brave Bird

  The fight for Big Mountain is being lost. The forced relocations are continuing. I fear that the beautiful country there will become a great black hole made by the strip miners. But I do not think that our fight has been in vain. One day it will bear fruit, and our years of support for the Big Mountain people have cemented the bond between the Diné and the Lakota people, particularly between the peyote church members of both tribes. It was like one long, long alowanpi—a seven-year-long relation-making ceremony.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Under the Tempe Bridge

  I had tried to run away from the Paradise before I finally left Leonard Crow Dog for good. I couldn’t take the life there anymore. It was killing me, mentally, physically, spiritually. We were so much inside a pressure cooker that our nerves were raw. Bleeding nerves, you might say. We blew up over little things. We no longer shared the same bed. So I gathered up the children and ran. I could make a very bad pun and say that I went from Crow Dog to the dogs. I was alone, penniless, without a roof over my head, and with four children to take care of. I was vulnerable, without protection. I was abused verbally and physically. At a party that, as usual, included some hard drinking, a man for no reason beat me within an inch of my life. He was blind drunk and in a state of wild rage, which he took out on whoever was most vulnerable and female. Somebody smaller and weaker.

  For a very short time I lived in a shack out in the boondocks. There was a lot of violence going on in the area—you could hear the yelling and shouting of drunks all night long. I was utterly depressed. I had an icebox with Jack Daniel’s in it, and I’d get up in the morning and take a shot as an eye-opener. I could not even get up the money to pay rent for this miserable hovel and had to leave. Once more I had the sky as a roof My heart muscle cramped, and I went to the hospital for an EKG. They gave me some muscle relaxants and told me to take them. I felt like downing the whole bottle. I wanted to get it over with. I wanted to die. I gathered up all my stuff and went to my mom’s place with all the kids, but she couldn’t handle it. There were already two of my sisters parked there with their babies. Then I got a job with the medical records department at the hospital. I was at the very bottom of the ladder and the pay was not enough to keep body and soul together. On the other hand, if I saw in the records that a man had the clap, or genital herpes, I could warn my girlfriends: “Stay away from him.”

  I had a real close friend. Her name was Norma Brave. She had been gung ho for the movement. She would have gone to Wounded Knee, but her parents stopped her. Later on she married a much older man, a relative of mine in the extended Sioux family kind of sense. Like me, she had to spend so much time with their children that she didn’t have time for anything else, such as going back to school. She had a hard life. She had twins, a girl and a boy. One of them was brain damaged and the fluid had to be drained away with a tube. Anyway, Norma and I were buddies on account of having both been in the movement and being sun dancers. We’d talk about our troubles and try to get strength from each other. She told me that she wanted to get back to school and hoped to get some form of public assistance so she could learn a trade. I had been working at the hospital only a short time when they brought Norma in—dead. Somebody had battered her so that she looked like a rag doll somebody had thrown in a trash can. I went to see her with her family before her body was cold. I looked at her and was petrified. I saw myself lying there. They said it was a stroke that killed Norma, but I think it was abuse. It is a real problem. The man I was staying with at the rime, whom I had just moved in with, was already hitting me. One day he had beaten me pretty badly and I was all black-and-blue. Just then Norma’s sister, Mary Ann, dropped in together with my sister Barb. I wouldn’t let them turn the light on because I didn’t want them to see how I looked. So they came in and we talked about Norma. Somebody turned the light on anyhow. Mary Ann stared at me and said: “My God!” Then she told me about the White Buffalo Calf Society and their shelter for abused women. “You should go there,” she said, “it is sad for you to be living like this. Go to the shelter. Look at me, I don’t even have a sister anymore. Don’t go on being a baby-sitter for this man. Go, do it for yourself, do it for your kids.”

