14
Cleveland
We pulled into Cleveland in the late afternoon of a hot July day. By the time we found the federal building and the BIA, signed in, and filled out the paperwork, it was past quitting time. Almost everybody except our counselor, who assigned a flunky to guide us to a hotel near downtown, had gone home. I had never been to Cleveland before, but one look at Euclid Avenue and I knew I was on skid row, the meanest section of the red-light district. The hotel was crumbling and seedy. Our room was in the basement, the filthiest part. I was filled with revulsion, but it was too late to do anything until morning. The hotel staff put us in one dimly lit room, with threadbare carpet, worn sheets, rat droppings in the corners, cracked bathroom fixtures—a traveler’s nightmare.
Later, I learned that several other Indian families lived in that basement, including a Choctaw couple from Mississippi with seven or eight kids. They had stayed in two rat-infested rooms for three years, mostly because they could speak only a little broken English and the father’s minimum-wage factory job paid so little they couldn’t afford better.
When I went to the store that first night to get some food for my family, the hookers hanging out in front of the hotel gave me the once-over. When I returned, I saw one bringing her john inside. What really got me was when Michele, then four, said, “Daddy, why are those men kissing?” Before I could think of an answer, she said she had just seen two men kissing each other in the corridor. That was enough for me. One way or another, we were moving out in the morning.
At sunrise, Betty and I bundled everything back into our car and drove to the federal building, where I told my BIA counselor that we were not staying another minute in that sewer. When I demanded that she find my family suitable lodging, she said, “You’re going to have to stay there.” She insisted it was the only place where incoming relocatees could go for temporary lodging. This was 1968; a few years earlier, I might have accepted that, but I was no longer so naive. I said, “Show me the budget—how much money is allocated for this program and for each family in it?” The counselor refused, although I kept after her. Finally she agreed to tell me how much had been earmarked for my family. It was the same as when I had gone on relocation in 1960—allowances for temporary lodging, rent, furniture, and clothing, plus work clothes for me. It seemed like more than enough to put us up in a decent hotel. I again demanded that the BIA find us one until we could find an apartment. The woman passed the buck to her boss, a white guy. I told him what I wanted and why. Visibly angry, I said, “If I don’t get some action, I’m going to let somebody know about the whorehouse you put us in.”
I was bluffing—I had no idea whom to report it to—but my threat scared him into action. Unlike those folks from Mississippi, we possessed the verbal skills needed to demand a change. We moved into a clean, modern hotel in Lakewood, one of Cleveland’s best neighborhoods. It was an exclusive place with a swimming pool, wall-to-wall carpeting, and a view of Lake Erie. Our room cost the BIA about thirty-five dollars a night—seven or eight times what it had paid for our basement hovel on skid row.
Surprised and happy, I asked to be shown some apartments, but the BIA counselor still didn’t catch on. She took us first to a black ghetto and then to a white slum where the stench of urine permeated the rooms. It was all I could do to keep my breakfast down. In the best of those dives, the window shades were cracked and torn, patched and taped, and there was no bathroom door, only a makeshift curtain. After three or four such places, I said, “We’re not going to live in a neighborhood like this.”
“Anything else is too expensive,” said our counselor. “Let me worry about that!” I snapped. “I’ll be the one who pays the rent, and I want to live in suburbia.” Finally she took us to a horseshoe-shaped apartment house near Fairview Park. I said, “Right there! That’s where we want to live.”
“Oh, no, that looks too expensive,” said the BIA woman. I insisted, and we went in and found ourselves a great apartment with a view of the park. After paying the first and last month’s rent, the counselor said, “Your rent allowance was supposed to last four months—you just spent it on two.”
“All I need is a job,” I said, “and you’re supposed to help me find it, so what are you worried about?” Next, I demanded my furniture allowance, but again I had to fight. “Just get some mattresses and wait until you have a job and a paycheck, and then you should buy some things on time and build up your credit,” she said. “We don’t want credit,” I replied. “We want furniture.” Reluctantly, the BIA gave us the money—less than two hundred dollars, but enough for what we required.
In a week, we had spent our entire relocation allowance, but we had everything we needed to reestablish ourselves—exactly as Congress had intended relocation to work. The BIA officials had fought us over every penny, as though it were their money and we ought to live like the Choctaw family in a skid-row hellhole. I know now that very few Indians insisted on their relocation entitlements as firmly as I did. I also know that when they got screwed out of their money, as most did, the funds saved meant awards and promotions for BIA supervisors. That money, instead of going to help poor Indians live decently, was turned back to the government.
