Stealing Indians Read online

  Praise for Stealing Indians

  “A poignant story of colonization and assimilation, something I know a little bit about. A masterpiece.”

  —Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart

  “When it comes to re-visioning the Native American experience in American history, few are as triumphant as John Smelcer.”

  —Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States

  “Smelcer captures the complexity, the pain, and what the meaning of the boarding schools was for not just the generation before us, but all of those that have followed. Its ripples are still being felt and suffered from in Indian Country.”

  —Joseph Bruchac (Our Stories Remember & Jim Thorpe: Original All-American)

  Books by John Smelcer

  Fiction

  Savage Mountain

  Edge of Nowhere

  Lone Wolves

  The Trap

  The Great Death

  Alaskan: Stories from the Great Land

  Native Studies

  The Raven and the Totem

  A Cycle of Myths

  Trickster

  The Day That Cries Forever

  Durable Breath

  Native American Classics

  We are the Land, We are the Sea

  Poetry

  Indian Giver

  The Indian Prophet

  Songs from an Outcast

  Riversong

  Without Reservation

  Beautiful Words

  Tracks

  Raven Speaks

  Changing Seasons

  STEALING INDIANS

  John Smelcer

  Leapfrog Press

  Fredonia, New York

  Stealing Indians © 2016 by John Smelcer

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a data base or other retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopy, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  Published in 2016 in the United States by

  Leapfrog Press LLC

  PO Box 505

  Fredonia, NY 14063

  www.leapfrogpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed in the United States by

  Consortium Book Sales and Distribution

  St. Paul, Minnesota 55114

  www.cbsd.com

  First Edition

  ISBN: 978-1-935248-82-8

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Smelcer, John E., 1963- author.

  Title: Stealing Indians / John Smelcer.

  Description: First edition. | Fredonia, NY : Leapfrog Press, 2016. | Summary:

  Four Indian teenagers are kidnapped from different regions, their lives

  immutably changed by an institution designed to eradicate their identity,

  and without family to protect them only their friendship helps them endure.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015046700 (print) | LCCN 2015050716 (ebook) | ISBN

  9781935248828 (softcover) | ISBN 9781935248835 (epub)

  Subjects: | CYAC: Indians of North America--Fiction. | Kidnapping--Fiction |

  Friendship--Fiction. | Identity--Fiction. | BISAC: JUVENILE FICTION /

  People & Places / United States / Native American. | JUVENILE FICTION /

  Historical / United States / 20th Century. | JUVENILE FICTION / Social

  Issues / Prejudice & Racism.

  Classification: LCC PZ7.S6397 St 2016 (print) | LCC PZ7.S6397 (ebook) | DDC

  [Fic]--dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015046700

  For all the Indian children who attended such institutions

  Acknowledgements

  The author thanks Bard Young, Steve McDuff, Rod Clark, Chinua Achebe, James Welch, Ursula K. Le Guin, Howard Zinn, Norman Mailer, Joe Bruchac, Tony Hillerman, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, Michael Dorris, Catherine Creger, Dan and Karol Lynn Johnson, and Amber Johnson for their insightful suggestions, as well as the numerous Indian elders from across America who shared their personal stories. To Winston Groom (Forrest Gump) who said this novel would give America a black eye and tried to convince me not to publish it: it’s never a bad thing to tell the truth. The myth “How Raven Brought Light to the World” (Chapter 9) is from the author’s The Raven and the Totem.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.

  “Kill the Indian to Save the Man.”

  —Richard Henry Pratt, Headmaster

  Carlisle Indian School, 1879

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Epilogue

  Questions for Discussion

  The Stealing Indians Oral History Project

  The Author

  Links

  In 1950, four Indian teenagers, from very different parts of America, are taken from their families, their lives immutably changed by an institution designed to eradicate their identity, to make them into something else—to make them less Indian. And no matter where they came from—north, south, east or west—their stories are representative of every story, every stolen life. So far from home, and without family to protect them, only their friendship would help them endure.

  This story is a work of fiction.

  Every word is true.

  Chapter One

  LUCY SECONDCHIEF could scarcely remember what her father looked like anymore. It had been four years since he died.

  To a thirteen-year-old, four years is a long time.

  As she set two spoons and two chipped bowls on a rickety table, Lucy remembered the day of her father’s funeral and how people kept stopping by their little, tilted cabin on the frozen tundra, telling her mother how sad they were for her loss. Others stopped by the community center delivering food for the after-service supper. There were boxes of fry bread and biscuits, spaghetti noodles and canned spaghetti sauce, cardboard boxes of frozen moose meat and caribou meat, and two brown bags full of dried salmon strips. They brought coffee and tea, paper plates and bowls, napkins—everything necessary to feed an entire village.

