Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  He was moved by my recitation and clutched my hand tightly. He said, “It’s more than this. It’s more than just repeating words. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded my head. “Yes, I know. The recitation is the easiest part but it’s more than this, Uncle Ralph.”

  He was quiet but after a few minutes his hand touched my shoulder. He said, “I couldn’t make it work. I tried to fit the pieces.”

  “I know,” I said.

  “Now before I go,” he said, “do you know who you are?”

  The question took me by surprise. I thought very hard. I cleared my throat and told him, “I know that I am fourteen. I know that it’s too young.”

  “Do you know that you are a Pawnee?” he asked in a choked whisper.

  “Yes, Uncle,” I said.

  “Good,” he said with a long sigh that was swallowed by the night.

  Then he stood and said, “Well, Sister, I have to go. Have to move on.”

  “Where are you going?” I asked. “Where all the warriors go?” I teased.

  He managed a smile and a soft laugh. “Yeah, wherever the warriors are, I’ll find them.”

  “Before you go,” I asked, “Uncle Ralph, can women be warriors too?”

  He laughed again and hugged me merrily. “Don’t tell me you want to be one of the warriors too?”

  “No, Uncle,” I said, “Just one of yours.” I hated to let him go because I knew that I would not see him again.

  He pulled away. His last words were, “Don’t forget what I’ve told you all these years. It’s the only chance not to become what everyone else is. Do you understand?”

  I nodded and he left. I never saw him again.

  The years passed quickly. I moved away from Momma and Dad and married. Sister left them before I did.

  Years later in another town, hundreds of miles away, I awoke in a terrible gloom, a sense that something was gone from the world the Pawnees knew. The despair filled days though the reason for the sense of loss went unexplained. Finally, the telephone rang. Momma was on the line. She said, “Sister came home for a few days not too long ago. While she was here and alone, someone came and tapped on the door, like Ralphie always does. Sister yelled, ‘Is that you, Uncle Ralph? Come on in.’ But no one entered.”

  Then I understood, Uncle Ralph was dead. Momma probably knew too. She wept softly into the phone.

  Later Momma received an official call that confirmed Uncle Ralph’s death. He had died from exposure in a hobo shanty, near the railroad tracks outside a tiny Oklahoma town. He’d been dead for several days and nobody knew but Momma, Sister and me.

  The funeral was well attended by the Pawnee people, Momma reported to me as I did not attend. Uncle Ralph and I had said our farewells years earlier. Momma told me that someone there had spoken well of Uncle Ralph before they put him in the ground. It was said that “Ralph came from a fine family, an old line of warriors.”

  Ten years later, Sister and I visited briefly at Momma’s and Dad’s home. We had been separated by hundreds of miles for all that time. As we sat under Momma’s flowering mimosa trees, I made a confession to Sister. I said, “Sometimes I wish that Uncle Ralph were here. I’m a grown woman but I still miss him after all these years.”

  Sister nodded her head in agreement. I continued. “He knew so many things. He knew why the sun pours its liquid all over us and why it must do just that. He knew why babes and insects crawl. He knew that we must live beautifully or not live at all.”

  Sister’s eyes were thoughtful but she waited to speak while I went on. “To live beautifully from day to day is a battle that warriors have to plot for as long as they can. It’s a battle all the way. The things that he knew are so beautiful. And to feel and know that kind of beauty is the reason that we should live at all. Uncle Ralph said so. But now, there is no one who knows what that beauty is or any of the other things that he knew.”

  Sister pushed back smoky gray wisps of her dark hair. “You do,” she pronounced. “And I do too.”

  “Why do you suppose he left us like that?” I asked.

  “It couldn’t be helped,” Sister said. “There was a battle on.”

  “I wanted to be one of his warriors,” I said with an embarrassed half-smile.

  She leaned over and patted my hand. “You are,” she said. Then she stood and placed one hand on her bosom and one hand on my arm. “We’ll carry on,” she said.

  I touched her hand resting on my arm. I said, “Sister, tell me again. What is the battle for?”

  She looked down toward the fence where a hobo was coming through. We waved at him.

  “Beauty,” she said to me. “Our battle is for beauty. It’s what Uncle Ralph fought for too. He often said that everyone else just wanted to go to the Moon. But remember, Sister, you and I done been there. Don’t forget that, after all, we’re children of the stars.”

  THE

  NINETEENTH

  CENTURY

  By the beginning of the nineteenth century, Native American tribes in the east and southwest had been engaged in a struggle for their lives and lands for more than 260 years. The arrival of the 1800s with its thrust of western expansion brought further chaos and upheaval to tribal peoples across North America.

  The United States’ expansion west marked the end of a life of self-governing freedom and the beginning of a life of enforced constraint. Reservations were established. The policy of allotment, which broke up commonly held lands into individual homestead parcels, was imposed to divest Native Americans of their communal traditions and pave the way for assimilation. Treaty making was abolished. Many Native American spiritual practices and ceremonies were outlawed. And tribes were reduced to colonial subject status and declared wards of the federal government.

  During this period, the American thirst for land resulted in the forced removal to Oklahoma of the Southeastern tribes as well as the tribes from the Great Lakes. Their journey is known as the Trial of Tears and it resulted in thousands of deaths. Tribes that were allowed to remain in their homelands found their lands reduced to mere remnants of the territories they had once inhabited. Other tribal groups fled farther and farther away from ancestral homelands in a desperate attempt to avoid the onslaught of settlers and soldiers and to regain some control over their own lives.

  from WATERLILY

  Ella Cara Deloria

  Set in the mid-nineteenth century and rich in cultural detail, Ella Cara Deloria’s novel Waterlily tells the story of what life was like for a traditional Dakota woman from infancy to early adulthood. This selection reveals the warmth of family life, the intricate web of reciprocity and responsibility that is kinship, and the depth of what it means to be honored as a hunka, a child-beloved.

  Ella Cara Deloria (Dakota/Sioux) was born in 1889 on the Yankton Sioux Reservation in South Dakota. Considered an authority on the language and lifeways of her Dakota people, she worked closely with the American anthropologist, Franz Boas. During her lifetime, she produced several books, including Speaking of Indians and a bilingual collection of her people’s mythology entitled Dakota Texts. Ella Cara Deloria died in 1971.

  WHEN TETON CHILDREN COULD BE REASONED WITH THEY WERE then said to have their senses. Waterlily was past six winters and going on her seventh when this could be truly said of her. Before that time, many things that happened were known to her, but not always because she remembered them in sequence. Rather, she knew them from repeated accounts of them. And how she loved those recitals of her early doings and sayings—so much that she came to think she remembered them as they had occurred.

  “Mother, what was that I did before I was even two winters old?” she would insist, while Blue Bird pretended to forget the story she especially liked to hear over and over. “Let me think…You did so many things, I hardly know…” And then, finally, “Oh, yes, for one thing, you once forecast the weather.”

  “Did I really, Mother?” she would ask, surprised all over again. “What did I say?”

&
nbsp; “You said nothing. You were too small to talk yet. But you toddled into our tipi with two sticks for the fire. We did not need a fire, for it was summer, and very warm. We did not ask for fuel.”

  “Oh! And then?”

  “Well, then”—Blue Bird always had to smile into the eager upturned face at this point—“And then you seated yourself by the fireplace and warmed your hands.”

  Waterlily would laugh merrily. “And what did Grandmother-killed-by-the-tree say to that?” Blue Bird’s old grandmother who was killed by a falling limb was of course unknown to Waterlily, but because her way of dying was a familiar story, Waterlily had so named her.

  “She said, ‘Hina! This means we are going to have a hard winter, sure! Children do not pretend cold weather for nothing.’”

