A hunter was in the woods one day in winter when suddenly he saw a panther coming toward him and at once prepared to defend himself. The panther continued to approach, and the hunter was just about to shoot when the animal spoke. Suddenly it seemed to the man as if there were no difference between them, that they were both of the same nature. The panther asked the man where he was going, and the man said he was looking for a deer. “Well,” said the panther, “we are getting ready for a green-corn dance, and there are seven of us out after a buck, so we may as well hunt together.”
The hunter agreed, and they went on together. They started up one deer and another, but the panther made no sign, and said only, “Those are too small; we want something better.” So the hunter did not shoot, and they went on. They started up another deer, a larger one, and the panther sprang on it and tore its throat, and finally killed it after a hard struggle. The hunter got out his knife to skin it, but the panther said the skin was too much torn to be used, and they must try again. They started up another large deer, and this the panther killed without trouble. Then, wrapping his tail around it, he threw it across his back. “Now, come to our town house,” he said to the hunter.
The panther led the way, carrying the captured deer on his back, up a little stream branch until they came to the head spring. It seemed as if a door opened in the side of the hill, and they went in. The hunter found himself in front of a large town house, with the finest detsanunli (ceremonial ground) he had ever seen. The trees around were green, and the air was warm, as in summer. There was a great company there getting ready for the dance, and they were all panthers, but somehow it all seemed natural to the hunter. After a while, the others who had been out came in with the deer they had taken, and the dance began. The hunter danced several rounds, and then said it was growing late and he must be getting home. So the panthers opened the door and the hunter went out, and at once found himself alone in the woods again. It was winter and very cold, with snow on the ground and on all the trees. When he reached the settlement, he found a party just starting out to search for him. They asked him where he had been so long, and he told them the story. Then he found that he had been in the panther town house for several days instead of only a very short time as he had thought.
He died within seven days after his return, because he had already begun to take on the nature of the panther, and so could not live again with men. If he had stayed with the panthers, he would have lived.
* * *
My family’s relocation experience in San Francisco was disturbing in many ways. But in retrospect, our ordeal was not nearly as harsh or painful as the problems encountered by the Cherokee people who had been forced to take the Trail of Tears in the late 1830s. At least we did not have to walk hundreds of miles through snow and sleet. We did not worry about getting bayoneted or shot by some soldier or bushwhacker. Our relocation was voluntary and not by federal mandate. There were some parallels, however. For instance, even after we had settled down in our two-family flat in the Potrero District, we still felt as alienated as our ancestors must have felt when they finally arrived in those unfamiliar surroundings that became their new home. Despite the decades that separated us, we shared a feeling of detachment with the Cherokees who had come before us.
I know that many native people who turned up in San Francisco as part of the BIA’s removal program in the 1950s considered California to be the land of new beginnings. At least that was their hope. They wanted to believe the promotional literature that spoke of good jobs and happy homes waiting for those who had relocated. I was only a youngster, but I did not accept the government propaganda. Instead, I was convinced that my parents had made the wrong decision when they bought the BIA’s bill of goods.
At first, nothing about the city was very appealing. The overt discrimination we encountered is what got to me the most. It became obvious that ethnic intolerance was a fact of life in California, even in the urbane and sophisticated world of San Francisco. Not only did African and Hispanic Americans feel the sting of racism, so did Native Americans.
I recall an incident that drove home for me the concept of racial bias. Soon after we moved to California, a woman came up to my mother and told her straight out that we were all “nigger children.” Then she called my mother a “nigger lover.” The woman said those things because of my father’s dark complexion. Mother was outraged by that repulsive word of contempt. Prompted by blind hatred and ignorance, it was intended to inflict pain. It must have stung like a hard slap on the face. My soft-spoken mother was so distraught by such a blatant display of malice that she jumped the woman!
Most of the time, however, people who had a problem with our being different did not say what they thought about us to our faces. They made snide remarks behind our backs. It was then that we found out the place where we lived was hardly exempt from racial prejudice.
All ethnic minorities in California have suffered from various kinds of unjust treatment and bigotry over the years. The abuse of Native Americans began with the white settlement of California and was the worst kind of oppression that any minority group has experienced there. Except for the cessation of violent acts in recent years, the shoddy treatment of California’s original inhabitants still continues.
At one time, the state sustained a much larger number of Native Americans than any other region of comparable size on the continent north of Mexico. Native people hunted, fished, gathered food, and generally learned to get along without killing one another. By the time the first Spanish settlement was founded in the mid-1700s, there were at least 275,000 Indians living in present California. That changed very quickly. By 1900, less than sixteen thousand native people remained.