  So I ended up going to the shelter with all my children. It’s a big building outside Mission. They are very strict there. You can’t be loud, you can’t yell at the kids. You have to watch them and make sure they don’t run around or be wild. It’s hard. You have duties and chores; for as long as you stay at the shelter you have to work and help keep the place clean. At least it was peaceful there. The people who ran it had created a peaceful atmosphere. You have to talk to the counselors, tell your story, and be honest. Tell them why things happened the way they did. One of the counselors assured me that the shelter would help me, but I was totally spooked. I was afraid to go out, even to the grocery store, even for half an hour. One day Archie Fire Lame Deer dropped in to visit me. I told him that I had left Leonard and he gave me a hug. Because he is a medicine man I asked him whether it was still okay to pray with the pipe, and he assured me that it was. The big problem was that Leonard would absolutely not accept the fact that I was leaving him. He wanted me and the children back. The pressure got so bad that I felt I had to get out of South Dakota altogether.

  A lady from the White Buffalo Calf Society took me to Marshall, Minnesota, and left me at the shelter there. But there was a hitch. I had to get through all kinds of red tape before I could be admitted. Also, it would take a month before my ADC money, Aid to Dependent Children, could be transferred from Rosebud to Marshall. So here I was on the street, in a strange town, without a penny, and with four hungry children on my hands. As usual, when I am absolutely desperate, I turned to Richard Erdoes in Santa Fe. Luckily I still had my notebook with the telephone numbers and I called him up. As always, he helped me out so that I could last until things were sorted out. Finally I got my ADC check and was admitted to the shelter.

  Being in Minnesota didn’t help much. In Rosebud they have a computer that keeps track of where the public assistance money is going, and through this, Leonard found out where I was. That alarmed me. I was determined no: to go back to him. So I left Marshall and hit the road again. I went to Sioux Falls and then took a bus to Omaha. I parked the kids at the shelter there. As I mentioned before, I knew that my father lived in Omaha and looked up his address. It was Christmastime. I went to see my dad and felt bad that I had to tell him that I was at a shelter and had no money. He said: “I’d take you in but I have a family here.” It almost broke my heart. After all, I was his daughter, but he never had any use for me or for my sisters. I guess he didn’t need me there with my four kids. He gave me thirty dollars to save his conscience. This got me as far as Denver.

  The shelter in Denver was a hard place. If you got edgy, or needed time for a cup of coffee, somebody would watch the kids for you. But if you wanted to go out for a couple of hours, to relax, to get away from it all, they wouldn’t help with the children. They had very strict rules. The daily workshops they had were no help. And they had a lot of psychological counseling, which I didn’t need. What I did need was a place to stay, school for my kids, a job while they were in school. So I went on to Tucson. I thought I might just as well drift toward the South, where it’s at least warm. In Denver the snow was a foot high. Also, in the Southwest I had friends who were members of the Native American Church and I felt a great need to take in a meeting. In Tucson they wouldn’t accept me at the shelter because I was “not within their jurisdiction.” They sent me to the Salvation Army, which was divided into a men’s side and a women’s side. I met a lot of people there who were in the same situation I was in. I found that I was not the only one and I took comfort from that fact. The Salvation Army was not exactly the Holiday Inn. I was in a room with many other women. We got bunk beds—one for me, one for my two biggest, and one for the two smallest kids. They gave us sheets, blankets, and a towel. They got us up early in the morning and gave us a kind of vegetarian soup. T
he people who ran the place had better food. I could smell it. I had the kids with me—Pedro, Anwah, June Bug, and Jennifer, who was only two and wasn’t talking yet. The whole thing was a nightmare. The Salvation Army people were on my case every minute—"Watch your kids! Control your children! Watch, watch, watch!” The kids were at that age when they get into things and run around. They did not want to be cooped up in a small chamber called the “playroom.” They were forever running off in different directions and I had to chase after them. Clean up after them, too. It was like watching a paper bag full of fleas. At the Salvation Army you had to be out at six o’clock in the morning. Every day it was the same: “Can’t I stay one more day? I have no place to go to.” It was very hard on the kids.

  It seems to me that the greatest difference between whites and Indians is the way that they treat those in need and their ideas of relationships. We might be poor, or even blind drunk, but somehow we take care of each other. If you have no roof over your head, you can knock on any door and somebody will take you in. They will give you their own bed or couch to sleep on. They feed you what they themselves are eating. And they won’t make you feel that it’s charity. It is just done automatically because there is a feeling that we are all in the same boat. There are no class distinctions. You might be only a sixth cousin but still be welcomed as a relative, part of the tiyospaye, the extended family. In New York, on a cold day, I saw an old homeless woman, in a flimsy dress, lying on the pavement in front of a fancy jewelry store. A well-dressed couple was stepping over her, going into the store to buy, maybe, a two-thousand-dollar watch. They treated that poor woman as if she had not been there. That could not happen on the res. We have our faults but at least we share, we still have feeling for each other. For us every Indian is a brother or a sister, welcome to sit at our table.

