Our little sister was named after an aunt who died before we
were born. Aunt Mary Susan was a young girl, a student at a
South Dakota mission school near the Wounded Knee Massacre
in 1890. The nuns at the school, hearing that something bad
was going on, took the children outside to a ditch where they
spent the night. They survived.
Mary Susan returned to Minnesota, where she married, had
five children, and was widowed. Left with a family to support,
she found a job as a cook at the Vermilion Lake Indian School,
then spent all of her working years with boarding school
children. My dad remembers her as a generous woman, only
as tall as a child, who spoke softly and kindly. He honored
her memory by naming our little sister after her.
Our little sister was the only blonde in our family. As children
we were fascinated by her coloring, her hair that lightened to
an ice frost in the summer, her cheeks that bloomed with a
red fire in the winter. Winters she became the sun; summers,
the moon. We masked our anger and humiliation at neighbors’
stupid jokes about the stork, the wrong baby, the mailman, by
pretending we didn’t understand. She was our sister, we could
see that. We were photo negatives, reversals of the same black
and white image, a bone structure and history interchangeable
under skin, eyes, and hair.
In the early 1970s an Indian Club was started at our high school.
What an event that was, an organization that would acknowledge
and support Indian ways in an institution that had stood for the
annihilation of our people through education/assimilation. Our
little sister went to Indian Club until picture day, when the other
students asked her to step off the riser and out of the camera’s
eye because with her coloring she wouldn’t match the group on
the yearbook page.
After that she always felt like she stood out in pictures.
Winters she became the sun, summers the moon.
In all seasons our sister and our auntie’s namesake.