Once we were settled into our new apartment, I demanded that the BIA help me find a white-collar job. As I had expected, they couldn’t. Because I had a data-processing background, I went to an employment agency specializing in that field. The people who ran the place hired me on the spot. My job was placing people into the huge industrial corporations and banks with headquarters in Cleveland. On my first day, I was shown a list of companies that had quotas for Jews and blacks. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, but I kept my mouth shut. My boss explained that this corporation will hire this many Jews and that one will take so many “niggers,” as he put it. I was puzzled. At a time when those big companies were crying for people trained in computers, they accepted fewer Jews than African-Americans, and some of the biggest firms would take no Jews at all.
As it happened, my first two clients were a young blond guy, who had just graduated from a prestigious Ivy League college with straight A’s in math, and his pretty wife. Their name was Goldstein. Later that day, a black guy came in with his wife and their small baby. He was a C-average math graduate from an all-black Southern college. I placed him in a downtown bank on my first call. I tried to place the Goldsteins, but every personnel director I spoke to told me their quota was filled. Of course they never actually put it that way. They said, “We’re not hiring today, call back tomorrow with a black or a white.” That blew me away. I didn’t know that kind of prejudice existed, and I couldn’t understand why whites hated Jews. I thought about it a lot, sitting at my desk. The more I considered it, the more it bothered me. No one who saw those people walking down the street could tell if they were Catholic or Episcopalian or Jewish. I never did place the Goldsteins. After two weeks on the job, when my first paycheck came, I decided I couldn’t blind myself to such racism anymore, so I quit.
We talked it over, and Betty decided she would go back to work. She soon found a job as a secretary for the Cleveland Housing Authority. Because I had worked for the Office of Economic Opportunity on the Rosebud Reservation, I decided to look for work in one of the OEO programs in downtown Cleveland. By the end of August, I had found a spot as an accountant—actually little more than a glorified payroll clerk—at the Council for Economic Opportunity. It was run by African-Americans, but the head of my department was white, a retired army colonel. He was old and crusty, but spineless. Under him were two Orthodox Jewish guys who took off early every Friday so they could get home before sundown. Aside from one black guy and me, everyone else in the department was female. My computer training was of little use. All we had to work with was adding machines and old-fashioned Comptometers, the kind with dozens of multicolored keys.
After Betty and I had settled into our jobs, we were hungry to meet other Indian people. We started to go to Chicago on weekends with our kids, for dances at the Chicago Indian Center. I won a couple of dance contests there. Then we heard about a dance at a school in Cleveland. When we got there, I found that the audience was all white. Some Indian singers who had come there on relocation were sitting around teaching their songs to whites, but I thought more Indians might show up later. I had brought my dancing outfit, and I wanted to dance, so I got dressed—but still no Indians showed up. As it turned out, it wasn’t an Indian dance at all, it was an event for white hobbyists. When the dancing started, they announced a fancy-dance contest, and I entered, of course. I was a champion, a very good dancer. The judges, all whites, gave first prize to a white guy. Years later, he became the head of Lakota studies at Black Hills State College, in South Dakota.
That was my first experience with “wannabes.” Since then, I’ve learned that the whole phenomenon—whites trying to emulate Indian cultural trappings—is the latest pathetic phase of a rebellion against spiritual bankruptcy. In the 1960s many whites, led by the Beatles, traipsed off to India to see the Maharishi. They wore Nehru jackets and played the sitar and gave up meat and recited mantras, but it didn’t make them happy. They tried Zen Buddhism, but that didn’t work either, so they switched to Taoism. What I find curious about the wannabes is that they appropriate what they think they need to satisfy their desires of the moment, but they never really commit themselves. In the end, they are never fulfilled, so they try something else—Hare Krishna, Scientology, Branch Davidian—the cult of the month. Now when I see wannabes, my first reaction is to reach out to them, poor things, to pet them and say that if they will just pay attention to who they are, they will be all right. My second reaction is to say, “You want to be an Indian? All right, great. Come on, let’s go!” My third and abiding reaction is that I know they won’t stick it out, so I just walk away.
After attending the hobbyists’ dance, I went looking for someplace—anyplace except a bar—where Indians congregated in Cleveland. I soon discovered that there was nothing but a few bars where Indians hung out. I finally went to one, even though Betty and I had chosen Cleveland because we hoped it would get me away from drinking. By then, I had recognized that going on benders for days at a time got in the way of having a family. I cut back my drinking even after I found Club 77 on Detroit Avenue.