Throughout history, beginning with the Spanish conquerors and continuing with the white settlers, the Indians of California endured genocide, disease, starvation, and overt oppression. In many instances, widespread violence became wholesale murder. While the Cherokees and the other Five Tribes adjusted to their new homes in Indian Territory, in California the white settlers, miners, and armed posses had a field day indiscriminately slaughtering native people. The law of the white man was, in fact, no law at all.
In many ways, California in the middle to late 1800s was much like violence-plagued Bosnia, where “ethnic cleansing” in the 1990s has become the norm. Wholesale genocide and rape became standard in California. According to a study conducted by the University of California, at least one thousand Indian women in the 1850s alone were raped so brutally that most of them died. Thousands of other native women were forced to become white men’s concubines. During that same period, almost four thousand Indian children were kidnapped and sold into slavery. Considered to be obstacles to white men’s progress, Native Americans were hunted like wild game. As late as 1870, there were communities in California actually paying bounties for Indian scalps or severed heads.
The only good Indians I ever saw were dead.
General Philip Henry Sheridan, January 1869
Some whites tried to halt the carnage. In the early 1880s, New England author Helen Hunt Jackson, noted for her espousal of the Native American cause, distributed to every member of Congress a copy of A Century of Dishonor, her book about governmental mistreatment of Indians. It set the standard for muckraking books that followed two decades later, and it became one of the most influential books of the late nineteenth century. Jackson was made a member of a special commission to study the problems of native people in California. The report that resulted had little impact on Congress, but by serving on the commission, Jackson came up with enough material to write Ramona. Some critics labeled this 1884 novel about the criminal abuse of the Mission Indians as the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin of California.”
Other whites also made attempts to help Native Americans. In 1901, a group in Los Angeles led by Charles F. Lummis founded the Sequoya League, named for our noted Cherokee linguist. Incorporated to “make better Indians”—whatever that meant—the organization had as its main objective giving aid to native people in obtaining food and clothing, or financial and legal assistance.
California Indians faced difficulties that most tribes elsewhere in the United States did not always encounter, because only a small number of the California Indians were ever placed on reservations. Treaties proposed in the nineteenth century that provided for reservations were never ratified, so the majority of California Indians were left without any land. They were forced to get along to the best of their abilities and wits. A great number of native people did not survive. Of those who did pull through, many of them became agricultural workers in the vast California growing fields. Others ended up destitute and homeless. They were shoved aside and written off as burdens to society.
I know what the misfortune of the tribes is. Their misfortune is not that they are red men; not that they are semi-civilized, not that they are a dwindling race. Their misfortune is that they hold great bodies of rich lands, which have aroused the cupidity of powerful corporations and of powerful individuals.… I greatly fear that the adoption of this provision to discontinue treaty-making is the beginning of the end in respect to Indian Lands. It is the first step in a great scheme of spoliation, in which the Indians will be plundered, corporations and individuals enriched, and the American name dishonored in history.
California Senator Eugene Casserly, 1871
Some of the questions I am asked most frequently today include what happened to native people, such as those in California? Why do native people have so many problems? How is it that they ended up facing high unemployment, low educational attainment, low self-esteem, and problems with alcohol abuse? I answer that all one needs to do is look at our history. History clearly shows all the external factors that have played a part in our people being where we are today.
Regardless of all the problems Native Americans faced, they became the fastest-growing minority group in California in the twentieth century. This took place without their reaping much of California’s extraordinary affluence. From fewer than sixteen thousand in 1900, at least forty thousand native people lived in the state by 1960, just a few years after my family arrived. Some sources claim that the 1960 population count could have been as high as seventy-five thousand, because census takers did not identify as Indians all native persons who were using Anglo or Hispanic surnames. Only a small percentage of those native people lived on reservations or rancherias; most had homes in the Los Angeles or San Francisco areas.
Several factors account for the dramatic rise in the Indian population in California, especially since World War II First of all, native people were starting to be treated a little better. Numerous social and economic troubles remained, but an awakening of consciousness began among some whites in the late 1920s and continued to gain momentum. About the time our family moved west, California was attempting to abolish barriers separating Indians from non-Indians in terms of education, welfare assistance, and other public services. The substantial Indian immigration from Oklahoma, the Dakotas, and the Southwest throughout the postwar years helped to boost the Native American population in California. The BIA’s removal program accounted for a great many Native American individuals and families moving to California, including the Charley Mankiller brood, direct from Mankiller Flats in Oklahoma.
