Stolen Life

by Rudy Wiebe

  “You poor thing,” he says, and takes me in his arms and pulls me to sit beside him on the bed. “You’ll be my little girl now.… I won’t let … anyone hurt you.… I’ve chosen you.… I’ll take care of you.… You’re mine.”

  He lays me back on the bed. I turn to stone.

  When did this happen? How?

  I am standing beside Leon in our living room. He has just brought me back and he gives Mom some money and she is angry. She throws the whole wad of bills into the woodstove, and Leon quickly grabs into the fire and pulls it out again and runs away, crying in his little squeaks. Maybe he burned himself. Mom jerks the presents I hold away from me, a white jacket and hat to keep me warm, and into the stove they go. But she keeps a beautiful plaid skirt and fur muff; she gives them to Karen to wear to the Catholic junior high, where she goes and gets very good marks. I stay in the house, but some days later I hear a noise. I peek out and see older boys carrying Karen. She is wearing the plaid skirt. They bring her into the room, Kathy and I sleep in the bunk bed because we have both started to wet our beds again at night, and they lay Karen on the double bed where she sleeps with Minnie.

  She is bleeding. Is she bleeding because she was hurt or because her periods have started?

  Nineteen seventy-two was a presidential-election year, a good time to exert political pressure. The incumbent president, Richard Nixon, and Senator George McGovern were both running hard. It was while the campaigns heated up in the middle of October that Cecilia, after three and a half months of work, quit her job at the Berkeley Pit. She also gave up a chance to have a movie made about her—the first woman, first Native, mother with six kids and a disabled miner husband, driving a 100-ton pit truck—and turned her Caddy east on Montana Highway Ten, heading for South Dakota. She was responding to the American Indian Movement’s call to join their “Trail of Broken Treaties” caravan and move on Washington.

  Over a year before that trek took place, Clarence tells me, when several AIM members came to Butte at Cecilia’s invitation and heard the details of Earl’s death, the leader of the group had told the Johnsons this was exactly what the new Indian movement was about: to seek redress for the continued wanton killing, the persistent, prejudicial violation of the human rights of Indians in the United States. For several days, the leader tried to contact the Butte police and the mayor, but when he identified himself as being from AIM he could never arrange an appointment; instead he received anonymous, threatening calls at his hotel.

  “It’s like being Black in America,” he told the Johnsons. “And the NAACP and Black Panthers are doing something about it. And so will we, for ourselves.”

  He believed the AIM campaign of focused, public action could be started right here; he would bring five hundred Indians to town and they wouldn’t leave until they had some answers about what or who had caused Earl’s death. “We’ll make a stand right here in Butte,” he said. “This case is serious enough.”

  In his small house, Clarence now sits alone, his upholstered chair shaped around his body, his head in his hands. “I went and sat in Earl’s room,” he tells me. “I thought and thought about my family, about all this. I love my country, I fought for it for years in one hell of a war, and damn near died half a dozen times. This is the United States of America: you have to do things by law. So I went out and I told him, ‘No. There’s law in America, we’re Americans, we’ll get our rights through the law.’ ”

  Clarence stares into blankness, and says what he will tell me several more times over the telephone: “That was probably the worst mistake I ever made.”

  Because all the structures of “the law” proved as immovable as the mayor of Butte. When Cecilia and Clarence finally got to see Mayor Mike Micone, with Father Finnigan of the Roman Catholic church beside them, the first thing he told them—he didn’t speak, he yelled across his cluttered desk—“I won’t hear anything said about my police. They’re good boys doing a tough job—not one word against my police!”

  Cecilia wanted to go with AIM’S idea; she and Clarence quarrelled bitterly, but Clarence was adamant and the AIM party left. So Cecilia continued to push the authorities, the law, to find the true cause of Earl’s death. She wrote—forget about Butte—to the third most powerful man in the the U.S. government, Montana’s senior senator, Majority leader Mike Mansfield; an assistant answered her on 3 September 1971, with the advice that the attorney general of Montana, Robert Woodah, “might be in a position to advise you on a matter of this kind.” That was all she ever heard from Mike Mansfield in Washington.

