My Life on the Road (27 page)
Read My Life on the Road Online
Authors: Gloria Steinem
Tags: #Biography & Autobiography, #Feminism, #Nonfiction, #Personal Memoir, #Retail
As she stood there, strong, kind, and not at all intimidated by another chief of state, I was not the only one in the audience who thought,
She could be president.
I also thought,
In a just country, she would be.
I
N
W
ILMA’S LAST YEAR
on the board, she overlapped with Rebecca Adamson, a shy, slender, magnetic woman who was a self-educated expert on grassroots economics. Younger and more diffident than Rayna and Wilma, she seemed to defeat her shyness by sheer force of will. Her gift for understanding everything from the most humble detail to the most challenging economic theory reminded me of that 1930s ideal, the working-class intellectual.
Unlike Rayna and Wilma, Rebecca had grown up totally outside Indian Country. She was saved by summers in the Smoky Mountains, where her Cherokee grandmother lived. There, Rebecca discovered a way of life that felt like home. Finally, she quit university to become the first staff member hired by the Coalition of Indian Controlled School Boards, a group with the huge goal of reforming schools that were abusing or shaming Indian children, whether they were run by religions, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, or local school boards. In Rebecca’s experience, this right to schools that didn’t shame and abuse was to become to Indian Country what registering and voting in the South was to African Americans—the beginning of a larger movement. Given the parallels of prejudice and power, Rebecca had her life threatened more than once.
By the time I met her, she had finished college part time, earned an advanced degree in economics, and was advising the UN International Labor Organization plus indigenous groups in other countries. She had a gift for being understandable—a sure sign of a good organizer—and wrote an essay on reservation life with the concise title “Land Rich, Dirt Poor.” She also put her organizing goal into a four-word slogan for T-shirts:
DEVELOPMENT
—
WITH VALUES ADDED
.
I wouldn’t fully understand how deep “values added” went until Rebecca asked me to come to a two-day meeting of activists near the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. My role was to bring knowledge of Gandhian village-level economics, plus the low-income and welfare women who had created their own family-friendly small businesses with the support of the Ms. Foundation. Otherwise, I had no idea what to expect.
Our meeting took place in the small tribally owned motel next to South Dakota’s Badlands. The goal was to figure out how to create communal economic success in an individualistic economic world.
For two full days and late into the nights, this casual, serious, idealistic, practical discussion went on. I noticed how carefully everyone listened and how little ego seemed invested in speaking. Every once in a while, Larry Emerson, a Navajo educator, and Birgil Kills Straight, the Lakota traditionalist from the Oglala Sioux Nation who had first hired Rebecca in the school movement, would speak, sometimes illustrating their comments on the blackboard; then they’d just listen again. Neither seemed to need to talk a lot, to show how much he knew, to approve or disapprove what others said, or to be in control. It took me a while to realize,
These men talk only when they have something to say.
I almost fell off my chair.
In those meetings, I learned that even economic diagrams needn’t be linear. Ours was a nest of concentric circles, and an enterprise was measured by its value to each circle, from the individual and family to the community and environment. I realized that Rebecca and her colleagues were trying to do nothing less than transform the System of National Accounts, the statistical framework here and in most countries for measuring economic activity. For instance, the value of a tree depends on its estimated value or sale price, but if it is sold and cut down, there is no accounting on the debit side of the ledger for loss of oxygen, seeding of other trees, or value to the community or the environment. This group was inventing a new way of measuring profit and loss.
By the end of our days together, I understood economics in a whole new way. A balance sheet really could be about balance.
F
AITH
S
MITH, AN
O
JIBWA
educator from Chicago, followed Rebecca onto the board. Quiet, intense, and classically beautiful, Faith represented the half of Native people who live in cities and have a multitribe experience. To give urban Native students a college that included their own history, she helped to found the Native American Educational Services College, a small, private, Indian-controlled, degree-granting institution where students ranged in age from seventeen to seventy.
She told me that only 10 percent of Native students who enter mainstream institutions stay long enough to get a degree, partly because they are in an academic version of the world that doesn’t include their experience or even their existence. However, this college was graduating 70 percent of those who entered and sending 20 to 30 percent on to graduate schools.
When I went to see Faith at the college in Chicago, we had lunch with students who told me that, in other schools, they felt forced to choose between an education that excluded them and a community that included them. Here, they could have both.
