Remnants of the First Earth

by Ray A. Young Bear

  There was even a school, the Weeping Willow Day School a.k.a. Weeping Willow Elementary. Built from government blueprints for an “Indian Reservation Sanatorium, Class B,” the school was the first and last tribal school. As student enrollment grew, rooms were simply merged or divided to accommodate the six grade levels. In 1935 the seventh, eighth, and ninth grades were added. In Iowa history books, the school earned status as an “institutional landmark.” In 1950, however, federal safety officers had the school condemned as a fire hazard. Undeterred, and taking the threatened closing as a government ploy to integrate tribal youth into the Why Cheer community school system, the tribe successfully fought to keep the classes going.

  It was an unprecedented twist of events. What was once a transgression against us became a permissible form of acquiescence by us. In a tribe that had formerly opposed outside education, a consensus indicated there could be immeasurable benefits in children-tend-ing school on the Settlement. Embroiled in nonending controversy, Weeping Willow withstood multiple arson attempts, hordes of termites, and indecent exposure charges against its Bureau of Tribal Affairs principals and regional officers in command. These allegations led to the tribe gaining total control of the school.

  Troubles were both internal and external.

  Neighboring whites felt it was their god-given duty to “remind the skinjins of their rightful place.” In 1920, the Why Cheer Women’s Preservation Club, with state endorsement, acquired property adjacent to the Black Eagle Child Settlement, near the tribal school. Like the club, the two highways and the two sets of railroad tracks that came afterward, running parallel through the Settlement’s geographical heart, reminded us daily of eventuality. The lonely whistles of trains passing each other each afternoon became familiar. And on the trip toward town everyone would pass the Red Barn Premises. Behind the high, barbed-wired fence stood the three fire engine red-colored barns where tribal youth in 1890 were “culturally disfigured,” as Pat Red Hat used to say.

  Once a year, during the Saturday and Sunday of the annual Black Eagle Child Field Days and Chautauqua, the Red Barn Premises were open to the public. Black Eagle Childs included. Grandmother, Alan, and I would make the long trek by foot from the tribal fairgrounds to what we later came to know as a museum. The Red Barn was historic. In 1890 some of our grandparents were brought back after their failed escape; here they were stripped of their clothes, given haircuts, and bathed in preparation for mandatory schooling. Our young grandparents, outfitted in dark uniforms, fresh from the wilds, sat rigid and expressionless for group photographs. Their capitulation was well documented. Grandmother would point every summer at her relatives encased in glass. While commenting on their sallow eyes and disheveled body posture, she recalled their clan-given names and how we were related to them. Watching them from the sides in the photos were the mustached federal truant officers who had cattle-herded them through the barns.

  Needless to say, the Red Barn Premises were monuments. Technically, these were the first government-designated schoolgrounds for the tribe. Beside the barns, on: the same property, were log cabins that housed the first teachers and their classrooms. The white visitors who were there for the tribal Field Days and Chautauqua streamed through the antiquated structures, buying imitation bead-work and hand-decorated postcards celebrating the “HOME OF THE WHY CHEER INDIANS.” Through the iron windows of the cabins we could view the three-room structures where the teachers lived; some were prettier and furnished better than most Settlement homes. Goose-down pillows and intricate quilts graced the brass beds; on elegantly carved nightstands were open Bibles and stacks of fat books with gold lettering. There were fancy lamps and chandeliers on the walls and ceiling of the dining room and kitchen. In the sink there was even a hand-operated, short-handled water pump. Around the lace-draped round table set for three, the chairs were richly stained and varnished. Inside the cast-iron woodstove glowed a red lightbulb.

  Eventually, the white Preservation Club women, along with the Combined Christians of Iowa, built a church to rescue “the lost souls of heathendom.” During summer weekends or national holidays, the women and their out-of-town guests would arrive in an automobile convoy, unlock the locks of the barbed-wire fence, and indulge in old atrocities. Like the trains, the carloads of umbrella and picnic basket-toting women became familiar annoyances.

  For a long time after Weeping Willow Elementary was opened, I detested the transparent-skinned teachers who brought strange-smelling books and papers, along with nauseating foods like beets and chocolate pudding; later, I would also find their sports games with spherical objects abhorrent. As was done for the predecessors of the Weeping Willow teachers, the Bureau of Tribal Affairs constructed Donna Reed American faculty housing. Like the log cabins, the whitewashed houses were surrounded with high barbed-wire fences.

  When I first met the Weeping Willow teachers and their families, they were impatient and jittery. To communicate with me they had to improvise; they sign-languaged. Simple doglike commands: stay, go, sit, lie down, and so forth. On more than one occasion, they requested and received visits from Clotelde, my mother. In her presence, they compared me to “a contagion”; I defeated their purposes by making “my peers converse in Indian.”

  Whatever it was they accused me of, Mr. Mateechna, the school janitor, would be summoned. Kneeling beside my desk, he’d whisper in a refreshing breath of Juicy Fruit gum, “If you don’t keep quiet, your friends and relatives will be unduly punished.” But it was too late. Since no one had explained English and the need to speak it to me, each member of the class suffered a red, ruler-sized welt on the forearm every day for weeks.

  In both of my years in fourth grade I went with different classes on train rides to Minneapolis and Chicago. It was during the repeat year that I met and made friends with Ted Facepaint, Pat Red Hat, Horatio Plain Brown Bear, Hayward and Kensington Muscatine. I was the only student to repeat a grade. There were advantages: I initiated all reminiscences; I’d been there. It was pleasurable and an honor of sorts until I realized something was not right. When I asked my mother why I flunked fourth grade, she said, “The teachers think that physically you’re too small.” For a while I accepted that as an explanation.

  Who could help it? I thought to myself; I was made this way.