I learned that Cleveland, which never had many Indians and for that reason had been the least popular relocation city, had fallen far short of BIA quotas. The BIA began to ship in Indians from all over the United States. Also arriving in Cleveland around then were Mohawk and Six Nations people—whom whites sometimes call Iroquois—including many Canadians. They were mostly ironworkers who had come to Cleveland to build the new skyscrapers going up downtown. Standoffish, they rarely mixed with other Indians, preferring their own bars on the east side.
At Club 77 I became friends with Sarge Old Horn, a Crow from Montana. He was a couple of years younger than me, kind of stocky, about five feet ten, but very quick and a former all-state basketball player. Sarge was a barber, married to a Sioux from the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. They had four little girls and another baby on the way. He liked to joke around and have fun, and he really liked women—any kind of woman, as long as she was alive.
We often commiserated that the Indians in Cleveland had no place to go except that bar. One night when it was very slow at Club 77, one of us said, over a beer, “We ought to start our own Indian center.” By then we had met quite a few Indians, including Cheyenne, Arapaho, Seminole, Kiowa, and Navajo people—enough for a good nucleus. Sarge and I and the rest of us wanted a center that would help Indian people with the problems we often experience in the urban environment. Hardly any Indians lived on skid row for long, but many were underemployed and many more were stranded, unable to get back to their homes. Our teenagers also needed someplace where they could stay out of trouble, and where they could retain their attachments to their traditional cultures.
The next week, Sarge and I talked our idea over with some friends, including Irma Yellow Eagle and her family, all from the Rosebud. We all agreed that we needed an Indian center, but where could we go? Irma, an Episcopalian and a member of the oldest church in Cleveland, introduced Sarge and me to the priest there, but he didn’t immediately offer us anything. We got a mailing list from the BIA. Our little ad hoc committee of four or five people met around my kitchen table to handwrite meeting notices, fold them into envelopes, lick stamps, and mail them out. In April 1969, we elected a board of directors and I got an OEO lawyer to incorporate us as a nonprofit organization. We were officially the Cleveland American Indian Center, but we still had no real place to meet, not even an office.
When summer came, I returned to Pine Ridge to visit family and friends. Many of them had come back home to attend the sun dance, the most important annual event in our traditional religion. Sarge Old Horn stopped by for a few days to look around before going on to the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana. His people have their own sun dance, which they got from the Shoshone. Our Nakota brethren in Canada hold one, but at that time the only sun dance for the Lakota Nation in the United States was at Pine Ridge. It was then less a spiritual event than a big fair, with a carnival, social dancing, a softball tournament, rodeo, and food booths all around. Sun dancing went on only from sunup until noon.
I didn’t participate in the dance except as a spectator, but I met an older fellow, Pete Catches, who began to tell me what the dance had once meant to our culture and what it still meant to him—why he danced. Enthralled, I soaked up everything he told me. After I listened to Pete and watched him dance, the sun dance seized my imagination and inspired me to explore my Lakota heritage with renewed fervor.
When I returned to Cleveland, Sarge and I had a few more meetings with the Episcopalian priest. Finally he offered us a big room in the church basement to use as an office for our Indian center. He said we could use his auditorium whenever it wasn’t booked for church events.
For months, we had been trying to organize members of the Indian community, even those such as the Withome family who had their own social organization for Friday night bowling, Sunday softball games, and summer picnics. Most of those people were breeds, skilled workers or office people who had gone on relocation to integrate with white society, and who wanted nothing to do with anything identifiably Indian. Brought together by blood or skin color or common experience, they wanted to do only white things. More power to them, we said. In the long run, those of us who wished to remain Indians, on the reservations and in the cities, have been better off without them.
The late 1960s were turbulent times in Cleveland. On the east side were blacks struggling for civil rights to make up for several centuries of exploitation and bigotry. The west side, in those days, was where all the white ethnic Europeans lived, mostly Irish and hillbillies who tended to be of Scottish or English ancestry. Cleveland was a very polarized town. The civil-rights movement was in full bloom, the antiwar movement was still strong, and the hippies were smoking dope and spreading their message of peace and love. The steelworkers hated the hippies, and the unions hated the blacks and all other people of color.
Now here came us Indians, organizing community groups on the west side. We made an alliance with a Puerto Rican council. I met constantly with community groups, mostly white but a few black, all trying to get political power. Then Carl Stokes, whose brother Lewis was in the U.S. House of Representatives, was elected mayor, the first black to run a major U.S. city. The faces at city hall changed forever. Sarge and other community activists and I went to see Mayor Stokes. After that, we got along with City Hall. We also established positive relationships with the police commissioner. Sarge and I spent a lot of time in each other’s company, constantly discussing our culture and what it meant to us. He was active in the Native American Church and knew much about the sacrament called peyote: Through our discussions, I gained tremendous respect for his church and its peyote prayers. Sarge was also a fountain of knowledge about many other cultural traditions, partly because, unlike many Indian nations, the Crow people have pretty much kept their extended-family units together.