Lunch was a lesson in itself. The students explained that food was a generational marker. Their grandparents and others born before World War II had lived in the country and eaten traditional Native foods, the kind that had caused colonists to write home about how much taller, stronger, and healthier Indians were. Then came generations of people living on reservations, dependent on government rations of refined sugar, lard, and white flour, and also with trading posts that dealt in alcohol. Health declined, and alcoholism and diabetes went up. Every student now eating healthy food in that sunny multipurpose classroom had at least one friend or family member who was on dialysis. Taking relatives to hospitals and clinics had become a family ritual.
I could see Faith was an example in many ways. For instance, she was president of this college, yet she paid herself the same as the teachers and the janitor whenever cash flow became an issue. Her physical self was important, too. Overworked but healthy and slender, she was a living, breathing example of the possible. A sign on the lunchroom wall brought it home:
YOU CANNOT THINK YOURSELF INTO RIGHT LIVING.
YOU LIVE YOURSELF INTO RIGHT THINKING. —Native Elders
Whenever I was on new turf, I asked about the vertical history of people who had lived there in the long past or who might still be there. I tried never to give a speech without including Native examples, just as we do other groups in this diverse country. It was like casting bread upon the waters. It almost always came back buttered—with new knowledge.
·
On a book tour in my own college town of Northampton, Massachusetts, I try out my question about original cultures. A very old and scruffy-looking white guy at the back of the bookstore says he’s heard there are abandoned fields nearby that have an odd pattern of large bumps in the earth every few feet, like a giant rubber bathmat. They’ve been there since time immemorial and are supposed to be an Indian method of planting.
I enlist the help of a Smith College librarian. We discover the bumps are
milpa,
small mounds of earth on which complementary crops were planted. Unlike linear plowing, which encourages water runoff and soil erosion, the circular pattern traps rainfall. Each mound is planted with a cluster of the Three Sisters that were the staples of Indian agriculture: corn, beans, and squash. The corn provided a stalk for the beans to climb, while also shading the vulnerable beans. The ground cover from the squash stabilized the soil, and the bean roots kept the soil fertile by providing nitrogen. As a final touch, marigolds and other natural pesticides were planted around each mound to keep harmful insects away. Altogether it was a system so perfect that in some Central American countries too poor to adopt linear plowing with machinery, artificial pesticides, and monocrops of agribusiness, the same
milpa
have been producing just fine for four thousand years.
19
Not only that, but
milpa
can be planted in forests without clear-cutting the trees; at most, by removing a few branches to let sunlight through on a mound. This method was a major reason why three-fifths of all food staples in the world were developed in the Americas.
·
I’m in Oklahoma City for a Women of the Year lunch honoring women business leaders. This is not a city where it seems like a good idea to ask about Indian Country. It is so conservative that its major newspaper prints Bible quotations on the front page. Also I’m distracted by making fund-raising calls on which depends the fate of
Ms.
magazine. Its brief and accidental owner is threatening to close it unless we come up with the purchase price pronto—a form of extortion, since he knows its staff cares too much to let it go.
After lunch a middle-aged woman with an American flag in her lapel tells me that she is haunted by a story her grandmother told her. An Oklahoma mining company was founded in the 1930s for the sole purpose of burrowing into and looting Indian burial mounds. Local newspapers compared its “finds” to the treasures of Egyptian tombs, a description that enticed souvenir hunters but made the burial mounds seem even more remote from local Native families whose ancestors had been interred there. This company traveled the country selling looted artifacts—flint knives as big as swords, copper bowls, pipes made to look like animals, shells carved into jewelry, pearls—everything for a few dollars or even pennies. Since they assumed there was little market for cloth or wood items, they piled them up and burned them.
Only after a couple of years did the Oklahoma legislature bow to outrage from archaeologists and Native families by passing a law against this looting. In revenge, the mining company strung dynamite through the mounds and blew them up.
I will remember this day in Oklahoma for the vengefulness of that dynamite and the importance of that grandmother’s story. When I return to my hotel room, there is another reason. A woman I have not met but who cares about the fate of
Ms.
magazine calls to say that she will help us buy it out of bondage. Her
yes
puts us over the top. As the last of a dozen women investors, she makes its continuation possible.
She also remarks on what a coincidence it is to find me in Oklahoma City, where her family comes from, and where she grew up. She is the feminist granddaughter of that very conservative family that owns the Oklahoma City newspaper with the Bible verses on the front page. She fled Oklahoma but took with her the spirit of the land, not the newspaper.
·
In Arizona where I’ve been speaking, I’m invited to Thanksgiving dinner by Leslie Silko, a Laguna Pueblo novelist and filmmaker whose writing seems to link all eras and living things. I know her only from spending one odd weekend with her and her screenwriting partner, Larry McMurtry, at a hotel near the Dallas/Fort Worth airport. We had met to talk about working on a possible film project together, but never could solve the problem of how to do the script. As compensation, we bought exotic cowboy boots.