  The Salvation Army finally kicked us out. Luckily, I had a friend in town, Ron Rosen, whom we called Doc because he was a volunteer doctor at Wounded Knee. I contacted Doc and told him I needed some help. He rescued us. Doc found me sitting at the bus station, on a cardboard box, with no money and all the kids whining for something to eat. So he took us to the nearest McDonald’s. I had some other friends in Tucson—Ed Mendoza and his wife, peyote people—and they took me in. Then another friend came to help, Fred Walking Badger, a Papago. He is a medicine man who once went to jail after a big ruckus with a white man who kept a two-headed snake. Fred had heard about this and confronted the man because he considered such an animal sacred, not to be owned by a white man who might exhibit it as a curiosity. So Walking Badger went to get this snake from the white man, who refused to give it up. The result was a free-for-all with a certain amount of damage to all concerned.

  Well, my welfare checks finally came in again, and I managed to make a small deposit on a run-down trailer home near a school. I always tried to keep the kids studying. Also, the Mendozas tried to organize their own Native American Church and I was again going to meetings. But then Crow Dog found out once more where I was so I packed up and hit the road again. In Phoenix, Leonard finally caught up with us, and so there we were, the whole happy family together again. We got a place where we all stayed together, though, in the case of Leonard and myself, not as husband and wife, but like brother and sister. Thus it came about that we all lived in Phoenix for about three years.

  I gave up trying to run. Leonard and I had come to an arrangement: we were no longer lovers. He was performing his ceremonies all over the country. He wanted me to travel with him but I was tired of the gypsy life. I said no. We both had our faults and yet we tried. If it had not been for the drinking it might have been all right. We pissed away a lot of money partying. We did not have a regular domestic household where the parents work nine-to-five jobs. Leonard always made sure we had food and were taken care of. We stayed together but physically and emotionally lived apart. When the pressure on us became unbearable we turned on each other. I am sorry for that, and I am sure he is too. He was away for long periods of time. He was free to see other women. I went to bars and had a few drinks with the boys.

  The switch from Rosebud to Phoenix was like jumping from the frying pan into the fire. In no time, the whole of Leonard’s entourage came down from South Dakota and moved in with us. It was like living in an ant heap. Some were nice and helpful but the total lack of privacy just tired me out. Coming home, I always had the image in my mind of joining an arctic bird colony—a million gulls or terns crammed on an undersized rock. There were the usual, never-ending cries for help, the welfare money going to bail some drunk out of jail, the same incessant, night-and-day coming and going. The hardships of living in the Paradise were now added to in Phoenix.

  We lived in different places. Mostly in the barrio. In Rosebud, during the winter months we had been freezing our asses off in temperatures of seventy below. In Phoenix, we were dripping with perspiration when the thermometer stayed at a hundred degrees in the shade for days on end. We moved around until we ended up in the same neighborhood where we started out, a Hispanic community that was Mexican and Indian. It was all right because you could walk around at night and no one ever bothered you. But they busted a lot of people because many of them came from Mexico illegally. There were also city ordinances—so many people per household—and they’d find ten people living in one room. Our last house was nice. It was one of the oldest in the city and it had a big porch with pillars in front, a pretty large Spanish-style adobe. It was on Van Buren and Fourteenth and the area surrounding the barrio was pretty rough. My oldest son, Pedro, was doing pretty well in school, and then, suddenly, he started changing habits. He’d sleep all day and was up all night. He’d take off with gangs. I’m pretty sure he was doing drugs at: the time. I thought about leaving, but I really liked Phoenix. Our neighbors were nice, but a lot of outsiders were moving in, gangs of drug dealers looking for new turf to conquer. You could get cocaine on any street corner. Pedro kept a knife at all times and he was not afraid to stick someone to save himself. He wanted a gun, and I said: “No. You think it will protect you. But if you carry a gun, you’ll die by the gun.” I was sitting on the porch one night and this guy comes up and says: “Hey, I got some good stuff, some crack.” I said: “Oh, really? Let’s see. . . .” He came up close and I grabbed him and hit him in the face. I said: “You’d better get out of my yard. I have children here, and don’t you ever try to bring drugs around here.” Later they told me I shouldn’t have done that—"Don’t you know most of those people have guns?” And there were a lot of hookers in that neighborhood, and a lot of drugs. And gang members—a lot of them moved from L.A. to Phoenix.