Nonetheless, our troubles did not disappear, even though the old days of exterminating Indians had ceased and California’s Native American population was increasing. There were still problems to solve and predicaments to face. Besides the poverty and prejudice we encountered, I was continually struggling with the adjustment to a big city that seemed so foreign and cold to me.
The San Francisco I experienced as a young girl in the late 1950s and early 1960s was not the sophisticated city of palatial Nob Hill mansions, picturesque cable cars, fancy restaurants, and elegant hotels. My family did not lunch amid the tourists at Fisherman’s Wharf or dine at Trader Vic’s. We did not meet friends to watch from the Crown Room high atop the Fairmont Hotel as the mists rolled in on the bay. Folks who did those things were on a much higher rung of the economic and social ladder than we were. Our family was more familiar—and comfortable—with the crowd that shopped for bargains at Goodwill or St. Vincent de Paul. We ate simple meals at home, wore hand-me-down clothes, and got by from paycheck to paycheck. Our family’s meager budget could not handle any nonessentials or luxuries.
After we had lived in San Francisco for a little more than a year, my father, with help from my older brother Don’s salary contributions, was able to scrape together enough money for a down payment on a small house. So we left the crowded flat in the Potrero Hill District and moved into a new home in Daly City, just south of San Francisco on the southern peninsula in San Mateo County. Daly City had come into being as a result of the earthquake and fire of 1906, when many San Franciscans fled to John Daly’s dairy ranch. It grew into a residential area that mushroomed during the boom years after World War II, when it became one of California’s fifty most populous communities.
Our new residence looked as if it had come straight out of a cookie-cutter mold. There were three small bedrooms, a full basement, and not many frills. My sisters and I shared bunk beds. I would describe it as modest, just like the hundreds of other ticky-tacky houses in endless rows that climbed up and down the landlocked hills flanked by the Pacific Ocean and San Francisco Bay.
For our family as a whole, the move to Daly City was a good one. It represented a marked improvement over our first dwelling. We were moving up in the world. At about that same time, my father started to become active at the San Francisco Indian Center, where we met and spent time with other native people living in the area. That had a positive impact on the family. But for me, nothing had changed. I still loathed being in California, and I particularly despised school.
I was uncomfortable. I felt stigmatized. I continually found myself alienated from the other students, who mostly treated me as though I had come from outer space. I was insecure, and the least little remark or glance would leave me mortified. That was especially true whenever people had to teach me something basic or elementary, such as how to use a telephone. I was convinced that they must think it odd to be teaching an eleven- or twelve-year-old how to pick up a phone, listen for a tone, and then dial a number.
In Daly City, I was getting ready to enter the seventh grade. The thought of that depressed me a great deal. That meant having to meet more new kids. Not only did I speak differently than they did, but I had an unfamiliar name that the others ridiculed. We were teased unmercifully about our Oklahoma accents. My sister Linda and I still read out loud to each other every night to lose our accents. Like most young people everywhere, we wanted to belong.
Also, there were changes going on inside me that I could not account for, and that troubled me very much. I was experiencing all the problems girls face when approaching the beginning of womanhood. I was afraid and did not know what to do. Besides having to deal with the internal changes, I was also growing like a weed and had almost reached my full adult height. People thought I was much older than twelve. I hated what was happening. I hated my body. I hated school. I hated the teachers. I hated the other students. Most of all, I hated the city.
I did not hate my parents or the rest of the family. I always loved them very much. But it was a time of great confusion for me. I was silently crying out for attention, but nobody heard me. My dad was constantly busy trying to make a living and, at the same time, deal with his own frustrations and confusion about city life in California. My mother was doing her best to help all of us with our problems while she kept us fed and clothed. Then on top of everything, my oldest brother, Don, announced that he was going to get married. He had met a nice young Choctaw woman named LaVena at the Indian Center. They had fallen in love. Everyone was very happy about the news, but there were long discussions about Don leaving home with his bride and how that loss of income would affect the rest of the family.
With so much going on, I felt like nobody had any time for me. I felt there was not one single person I could confide in or turn to who truly understood me. My self-esteem was at rock bottom. That is when I decided to escape from all of it. I would run away from home. At the time, that seemed my best and only option.
I ran off to Grandma Sitton, who lived at Riverbank. She was an independent woman. I had gotten to know her better since our move to the West Coast, and I liked her very much. I thought perhaps my grandmother would understand and comfort me and help with my problems. Also, I liked Riverbank because Oklahoma families who had come out during the Dust Bowl period were living in the area. I felt more comfortable around them.