  So she took her petition personally to the Capitol in Helena; nothing came of that. She drove to Denver, Colorado, again with Father Finnigan, to speak personally to Hollis Bach, the U.S. regional civil rights director. On 21 October 1971, he wrote her a polite letter saying he had passed her statement about Earl on to the regional attorney for civil rights; nothing came of that. Finally, almost a year later, on 2 October 1972, her Montana district member of Congress, Dick Shoup of the House of Representatives, sent her an answer that completed the futile circle:

  Dear Mrs. Johnson:

  This will acknowledge your recent letter regarding your son’s death.

  I am most sympathetic to the situation you outlined, but since this matter is not within my jurisdiction … I have forwarded your letter to Mayor Micone for his review. I know he would wish to be apprised of the incidents to which you refer and will do all he can to assist.…

  “Mom drove away and Aunt Rita went with her,” Yvonne tells me. “I don’t know if she drove all the way to Washington or not in the Caddy, but Mom was so hyper now, when she wasn’t working her shift in the pit she was never home, driving a load of relatives to Idaho to pick potatoes and British Columbia to pick fruit, possibly making political connections. Once she drove to Helena with a box of ‘evidence.’ I waited outside in a long room while she took the box into an office, and after a long time she came out but never said a word to me of what went on. Later the Montana government said they had seen no evidence, Mom’s box did not exist. She drove to federal government offices wherever she could find them, to find the ‘inspectors from Washington’ or any of the guys in that jail under city hall that day, to the FBI, wherever they had a district office. She was always searching or working on new reports and collecting pictures and making more copies and travelling. I was living my own ugly life and didn’t know where she was. And then she was gone completely, away with AIM—South Dakota, Minnesota, Ohio, or Washington, the Caddy could go anywhere. I never knew all the details, but I know she really tried.”

  Clarence shows me various cards he received from Cecilia.

  A postcard dated 15 October 1972, from Custer, South Dakota:

  Dear Clarence and children: Be good now as I love you all and pray for me I need it, Love Mom.

  An undated card from Wounded Knee, South Dakota:

  Be good, you belong to me.

  A card dated 24 October 1972, from Mankato, Minnesota:

  Dear Clarence and Kids: … I’m A OK hope this finds you all the same way. Happy birthday to you all [the four girls all have birthdays in October] hoping and wishing that I was there with you guys. I’m getting very lonely for home. It was a nice day today. I guess we’ll be here till Friday [She goes on at length about how expensive everything is: “… car wash 2.50 and they done a piss poor job of it.”]

  So I’ll close for now I remain yours, Cecilia

  An undated, unplaced card mailed to Clarence, a printed verse unsigned:

  You’ve seen me at my best

  You’ve seen me at my worst

  You’ve never seen me

  when I didn’t love you Honey.

  Happy Birthday.

  Cecilia later told her family that she was “a gunner” for the caravan. The AIM leaders, who had the trek very well organized—and hoped to gather together at least 5,000 of the 900,000 Indians in the United States and the half-million in Canada by the time they arrived in Washington—inten
ded that the caravan stop at every point where a treaty had been broken. Cecilia said driving “gunner” meant being at the end of the long caravan of motor vehicles and assisting any who broke down, helping them keep on moving to the next stop. Generally motels refused to rent them space, so they sent individuals ahead and pinpointed motels they would take over completely: AIM paid all the bills. The people who stayed home were urged to make memorabilia for AIM members on the road, mostly beaded medallions, and the Johnsons in Butte did that too.

  “Dad made more than any of us—necklaces, medallions for jackets, the AIM logo in black and red beads. He still does.”

