The Tao of Nookomis Page 11

  We talked until nearly midnight. Wayne shared his knowledge of the history of his tribe. I shared what little I knew of the Ojibwe people from the reading I had just completed. We became immediate friends.

  I was curious, of course, about how Wayne was treated in his community as a blind person. Surely from what I saw in the eyes of his students, adult children, grandchildren, and wife, he was a person who was deeply loved, respected, and admired. And even I, who had not spent time around a Native elder since I was a young boy, sensed his gentle spirit. So I gathered my courage and asked him.

  “Wayne,” I said, hesitantly, “what is it like as a non-sighted person, as a teacher, and as a Native person, in the school where you work and the community in which you live?”

  He was sitting in his rocking chair, his white cane resting at his knee, and he reached for it and rubbed it and licked his lips, and thought. Then he finally talked.

  “You know,” he began, “I never had any trouble with people here. Never. I never did. Other places I suppose people judged me differently because I am blind.”

  And he told a story about when he went to Orono for the first time and overheard someone whispering about “that blind injun.”

  “Here,” he said, “I’ve never ever felt any less, or been treated any less. Our ancestors, you see, they had people like me back in them days. I heard about this from my grandparents.”

  He smiled gently.

  “In the old language, the language before the Europeans,” he said, “there was no word for blind. There was no word for deaf. We are all equal in the eyes of the Creator.”

  I WAS GIVEN THE GRANDKIDS’ room to sleep in for the night, and when I finally made my way into bed I drifted right off to sleep. I slept better than I had in a long, long time.

  Wayne was sitting at the kitchen table having coffee when I arose the next day.

  “Did you sleep well last night, my friend?”

  “I slept like a baby.”

  Lorraine had already prepared our breakfast. Oatmeal, toast, bacon, scrambled eggs. The coffee was appropriately strong.

  I knew it was time for me to hit the road. Wayne needed to get to work, and I had a long drive ahead of me. After we had finished our meal, I stood and brought my plate over to the sink and put it in the soapy water.

  “I want to thank the both of you for having me in your home. Your children and grandchildren are very lucky to have the two of you. You both made me feel very special. I feel so much at home here. I’m beginning to see things and think ways I haven’t done before. ”

  And I was thinking how it took a gentle, blind man to open my eyes, to point me in the right direction, and to help me along the way in my journey.

  Wayne put his hand on my shoulder. “Maybe the next time you come around we’ll have some fresh moose meat to fry up.”

  Then he laughed, and so did I.

  “Uncle …” I began to inquire of him.

  He pursed his lips and said, “you see, we Passamaquoddy are still sending you Ojibwe on your way.”

  Maggie

  My birth certificate reads that I was born on February 27, 1951, at the Hennepin County Medical Center in Minneapolis, mother Genevieve Ann Manypenny, father unknown. I remember I had a hard time finding an original copy of that certificate once I decided to go looking for it. I was eighteen years old at the time. At first I went to the Hennepin County offices. After all, that’s where I was living at the time, and I didn’t know any other place to look. Well, they didn’t have it, which made me wonder. Then someone told me that maybe I could find it in the Minnesota Department of Public Records over by the University of Minnesota Hospital, just off Washington Avenue, so I went over there. Ten dollars later and I had my own certified copy. Apparently, illegitimate births are stored at the state office, not at the county of birth. And that made me ask, what if someone didn’t know that she or he was illegitimate? How would the person know where to look? And when they found out, that would be one hell of a way to find out, wouldn’t it?

  I knew things were going to be screwy early on because I grew up being bounced from foster home to foster home, group homes, and for a while, anyway, juvenile centers. It all made sense later on when I was older and the social worker told me my mother signed me away right there at the hospital right after I was born. The first home I remember was up in Brooklyn Center. I started kindergarten there—that’s why I remember. I was living with this family. They were all blond-haired, blue-eyed Scandinavians, true-blue Minnesotans for sure, don’tcha know. I shouldn’t make fun of them. They were really very nice people. They had two boys of their own, both a couple of years older than I was. They were real nice to me, at least that’s what I remember, and I got along at school reasonably well, except for teasing from some boys who called me “squaw baby” and things like that once in a while. I remember once I told my teacher about it. After all, I was her pet, sort of. She told me to tell them that sticks and stones may break my bones, but words would never hurt me. I didn’t like her as much after that.

  Anyway, I stayed with that family until sometime in the middle of the third grade. Then the man got transferred in his job or something, and there I was being sent to a temporary foster home. That was a nightmare, I remember, because I had really gotten to like the lady in the Brooklyn Center home. And the new foster mother would get mad at me sometimes and pinch me hard until I had bruises all over the back of my arms. School wasn’t going too hot, either. I started having a lot of trouble with reading and math. At first I got put into Title I, or whatever it is called, for supplemental reading and math. When that didn’t work they did an assessment and I ended up in an Ld (learning disability) room, where I spent two hours every day. And of course even then as a young kid I noticed that most of the other kids in that room were brown like me, and most of the “regular” kids at the school were whiter than ghosts.

