2.

The Social Services Department of the Bureau of Indian Affairs deposited the two Catch the Bear boys, Anthony, age six, and Collins, five, with Donald and Virginia McClain of McLaughlin, South Dakota. The McClains were an exemplary white Catholic couple with two older boys of their own. The BIA would pay them a monthly stipend for care of the boys, though two more little children in the family wouldn’t cost much more.

I talked with the McClains. Mrs. McClain, a mother to her core, was proud that her home had been approved by the U.S. government to provide foster care for Indian children. Her husband, Donald, was a construction foreman on the railroad. He said he liked kids, but he wasn’t home much; he had to be on the road. Mrs. McClain recalls the day Anthony and Collins arrived at her house.

“Look at them,” Mrs. McClain said after the social worker had delivered Anthony and Collins. “Aren’t they a sight?” She reported that she tried to kiss little Collins, the boy with the fat baby cheeks and the skinny legs that came out of his body like sticks out of a bloated bladder. “My, my,” she said. “This is not a very friendly little boy. But he will learn to be a good boy. Good boys grow in good homes.”

“Probably never had any parental guidance at all,” Mr. McClain said. “Maybe got ’em just in time. Hope it isn’t too late.”

Collins had “the prettiest black eyes,” Mrs. McClain said. “But look at him. He looks like a scared rabbit.” She laughed affectionately and scrubbed the naked little boy down with soap and a washcloth.

“Probably never had soap on ’em before,” Mr. McClain said.

“Did the little Catch the Bear ever have soap on him before?” Mrs. McClain asked in sweet baby talk, but the child began to cry, and Anthony, his older brother, began to cry, and in unison they were like two coyote pups howling in the night.

“They’re probably lonesome for their mother,” Mrs. McClain said, grabbing Collins and trying to hug him again, but he kicked and screamed like a freshly captured little animal. She told us he was screaming so loudly and gasping for air so violently that she was afraid for the child. When she put him down, the boy ran naked to the corner, sobbing and shivering. Mrs. McClain put a big towel around him.

“Gonna be like raising a couple of pet coons,” Mr. McClain said, shaking his head.

The two McClain boys were watching at the bathroom door, grinning and pointing and snickering to each other. “Looky, ain’t they cute,” the older boy said. “Ain’t they just cute as little monkeys?”

“That’s right,” Mrs. McClain said. “They are sweet, dear little Indian children, and they’ve come to live with us.”

“Where’s their mama?” the oldest boy asked.

“Their mother was a drunk, and so was their father, and that’s why we send you to church, so that you will learn how to live right. These little children have never been to church like you.” Mrs. McClain smiled at her own darling boys and kissed them both.

“And I will give these two little boys, Collins and Anthony, kisses, too. We will treat everybody the same in this house,” she said, and she reached over to kiss Collins, but he lowered his head and began to cry again and shook her off with his bony little shoulders.

Then Mrs. McClain dressed the children. She bought new shoes for the boys, and there were certain hand-me-downs from the older McClain children that should not go to waste. “‘Waste not, want not,’ the Bible says.”

Mr. McClain said that, later on, he saw the kids scratching their heads, and sure enough, there were body lice all right, plain as day, and they had to shave the boys’ heads. “I’ve seen it before,” he said. “Hungry children always seem to be supper for hungry lice.”

“These Indians! I don’t understand them,” Virginia McClain said the next day. “Letting those little children go hungry like that. They ate like starved little animals. I had to stop them. This boy,” she pointed to Collins, “drank two tall glasses of milk and wanted more. I thought he’d get sick for sure. But he won’t touch the Wheaties.”

“Never ate decent food,” Mr. McClain said.

“I cooked them up a bowl of oatmeal and put sugar and milk on it, and the boy”—she pointed to Collins again—“burned himself, he ate it so fast. Never had a dish of cooked oatmeal in his life, I bet. Probably never even had a decent hot meal. When I opened the icebox, he looked in, and the first thing he saw that he recognized was a weenie. He was so cute. There was fruit there, apples and oranges, but the first thing he grabbed was a weenie.”

“Probably all he ate at home—if he ate at all, Mr. McClain said. “There’s sure not much profit in it, but it’s something for the missus to do while I’m gone during the week. She loves children; reminds me of Old Mother Hubbard. Besides, people need somethin’ to do with their lives.”