My younger sister Linda and I had stashed away a little bit of money saved from baby-sitting jobs we had gotten through meeting other families at the Indian Center. We did not have much, but it was enough to buy a bus ticket. Of course, as soon as I got to her house, my grandma called my folks and said, “Pearl’s here, you better come get her.” My parents were upset—very upset—and my dad drove out and took me back. But that did not end it. That first time was just the start of a pattern of behavior that lasted until I became a teenager.
I waited a little while, and then I ran away a second time and went straight to my grandmother’s house. My parents and I went through the same routine. But I did not stop. I did it again. Once more, my dad drove to Riverbank and took me back to Daly City. One time my sister Linda ran away, too. She took off for somewhere on her own. I am not sure where she went. My folks found her and brought her home. But I kept running away. Every single time, I went to Grandma Sitton’s. Over a year or so, I guess I ran away from home at least five times, maybe more.
My parents could not control me. Eventually, they decided that I had become incorrigible. They saw that I truly did not want to live in the city. I wanted no part of it. So they gave in and let me stay with my grandmother. By then, she had outlived another husband. She sold her home and gave the money to her son and his wife—my Uncle Floyd Sitton and Aunt Frauline. They had moved to California after Uncle Floyd’s return from World War II and his discharge from the service. He used the money my grandmother gave them to buy a dairy ranch north of Riverbank, near the town of Escalon. In exchange for helping them buy their “dream place,” Grandma Sitton moved in with my uncle and aunt and their four children, Tommy, Mary Louise, and twins about my age, Eddie and Teddie.
I was preparing to begin the eighth grade when I joined my grandmother and the other Sitton relatives at their ranch. The agreement was for me to stay with them for one year. Ultimately, it turned out to be a very positive experience, but at first there were difficulties. There was a fair amount of conflict between my cousins and me, but they finally got used to my living there. Our problems sprang not from my Native American blood, but from a rivalry between the four of them and me. In a nutshell, we were all competitive kids. We were pure country, too, and that meant we would not run from a fight. When I arrived, it took only the slightest agitation to provoke me. I was highly sensitive and self-conscious.
One time in particular, I recall, several of us were walking back from the fields following Uncle Floyd. My cousin Teddie kept taunting and teasing me until I could not take any more. When he pulled my hair again, I whirled around and punched him in the jaw so hard that he dropped to the ground. I got into trouble over that incident, and there was some talk about shipping me back home to the city. That finally passed. I settled down, and the teasing stopped. The conflict faded. My life seemed to improve.
I began to gain some confidence. As I felt better about myself, I felt better about others. My grandmother deserves much of the credit. Even though she was strict, she was never judgmental. At a very critical point in my life, she helped me learn to accept myself and to confront my problems.
School even seemed more palatable. When I moved to the farm, I did not have one single friend my age at school. I relied on my tough demeanor to protect myself, and I found that this really turned off people. My cousins had told all the other kids at the small community school we attended that my parents had sent me to live with them because they could not handle me. That was not a good way for me to begin. During lunch and recess, I was usually by myself. Although I got off to a bumpy start, I had made some friends and had developed a routine by the close of the school year. I got along better with my cousins and enjoyed the work on the farm.
All in all, the year I spent on the dairy farm was just what I needed. I slept in the same bed with my grandmother, and we all got up every day at 5:00 A.M. to milk the cows and take care of chores. My main job was to help keep the barn clean. Besides the dairy cows, my uncle and aunt had some pigs and a horse. There was a big vegetable garden. I even helped my Aunt Frauline deliver a calf during a difficult birth. The hard work and fresh air at the farm were so good. We also found time to explore the fields and swim in the creeks.
During our year together, my grandmother helped shape much of my adolescent thinking. I spent much of my time with her, and never considered a single moment wasted. Although she was small, only about four feet ten inches tall, she was solidly built. She also was opinionated, outspoken, tough, and very independent. She was deeply religious and sang from her hymnbook every day. Her favorite song was “Rock of Ages.” My grandmother also loved to garden, raise chickens, and pick peaches. Grandmother Sitton and my father—two of the people I most admired as a young woman—valued hard work. I believe it was their examples more than anything else that contributed to my own work ethic.