  From there I ended up in Wayzata for a couple of years. Those people were rich, and I was the only child in their home. The woman there bought me new clothes all the time, and we went on trips to Disneyland in California, and to New York to visit their relatives. School wasn’t good, though. I was in another special education room and having a heck of a time getting things to sink in. Looking back at it all, I suppose I had a lot going on in my life, and all that just made school hard to deal with.

  I loved it there in the foster home, though. But the couple got in some awful fights sometimes, and one time the man didn’t come home after one of their big fights. I remember I begged my foster mom to take him back because I knew that if they broke up, I would end up being sent to another home. Well, they broke up.

  By that time I was in the sixth grade and getting tough as nails. I ended up being sent to another foster home somewhere near the West Bank of the University. The couple that took me both taught at the U. Their kids were all grown up and moved away. They had one other foster girl, Marilyn. These people were okay, I guess. But I remember getting dragged to all kinds of boring adult things—art exhibits, guest lecturers, symposiums, poetry readings, and the like. Now that I’m an adult, I’d die to get the opportunity to go to any of these types of events. We never get anything resembling that here in Red Cliff.

  Well anyway, Marilyn, the other foster girl there, was in the seventh grade. She introduced me to smoking and stealing candy and other things from stores. I’d act like the decoy, asking the clerk where things were, while Marilyn helped herself to whatever she could fit in her pockets. We were pretty good at it, as I recall. At least, we never got caught. Marilyn was always talking about running. She had sisters and brothers in other foster homes scattered all over the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, and she must have missed them like crazy. She wanted to go home to her mom, even though she told me that her mom drank a lot.

  At school I was still receiving special education in reading and math and I suppose that it helped. Of course, I noticed most of my schoolmates in that room were brown people like me and I began to resen
t it.

  The U couple, of course, wanted nothing to do with me anymore, so I ended up getting put in my first group home in Eden Prairie. That wasn’t too bad, actually, because I got to be with a bunch of other girls. I stayed there for two years and then I ran again. Don’t ask me why. It was really stupid. Things were going okay there for me at the time, and in school. A couple of us ran together that time. We hitched rides up Highway 61. One of the girls had relatives living near Duluth, she said, and we could stay there. That turned out to be a crock. The highway patrol had us in the back seat of a patrol car just out of Carlton, Minnesota, two days later. One of the other girls and I had decided to hitch back to the Cities. That little escapade put me in the juvenile center.

  Back in the foster home I was a good follower, so the night Marilyn decided it was time to run, I tagged along. We took buses to South Minneapolis to her old neighborhood and found her mom and boyfriend, and a bunch of other people, all drinking it up. It was scary. I remember I didn’t want to stay. But I did anyway, for a couple of days. Then her mom sobered up and said that she could get into trouble for having me there and that I would have to go. So there I was out on the street. Twelve years old. Luckily, the police picked me up just a couple of hours later walking down Cedar Avenue on my way back to the West Bank.

  From there, things were kind of a blur. I bounced around in temporary or permanent placements, a few other group homes, and in and out of the juvenile center. I was hanging out with some pretty rugged kids, so school wasn’t going great, either. I’m thinking I was in special education from the third grade on all the way through high school. That and skipping school and not doing homework, not studying, all that kind of crap sort of added up to a pretty dismal school transcript.

  But I grew up or something, all of a sudden, when I was seventeen and entering the twelfth grade. I promised my social worker I was changed, and she believed me for some reason. She found a nice, older, single lady to take me in for my senior year. She had a nice big house just off Cedar in a mixed neighborhood. Her name was Martha.

  She was the closest thing to a mother I ever had.

  Looking back now, I feel fortunate I survived those growing-up years. I could have easily ended up getting killed the way I lived. Drinking, drugs, you name it. But Martha was just this kindly old lady, and I don’t know how else to put it, but I didn’t want to disappoint her. So I buckled down and starting going to all my classes. I quit hanging out with the losers and found a couple of decent friends. I even had a nice boyfriend who picked me up and took me to cinemas, just like in the movies. Shit, every other boy I’d known before had just tried to get me drunk so he could get in my pants.

  I graduated from Minneapolis South in 1969, at eighteen years of age. My diploma had an asterisk on it, I found out later, to signify that I was in special education. Here, I thought I was special for another reason. Martha said I could stay with her as long as I wanted, even though the county ended the foster care checks. I stayed with her until I was twenty-two. By then I was paying her some rent to help with the bills. She got sick, though, and died of some kind of viral infection my senior year of college. Her funeral was really sad because she really didn’t have any family. I was it.

  There had been a Native program at South High when I was there, and I hung out there once in a while because I always knew I was Native. I just didn’t know much about my Native heritage, and hanging out there was my way of finding out. Anyway, the Native counselor asked me if I was interested in going to college, and I told him I’d never really thought about it. I wasn’t sure I could handle college, being in special education and all. He said a lot of money was available, and I would probably get a free ride if I packaged it right with my financial aid.

  I remember him asking me, “So what rez are you from?”

  And I said something like, “Franklin Avenue.” you see, all the Native people in Minneapolis, it seemed anyway, lived on Franklin Ave.

