Growing Up Native American

by Bill Adler

  Grandpa Good Fox told me about the young hunters who killed a buffalo with a big rattle for a tail. After eating of its meat these young men were changed into giant rattle-snakes with human heads and human voices. They lived in a cave beneath the earth and ruled the underworld.

  The stories I liked best had to do with Iktome, the evil spiderman, a smart-ass who played tricks on everybody. One day this spider was walking by a lake where he saw many ducks swimming around. This sight gave him a sudden appetite for roast duck. He stuffed his rawhide bag full of grass and then he showed himself. When the ducks saw him they started to holler, “Where are you going, Iktome?”

  “I am going to a big powwow.”

  “What have you got in your bag, Iktome?”

  “It’s full of songs which I am taking to the powwow, good songs to dance to.”

  “How about singing some songs for us?” begged the ducks.

  The tricky spider made a big show of not wanting to do it. He told the ducks he had no time for them, but in the end he pretended to give in, because they were such nice birds. “I’ll sing for you,” he told the ducks, “but you must help me.”

  “We’ll do what you want. Tell us the rules.”

  “Well, you must form three rows. In the front row, all you fat ones, get in there. In the second row go all those who are neither fat nor thin—the in-betweens. The poor scrawny ones go in the third row, way down there. And you have to act out the song, do what the words tell you. Now the words to my first song are ‘Close your eyes and dance!’”

  The ducks all lined up with their eyes shut, flapping their wings, the fat ones up front. Iktome took a big club from underneath his coat. “Sing along as loud as you can,” he ordered, “and keep your eyes shut. Whoever peeks will get blind.” He told them to sing so that their voices would drown out the “thump, thump” of his club when he hit them over the head. He knocked them down one by one and was already half done when one of those low-down, skinny ducks in the back row opened its eyes and saw what Iktome was up to.

  “Hey, wake up!” it hollered. “That Iktome is killing us all!”

  The ducks that were left opened their eyes and took off. Iktome didn’t mind. He already had more fat ducks than he could eat.

  Iktome is like some of those bull-shipping politicians who make us close our eyes and sing and dance for them while they knock us on the head. Democratic ducks, Republican ducks, it makes no difference. The fat, stupid ones are the first in the pot. It’s always the skinny, no-account, low-class duck in the back that doesn’t hold still. That’s a good Indian who keeps his eyes open. Iktome is an evil schemer, Grandpa told me, but luckily he’s so greedy that most of the time he outsmarts himself.

  It’s hard to make our grandchildren listen to these stories nowadays. Some don’t understand our language anymore. At the same time there is the TV going full blast—and the radio and the phonograph. These are the things our children listen to. They don’t care to hear an old-fashioned Indian story.

  I was happy living with my grandparents in a world of our own, but it was a happiness that could not last. “Shh, wasicun anigni kte—be quiet or the white man will take you away.” How often had I heard these words when I had been up to some mischief, but I never thought that this threat could become true, just as I never believed that the monsters ciciye and siyoko would come and get me.

  But one day the monster came—a white man from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I guess he had my name on a list. He told my family, “This kid has to go to school. If your kids don’t come by themselves the Indian police will pick them up and give them a rough ride.” I hid behind Grandma. My father was like a big god to me and Grandpa had been a warrior at the Custer fight, but they could not protect me now.

  In those days the Indian schools were like jails and run along military lines, with roll calls four times a day. We had to stand at attention, or march in step. The B.I.A. thought that the best way to teach us was to stop us from being Indians. We were forbidden to talk our language or to sing our songs. If we disobeyed we had to stand in the corner or flat against the wall, our noses and knees touching the plaster. Some teachers hit us on the hands with a ruler. A few of these rulers were covered with brass studs. They didn’t have much luck redoing me, though. They could make me dress up like a white man, but they couldn’t change what was inside the shirt and pants.