  The loss of her father was accompanied by more loss.

  Some people, mostly old friends of her father’s that Lucy hadn’t seen in a long time, came to say how much money her father owed them. He must have owed a great deal because by the end of the day, Lucy’s mother had given away all of her father’s tools, two rifles, and a large stack of lumber, with which he had planned to expand the small, sagging cabin. One man was owed so much, so he said, that Lucy’s mother let him take the entire sled-dog team that her husband had used to run his trap line. The man even took the sled.

  Lucy spent the whole day sitting on a small chair b
eside the crackling wood stove, listening quietly to all the conversations that came and left the house each time the door opened or closed. She sat that way all day just listening and holding tight to the cheap, ragged doll her father had brought her nearly a year before when he came back from the city. It was her only toy. Her grandmother used to try to take it away from her during winter. She said that children weren’t allowed to play with toys of any kind because if the winter knew that children were enjoying the slow winter months, it would stay around even longer.

  On the night of her father’s funeral, the sky was filled with northern lights. It was the most intense display anyone had ever seen. Lucy knew that the lights, the aurora, were a bad omen, a malevolent force that comes down to carry people away. Some stories say the lights are the spirits of the dead marching into the sky. Hunters in the wilderness brandished knives to keep them at bay. Parents told children to stay quiet on such nights, so the lights wouldn’t hear them. Lucy had once seen some boys challenge the lights, standing nervously outside calling to the sky and whistling. But eventually they all ran back inside their cabins out of fear.

  But on the night of her father’s funeral, when the lights were at their very brightest, Lucy walked right out into the middle of a great field, stood beneath the shimmering stars and the dancing aurora, and yelled to the lights, demanding them to take her away. Her mother came out from the cabin, calling to her. The lights heard Lucy’s defiance and dropped down from the star-raddled sky, encircling the young girl within shimmering red and green waves. The whole village watched in disbelief from behind frosted windows as the girl just stood there. Sled dogs belonging to other villagers, sitting atop their little straw-filled houses, began to bark and howl. Others cowered with their bushy tails tucked between their legs.

  No one could remember anything like it.

  Instead of running, little Lucy Secondchief just stood where she was, right in the middle of a great spruce-edged field, until she began to laugh. She laughed so loud that her echo returned all the way from the far, white mountains thirty miles distant across the wide, silty river.

  After that, she never cried again for her dead father.

  Her mother still wept every night, though, not so much from loneliness, not simply because she missed her husband, but because the life of a widow in a small village is a sad one.

  Life was hard, but Lucy and her mother managed.

  All through the intolerable winter, her mother worked a trap line every morning. She would get up early, drink a cup of weak tea made from the dry leaves of a local plant called Labrador tea, put on her parka, winter boots, gloves, and hat, and strike out into the wintered hills on snowshoes. In spite of the cold, Lucy’s mother always paused at the top of the hill overlooking the little valley where her cabin sat just below the shadows cast by spruce trees, the sun barely reaching above their tops during this time of year, and waved to Lucy. She’d stay out there all morning, alone in the whiteness, checking rabbit snares and resetting them as needed. Sometimes she’d catch a martin or a weasel, which she would trade for the things she and Lucy needed. She’d go out even when the temperature was thirty degrees below zero. She had to. On a good day, she’d bring home at least one scrawny rabbit for their pot.

  But most days were not good, and Lucy’s mother would bring home only sadness and hunger in the empty rucksack. On those days, they would sit in the small, dark room that was their cabin, lit by a single, flickering candle, and sip hot broth made from boiled leftover bones from the day before.

  In every measurable way, all they had was each other.

  But Lucy and her mother had survived, were surviving. In the spring they set fish traps beneath small, swollen creeks to catch suckers and whitefish. In the summer they sometimes caught salmon stranded in the shallow gravel channels of the great river. In the fall they gathered berries. During the second winter after her husband died, Lucy’s mother shot a cow moose that came close to the cabin. It was illegal to shoot a female moose like that, out of season and without a license, but their cabin was far enough away from the rest of the village that no one heard; no one came to investigate, and, fortunately, not the game warden. If he had caught them, he would have taken away her mother’s rifle.