I continued to visit the farm every summer during my high school years. Some of my brothers and sisters usually came too, and we would help tend the crops or pick fruit to earn money for new school clothes. We worked alongside some white people in the fields, and my mistrust of whites certainly did not apply to them. The people whom some Californians derisively called Okies or Arkies were great friends—hardworking people, close to the land, and quick to share what little they had with others who had even less. The farm work was demanding, but those were summers of freedom. We swam in the canals, went to drive-in movies, and sipped cherry Cokes or limeades at the local Dairy Queen. Sometimes we headed to the nearby town of Modesto to cruise the streets. Later, Modesto was the setting for American Graffiti, the film about teenage life in small-town America directed by George Lucas, a native son.
I looked forward to those visits with my grandmother. After I was married, I still went to see her. I would sit on her lap, and we teased each other and laughed. Full of spirit and energy, my grandmother married her third and last husband when she was in her eighties. During their courtship, she had me dye her hair black because she believed it would make her look her best. I obliged. Later, I helped her get all prettied up before they went to Reno, Nevada, for a quick wedding. Pearl Halady Sitton never stopped enjoying life. She canned vegetables and fruit, kept chickens, worked in the garden, and sang those hymns until shortly before she died. I am inspired whenever I think about her and all those good times we had.
Guided by my heritage of a love of beauty and a respect for strength—in search of my mother’s garden, I found my own.
Alice Walker
In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens, 1974
At the end of the year I spent with my mother’s family, I returned to the Bay area, but not to our house in Daly City. My family no longer lived there. While I was gone, my brother Don and his girlfriend, LaVena, had married. LaVena got a job with the telephone company, and Don went to work for Pacific Gas and Electric. They set up housekeeping at their own place not far from Candlestick Park. As was expected, the loss of Don’s income meant my parents were forced to make budgetary adjustments. That meant giving up the house in Daly City. I came home to a more affordable residence my father had found for us, in southeastern San Francisco on a spit of land projecting into the bay. It was a place known as Hunter’s Point.
Named for Robert E. Hunter, a forty-niner from the last century who had planned to create a city on the site, Hunter’s Point eventually had become the home of a huge U.S. Navy shipyard and dry docks. It flourished during World War II and continued to thrive for some years afterward when a severe housing shortage occurred. Ironically, Japanese-Americans returned to the Bay area after their long confinement in Dillon Myer’s camps only to find that black workers, attracted by plenty of jobs at the shipyards and defense plants, had moved into the “Little Tokyos” of the city. But thousands of black families also occupied the housing built on tidelands adjoining the shipyard at Hunter’s Point. Many of those black families had migrated from Oklahoma, Texas, and other states that whites also had fled during the Dust Bowl years.
Hunter’s Point may sound like the name of an affluent residential development where polo players and stockbrokers lived, but it was far from that. The only thing fancy about it was the name. Shipyard employees and hourly wage earners made their homes there. Although the shipyard did not close until 1974, jobs started to become more and more scarce in the 1960s. The workers who resided at Hunter’s Point fell into financial difficulties, and the housing area became little more than a ghetto.
We found a few Native Americans living at Hunter’s Point, including another Cherokee family. They had come to California from Locust Grove, an old Cherokee Nation town in eastern Oklahoma and the home of the late Willard Stone, the wood sculptor whose claim of Cherokee ancestry recently created a great deal of controversy. That other Cherokee family at Hunter’s Point was also part of the relocation program masterminded by the BIA.
At Hunter’s Point, my perceptions of the world around me began to take shape. Most police, teachers, political leaders, and others in positions of power and authority were whites. There were a few white people living at Hunter’s Point, perhaps a few Asians, and several Samoan families. Regardless of the ethnic sprinkling, Hunter’s Point was primarily a community of black families. Black culture had a profound impact on my development. When the rest of America was listening to Pat Boone, the Beach Boys, or Elvis, my friends and I listened to Etta James, Dinah Washington, Sarah Vaughan, B. B. King, and others. I talked endlessly with my best friends, Johnnie Lee and LaVada, about things which girls our age were obsessed with—music, boys, parents, and growing up. We sometimes put on makeup, fixed our hair, played records, and danced, pretending we were at a party far away from Hunter’s Point. Even today, more than thirty years later, the sisterly company of black women is especially enjoyable to me.
My mother also became good friends with people from different backgrounds. She developed a close relationship with a Filipina woman who lived next door. This neighborhood of diverse cultures was where we remained for several years. Those outside our community called our new home “Harlem West.”
We lived in one of the typical little houses, but to everyone’s amazement, it had a surprisingly pleasant interior. The rooms were small, but the house had two stories and was not as tiny as some of the other places we had lived. More important, there was not a rat in sight. The kitchen and bathroom were satisfactory, and the wooden floors were in fairly decent shape.