Dinner is with Leslie and her mother at home, a small sun-bleached wooden house that looks as if it grew out of the desert. After dinner, Leslie gives me the memorable gift of a ride on one of her Indian ponies. Among the things I discover, as we amble along at the ponies’ own pace, is that the Serpent Woman of the Midwest is called Spider Woman here in the Southwest—but she is the same source of creation and energy. I remember Spider Woman from the first page of Leslie’s novel
Ceremony.
She is the Thought Woman who names things and so brings them into being. Until then, I had imagined myself alone in believing that spiders should be the totem of writers. Both go into a space alone and spin out of their own bodies a reality that has never existed before.
Until this ride, I’d felt good in nature only if it was near the ocean. Perhaps because an ocean beach had always been our goal during the travels in my childhood, or perhaps because my experiences of midwestern green expanses had been cold and lonely, the ocean was the only part of nature that I, a city and village person, really enjoyed.
But this was different. The great expanse of ivory-to-beige-to-rose sand, the seeming nothingness that turned out to be a delicate universe of plant life as soon as you looked closer—all this was laid out before us as we rode in the late afternoon light.
I tried to explain all this to Leslie, a little ashamed of confessing any discomfort in nature to this woman who was so at home in it, yet mystified as to why I was undepressed and unreminded of midwestern childhood sadness here, so far from any ocean.
“Well, of course,” Leslie said. “The desert used to be the ocean floor.”
Suddenly, I had a moment of seeing this land as a living being in its own time span, as she did.
Clearly, Columbus never “discovered” America, in either sense of that word. The people who knew it were already here.
Wilma did not run for a third term as principal chief; she had received a diagnosis of cancer and needed chemotherapy. I knew she dreaded the regular visits to the hospital for weeks of outpatient infusions. She had already spent way too much of her life in hospitals, and she was not as invulnerable as she seemed. Her two daughters had been with her faithfully in past health crises, but they had jobs and lives in Oklahoma. I asked Wilma if she would let me stay with her in Boston, instead of going on a scheduled trip to Australia that I could easily do another time—hoping but not believing that she, always the strong one, would say yes—but she actually did. Of all the gifts she had given me, that was the greatest.
Wilma and I stayed in a big old-fashioned house that friends of hers had left for the summer. Every morning we went to the hospital, where chemicals were dripped slowly into her veins, then we came home to watch movies we had rented, including every episode of Helen Mirren’s
Prime Suspect,
a depiction of female strength and complexity that Wilma loved.
For me, those weeks in Boston, with Wilma, became a lesson in her ability to be “of good mind,” in her phrase, which also meant a people’s ability to survive. Her hope was to preserve what she called The Way, to keep it alive, for that future moment when the current obsession with excess and hierarchy imploded. Wilma said many Native people believed that the earth as a living organism would just one day shrug off the human species that was destroying it—and start over. In a less cataclysmic vision, humans would realize that we are killing our home and each other, and seek out The Way. That’s why Native people were guarding it.
This seemed impossibly generous. It also seemed just plain impossible. Too many Native people have themselves forgotten or forsaken The Way, with too few chances to relearn it. This worldview has more layers than I know, but it seems to start with a circle in which all living things are related, and with a goal of balance, not dominance, which upsets balance.
In our weeks of talk, movies, and friendship, I watched as Wilma turned a medical ordeal into one more event in her life, but not its definition. I believe she was teaching me an intimate form of The Way. In her words, “Every day is a good day—because we are part of everything alive.”
That wasn’t Wilma’s only gift to me. Often over the last dozen years, I’ve joined her in Oklahoma at the end of the summer for the Cherokee National Holiday: days filled with ceremonial dances, feasting on traditional and not-so-traditional foods, buying creations of artists and craftspeople in booths that ring the campground, and meeting members of other nations who come as dancers and guests. It was there that I finally fulfilled the dancing prophecy of the women who gave me that ceremonial red shawl in Houston so many years before.
O
N A HUGE GRASSY FIELD
surrounded by low bleachers and tall klieg lights, dozens of traditional dancers were circling slowly in the summer night. Each participant or group was dressed and dancing in a traditional style of a tribe and a part of the country, but each person was unique, too. There was no program to explain the order of the dancers. Each seemed focused internally, not on the audience. Prizes would be given out eventually, but no one seemed aware of being judged.