  Although their bellies were empty and aching much of the time, their nights were filled with a kind of happiness, at least a contentment that comes of a sense of place, of belonging, of loving and being loved. Every night, Lucy’s mother would fire up the small sauna behind the cabin, and the two would sit in the dark—sweating, talking, singing, telling stories, gently lashing each other with swatches of spruce, the scent of the boughs permeating the close room. When Lucy and her mother became too hot, they would step out into the cold night air and rub handfuls of snow on their naked, brown skin to cool down. After the sauna, they would sit inside the warm cabin—their tiny wood stove rattling—combing and braiding each other’s long, black hair. Her mother’s hair had long strands of gray, even though she was not yet forty. Before bed, they told traditional stories about Raven, drank weak tea, and prayed for more rabbits.

  One night, toward the end of the short-lived fall, after most leaves had fallen and bears began to search for winter dens, as mother and daughter lay in bed while the moon lay on the edge of the windowsill, Lucy told of a dream she remembered from a few nights earlier.

  “I dreamt that I was in a strange house and there was a table full of food. There were all kinds of breads and meats and cheese,” she whispered, her eyes open and staring at the ceiling. “There was even a basket full of apples.”

  “It sounds like a good dream,” her mother whispered through the darkness.

  Lucy was quiet for a long time before she spoke again.

  “There was all this food, enough for many people. Then I saw you outside, and I tried to let you in, but the doors and windows would not open. You were alone and starving, your eyes were dark and hollow, and your hair was white. I yelled to you, but you did not answer. I tried to break the glass with a chair, but it would not break. Then you walked away. I screamed for you to come back, but you did not hear me. When you were too far away to see, I turned around and there were other Indian children sitting at the table eating all the food. But then they didn’t look like Indians any more. I stood by the door crying until there was nothing left for me.”

  The tired woman turned toward her daughter, raised herself on one elbow, and kissed her on the forehead.

  “It was only a dream, child,” she said as she rolled back into the warm spot her body had made in the thin mattress and pulled the heavy blankets up to her chin.

  The next day, Lucy was outside carrying a stack of firewood when a big, tall-roofed black car pulled into the drive. It was a cold and windy day, even for fall. Lucy’s mother came out from inside the house, wearing the tattered, old shawl she wore when she was inside the house.

  Two men stepped from the car and walked up to Lucy’s mother. From where she stood, Lucy could see the taller man pull a piece of paper from a black briefcase and hand it to her. Her mother looked at the paper for a long moment, but she could not read it. She had never learned to read. Nevertheless, she knew what the document said. Every Indian parent knew what it said. All across the country, Indian families were given the same piece of paper, which proclaimed the end to families. The paper was the law. It was the government’s authority to steal Indian children from their families and send them far from their homes and villages. The law was for the sake of the children, a ticket to a better life free from the burdens of poverty and ignorance. The paper was the law that sent them to Kansas, Oregon, the Dakotas, California, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania—anywhere far enough away so that they would forget what it means to be Indian.

  “It’s in the child’s best interest,” the government men told the distraught and grieving families.

  The men walked toward Lucy, still standing with her two arms full of firewood
. When they were close, she dropped the pile and tried to run to her mother. But they grabbed her, put her in handcuffs, and dragged her to the car, pushed her into the back seat, and closed the door. There were no handles on the inside.

  Lucy was trapped.

  She screamed and kicked. Then the low, powerful engine started again, and the car slowly turned around. Lucy stood on the back seat with her feet pressed into the cushions and looked out the slender back window as the car drove down the long, rutted driveway. She cried out for her mother and beat her bound fists against the curve of the thick glass.

  Just then a great wind arose, shaking the last orange and yellow and brown leaves from trees, raking them up from the ground, the brittle and rotting leaves swirling and twisting across the rutted driveway. It began to sleet, angry and lashing. A large branch broke off from a tree and fell across the road ahead, almost blocking the car.

  Lucy watched through tears as her mother ran behind the black car, her tattered shawl flapping in the wind like a ragged bird, saw her slip and fall in the muddy ruts, her thin, brown arms reaching out as she cried for her daughter.

  SIMON LONE FIGHT was running across an arid desert, dodging rattlesnakes and scorpions, jumping over tumbleweeds spinning across the red earth.

  Simon was always running.

  He ran to and from everything—from the grocery store to the service station where his uncle worked, from his ramshackle home to the community hall where everyone played bingo on Fridays and Saturday nights, from the future and toward the past. He ran all day across his reservation, which was so destitute that even the few small streams winding across the arid landscape were almost always empty-pocketed and bone-dry.