Outside was another story. There was a great deal of animosity between the black youths and Samoan youths of Hunter’s Point. Sometimes it seemed like a war zone when rival gangs clashed on the streets. Now and then there were enormous battles. Upstairs, in the bedroom I shared with my sister Linda, we could gaze out the window at the beauty of the sky and water, or we could lower our eyes to the streets where the gangs fought furiously.
I was taught invaluable lessons on those mean streets. They were part of our continuing education in the world of urban poverty and violence.
In many ways, Hunter’s Point appeared to be like everywhere else we had been, yet it was also a very different world. Most of the differences, I found, were a matter of perception. I learned that in the “hood,” there is a constant fight against racial prejudice. There is a struggle to keep the children off the streets and away from drugs. This takes place in an environment of overwhelming frustration among many diverse people who are alienated from the rest of America in many ways other than by simple geography. Living there was really like one long, hot, boring, lazy afternoon—nothing to do, no place to go, and no promise of anything better in the future.
I will not forget the time I was choking on something, and I became so distraught that my father called an ambulance. It was late at night, and when my father gave our address to the person on the telephone, he was told that no ambulance would come to Hunter’s Point after sundown. My father finally cleared my throat and I was fine. We never discussed what would have happened to me if he had not been successful. Another time, I recall a police car driving around our neighborhood. When the officers stopped to make a call and left their car unattended, every window was shattered. That was standard procedure. All of the police, across the board, were considered to be “the enemy.” They were never looked upon as concerned individuals who could help. Hunter’s Point was like a “no man’s land” that was constantly under siege.
Still, Hunter’s Point was my home. I would not trade my experiences there for any amount of money. We were living there when my brother Bob died in Washington, when I decided to get married, and when my father made the decision to leave San Francisco for Castroville in Monterey Bay. Many important moments in my life took place there.
Living in Hunter’s Point also gave me an insight into cultures I otherwise might not have ever known. In 1991, when I saw the film Boyz N the Hood, I was struck by how familiar the families in the film seemed to me, even though more than thirty years had passed since I had lived in a similar place.
Whenever I hear or read about inner-city crime, drugs, and gangs, I filter it through my own experiences at Hunter’s Point. Although communities such as Hunter’s Point have tremendous problems, they also have strengths that few outsiders ever recognize or acknowledge. The women are especially strong. Each day, they face daunting problems as they struggle just to survive. They are mothers not only of their own children but of the entire community. Poverty is not just a word to describe a social condition, it is the hard reality of everyday life. It takes a certain tenacity, a toughness, to continue on when there is an ever-present worry about whether the old car will work, and if it does, whether there will be gas money; digging through piles of old clothes at St. Vincent de Paul’s to find clothing for the children to wear to school without being ridiculed; wondering if there will be enough to eat. But always, there is hope that the children will receive a good education and have a better life.
There are tens of millions of Americans who are beyond the welfare state. Taken as a whole there is a culture of poverty … bad health, poor housing, low levels of aspiration and high levels of mental distress.
Michael Harrington
The Culture of Poverty, 1962
By the time we moved to Hunter’s Point, in 1960, my father had left the rope factory and was working as a longshoreman on the docks. He began to augment his income by playing poker. People used to come to our house for big poker games that lasted well into the night. Before they left, my dad usually had picked up a little money. He had a lot of confidence. That was important. Some of those who played cards with him were men he worked with, but many were other native people he had met at the San Francisco Indian Center.
Located upstairs in an old frame building on Sixteenth Street on the edge of the very rough and tough Mission District, the Indian Center became a sanctuary for me. It was my safe place for many years. At last, the mythical Rabbit had finally found a hollow stump the Wolves were not able to penetrate.
In many ways, the Indian Center became even more important to me than the junior high and various high schools I attended. During my teen years, I transferred from an inner-city school dominated by violence to another public high school with a predominantly Asian student body, because it offered a calmer atmosphere. However, changing schools did not help me very much. I had made some headway in gaining self-esteem, but like many teens, I remained unsettled as far as goals, with no sense of direction. I was not sure what I wanted to do once I finished school and had to make my own way in the world. But a moody and self-absorbed teenager could count on one thing—at the end of the day, everything seemed brighter at the Indian Center. For me, it became an oasis where I could share my feelings and frustrations with kids from similar backgrounds.
There was something at the center for everyone. It was a safe place to go, even if we only wanted to hang out or watch television. For the younger children, the center provided socialization with other native people through organized events such as picnics and supervised outings. Older kids went there for dances, sports programs, and an occasional chance to work behind the snack bar to earn a little money. Adults played bingo, took part in intertribal powwows and, most important, discussed pertinent issues and concerns with other BIA relocatees from all across the country. We would jump on a city bus and head for the Indian Center the way some kids today flock to shopping malls.
The Indian Center was important to everyone in my family, including my father. Always a determined person who stuck to his principles, even if they turned out to be lost causes, Dad ultimately quit working as a longshoreman to become a shop steward and union organizer with a spice company based in San Francisco. Besides his union activities, he also became more involved with projects at the Indian Center. For instance, when the question arose about the need for a free health clinic for Indians living in the Bay area, he rallied the forces at the Indian Center to get behind the issue. In an effort to heighten public awareness, he appeared on a television panel discussion about the urban clinic. Perhaps at that time, he influenced my life in ways I could not imagine then.
When he believed in something, he worked around the clock to get the job done. He was always dragging home somebody he had met, someone who was down on his luck and needed a meal and a place to stay. It was a tight fit, but we made room. My dad never gave up on people. I think my father’s tenacity is a characteristic I inherited. Once I set my mind to do something, I never give up. I was raised in a household where no one ever said to me, “You can’t do this because you’re a woman, Indian, or poor.” No one told me there were limitations. Of course, I would not have listened to them if they had tried.
The exception would have been my father. I always listened to him, even if I did not agree with what he had to say. From the time I was a little girl, we discussed all the topics of the day. Our very best debates concerned politics. Sometimes those conversations would get a bit heated. After my political awakening as a teenager, I became aligned with the party of Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, and a rising young star of the sixties—John F. Kennedy. My father, on the other hand, was a registered Republican, which was not unusual among older members of the Five Tribes, especially the Cherokees. Folks who know our people’s past can usually figure out why so many of the older Cherokees belonged to the Republican party. The story goes that a historian once asked an Oklahoma Cherokee why so few of the old-timers became Democrats. The Cherokee supposedly replied, “Do you think we would help the party that damned ol’ Andy Jackson belonged to?” For the elders, the choice was obvious—Republicans were the lesser of two evils.
Despite our political differences, my father and I enjoyed our discussions, and especially our time spent at the Indian Center. Throughout the sixties, my entire family considered the Indian Center to be a stronghold. At the center, we could talk to other native people about shared problems and frustrations. Many families we met there were like us. They had come to the realization that the BIA’s promises were empty. We all seemed to have reached that same terrible conclusion—the government’s relocation program was a disaster that robbed us of our vitality and sense of place. That is why the Indian Center was so immensely important. It was always there for us. It was a constant. During the turmoil and anguish of the 1960s, it was where we turned.
In 1960, when my brother Robert was killed, we went to the Indian Center for solace. Bob was only twenty years old when he died. He had joined the National Guard, boxed a little bit, and worked at various odd jobs. He did not seem to have any real plans. My dad wanted him to settle down and find steady employment. But Bob was restless. He and his pal, Louie Cole, a quarter Choctaw, decided to leave the city. Louie was nineteen, and I thought of him as my first real boyfriend. He and my brother took off one morning, intent on making money for a grubstake. Then they planned to go off on their great adventure and discover the rest of the country.
Bob and Louie had been gone for two or three weeks and were up the coast in Washington state when they found work as apple pickers. The boys lived in sharecroppers’ cabins near the orchards. When they got up early in the morning, it was still cold and dark outside, so they would start a fire in a wood stove using a little kerosene to get the flames going. One morning, my brother was still groggy with sleep when he lit the fire. Instead of the kerosene, he mistakenly picked up a can of gasoline. The cabin exploded in flames. The door was locked with a dead bolt, so by the time the boys got outside, they were severely burned. Louie was burned over much of his body, but Bob was in far worse condition.
My parents, my brother Don and my oldest sister, Frieda, who still lived in Oklahoma, went to Washington to be with Bob. The doctor told them that if Bob lived for seven days, he would probably survive. Among Cherokees, the number seven is considered sacred. We have seven clans, our sacred fire is kindled from seven types of wood, and there are seven directions—north, south, east, west, up, down, and “where one is at.” We thought maybe the seven days would bring luck to Bob.
Attractive and charming, Bob always had been the best looking of all of us. He was tall and athletic, a happy-go-lucky type. I looked up to my big brother Don, but for my carefree role model, I had Bob. I think all of us wondered what his life would be like if he survived. It was clear that he would never be the same.