This balance between tribe and individuality, community and uniqueness, was a surprise in a world that makes us think we have to make a choice between them.
After this public Holiday, Wilma and Charlie invited me to join them in the all-night Cherokee Stomp Dance that follows. Even after 1978, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act finally lifted the legal ban on sacred rituals, this ceremony, which had gone on for millennia, remained safe and secret, or at least private. Outsiders had to be invited to go—or even to know
where
to go.
We drove down dark rural roads with no signs or lights to mark their twists and turns, then parked in an unmarked field amid dozens of cars and pickup trucks. Walking toward a large flickering light rising into the sky, I gradually saw that it came from a bonfire that was even taller than the men and women moving around it. On our side were rough wooden shelters and dozens of long picnic tables, all lit with lanterns or bare bulbs hanging from the trees. They were laden with enough food to last the night. There were old-fashioned cauldrons of stew, platters of fried chicken, dozens of deep-dish fruit pies, and mounds of fry bread made with the white flour, lard, and sugar that government rations had turned into a time-honored and unhealthy treat. Alcohol was not allowed in this sacred space, but there were coolers of soft drinks and urns of coffee. Family groups were eating or talking quietly—not hushed, as in a church, but not loud or boisterous either. People were watching the dancers from lawn chairs, some far from the fire and wrapped in blankets against the chill, others closer and just resting before rejoining the dancing. On the other side of the huge bonfire, I could see a shadowy group of men chanting deep-toned call-and-response songs.
Dancers spiraled around the huge bonfire, the innermost circle barely moving and the outermost one increasing in speed like a whip until only the young and strong could keep up. Charlie invited me to join with him, and it was daunting, like trying to get on a moving train. Once inside, I realized that the dancers were not so much stomping as caressing the earth with each sliding step. So many together made a deep
whooshing
sound. We formed a curved line, like a huge living nautilus shell, with women elders at its heart around the fire. I knew from Wilma that their heavy leggings were sewn with small tortoise shells, and each shell was filled with tiny pebbles, so as their feet and rattling shells hit the ground, there was a sound I’d never heard before, yet it was right and familiar. Women elders were keeping the rhythm of life.
I knew that Wilma should be dancing with these women elders at the center near the fire. But could she?
I sat with her at the outer edge of the firelight as she prepared for a ritual that has survived centuries of land loss, warfare, lethal epidemics, outlawed languages and spiritual practices, and other attempts to take away home, culture, pride, family, and life itself. I watched as Wilma wrapped thick strips of cloth from knee to ankle, covering the steel brace that she could not walk without, adding the weight of tortoise shells and stones by her own choice. She moved out of the dark, past the dancers at the speeding end of the spiral, into the inner circle of women moving around the fire.
And then she danced.
I
T’S A FEW YEARS LATER,
and I know that Wilma still has health problems. Lately, she has had a series of tests for fatigue and back pains. But I assume she will overcome these obstacles because she always has. I have been with her through dialysis because of kidney disease inherited from her father, a kidney transplant, cancer brought on by immune suppressants to maintain the transplant, chemotherapy and a second transplant, then a second bout with cancer.
For a long time, we’ve wanted to write a book together. Now we’ve made plans to set aside the month of May 2010 to spread out our notes and research on her kitchen table and start writing about traditional practices in original cultures that modern ones could learn from. She has even less time for writing than I do, so we’re excited about it. Also, if we have one more start-up left in us, it will be a school for organizers. Wilma can pass on her gift for creating independence; I can explain why stories and listening are part of change that comes from the bottom up. Organizers from this and other countries can come to teach and brainstorm solutions to one another’s problems.
In March I’m at a conference at my own college, where I always imagine my former self on campus, a little scared and out of place. Yet now I’m about to be seventy-six and planning to live to a hundred. I’m doing work I love, with friends I love. What could be better than that?
Then I get an unusual message from Wilma:
Can I come now instead of waiting for May
?
I know what this means. I cancel conference and birthday plans. On the phone with Charlie, I learn that Wilma has been diagnosed with fourth-stage pancreatic cancer. It is one of the least curable and most painful forms.
Two plane flights and a long drive later, I arrive at Wilma and Charlie’s house on Mankiller Flats. Her caregiving team is assembling. Besides Charlie, there are Gina and Felicia, her two daughters, who come and go from their nearby homes; Dr. Gloria Grim, a young physician who heads the Cherokee Rural Health Clinics that Wilma started; also two of Wilma’s longtime women friends, one a nurse. They have had a lifetime pact to come and stay whenever one of Wilma’s many health crises seems likely to be her last.