  This was the place for a long, thoughtful pause, always. And then Waterlily asked, much impressed with her power, “And did we have a hard winter, Mother?” She knew the answer very well, but it was good to hear it again. “Very hard. One of the worst our people could remember. There was snow and more snow. Men could not hunt and no buffalo came near, and our food gave out and many people died. A very hard winter indeed; may we never know another like the one you predicted.”

  “Oh, my!” Waterlily would say with awe, her amazement renewed with each telling. “How did I know that, Mother?” And Blue Bird would say, “Well, how did you?” and they would laugh, and the interview would end very satisfactorily to Waterlily.

  She liked to go over her past with Gloku, too. “Grandmother, what did I do when you carried me on your back?”

  “You were such a lively little girl—never quiet. You used to take my two braids for reins as if you were on horseback, and pull first this way and then that way until you had my eyelids stretched back so far that it is a wonder I did not fall into a gopher hole with you on my back!” This was very amusing. Waterlily would clap her hands and laugh, and ask, “Did it hurt, Grandmother?” But Gloku would say, “I forget if it hurt. I only remember how you enjoyed yourself.”

  Then Blue Bird would cut in, defending her mother-in-law, who was always too indulgent of her grandchildren, Waterlily included. “It was not funny, Waterlily. You were naughty to hurt your grandmother. How would you like your two braids pulled?”

  Waterlily would not like it at all. But those had been days when she did not know any better and nothing she did could be held against her. Now, going on seven, she was growing more and more accountable and able to remember past experiences and to be guided by them. And that was because she had her senses at last—her senses and her memory; it was all one.

  The autumn day was raw and overcast when Gloku took her dogs and went after fuel, leaving Waterlily and her grandfather in the tipi. “You are a big girl, now, grandchild. Remember to hand water to your grandfather when he is thirsty. That is why your mother wants you to stay with him while I am gone.”

  The energetic Gloku set her tipi to rights while she said this. She hung all the food high up on the tipi poles, beyond the reach of dogs that might stray in. Then she made her old man comfortable. His sight, which had been failing for years, was now practically gone and he had to have things handed to him that were not close by. So before leaving him alone, Gloku always seated him exactly right, where he could blow the ashes from his pipe into the fire. He was able to fill and light his pipe and to clean it out when he finished, having developed the habit during the last few years by sitting with eyes shut and doing things by feel, as though preparing for total blindness. At least he was already well able to take care of his smoking needs.

  The old man sat silently, with thoughts of his past activities. Waterlily threw back the fur rug and set up her play tipi on the ground for a pleasant time with her little dolls. She assigned them different roles and invented simple situations such as came up in the family. She carried on a spirited conversation as though the dolls were talking. After a long time she remembered her duty. “Grandfather! Grandfather! Water!” She held some water out to him. He groped for the dipper, saying “Hao, grandchild,” by ways of thanks, and drank noisily.

  Soon he was back into his reverie, and Waterlily played on until she felt hungry. Opening out the container of food her grandmother had left for them, she offered some to the old man and then started to eat. But the food did not taste as good as that sweetened cake of pemmican hanging high up on the tipi pole. Suddenly she wanted some of it, so badly that she piled up many rawhide cases full of dried meat until she could reach it by standing on them.

  It was of a pemmican base, filled with wild fruits and held together in a hard cake by rich oils derived from bones. A little of it was enough, for it was the richest delicacy there was. But Waterlily ate and ate and could not leave off, until she began to feel miserable in her stomach. She was lying very still when Gloku returned. She could hear her outside feeding and thanking her dogs as she unhitched them.

  The old man called out, “Are you back?” He knew she was, but this was their way of saying hello. “Yes,” she replied. “I am back.” As she entered, he said, “You better see what the child has been up to. For a long time she played very nicely with her dolls. But since we ate our meal, she has been very still, and for a child to be that still is a bad sign. It seemed to me she was moving heavy things about and reaching upward—to judge by her grunting efforts. For a time she was all over the place and then she became very silent. I called to her, but she did not answer. See if something is wrong.”