  I did take classes at P.C., Phoenix College. I took home economics, nutrition, textiles, child development, cloth making. I was taking care of the kids during the day, so the evenings were the only time I had to go to classes. I really enjoyed it. I felt good about myself, and the teachers at P.C. were first-class.

  But I went home one evening and Leonard was there and he was really mad. He wanted to know where I had been. I said I had been at class. He said it was a waste of time, that I’d be better off staying at home with the kids, being a housewife and mother. We had our agreement, but in a way he still felt that he owned me, if not as a husband then as a father or older brother. It was a difficult situation for both of us. We tried to leave each other but somehow couldn’t let go. He has tried very hard, sometimes, to understand a woman’s point of view and he even thinks that he is “pro-woman.” But he comes from a male-oriented hunting and warrior society whose centuries-old ways are ingrained in him, a society with proverbs such as “Woman should not walk before man.” He also comes from a tribe that has a great oral tradition. He is a wonderful and compelling speaker, but he cannot read or write. He inherited his father’s and grandfather’s contempt for the white man’s books and schools. To him, book learning—ta-chesli, bullshit. I can’t blame him. Schools of his and his father’s generations were terrible. Old Henry went to the third grade for eight years because
there was no higher grade in Indian schools. I know men and women who, as recently as twenty years ago, got their high school diplomas though they were totally illiterate. So I understood him, but that didn’t help me. When we moved, I stopped going to college.

  I wanted to buy a house but it didn’t work out, so eventually we ended up back on Fourteenth Street right off Van Buren—that’s where all the hookers are, the pimps, the drug addicts. But nobody bothered us. My friend Sharon always had some smoke, and we’d drink beer. Her boy ended up getting in trouble because he shot a cop. He was young but he was a gangster involved in drugs. It wasn’t much help that our Indian and Mexican neighbors were kind, ready to lend a helping hand when needed, because the gangs from L.A. and Chicago were moving in. That we were living in a very dangerous part of town was brought home to us in a terrible, heartbreaking way.

  Among our closest friends were the Roys, a family of Minnesota Indians. The father, Jerry, is a fine, good man who sun danced many times and hung from the tree. He earns a living by making and selling tipis. Leonard and Jerry were always together, as close as twins. The Roys had moved down to Phoenix to help Leonard, who needed somebody to do his organizing and handle the correspondence. Jerry brought his whole family. He was still selling his tipis out of Phoenix. They were always going with us to peyote meetings and sweat lodge ceremonies on the Salt River Reservation. Jerry has a number of kids. One son, John, is a very spiritual young man who has pierced at the sun dance and is heavily involved in Indian religion. His youngest son at the time was a sweet, friendly kid named Teddy Bear who didn’t like living in a big city with a population of over a million. He didn’t like the overcrowded schools, and he missed his old friends and classmates in the small city the Roys came from. So he went back to Minnesota to stay with his auntie. Teddy Bear was doing really well. He was on the honor roll and on the football team. Then he phoned that he’d come down to Phoenix for the Christmas holidays. His mother, Pat, was very happy. On Christmas Eve, Pat wanted to take us and the whole family out to dinner, but an older brother, Miles, was out shooting pool. It’s his hobby. So, about nine-thirty, Pat got tired of waiting for Miles to show up and sent Teddy Bear and Mickey, another brother, to look for him and bring him back so that we could all go out to a restaurant. We were having a few beers when somebody knocked real loud on the door. When we opened it, there was nobody there. In our Indian way, that’s a sign of death, a way of telling you that someone you love is dead. So Jerry was very concerned and went out looking for his boys.