Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (10 page)

Over the years, Colonel Pratt personally made many recruiting trips out to tribal territories and rounded up thousands of Native children five years old and up. The children were loaded onto trains and transported thousands of miles away from home. The older youth cared for the needs of the little ones as best they could during the long, cold trip to Pennsylvania. They also attempted to protect them from abuses at the boarding school. Like their tribal chiefs and warrior relatives before them, the children were also stripped of clothing and hairstyles bearing any resemblance to their particular tribe. Pratt’s philosophy of “Kill the Indian, Save the Man” was evident in all aspects of America’s first boarding school for Indian children. Pratt’s experiment was backed by the Quakers and eventually by the U.S. government as a means of taking care of America’s “Indian problem.”

In 1929, fifty years after the opening of Carlisle Indian Industrial School, a five-year-old child entered a local boarding school on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota to begin her education. This child would later become my mother. Although the boarding school had honed the skills developed by Pratt to discourage “Indian talk” through corporal punishment, my mother was determined to keep her language and culture alive. My mother’s spirit survived it all.

In 1953, at the ripe old age of five, I entered the same boarding school that my mother had attended. It had been seventy-four years after the establishment of Pratt’s Pennsylvania boarding school for Indian children. By this time, Pratt’s tactics were being used to not only kill the Indian, but the man as well. I became an unrecorded statistic over and over again, sexually abused by thoroughly trained, human products of Pratt’s well-thought-out military system of deprivation. The war against Native children was alive and well and still churning out children conditioned to turn against their tribal culture, spirituality, and anything feminine in their psyche. Over the centuries, we shared the same fate as our ancestral sisters. Our men, who once were warriors of great tribal chief, warrior, and medicine societies, were changed and set loose in the homes, families, and extended families of the tribe to wreak havoc upon the ancient ways of
wolakota.

There were no chiefs in sight when this war was being carried out upon the sacred descendants of our great chiefs and medicine people. I have read that some great chiefs volunteered their own children to attend Carlisle Indian School in order to prove their trust in the white man’s education. This was done against the advice of their own people, especially the mothers. It was no different in my
Ina’
s day or my days. There were no warriors within miles when our screams died away into shocked silence. There were no medicine men with us when our Lakota spirit left our tortured little bodies.

In the wake of boarding schools came institutionalized, “once were warriors,” shrewd, cunning pedophiles without a conscience. Somehow, a Native pedophile seems even more wicked (whether he is drunk or sober) because he is acting contrary to tribal teachings that women and children are sacred. Perpetrating sexual acts upon little children is an evil art of sexual violence that is being played out over and over again from generation to generation. Little girls grow into women and little boys grow into men. Without healthy guidance and direction, sexually violated girls grow into womanhood already conditioned to a high threshold of pain and suffering. Anything below that threshold is not what is normal to them. These are the ones targeted by sexual predators who prefer children and seek out ones who have already been abused.

Within a very short time of starting boarding school, I fell under the scrutiny of and received unwanted attention from both male and female pedophiles. I must have been the perfect victim, having been initiated before I got to school. The second perpetrator in my short life on this earth was my kindergarten and first grade teacher. She was a redhead who always wore her hair in a bun. She seemed to relish degrading, humiliating, and punishing me in front of my peers. Eventually, the time came that I preferred physical punishment to the ugly wrongs that she did to me and made me do to her while the rest of the class napped. If I recoiled from her touch, she punished me. If I hid from her during recess, she punished me. If I recognized and tried to help alleviate the fear and emotional pain of another student whom she focused her nasty attention upon, she punished me.

The third self-appointed sex teacher was another white female. From those particularly intrusive encounters came something dark and insidious, like memories marinating in a dark murkiness that would make me physically sick when I heard stories of women being raped with foreign objects. When young Native men disrespectfully recited sexually explicit jokes about oral sex in the presence of young women, I could not argue with them as other young women did. I usually ended up in the bathroom vomiting.