Mrs. McClain nodded her agreement.

“We’ll get ’em straightened out right away,” Mr. McClain said to his wife. “Here, you kids quit staring at these little boys. Go play with them now,” he said to his own two sons. But when the youngest McClain boy pulled him by the hand, Collins held on to the chair and began to cry again.

Collins and Anthony were always tight in the McClain household. In some ways, they banded together against the McClain children, which isn’t to say the two little boys were mean, but they hung together the way animals of the same species do. They ate together and slept together, and if they got separated, they’d cry. Mrs. McClain took the boys everywhere she took her own, and they got everything her own children got, but the Indian boys knew they didn’t belong.

“One time I was helping Collins read,” Mrs. McClain said. “He loved to read. Learned to read very easily, easier maybe than my own, and I asked Collins, ‘Do you like Dick and Jane?’

“‘No,’ he said.

“I was surprised. ‘Why don’t you like Dick and Jane?’

“‘Because they’re not Indians,’ he said. Then I said, ‘Well, don’t you even like Spot?’ And he said, ‘No.’ And I said, ‘Why don’t you like little Spot?’ And Collins said, ‘I don’t like Spot because he is not an Indian dog.’ And I didn’t say anything more. I just let it go by.”

Virginia McClain said she loved Collins. But he knew he was not white. He knew his mother had discarded him like an empty bottle of wine. He knew he wasn’t blood kin of the McClain’s. He was Lakota, but could not speak Lakota. Some of the kids at school called him nigger. He didn’t once hear from his mother, or from any of his blood. He didn’t call Mrs. McClain Mother. He knew the tribal judge could take him from the McClains whenever he pleased, like emptying the garbage into another pail.

The next year, the tribal authorities sent Anthony back to the reservation to live with an aunt who wanted him. “That was very hard on poor Collins, to lose his big brother,” Mrs. McClain said. “I tried to comfort him. He cried. He wouldn’t eat. He wouldn’t talk. I worried about him. He was grieving. At night, he would cry out in his sleep. He cried every night for weeks, and it was such a frightening loud, wailing cry.

“He wouldn’t eat. He sat at the table, turned his head from the food, and if we said, ‘Collins, now eat your food, honey,’ he would only cry. He wouldn’t let me hold him, like his whole body was burned or something, like touching him was too painful for him to bear. I thought he would die. I called the social worker and told him, but he said there was nothing they could do about it. The aunt who took Anthony had that right.

“Collins wasn’t an affectionate child,” Mrs. McClain said. “But we had long talks together, and he told me things. He told me he knew that his mother must not love him, or she wouldn’t have let him go, and I think after they took Anthony away like that, that Collins thought there was something wrong with him. ‘Why didn’t my aunt take me?’ he asked me once. It only came up once,” Mrs. McClain said, “I tried to answer him as best I could. ‘Well, she had children of her own, Collins. She only had room for one more.’

“‘Why did she take Anthony?’ he asked me.

“‘Maybe he was the oldest. I don’t know,’ I said. What do you tell a child why somebody chose his brother over him? I didn’t know what to say, so we didn’t talk about it after that.”

Mrs. McClain said Collins did well in school at McLaughlin. “He learned fast, read well. But he stayed to himself, and never brought anybody home. He had no playmates. He was a lonely child. He seemed to bring it on himself, and he tried not to cry, but if somebody corrected him or said hardly anything to him at all, he would start crying. He was very sensitive.” It got so that the McClains sort of let him alone. It was easier that way.

In 1972, the McClains moved to Milwaukee, and of course Collins moved with them. He was ten. He attended the Blakewood Grade School and did well there at first, but the children teased him about his name. “Did you catch the bear? What did you do with the bear?” They taunted him over and over in their singsong child’s voices. And at night he cried out in his sleep.

To be able to take Collins to Milwaukee with them, Mrs. McClain signed a document required by the tribal court. It acknowledged that Collins was in their “temporary custody,” and that the McClains would “cooperate with the Court and return Collins when the Court so orders.”

Collins knew he belonged not to the McClains but to the tribal judge, with his far-reaching power that could extend clear to Milwaukee. He belonged to forces in the Bureau of Indian Affairs he did not know, not by sight, nor by name, forces with the power of God, but a god who cared only about the records kept by the BIA.