  My first teacher was a man and he was facing a lot of fearful kids. I noticed that all the children had the same expression on their faces—no expression at all. They looked frozen, deadpan, wooden. I knew that I, too, looked that way. I didn’t know a word of the white man’s language and very little about his ways. I thought that everybody had money free. The teacher didn’t speak a word of Lakota. He motioned me to my seat. I was scared stiff.

  The teacher said, “Stand,” “Sit down!” He said it again and again until we caught on. “Sit, stand, sit, stand. Go and stop. Yes and no.” All without spelling, just by sound.

  We also had a lady teacher. She used the same method. She’d hold up one stick and say, “One.” Then she’d hold up two sticks and say, “Two,” over and over again. For many weeks she showed us pictures of animals and said “dog” or “cat.” It took me three years to learn to say, “I want this.”

  My first day in school was also the first time I had beans, and with them came some white stuff, I guessed it was pork fat. That night, when I came home, my grandparents had to open the windows. They said my air was no good. Up to then I had eaten nothing but dry meat, wasna, papa, dry corn mixed with berries. I didn’t know cheese and eggs, butter or cream. Only seldom had I tasted sugar or candy. So I had little appetite at school. For days on end they fed us cheese sandwiches, which made Grandma sniff at me, saying, “Grandson, have you been near some goats?”

  After a while I lost some of my fear and recovered my daring. I called the white man teacher all the bad names in my language, smiling at him at the same time. He beamed and patted me on the head, because he thought I was complimenting him. Once I found a big picture of a monkey in the classroom, a strange animal with stiff, white side whiskers. I thought this must be the Great White Father, I really did.

  I went to the day school on the Rosebud Reservation, twelve miles south of Norris, South Dakota. The Government teachers were all third-grade teachers. They taught up to this grade and that was the highest. I stayed in that goddam third grade for six years. There wasn’t any other. The Indian people of my generation will tell you that it was the same at the other schools all over the reservations. Year after year the same grade over again. If we ran away the police would bring us back. It didn’t matter anyway. In all those years at the day school they never taught me to speak English or to write and read. I learned these things only many years later, in saloons, in the Army or in jail.

  When I was fourteen years old I was told that I had to go to boarding school. It is hard for a non-Indian to understand how some of our kids feel about boarding schools. In their own homes Indian children are surrounded with relatives as with a warm blanket. Parents, grandparents, uncles, aunts, older brothers and cousins are always fussing over them, playing with them or listening to what they have to say. Indian kids call their aunt “Mother,” not just as a polite figure of speech but because that aunt acts like a mother. Indian children are never alone. If the grownups go someplace, the little ones are taken along. Children have their rights just as the adults. They are rarely forced to do something they don’t like, even if it is good for them. The parents will say, “He hates it so much, we don’t have the heart to make him do it.”

  To the Indian kid the white boarding school comes as a terrific shock. He is taken from his warm womb to a strange, cold place. It is like being pushed out of a cozy kitchen into a howling blizzard. The schools are better now than they were in my time. They look good from the outside—modern and expensive. The teachers understand the kids a little better, use more psychology and less stick. But in these fine new buildings Indian
children still commit suicide, because they are lonely among all that noise and activity. I know of a ten-year-old who hanged herself. These schools are just boxes filled with homesick children. The schools leave a scar. We enter them confused and bewildered and we leave them the same way. When we enter the school we at least know that we are Indians. We come out half red and half white, not knowing what we are.

  When I was a kid those schools were really bad. Ask the old-timers. I envied my father, who never had to go through this. I felt so lonesome I cried, but I wouldn’t cooperate in the remaking of myself. I played the dumb Indian. They couldn’t make me into an apple—red outside and white inside. From their point of view I was a complete failure. I took the rap for all the troubles in the school. If anything happened the first question always was “Did you see John do it?” They used the strap on us, but more on me than on anybody else.

  My teacher was a mean old lady. I once threw a live chicken at her like a snowball. In return she hit my palms with a ruler. I fixed an inkpot in such a way that it went up in her face. The black ink was all over her. I was the first to smile and she knew who had done it right away. They used a harness thong on my back that time and locked me up in the basement. We full-bloods spent much time down there. I picked up some good fox songs in that basement.