Through Sarge, I came to admire the Crow people. When I was growing up, I had always been taught that they were our traditional enemies. For generations, the descendants of Sioux living farther east were taught by white missionaries and schoolteachers that the Chippewa, as whites call the Ojibwa, were their enemies—just as the Ojibwa were taught that Sioux were their enemies. I’m still amazed at how all of this white disinformation filled our heads. The truth is that the correct translation of Indian words usually rendered in English as enemy is aggressor. We had no word for enemy.
When we weren’t out meeting people in the community or at city hall, Sarge and I worked to make our fledgling Indian Center into a viable enterprise. We heard about the National Urban Indian Council, with headquarters in Chicago. We wrote to its leader, Jess Sixkiller, and asked him to come to Cleveland to give us organizational advice and to show us how to write grant proposals. Jess was an Oklahoma Cherokee, a former lieutenant in the Chicago police force and a good man. In the autumn of 1969, after Mayor Stokes had helped establish the Cleveland Fund to provide seed money for local communities, Sarge and I decided to get some of that money for our center. We set up a meeting with the mayor, and Jess came to help us. We met in one of those dark, dignified City Hall chambers paneled in old wood. When we walked in, Jess marched to the head of the table, took out a tape recorder, turned it on, and said, “Now, let’s start the meeting.” The look on those officials’ faces was priceless. We walked out of there with the promise of a grant of five thousand dollars. You could have bought two new Chevrolets with that in those days, and had money left over.
Jess had been going around the country for more than a year, trying to get Indian centers and urban Indian groups to join together in one big national organization. He and his people decided to have what they called a National Urban Indian Organization (NUIO) conference in San Francisco in October. When Jess sent me a round-trip ticket, I took a couple of days off work and flew out. Waiting for the meeting to begin, I stood near the ballroom talking to people. In those days, my hair was down to my shoulders and very wavy. I wore stylish “mod” suits with bell-bottom trousers, colorful shirts, ascots, and cream-colored loafers. Some guys walked by. I couldn’t help noticing the way they were dressed and their haircuts—parted on one side and combed into waves falling across the other side, the way Indian boarding-school students had once been forced to wear their hair. They wore beaded belts, sashes, chokers, moccasins, headbands, and lots of Indian jewelry. I thought, what are they trying to prove? There I was, in the swing of things, accepted by the white man, wearing his stylish clothes. Those guys looked ridiculous, all dressed up like Indians. I asked somebody, “Who are those guys?”
“They’re from the American Indian Movement in Minneapolis,” he answered.
When the conference started, those guys from Minneapolis got up and condemned the National Urban Indian Organization. Jess Sixkiller responded with a defense of his goals. I was on his side, so I gave an impassioned extemporaneous speech in defense of the organization, my first public address outside a classroom. I described how Jess had come to Cleveland and what he had done to help the Indian community there.
Among the last speakers were two of the guys from AIM, Dennis Banks and Clyde Bellecourt. Banks said, “You have one of two choices—either radically change your organization, or we’ll destroy it. Tomorrow, we’re going to come back and tell you how to change it.” With that, they left.
When Banks and AIM returned in the morning, they had an angry war of words with most of the other people. Members of Jess’s group argued that their organization was doing good work, so there was no reason to change it. The AIM guys said, “Maybe you’re doing good work, but you’re not accountable to anyone for the money you raise and spend. You have no constituency.”
Jess’s people said, “The national organization is our constituency.”
“No,” replied the AIM guys. “Your constituency has to be the community. You just popped up and started the organization, got a Ford Foundation grant and all that, and you’re traveling all over the country talking to Indian groups—but you’re not accountable to anyone. You called this convention to find a constituency, but you still don’t have one.” Finally, the AIM guys said that if NUIO would move its headquarters to Minneapolis, where AIM could monitor its activities, they wouldn’t destroy it. Nobody wanted to move to Minneapolis, so Banks, Bellecourt, and the rest reiterated their threat to destroy NUIO. They walked out looking disgusted.
Until that San Francisco meeting, I had never heard of AIM and didn’t care much what they had to say. I was more intent on a good time back in my old stomping grounds. Anxious to look up some old friends and enjoy myself, I went out and partied, putting AIM out of my mind completely.