It seemed that the rapes, molestations, attempted molestations, snarling anger, and the hunter-prey stalking tactics of the predators became commonplace. The only time that I felt safe was alone or with my immediate family. It was not a foolproof defense because I grew up in boarding schools (except for a couple of semesters) and I couldn’t always be with my family. I was prey just like the rest of the poor innocent little children.

Throughout my school years until my early thirties, sexual predators seemed to be everywhere! My spirit left my body many, many times. Mental health professionals have labeled this as a dissociative disorder. I believe that the ability to leave one’s body is
of the spirit
. It can become a disorder, but I will go into that later in this chapter.

In boarding school, I was a chronic bed wetter and was shamed by being forced to hold up and display my soiled sheets for all the girls to see as they went by in line with their sheets. Sometimes the sheets were hung out the window for the boys to see, and they would always ask whose sheets they were. Shame and ridicule were daily lessons, as if we weren’t carrying enough burdens already. When I left that particular boarding school, I went home with my family. My bed-wetting stopped because something more sinister was taking place.

Social and Legal Realities of Sexual Violence

Using my own experiences as a victim of sexual violence in childhood and young adulthood is an attempt to follow the trauma through its life cycle and to describe the unseen trash that we carry into the different phases of our life cycles, sometimes right to our very deathbed. It is meant to show that whether you were sexually traumatized once or thirty times, it is a devastation that cannot be ignored. This chapter is not a cleaned-up, sanitized storybook tale that excludes negative human aspects that we don’t like to look at for very long, if at all. On the contrary, it is those very aspects that we need to identify and heal.

If reading my story brings up memories and feelings that you thought you swept deep into the recesses of your mind, please, ask for help from someone you trust. Find someone who has dealt with their own incest and/or sexual abuse issues by working their way through it in an inpatient therapeutic setting, preferably someone who has lived a continuous healthy lifestyle for more than three years. These people will help you to learn how to begin dealing with and healing your pain. We’ll take a look at that as we explore the realities of sexual violence.

As an encouragement to all readers, know that when we are able to begin our own individual healing, we are able to connect the dots (so to speak). We are able to understand the “balance” that our ancestors have always encouraged us to seek, which involves our emotional, physical, mental, and spiritual selves. When our fear subsides and we are able to begin understanding and connecting the causes and effects of sexual violence, we see more clearly how centuries of sexual and other kinds of abuses against Native girls and women have brought great tribal nations to their knees.

Let’s take a look at how a sexually violent act begins to devastate a person’s life, whether that devastation takes decades or an entire lifetime. Why do we need to look at sexual violence against Native women? One reason is that we are the sacred bearers and givers of life. Second, we are
spiritually
stronger than our male counterparts; they are physically stronger than us. Another reason is that we Native women are the ones that hold two-thirds of our family together when the father leaves the home (mother plus children, minus father, equals two-thirds). Therefore, we are the ones who hold up the tribe. In fact, we women hold up the world! But, most important, we are ancient spirits who came to earth to learn how to use our spiritual gifts. In learning that lesson we become helpers to the spirits that we carried in our physical bodies. For me, one of the impacts of sexual violence was alcohol and drug use.

At the age of five, I was unwittingly introduced to alcohol by an aunt who tricked me. My first drink was from the “land of sky blue waters,” Hamm’s Beer. To this day, I still remember the feel of bubbles in my mouth after drinking this odd-tasting water. I thought it was soda pop because it was given to me with shoestrings (an old name for French fries).

I smoked my first cigarette, an unfiltered Camel, when I was nine years old. A playmate of mine found a cigarette butt where the “big boys and big girls” were smoking and talked me into trying it out with her, so I did. We went behind the laundry building and lit it up. We didn’t finish smoking the rest of the cigarette because we both got really dizzy from one puff.