  “No, I mean, where are you enrolled?” he asked again. I had to tell him I had no idea.

  So that’s what got me to looking for my birth certificate. I found it but didn’t follow up on finding out what rez I was from. That was about it for the next four years, because college preoccupied my time.

  I suppose having spent most of my school years thinking I was dumb, and being in special education classrooms, college wasn’t even on my radar. But the Native counselor talked me into it somehow and I ended up applying and getting accepted at Metro State in St. Paul. My grades weren’t that good in high school, and my ACT scores were pretty dismal. Maybe they were trying to meet some racial quota or something and that’s how I got in. They had a good program to support us Native students, though, and I went to the college’s access center to help me out with academics, particularly with writing. They found me a good editor, and that seemed to make a lot of difference. I did pretty well there, all things considered, graduating in 1973 with a teaching degree in early childhood special education. I suppose because I had spent most of my schooling receiving special educational services myself, this was something I knew well. In my heart, though, I wanted to go back into schools as the teacher. And as a Native teacher, I wanted to see if I could do something to help young students of color in special education, be their advocate, their voice. I wanted to do something about the high placement rate of students of color in special education as well.

  I got my first teaching job at an early childhood center near Chicago Avenue and Lake Street, in the heart of the ghetto, and worked there for six years. And I fell in love and married a white man I first met at an early childhood conference in Rosedale. That didn’t last. In less than six months I was divorced, wounded, relieved, and I intended to be more cautious the next time around. That is a whole other story, though.

  Like so many Native people living in Minneapolis, I attended pow-wows and other social gatherings at the Minneapolis Indian Center. I still didn’t know if I was an enrolled tribal member or not, or where I really came from. But I wondered about it, more so as the years passed. So one day I asked a social worker friend who worked there how I might go about finding out, and she said if I had my birth certificate she would help me begin the search. She helped me write letters to the Social Security Administration to see if my birth mother, Genevieve Manypenny, was still alive. If she was, she could be identified through her social security number. She told me to visit the area office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in downtown Minneapolis. They had me contact all the agency enrollment offices within their jurisdiction, which included Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan.

  By now it was 1980. Then one day I got a letter from the Ashland Agency saying they had a Genevieve Ann Manypenny on the rolls at Red Cliff Reservation in Wisconsin. The letter also indicated she was deceased.

  I was so disappointed when I read that, I just sat down and cried. But my social worker friend said, “Hey, you might still have a whole family up there in Red Cliff. Let’s go see.”

  So the next weekend we got in my car and drove up to Red Cliff. It was the middle of October and colder than hell there, and I remember thinking, who in the hell could ever live in this godforsaken place? We stayed in Bayfield mostly because it catered to tourists.

  That Sunday we drove back to Minneapolis and I figured there was no looking back. But some kind of invisible ancestral hook must have been pulling me back all the while, because a few months later I saw a job posting for a Head Start ECSE (early childhood special education) teacher at the center in Red Cliff, Wisconsin, and before you know it my application was in the mail. A month later I was there again for my interview, and two weeks after that I was there again looking for a place to live.

  I met Ron, my husband, just a week after I’d moved here. He came into the Head Start building with his brother Eddie, who was one of our cultural aides. I think Ronnie and I fell in love the minute we laid eyes on one another, and there was no turning back fate so far as we were concerned. Before the school year was out
, I was barefoot and pregnant, and standing in our kitchen cooking fry bread.

  In the meantime, I took my birth certificate to the tribal council and proved my ancestry and became an enrolled member of the tribe.

  And I’ve been here ever since.

  This place is so much a part of my soul I will never leave it.

  THE EARLY CHILDHOOD center here never had a Native person as a licensed teacher before, let alone an ECSE teacher. And I take my work seriously, particularly with regards to assessment and being careful so as to not attach the “special ed” label to these young ones unless they truly need the services. There are so many issues from what I see on why so many minorities, Native people, end up in special education. From my perspective, at least, much of the problem is that fuzzy area of race, socio-economic status, and disability. At least from my perspective, race plays its hand in the decision-making process all along the way, from initial referral to placement. If I were to pinpoint the problem to one area in particular, it would be assessment.

  So I am always shooting off my big mouth when I think the other teachers are shirking their teacher duties and just trying to pawn young ones off into my classroom because they can’t deal with the them for some reason or the other. So at least here at our center we are careful in making a placement unless it really is necessary.

  That, of course, isn’t the case when it comes to the local public school. There, all kinds of Native students end up in special education classrooms. And when I found that out, I ran for the Indian parent committee and was elected. I use that as my pulpit to raise hell with the school system. Here they are with 800 or so kids in the schools, over seventy percent of them Native, and nearly all the kids identified for special education are reservation kids. So when I had a chance to talk in front of the school board last week I let them have it with both barrels, and it really got their ears perked up because I let them know that we are going to be watching them. I don’t think they were use to hearing a Native person spit back all that educational jargon to them like they’ve been dishing out to us all these years to confuse us, so it was fun to watch them squirm. Just a summary of what I said, straight from the school board minutes: