Читать книгу Racing Toward Recovery - Lew Freedman - Страница 9

That was a very good homecoming after Wrangell. I got back to doing what I had always been doing with my family. But after the summer passed I was in the same situation again. If I wanted to continue my education, go on and attend high school, there were not many choices. There was no high school in Akiak.

I ended up attending Chemawa Indian School in Oregon. The year in Wrangell was just preparation for four years of high school, starting with the ninth grade. Part of me still wanted to stay home, but I was also excited a bit by going outside of Alaska and seeing another state. This was another boarding school. Going to live out of state seemed different from going to another school in another part of Alaska. I flew into Seattle and then took a bus to Salem, Oregon.

Chemawa was a lot like Wrangell, but it was bigger. There were three dormitories there, Brewer Hall, McNary Hall, and Mitchell Hall. But they had the same kind of rules. It was the same thing as at Wrangell. We had to get up in the morning at a certain time, do this, do that. But the kids were more independent because we were older than we had been at Wrangell. I arrived for high school in the fall of 1969.

Sports had been a high point for me at Wrangell so I wanted to continue playing sports at Chemawa. One big difference was that they had a football team. That was one thing I wanted to try and I did. The mix of people at the school was interesting. There were people at Chemawa from all over Alaska, from Point Barrow, Southeast, the Interior, and also Indian tribes from the Northwest. There were kids there from the Navajo nation.

There were a whole bunch of tribal kids in the student body and we were all curious about football. Nobody had really played, but we had seen games on television and wanted to try it. There were Eskimos from everywhere who signed up. On the first day we were in the locker room and the coach came in and gave as all of the equipment to put on. He said to put it on and go out and play football. We had to figure out how to put the equipment on by ourselves.

Nobody told us how to do it. If you have ever seen all of the pads that go on under the uniform you will know it is not as easy as it sounds to figure out what goes where. We put the hip pads on and then we tried to figure where the piece that was the tail guard went. We wondered what it was for. Was it for our backsides? Or was it to protect our private parts? We didn’t know. We figured that it was to protect our private parts in case we got hit by a helmet on a play. So we agreed on how to put the pads on and ran out to practice. It was very uncomfortable. You had all of these Eskimo kids running around on the football field being very uncomfortable because we had the pads on backwards. Ouch.

We couldn’t move very well and we were grimacing and frowning. All of the coaches looked at us and they were smiling, then they were snickering and then they were laughing. We made the adjustments quickly.

At that time my body was built very differently than it is built now. I was about five-foot-seven inches tall and weighed around 150 pounds. I was also a pretty fast runner, so because of my speed they made me a running back. I was a sprinter back then. Mostly I played positions for a smaller, fast guy. I was a running back throughout my football career and I also returned punts and kickoffs. On defense I was a linebacker. Everybody played offense and defense both at the time. I loved playing football. I really loved it. Our team was the Chemawa Braves.

I was 150 pounds when I first went out for football, but I grew. I got to be 160 pounds and then 170 pounds. I am big-boned, so I had the body frame to handle more weight. I was a fast runner, but I also had some strength from the lifestyle I led in the outdoors at home in Akiak, hunting and fishing and chopping wood.

We didn’t have a lot of size on our team. I think our linemen averaged like 180 or 190 pounds. We played a lot against white schools that had guys that were six-foot-two hulks who weighed 250 pounds. I think our tallest guy was six-foot-one. We were smaller, but we were fast. Our teams weren’t bad.

Our team had a wonderful coach. His name is Kugie Louis. He was the football coach and the track coach. I got the best coaching. He built our stamina and toughness. He was always big on fundamentals. He stressed knowing the fundamentals of the game and always being prepared to play. He talked about us being prepared to run and being prepared to have your body withstand pain. He was the best coach I ever had.

In high school I played football, basketball, and competed on the track team. I was the captain of the freshman team in basketball in ninth grade. As a sophomore I played on the junior varsity and the varsity. My junior year I was cocaptain of the basketball team.

As a member of the track team I ran the 100-yard dash and the 220. I also did some low hurdles and high hurdles. My best event was probably the 100-yard dash. My best time was 10.5 seconds. My best 220 time was under 23 seconds. I wasn’t slow.

The Chemawa school was a lot like being at Wrangell in that I was living away from home again and a lot of the program was aimed at acculturation. They still wanted to strip away our culture, I think, but it was a little bit more liberal in that we were allowed traditional dances. The Navajos did some Indian dancing and the Northwest tribes did their dances. They were good dancers, too.

They did tell us that our goal should be to go to college. Academics were stressed and I think they had a pretty good academic program. I was a pretty good student overall. I had good enough grades to make it to the honor roll. I was a good athlete who was good in sports and that’s how the other students knew me. I had not participated in student council or student government in any way, but at the end of my junior year I decided to run for student body president. I won.

That was the first time I had ever been involved in student government and I didn’t know what I was getting into. Suddenly, I was into politics and I got interested in that. From there I dropped sports and focused on student government. During the summer after my junior year I went to a training program in the central part of Missouri at Westmont College to learn more about it.

I was given the opportunity to spend three weeks at this small, liberal arts college not far from St. Louis. There were kids there from all over the United States. It was an intensive program where I learned how to conduct meetings and understand Roberts Rules of Order, politics, and the issues of student governments. It was designed to help develop leadership and that’s where I think I got all of the leadership skills I needed to carry out my presidential duties my senior year.

So I gave up sports for politics for my senior year. I could have done both, but I decided to focus more on academics and student government.

I think my four years in Oregon really helped shape me as a person. I broadened my horizons. I got a chance to play on sports teams. I became president of the student body and learned about political issues. That was a whole new area for me then. The school did ask quite a bit from its students. I got an exposure to the western way of life in the United States, and by that I mean western as in American as opposed to Native. But Chemawa also made us learn practical skills. We did our own banking and by that I mean that we started a student bank my senior year. We started other programs. One was like a junior entrepreneurship and we started a business selling hamburgers. The business was for fund-raising for the student body.

We started another program built around alcohol education. We had all heard for years from white people and from movies that there was an image of “the drunken Indian” out there in society. We started a program when I was school president to try and focus on changing that image of the drunken Indian. It was basically a counseling program for people with substance abuse problems, both for students and staff who needed help. I was only twenty years old at the time, but I recognized that my people had problems with alcohol that needed to be fixed.

One thing we worked on was alcohol awareness in terms of the harm it could do. I worked with a guy named Steve Labuff. We also started a campus patrol program to help people who were drunk and to prevent crime problems. We wanted our campus to be safe and to make sure people got home all right.

Part of the idea was also to improve the image of Alaska Natives and Indians by promoting heroes. Ira Hayes was one of the six Marines that worked to raise the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II in the famous photograph. He helped to raise that flag.

My father saw the future pretty well. Although he was very involved in preserving Native traditions he also knew that things were going to change. He told his children that we should get a good education and get as much schooling as we could. I think getting that western education was important. I remember my dad saying, “I think you guys need to go get your education and try your best in school because you’re going to be dealing, negotiating for land. You’re going to be negotiating your rights. You’re going to be negotiating a lot of big issues that are going to come up.”

He really knew what he was talking about on this subject. He said we should try to go to the best schools that have the best education and provide the best opportunities. “Try to get as much education as you can so you can protect what we have,” he said. “We’re going to be challenged for our way of life.” His generation did not get a similar education and many could not read or write, nor could they understand these government policies that were popping up.

He was right. The Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act was implemented in 1971. The act was signed into law by President Richard Nixon and formalized land dispersal in Alaska to twelve Native corporations and 200 village corporations. A few years later the Alaska Pipeline opened and began pumping oil from the North Slope of Alaska not far from Barrow. Congress passed the Endangered Species Act in 1973 and that affected Alaska Natives’ hunting and fishing prospects. The Molly Hootch Case resulted in a consent decree in 1976. That came from a lawsuit filed by Alaska teenagers that provided for more education in villages. New high schools were built all over. If that had become the policy a decade earlier I never would have had to go live in Wrangell or go to school in Oregon.

All of these huge issues affected rural Alaskans economically, in our subsistence lifestyle, and in the way we educated our children.

When I was a teenager going to Chemawa my father—and other Elders—said getting a white man’s education was important, regardless of whether we liked it or not. They understood they had been passed by and missed out on getting a high school or college education and they wanted things to be better for their children and grandchildren. Their thinking was: You guys have to go. Go and try to get your degree because you are going to be dealing with these tough issues. It was important to my dad and my mom and the Elders for people like me to get that western education. They were concerned about the future and they had every right to be.

Even though I liked Chemawa more than Wrangell and I had some good experiences there, I was still homesick a lot. When I came home during the summers I got jobs either working in the canneries in Dillingham fish processing, or working as a firefighter. Alaska always had forest fires in the summer when it gets dry and lightning strikes. Most of the fires start that way. I got to see my family, but I had to work for money during the summer for my expenses at school.

In Akiak we could live from hunting and fishing and berry picking, but I needed cash in Oregon. My entire four-year high school experience was a lot like going to college for four years. My schedule was structured the same way. Go to school in the fall, come home in the spring and visit with the family briefly, and then go make some money to have at school. I couldn’t really depend on my mom or my dad for money because they didn’t have any. My dad was a businessman by then, though, running a grocery store. The store was called the Tim Williams Store. My grandfather Peter Williams had his own store that was just down the road from where my dog yard is now.

My grandfather was a very good businessman. He traveled to Seattle, to San Francisco, to Japan as part of his business work. I don’t know how he did it with his limited education, but I believe he did very well as a businessman. After my grandfather Peter died, his brother Joe took over. He ended up selling it to a Native cooperative, so we didn’t have the store in the family anymore. Then my father started his store. I never worked in the store. My father pretty much took care of the store on his own. I wasn’t that interested in working there. I worked, but I did other things that interested me more.

When I became the president of the student body at Chemawa it opened a lot of doors to opportunities and experiences. That afforded me the chance to visit with the Yakima Indian nation and to travel to the Navaho nation. The goal was to visit tribes and learn how they operated. That was part of becoming a leader and I learned quite a bit. Looking over the tribes had a big influence on me. It was a good political education and taught me lessons about leadership.

By being elected president of the student body I got an entirely other kind of education at Chemawa. I learned a lot of politics and I learned about other Native tribes and cultures. My advisor, Clement Azure, was the one who suggested the training prior to my term as president. He was one of the best student advisors.

Up until then I didn’t know how to run a meeting or carry out the directions or rules that the student body made or the student council passed. I’d say the school benefitted from me attending that program in Missouri. I learned about much more than overseeing meetings. I learned how to do something. For me alcohol was already an issue to be looked at. When I traveled I heard that “drunken Indian” phrase a lot. I heard people say that if they just looked at the way Indians were portrayed in the media, they were all drunks. The portrayal in many places, certainly the movies, did show all Indians as drunks who didn’t know what they were doing. The image was that they are all killing themselves and that they’re always drunk.

At that time the activists Russell Means and Dennis Banks were making speeches and they came to our school. They talked about the American Indian Movement and sovereignty. They really got me thinking when they talked about the history of how the federal government had treated Indians and Alaska Natives. They said, “It’s not right. We need to change that. We need to take our land back. We need to take our rights back. We’ve lost them so far.” What was interesting was that the United States was involved in a war in South Vietnam at the time and they seemed to be making waves.

I was wondering, Gee, how come these guys are saying that? I was strongly affected by it. Most of the Native people I knew were not like that. Our people were healthy. They weren’t like that stereotype. I thought, We’re better than that. I also did a lot of reading, books like Custer Died for Your Sins, and read about the Wounded Knee Movement.

Russell Means and Dennis Banks made a big impression on me and they were right. American Indians had lost their land and they wanted to reclaim some of that land. The American government broke every promise it made to Indians. It broke every treaty.

My senior year was a turning point for my life. It raised my consciousness. I became much more socially aware. I had liked playing sports and I had fun doing it. When I made the change to becoming student body president my last year in high school that one thing became a big part of my life. That time period led me to the rest of my life. Yes, I do like dog mushing and remain involved in that sport, but becoming student body president and having those experiences helped me for the next thirty or forty years.

That year I threw myself full blast into politics and government and issues. I gained so much awareness. It was never the same for me after that.