  I was a good athlete. I busted a kitchen window once playing stickball. After that I never hit so good again. They tried to make me play a slide trombone. I tore it apart and twisted it into a pretzel. That mean old teacher had a mouth like a pike and eyes to match. We counted many coups upon each other and I still don’t know who won. Once, when they were after me again for something I didn’t do, I ran off. I got home and on my horse. I knew the Indian police would come after me. I made it to Nebraska, where I sold my horse and saddle and bought a ticket to Rapid City. I still had twelve dollars in my pocket. I could live two days on one dollar, but the police caught me and brought me back. I think in the end I got the better of that school. I was more of an Indian when I left than when I went in. My back had been tougher than the many straps they had worn out on it.

  Some doctors say that Indians must be healthier than white people because they have less heart disease. Others say that this comes from our being hungrier, having less to eat, which makes our bodies lean and healthy. But this is wrong. The reason Indians suffer less from heart disease is that we don’t live long enough to have heart trouble. That’s an old folks’ sickness. The way we have to live now, we are lucky if we make it to age forty. The full-bloods are dying fast. One day I talk to one, the next day he is dead. In a way the Government is still “vanishing” the Indian, doing Custer’s work. The strange-looking pills and capsules they give us to live on at the Public Health Service hospitals don’t do us much good. At my school the dentist came once a year in his horse and buggy with a big pair of pliers to yank our teeth, while the strongest, biggest man they could find kept our arms pinned to our sides. That was the anesthesia.

  There were twelve of us, but they are all dead now, except one sister. Most of them didn’t even grow up. My big brother, Tom, and his wife were killed by the flu in 1917. I lost my own little boy thirty-five years ago. I was a hundred miles away, caught in a blizzard. A doctor couldn’t be found for him soon enough. I was told it was the measles. Last year I lost another baby boy, a foster child. This time they told me it was due to some intestinal trouble. So in a lifetime we haven’t made much progress. We medicine men try to doctor our sick, but we suffer from many new white man’s diseases, which come from the white man’s food and white man’s living, and we have no herbs for that.

  My big sister was the oldest of us all. When she died in 1914 my folks took it so hard that our life was changed. In honor of her memory they gave away most of their possessions, even beds and mattresses, even the things without which the family would find it hard to go on. My mother died of tuberculosis in 1920, when I was seventeen years old, and that was our family’s “last stand.” On her last day I felt that her body was already gone; only her soul was still there. I was holding her hand and she was looking at me. Her eyes were big and sad, as if she knew that I was in for a hard time. She said, “Onsika, onsika—pitiful, pitiful.” These were her last words. She wasn’t sorry for herself; she was sorry for me. I went up on a hill by myself and cried.

  When grandfather Crazy Heart died they killed his two ponies, heads toward the east and tails to the west. They had told each horse, “Grandson, your owner loved you. He has need of you where he’s going now.” Grandfather knew for sure where he was going, and so did the people who buried him according to our old custom, up on a scaffold where the wind and the air, the sun, the rain and the snow could take good care of him. I think that eventually they took the box with his body down from the scaffold and buried it in a cemetery, but that happened years later and by then he and his ponies had long gone to wherever they wanted to be.

  But in 1920 they wouldn’t even allow us to be dead in our own way. We had to be buried in the Christian fashion. It was as if they wanted to take my mother to a white boarding school way up there. For four days I felt my mother’s nagi, her presence, her soul, near me. I felt that some of her goodness was staying with me. The priest talked about eternity. I told him we Indians did not believe in a forever and forever. We say that only the rocks and the mountains last, but even they will disappear. There’s a new day coming, but no forever, I told him. “When my time comes, I want to go where my ancestors have gone.” The priest said, “That may be hell.” I told him that I’d rather be frying with a Sioux grandmother or uncle than sit on a cloud playing harp with a pale-faced stranger. I told him, “That Christian name, John, don’t call me that when I’m gone. Call me Tahca Ushte—Lame Deer.”

  from LOVE MEDICINE

  Louise Erdrich

  Love Medicine is the compelling and tumultuous tale of two Chippewa families, the Kashpaws and the Lamartines, whose lives are inextricably bound by blood and history. Filled with elements from the Chippewa oral tradition, it is an exhilarating legend of love, betrayal, and the search for identity.