  Cecilia explained that the Trail of Broken Treaties trek to Washington was to be a spiritual movement, that the caravan really began as a peace demonstration to make Americans aware of how the traditions and needs of aboriginal people had been destroyed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs, an arm of the Department of the Interior. But as more Indians joined, and they took part in ceremonies held at the sites of massacres and betrayals, their feelings rose higher, especially since many of the travellers were young men.

  “Mom was very strong,” Yvonne says to me. “She had a powerful need for justice for the death of her son—she had the pictures of Earl in his coffin, the autopsy papers, she told the story—and she helped everyone, she knew things, she made up her mind quickly. She became a true warrior woman for many of those kids.”

  But at one point the young men tied red bandannas above their knees and moved into the vanguard, as if, like warriors of old, they would lead and were willing to die if they had to. In Ohio, state troopers blocked the highway and an old woman tried to run forward and plead with the police: their men were young and excited, so please, just let them pass through. But troopers surrounded the woman and threw her aside in the ditch, and the young men stormed the roadblock. They rolled several police cars over into the ditch and cleared the road and somehow Cecilia got into the mêlée as well. Calm was soon restored, but not before she grabbed at a cop inside a cruiser and her hand came out with his hat.

  The caravan began to arrive in Washington on Monday, 30 October. On 3 November the Post reported “at least 500 Indians barricaded themselves inside the Bureau of Indian Affairs building last evening.” After that, even during the last days of a presidential election campaign, they created front-page headlines. While “hundreds of young Indians ranged through the government-drab corridors” of the Indian Affairs building, a Cherokee mother, Martha Grass, told Post reporter Peter Osnos:

  “It’s for these youngsters to take us back to Indian ways. They’re the ones to say, ‘Now we will take care of ourselves.’ The older people are just beat. They don’t think change is possible.”

  In the parking lot crowded with Indians’ cars, young Len Not-Afraid wiped his nose with an American flag and told Osnos, “We are prisoners in our own country.”

  The senior chiefs who formed the official National Tribal Chairmen’s Association, and who claimed they represented three-quarters of all U.S. Indians, condemned the occupation. There was a flurry of consultations, court orders, and manoeuvrings; rumours flew; young men stated they would die but never leave. On Tuesday evening, 7 November, Richard Nixon was re-elected president in a landslide, and on 9 November the protesters received “binding promises” that the highest officials would deal with their documented grievances. Sixty-six thousand, six hundred dollars in “expense money” was distributed in $100 bills from a black attaché case and eventually everyone scattered back to Canada and the twenty-eight states from which they had come.

  Yvonne says, “In their brokenness, they were just bought off.”

  The week-long occupation had been a misery for the protesters barricaded inside a building with almost no food and nothing but the floor and office furniture to sleep on; where lights and toilets soon ceased to function because the authorities turned off all water and electricity. The women and children had tried to bunk down on the top, fourth, floor, while the men and boys had been on the third floor in case of attack. The newspapers reported they left two million dollars’ worth of damage behind; some claimed it surpassed anything federal Washington had experienced since the British burned the city in 1814.

  “I guess it’s right,” Yvonne says sardonically, “that it was Indians did it. But all Mom had when she came home was the Ohio cop’s hat and a heavy office-table leg she tore off as a possible weapon one night when they believed the police were set to raid—even perhaps burn them out.”

  For eighteen months Butte City and Silver Bow County officials had refused to do anything about Earl’s death, but finally, Clarence tells me, the sheriff from Boulder in the neighbouring county of Jefferson offered some practical help; he took the information about Earl to the proper authorities in Washington, D.C. In spring 1973, Cecilia finally received two letters from the the U.S. Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Criminal Section. One, dated 2 March, explained to her:

  … an investigation of this matter has previously been conducted by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. After careful analysis of the information … and additionally, of the information which you provided … we have concluded that this matter does not involve the violation of a federal civil rights statute. Therefore, this Department is without authority to take further action.

  The second letter was dated 1 May 1973:

  Dear Mrs. Lucille [sic] Johnson:

  Your letter of November 15, 1972 to the Director of Civil Rights, Washington, D.C. has been referred to this office for reply. Please excuse the delay in responding.

  The death of your son … has been investigated by the Department of Justice. No evidence was developed … that would indicate that your son’s death was other than … self-inflicted strangulation.

  This letter was signed by the same two men who had signed the one of 2 March.

  When Cecilia returned from Washington, the first thing she did was drive north to see her parents, perhaps for prayer ceremonies. Yvonne cannot be certain, but one of AIM’S purposes was to revive the traditional Native ceremonies, and that encouraged Cecilia. Then she returned to Butte; after twenty-four years in the United States, a twenty-two-year marriage to a White American ex-Marine, six children living and one dead, Cecilia had had enough. She was going to return permanently to her people on the Red Pheasant Reserve in Canada, and she wanted to take her children with her.

  Clarence didn’t like either idea one bit. For him, a family was and remained a family. But Cecilia was “one true warrior woman,” as Yvonne now sees it, and she made her stand: any hope or possibilities there might have been for her and her White husband were gone; she was returning to her people. Clarence could not change her mind and he knew it. She arranged for a lawyer to manage their separation. The lawyer suggested a compromise concerning the children: why not ask each child in turn, Do you want to stay with your dad in Butte, or do you want to go to Canada with your mom?

  When did this happen? How?

  The black-haired boy and his friends don’t come to get me any more, but I’m at the municipal swimming pool. I’m locked in the house otherwise and not allowed to go out anywhere else, but a boy comes who says he knows Earl, Earl told him to get me, so I go with him. There is construction on the road by the pool, traffic is piled up and I’m in my swimming suit so it must be summer, and I’m in the front seat of a logging truck and I see Earl coming in our logging truck and I shout, Here I am, Earl!

  But the boy driving the truck throws me on the floorboards. I’m hauled out under a bridge where there are cars, someone is beating me, shouting. When I’m conscious again I’ve been placed on a sawmill belt that carries the bark from the logs up to the top of the trash cone that smokes all the time, it’s always on fire, but I fall off before I’m carried to the top and crash on hard ground. The burner is rumbling so hard the earth shivers, and I scream and scream. They won’t leave me alone, they yank me around, they’re fighting among themselves, quarrelling, mad, and then a boy appears at
the top of a cliff and yells down at us,

  Her brother’s coming!

  An older man has me in a small black car. He’s driving as if he’s insane, roaring through town, running corners and red lights. I see Earl in our logging truck right behind us. We shoot into a narrow street. Then I’m on the floor, plastered against the door of the car, as the old man speeds up, tries to hold the car on four wheels going around a big curve, tires squealing, but as the street straightens suddenly the car hits the curb, whips back and forth and smashes into a pole beside a gas station. The attendant comes running out, sees me all bloody, and the driver slumped over the wheel gasping and he jumps in and drives the crumpled car to Silver Bow Hospital; it’s just a few blocks away.

  At the Emergency entrance, they pull the driver out onto a stretcher fast. Earl arrives in the truck, slams on brakes, and jumps out. He runs straight for the stretcher and starts hammering at the old man while the orderlies try to wrestle him away. Earl’s screaming, Where’s my sister? What’d you do to my little sister! A nurse looks in the car, sees me, and shrieks,

  Here’s another one!

  They lift me carefully out and onto a gurney. Earl is cursing, trying to tear himself loose from the orderlies to get to me, but they’re too many for him. I hear the glass on the emergency door smash. Earl still fighting to reach me.

  I am in a green room full of glass shelves. Mom is beside me, and then Dad is there too and he’s going crazy at me all bloody, I’m gonna fucken kill the guy that did this! Mom walks around me and grabs him. Be quiet! she says and they’re wrestling against the big glass window so hard I can hear his back-support girdle creak; he cries out in pain. We’ll take care of it, she tells him, just shut up here, shut up.