Wilma herself is lying in a hospital bed next to the big four-poster she shares with Charlie, so they will still be in the same room. She is calm, honest, laconic, even funny, and as clear as any doctor about what is happening inside her body. She can tell I haven’t accepted any of this yet. As if to comfort me, she says most Americans want to die at home, but many spend their last weeks in a hospital without friends and family. I ask her if she’s now organizing a campaign for the right to die at home. This makes her laugh, and I buy some time.
All I can think of is her description of her near-death experience after the head-on car crash years earlier. She told me it felt as if she were flying through space, faster than any living thing could fly, feeling warm and loved in every pore of her being, as if she were one with the universe, then realizing:
This is the purpose of life!
Only the thought of her two young daughters made her turn back.
I’ve always remembered that and hoped other people I love would share this last feeling. One day I hope I will, too. But I can’t think about such a moment for Wilma now. I can’t wish it for her, because then she will be gone. She shows me a statement she is making about her illness, explaining that she is “mentally and spiritually prepared for the journey.” She’s definitely more ready than I am.
That night I’m bolted awake by hearing Wilma cry out in pain. I find Charlie warming blankets on a potbellied stove. As a traditional healer, he not only knows the uses of herbs but has an instinct for the untried. He has devised a system of spreading heated blankets over Wilma’s body, and it does seem to relieve the pain. This terrifying sequence is repeated several times.
The next day I ask the young Dr. Grim, who could not be more different from her name, what can be done about the pain. She says Wilma knows that morphine and other opiates would help, but taking enough to cut the pain would also dull her consciousness. She wants to be fully present for as long as she can.
In the next few days, relatives, friends, and colleagues come from miles around to pay their respects. They sit near her, reminisce about the past, argue politics for the future, and bring pies, cakes, and casseroles for ever-increasing numbers of visitors. Children bring flowers, or sing a song from church or school, or just watch television. Some stare at Wilma and their parents in a way that says they will never forget. As some of the older visitors leave, they say, “I’ll see you on the other side of the mountain.”
I’ve never seen such honesty about dying.
People closest to the family do the small and continuous tasks: laundry, bringing in firewood, feeding Wilma’s indoor dog and outdoor cats. Soon, they include our mutual friends of many years, Kristina Kiehl and Bob Friedman, who fly in from San Francisco. Kristina invents a way of washing Wilma’s hair in bed since she can no longer stand in the shower. Bob takes over the continual task of washing dishes for the many people who gather in the big kitchen, talking softly.
At night Wilma calls out in pain. Then it begins during the day, too. I can’t bear it. I go into full research mode and phone every physician I know. I learn that there are several kinds of drastic nerve blocks that could diminish her pain and leave her mind clear. But such procedures can be done only in a hospital.
Wilma’s caregiving team has a conference with Dr. Grim, who says a local ambulance could take her to and from the hospital—more than two hours or so each way. We talk to Wilma. She thinks about it. The ambulance comes and parks in the yard just in case. She decides she might die in transit, or become too hooked to tubes to leave the hospital, and she wants to be at home in Indian Country. She thanks us for giving her a choice. To me, she says with some of her old humor, “You’re an organizer to the end.”
It also reminds me of an organizing principle:
Anybody who is experiencing something is more expert in it than the experts.
From that moment on, I accept Wilma’s wisdom.
Seeing that I need a task, Wilma’s daughters assign me the duty of making sure each visitor’s contribution is recorded on a list in the kitchen. I write names down next to rhubarb and peach pies, vats of sweet iced tea, and trays of cornbread. A high school student carries in crates of bottled water, and a silent man in overalls mows the lawn just because it needs it. Wilma’s family wants to be able to thank each person, hence the list. Once again the individual honors the community, and vice versa. I finally understand why Winterhawk, Charlie’s son by an earlier marriage, turned down a scholarship to Dartmouth and stayed here instead. It was not just land that brought Wilma home; it was also community.
At the long kitchen table, knowing Wilma creates a bond among us, and strangers talk. The husband of her dear friend who died in the car crash has been here for days, and explains that Wilma helped to raise their daughter. Gail Small, Wilma’s friend and one of the activists she admires and profiled in her book
Every Day Is a Good Day,
has come all the way from the Northern Cheyenne Nation in Montana. There, Gail has waged a lifetime battle to keep extractive and exploitive energy companies from destroying the land, and to keep religious schools from abusing the next generation. As she says, “Children were sexually molested by priests and nuns, then came home to spread the cancer themselves.” She started not only an environmental group called Native Action, but also a high school on the reservation.
