By virtue of genetics I am a
mixture of Native American and Anglo. But the real me is only part genetics,
mostly Native American, raised in the White World, searching for my culture. My
maternal grandmother was Comanche, or so she told my brother. She never told her
children, they only knew she was part Indian. Her husband was British, Welsh,
Irish, and perhaps a little Cherokee. I never really knew my grandparents, I
only met them five or six times in my life. But my grandmother was partial to my
brother and they kept in constant contact. My memories of my grandmother are of
a very religious person, (she was always praying), who never cut her hair until
her husband died. She believed in hard work, and that children should be bathed
in Tide detergent. My grandfather was a very quite man who was just there. My
paternal grandmother was said to be Blackfeet. That is until someone made the
comment to my father that he was African American, after that he said she was
Cherokee. His father was said to be British, Welsh and Irish. They both died
before I was born. I have so far been unable to confirm their heritage, but who
I am is Native American.
As a child I remember my mother telling me
about a woman who said her ancestors came over on the Mayflower, my mother told
her, ours were here to greet them. I grew up with a tremendous sense of pride in
my Native American heritage. I bragged about being Native American to the other
children, and was called a dirty Indian. I was ostracized and a loner, but that
didn’t change the pride I have for my culture. I was raised in a hell hole
called Littlerock, California. A place where the wind never stops blowing, the
summer heat can fry an egg on the sidewalk, and the winter chill freezes the
ground to permafrost which in the shade lasts well into April. A place the
snakes and scorpions didn’t seem to want. My father called this inhospitable
place God’s Country. I often wondered what God he worshipped. It was the place
where I grew up, it was never home. But I learned a love for the land, and an
appreciation for the desert. It survives no matter what mankind tries to do to
it. You can bring in water and cultivate it, but let the water stop and it
returns to desert.
We were as poor as the land we lived on. We lived in
a old garage. My mother covered the entrance with an old rug she found, to help
keep out the cold, while my parents built the house. And even after we moved
into the house, it was years before we could afford a toilet, so in the middle
of winter, in the dark of night, we traipsed out to the outhouse in the back
yard. My parents built a cistern and filled it with water when the county
flushed the water lines. I was a few months too old for the county to help us
get electricity so my mother worked as a waitress, and saved her tips so she
could afford to have electricity put in. We used propane gas to heat the house
with an unvented gas heater. We often bathed in a washtub, in front of the
heater in the living room. Our curtains were made of plastic and came from
Woolworths. We collected pop bottles so we could buy a pound of hamburger, but
that was a treat. We ate pancakes made with water, water gravy, beans, rice and
sometimes potatoes.
My father always had a get rich scheme, one year
planting peanuts, one year raising rabbits, one year getting tomatoes to sell in
Los Angeles. My mother canned a lot of tomatoes that year. We ate macaroni, with
tomato juice. The only time I remember having enough to eat, was when we raised
rabbits. I learned to kill and skin a rabbit at seven years old.
My
father hated me. I remember standing at the foot of my mother’s bed, crying,
asking her if Daddy ever loved me. She said no. A couple of years later, at
seven years old I disowned him after a severe beating. I went to school, ashamed
that my clothes came from the Goodwill. By ten years old I was bored with the
educational opportunities at school and began getting into trouble. By fourteen
I was married, and a high school dropout. By seventeen I was widowed, by
eighteen I was remarried and a battered wife. I had no self esteem. I got my GED
became a cosmetologist and started working in the Aerospace industry. I got to
the point where I felt I was better off dead than continuing to live as a
prisoner of war in my own home, and that is when I found the courage to leave my
husband.
Although I finally after twenty three years I met and married David.
I tell you these
things to tell you, my reader, where I have come from. I have been homeless, I
have been date raped, I have been battered, but getting back to who I am. I am
like the coyote. I AM A SURVIVOR. I have educated myself, and learned to fly. I
had a well paying career in the aerospace industry, with tremendous
responsibilities, and a high level of stress which I retired from after a work related injury.
I own my home and property, and
drive a nice car.
You see, you can be a victim of your circumstances, or
you can overcome your circumstances. The road I chose to walk has been hard,
fraught with many precipices and pitfalls. A winding journey, that twists and
turns mostly uphill. It tests and tempers me. It validates me as I meander
through this excursion called life. I would not change a thing, except loosing
my brother, (that has been the hardest test of all), you see, I can honestly say
I like myself.