  This chapter from the novel concerns a fourteen-year-old girl named Marie Lazarre who, determined to become a saint, ventures up the hill to enter the convent school, only to find herself locked in mortal combat with the formidable Sister Leopolda. Erdrich’s unusual style, often described as “magical realism,” adds a haunting, mythic quality to her work.

  Novelist and poet, Louise Erdrich is a member of the Turtle Mountain band of Chippewas. She was born in Little Falls, Minnesota, in 1954 and grew up in Wahpeton, North Dakota. She has written numerous short stories, and two books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, which have been widely acclaimed. Her best-selling novel, Love Medicine, won the National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction in 1984, and the American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Love Medicine is the first novel in a tetralogy that includes The Beet Queen and Tracks. The fourth novel, American Horse, is yet to be published. Erdrich also wrote The Crown of Columbus with her husband, writer Michael Dorris. She currently lives in New Hampshire with him and their children.

  SO WHEN I WENT THERE, I KNEW THE DARK FISH MUST RISE. PLUMES of radiance had soldered on me. No reservation girl had ever prayed so hard. There was no use in trying to ignore me any longer. I was going up there on the hill with the black robe women. They were not any lighter than me, I was going up there to pray as good as they could. Because I don’t have that much Indian blood. And they never thought they’d have a girl from this reservation as a saint they’d have to kneel to. But they’d have me. And I’d be carved in pure gold. With ruby lips. And my toenails would be little pink ocean shells, which they would have to stoop down off their high horse to kiss.

  I was ignorant. I was near age 14. The length of sky is just about the size of my ignorance. Pure and wide. And it was just that—the pure and wideness of my ignorance—that got me up the hill to Sacred Heart Convent and brought me back down alive. For maybe
Jesus did not take my bait, but them Sisters tried to cram me right down whole.

  You ever see a walleye strike so bad the lure is practically out its back end before you reel it in? That is what they done with me. I don’t like to make that low comparison, but I have seen a walleye do that once. And it’s the same attempt as Sister Leopolda made to get me in her clutch.

  I had the mail-order Catholic soul you get in a girl raised out in the bush, whose only thought is getting into town. For Sunday Mass is the only time my father brought his children in except for school, when we were harnessed. Our soul went cheap. We were so anxious to get there we would have walked in on our hands and knees. We just craved going to the store, slinging bottle caps in the dust, making fool eyes at each other. And of course we went to church.

  Where they have the convent is on top of the highest hill, so that from its windows the Sisters can be looking into the marrow of the town. Recently a windbreak was planted before the bar “for the purposes of tornado insurance.” Don’t tell me that. That poplar stand was put up to hide the drinkers as they get the transformation. As they are served into the beast of their burden. While they’re drinking, that body comes upon them, and then they stagger or crawl out the bar door, pulling a weight they can’t move past the poplars. They don’t want no holy witness to their fall.

  Anyway, I climbed. That was a long-ago day. There was a road then for wagons that wound in ruts to the top of the hill where they had their buildings of painted brick. Gleaming white. So white the sun glanced off in dazzling display to set forms whirling behind your eyelids. The face of God you could hardly look at. But that day it drizzled, so I could look all I wanted. I saw the homelier side. The cracked whitewash and swallows nesting in the busted ends of eaves. I saw the boards sawed the size of broken windowpanes and the fruit trees, stripped. Only the tough wild rhubarb flourished. Goldenrod rubbed up their walls. It was a poor convent. I didn’t see that then but I know that now. Compared to others it was humble, ragtag, out in the middle of no place. It was the end of the world to some. Where the maps stopped. Where God had only half a hand in the creation. Where the Dark One had put in thick bush, liquor, wild dogs, and Indians.