  Very soon Gloku discovered the half-eaten pemmican cake and let out a cry of distress that brought her daughters and Waterlily’s mother running. “My grandchild has sickened herself! Oh, what is to be done?” Her only concern was for the child; that the pemmican cake was largely a loss was something she had no time to think of. But she did turn on the old man. “And you! Here you sit placid while terrible things go on! You might have called out to the others—our tipis all but touch!” Not a word from him.

  Waterlily’s aunts and mother tried to force medicine down her throat, but it seemed to Waterlily that the tipi was turning round and round. The tipi poles meeting overhead were a great spider web spinning rapidly; the anxious faces of the women whirled with the web until they were all of a piece, slowly fading into darkness.

  Fainting was considered the opening step in the dying process. To give in was to surrender to death. If the one fainting were allowed to recline and lose consciousness, permanent death could ensue. With such beliefs, the women shook the ailing girl and kept her in a sitting position though she toppled this way and that. They continually dashed water in her face. Gloku kept saying as she rubbed Waterlily’s cold wrists and temples, “Do not forget, grandchild. Keep remembering, or you will die.” Remembering also meant being conscious. But Waterlily was not frightened by the threat of dying; it was not important. “Let me alone. I just want to lie still,” she moaned.

  The medicine eased her enough that she finally slept normally while her relatives sat around her all night. Early next morning the first person she saw was her stepfather, Rainbow. Never had he spoken directly to her till now; always at a distance had he provided her wants dutifully. Waterlily, closer to his mother and father, felt herself a stranger to her silent stepfather. But now his worried eyes said he was very much affected. “Daughter,” he spoke to her, “I have tried in my humble way to provide for you because I do not want any child in my tipi to grow up in want. Yesterday you gave me a great fright, but if you will hurry and get well, then by and by you shall wear a gown and put red paint on your face.”

  It was not a very exciting promise to Waterlily. What was so extraordinary about wearing a gown, when one had always worn a gown? And red paint? She had worn that, too. But to the adults who understood the significance it was very important, for Rainbow was saying he would arrange and pay for a hunka ceremony for Waterlily. To become a hunka (child-beloved) was to be elevated to a high station in the tribe, and that was an honor that did not come to everyone.

  Rainbow beg
an at once to hunt for elk and to watch the hunting of other men so that he might buy from those who shot an elk the teeth that would be needed to decorate Waterlily’s ceremonial gown. People were much impressed and spread the news about. “Have you heard? Rainbow is pledged to a great undertaking. He is making that little daughter of his wife a ‘beloved.’ Right now he is collecting elk teeth for her gown.”

  Everyone helped. But it was slow work because each animal yielded only two teeth that could be used. Moreover they must come only from the female elk. So widespread was the interest that even hunters from other camp circles saved elk teeth for Rainbow and sent or brought them to him from time to time. For these that were proffered he gave suitable presents in return. Only where he asked for teeth outright did he buy them.

  When enough elk teeth were on hand, his sister Dream Woman made the gown; and it was something to behold. Many women, especially those who fancied themselves to be inspired artists, as Dream Woman was believed to be though she never said, came in to examine the finished gown and went away marveling at its beauty of material and workmanship. As usual, Dream Woman had dreamed an original design. It was worked into the wide border of embroidery that topped the heavy fringe around the bottom of the skirt and of the loose, open sleeves. The matched teeth, which had been painstakingly polished to a high luster by the grandfather, who was happy to help to that extent, were appliquéed in pleasing groups all over the upper half of the gown, above the belt and down over the sleeves. The gown was exactly alike both front and back.

  Two whole years were spent in getting ready for the ceremony, and meantime Waterlily was preoccupied with a new baby sister, to the extent that she often forgot for long periods the great event awaiting her. The baby was named Mysterious Hand, and that was in compliment to her aunt Dream Woman, whose hands turned out unvarying beauty “too perfect to be human,” as people said. But Mysterious Hand would be the ceremonial name, not to be spoken carelessly. Waterlily’s descriptive term for the baby became her nickname, Smiling One.