My next drink was as a preteen at a school for Indian girls where we were supposed to learn how to be prim-and-proper young ladies. A few girls were detailed to clean the headmaster’s house where we found a gallon of church wine in the pantry. We drank it and thought we were drunk. I don’t think any of us knew what it felt like to be drunk, but we sure were giggly and woozy. Nothing prim and proper about that!

By my early teens I was hanging around friends whose parents were heavy alcohol users so it was easy to sneak drinks and smoke cigarettes. The first time I really got drunk was off of bad port wine that someone bought for us for three dollars. Really bad stuff! My alcohol use escalated throughout my late teens and twenties until my early thirties. When my aunt tricked me into drinking beer when I was five years old, little did she know that booze would be the double-edged sword that would increase my vulnerability for the next twenty-nine years.

My
illicit
use and distribution of drugs began around the age of twenty-one. I used hallucinogens (acid, mescaline, psilocybin), amphetamines, marijuana, hashish, cocaine; shot up “yellow jackets” and heroin; and dropped “reds.” I used whatever I got my hands on. Use of mood-altering chemicals became a very negative survival skill for me. Getting intoxicated or “high” provided only temporary relief from memories that I didn’t want to remember and feelings that I didn’t want to feel. I was a loner throughout childhood and college, except for family and relatives. If I isolated myself from people, I wouldn’t have to deal with them. Along the way, I met many sexually violated people who also were hypervigilant and hypersensitive. I figured that since none of us trusted anyone, it would be all right to party with them. Wrong! It was the worst pit of vipers that can be imagined. It was a den of sexual predators and no female was safe—whether infant, toddler, teenager, adult, or elder. My addiction to alcohol and drugs only succeeded in making me sicker emotionally, physically, psychologically, and spiritually.

During my childhood, I became quite a talented artist. I won an award for my portraits and animal charcoals in a large county fair when I was twelve years old. When I was about fourteen or fifteen years of age, I was selected as one of four people in South Dakota to study under the tutelage of a famous Dakota artist, Oscar Howe. I had many opportunities to excel throughout my life. Still, there were things that people didn’t know about me, such as my intense bouts with fear of people that kept me hidden in my room for weeks. During those times, the only person I sometimes allowed in was my mother. Sometimes I refused to eat and I let my personal hygiene go. I refer to that as my “skunk syndrome,” another negative survival skill. I identified with the skunk, my four-legged relative, because it is a nocturnal and shy creature. When it becomes fearful it quickly and effectively repels humans and animals with its protective scent.

I mentioned earlier in this chapter that my bed-wetting in boarding school had stopped because something sinister was taking place. I began to harbor an intense hatred of people who terrorized and mercilessly teased the
Lakota hci
(the very Lakota) and the passive, shy, and fearful ones. This hatred gradually developed into a violent rage. I began to speak less and less and to show my rebellious stubbornness more and more, especially as I got older. I experienced my first blackout rage when I was nine years old and in the fourth grade. A girl slapped me and before I even felt the sting, my mind was gone. What brought me to my senses was pain at the top of my head. When I was fully aware of what was going on, I realized that my hair was caught in the bedsprings of the bottom bunk bed and that someone was pulling me by the ankles trying to break up the fight. I was on top of her, hitting her with my fists. I found out later that we fought until a matron came and pulled me off of her. It was a very strange experience, like being able to leave my body and watch what was happening from up above.

I began to read detective magazines and daydreamed about killing white people. Sometimes I drew detailed scenes of bloody carnage, or women being beaten and raped. I despised weakness in people, especially the women who behaved provocatively or who were sexually promiscuous. In my teenage mind, I thought they didn’t know what perverts could do to them! In hindsight, I realize that it was my own self-hatred, self-loathing, and feelings of powerlessness that led me to be judgmental toward other rape victims. I became interested in the weapons section of the detective books and began saving up my babysitting money for an Uzi. As my rages became more frequent I resigned myself to the idea that I would end up in prison for the rest of my life someday for mass murder.