When it seemed that there was a slim chance Bob might pull through, my father, who had to return to his job, left my mother in Washington to stay with Bob through his long recovery. But as it turned out, Bob could not be saved. He lived for seven days and no more. On the seventh day, he died. I am not so sure the number failed him.
When they brought him home to California, he was buried at Oakdale, a community on the Stanislaus River not far from my grandmother’s place. Bob’s death stunned all of us. It left me in a state of shock. I cannot remember who told me that Bob had died. Probably it was one of my older sisters. All I know is, I just stood there and screamed. I screamed as loud as I could, hoping that my screams would drown out those awful words I did not want to hear. I was fifteen years old, and the loss of Bob was the closest I had ever been to death up to that point.
My parents, of course, were devastated. The loss of a child is the worst kind of death experience. You never expect to outlive your offspring. But after that tragic event, something very good happened to our family. My mother, who was forty years old, became pregnant the same month my brother Bob died. Everyone was quite surprised. Nine months later, my brother William was born. No one can take someone else’s place, but after losing Bob as we had, all of us were happy when Bill arrived.
Louie Cole remained hospitalized in Washington for several months before he was allowed to return to California. He lived near Riverbank, where I had first met him when I stayed with my grandmother. We stayed in touch after he came home to recover, but we were never girlfriend and boyfriend again. Every so often, we wrote to each other, and then finally that stopped.
Many years later, long after I had come home to Oklahoma and had became involved in tribal politics, Louie came to visit me. He had been married several times, and he still collected disability because of the injuries he had received in that fire so many years before. I was not totally comfortable seeing Louie again. There was something brooding about him, and he wanted only to focus on the past, especially the bad times. About a year after his visit, I received a letter from Louie’s mother informing me that he had been shot and killed by one of his former wives during a quarrel.
Louie was my first boyfriend, but it was not as if I had a whole string of them. In fact, I was basically shy with boys. However, I did meet several young men at the Indian Center who interested me. One of them was Ray Billy. I was about sixteen when I started to date him. He was Pomo, a California tribe, and was a little older than I was. He had his own apartment. I dated him for about a year. My dad liked him, and that counted for something. Occasionally, Ray got the use of a car, and he would come to our house at Hunter’s Point and ask my dad if he could take me for a ride. Other times, my dad let us go for rides in our family car. Everyone liked Ray. He was a gentleman—most of the time.
He was also crafty, and I had to watch my step. One night we were down on the beach. I was getting cold, so he suggested that we go to his place to get a jacket and warm up. It was a classic trick, and I almost fell for it! When we got to his apartment, he said he was tired and we ought to rest on his bed for a while. I came to my senses. I put my foot down and would not cooperate. He thought I was stupid for reacting as I did. A short time later, he dropped me for a girl who had just been crowned Miss Indian San Francisco, or some such title. Ray and I did not see each other again. I was hurt by his treatment, but I pulled through. I learned that most first crushes—even second or third crushes—can be survived.
Friends and family helped me mend my broken heart and get over Ray Billy. Our music was also a big help. My girlfriends and I listened to rock and roll and to soul music. “Hit the Road, Jack” and “I Found my Thrill on Blueberry Hill” were popular then. We listened to two soul stations, KDIA and KSAN. We dreamed of the time we would be out of school and free.
Most of the time, I was only going through the motions of attending classes. I was never much of a scholar, and I do not have many memories from my years in high school. Those I do have are not of much consequence. My grades ranged from A to F, depending on the subject and my level of interest. Science and math were my downfalls, but I had an affinity for English and literature courses. None of my teachers left enough impact for me even to remember their names. I was not much of a joiner. I did not go in for glee club or the yearbook staff or sports or any of the organizations except Junior Achievement. I did participate in that for a while, and I liked it.
Mostly, I went to the Indian Center. That is still my best teenage memory. Much more was going on at the center besides pingpong games and dance parties. It was the early 1960s, and change was in the air. A person could almost touch it. During that time, many people, including my friends and siblings and I, were aware of the currents of restlessness. The new decade promised to be a time of momentous social movements and open rebellion. There would be sweeping legislation and great achievements, as well as devastating war and senseless tragedies.
Even before the 1960s, the entire Bay area had become a magnet for artists and rebels who were ready and willing to act as the merchants of change. Now a new generation was getting its voice, testing its wings. I was part of that generation. San Francisco was the place to be. We were ready to proceed with the decade and with our lives.