  It soon began to dawn on me that being deprived of promotion to the next grade had nothing to do with size. My questions escalated into theories of conspiracy, that it was all a payback for being fluent in Black Eagle Child.

  Whatever the reasoning, these were memorable days when some of the older female teachers wore blotches of cherry red paint on their lips, while the unmarried ones wore skirts so tight that company logos of their girdles showed up over their thighs. The outlines, it was reported by Pat Red Hat, felt interesting to the touch.

  On one particular field trip there was a voluptuous Negro woman who became so involved with her monitor duties that several students crawled under her skirt and looked heavenward between her stocky, muscular calves at the mysterious constellations. Moving secretly like a bull snake under the seats of the rumbling school bus without drawing the attention of the teachers was done for amusement. With the exception of Pat Red Hat, nobody knew what to look for. But compared to other educational seediness offered at Weeping Willow, African astronomy was kid stuff. For example, from the sewer drains, especially in a quick, spring thaw with rain, white balloons that the older students said the principal wore on his “peeno” slid out into the swamps.

  They would be brought out like uncaged circus animals, dangling from the tips of long, crooked sticks. Everyone ran in ignorant terror. Even when’Pat Red Hat, an erudite but slow-running classmate, tried to explain their function, I was befuddled by the commotion caused by the wet balloons. I was told to visualize that they had been used by the only man-occupant of the faculty housing, the principal. With whom? Nobody knows, Pat whispered. Maybe the principal’s invalid wife or the Bureau of Tribal Affairs secretary? The juvenile de
linquent, John Louis, made illustrations of this provocative affair, which were then traded for cigarettes or bullets. Highly valued, they were shared among the classes. We feasted on the side cutaway profiles of two intertwined people. An arrow pointed to the necktied man’s protrusions where the balloon might be placed; another arrow pointed to a groin close-up, showing internal compartments where the “chicken soup” might be made; another arrow showed the upside-down Y bodily contortion of the would-be woman partner; and the final arrow pointed to a woman asleep and alone in her wheelchair beside the bed.

  From the year I was able to speak and gesture with my stumpy hands, imitating the mannerisms of noted storyteller Carson Two Red Foot, I composed and recited tales on the spot for my proud mother and grandmother amid throngs of ogling playmates. At family get-togethers, there were constant requests for “Ki sko, the Beastly Tongue Man” or “To ka ni, the Witch’s Brown Club.” Even before I accepted invitations to perform these one-child actor skits, I would make a crowd chuckle as I impersonated the Indian Katzenjammer Kids. Without fail my characters could generate an appreciative audience.

  As further proof of precociousness, and long before I heard of chapbooks or comics, I made gifts of my tales through illustrated, hand-sewn booklets. When I was three years old, my mother said I peppered people with words fresh to my vocabulary. In one famous incident, I kept saying “So?” for an entire day to anyone unfortunate enough to be within hearing range. With each white or Indian word acquired, provided it didn’t backfire, I grew. This word-collecting talent led my grandmother to believe that I should be the caretaker of the Six Grandfathers’ Journals.

  During the first years at Weeping Willow Elementary a group of older classmates became frustrated by my vocal talent, judged to be insolence. They pointed directly at my round, chicken pox-scarred face and yelled, “Don’t you know you have an ugly face? A kwi we na-ke ke ne ta ma ni ni-e ne tti wi na ko si wa ni?” This was the ultimate put-down in 1957. Still the smart alec, in defense of my scars, I retaliated, “Yes, I do grimace . . . when I am toileting on your face!”

  In what was perhaps reprisal for being quick-witted and tongue-talented, I was also ambushed by five lunch-table leaders who then proceeded to depants me beside the orange school bus with onlookers around. I can still recall the incredible surges of humiliation as I bucked and wrenched about helplessly over the wet concrete. There were strong, boney grips over my husky legs, arms, and shoulders, and a flurry among females unlike any I had ever seen. Their dresses sprouted large, grotesque wings that flew around me like metal spears, prodding me into submission.

  Lying on my back over the wet sidewalk I could see the rain-clouds from another angle, a view I had rarely experienced. In multitudes the watery specks grew larger shortly before they landed, stinging my terrorized, tear-filled eyes. As the zipper to my crotch was unfastened notch by notch the girls displayed sneers along with looks of profound satisfaction. As my baggy shorts were peeled down shamelessly around my chapped thighs and ankles, they kept chanting, “Do you know what revenge means, you stupid little kid?” In an act of futility and to keep from crying aloud, I tried to spell this unfamiliar, mean-sounding word, REE-VENN-GEE, in my damaged psyche. “How do you spell it?” I moaned under the strong, perspiring bodies.

  I fought the lunch-table leaders so hard that several had to use their developing chests to subdue the thrashing elbows and knees.

  In the ensuing ruckus my uncircumcised penis fossilized itself with blood. Usually it awoke during wrestling matches with weak females or upon sight of colorful Christmas decorations. On this particular occasion I was caught off guard. There was a wrestling match, yes, but I was the one being pinned under the tall, bushy pine tree with leftover Christmas decorations and tinsel. Like a startled snake roused from its den by unannounced visitors, it uncoiled and rose to the challenge, engorging itself with stone liquid. On their hands and knees the lunch-table leaders looked at one another in disbelief at the young male erection that tottered menacingly in the rain. The grotesque metal spears folded in midflight and shot back to the side panel of the dresses.

  “Do you like eating corn mush? Ke wi ka ta ba-ka ni mi na bo wi?” I asked in a brave but quivering voice. Because of bedwetting, my penis had been jokingly named “Corn Mush” by my uncles, Winston and Severt Principal Bear, when I was four years old. “What do you say when someone you don’t know comes to your aid?” I cried out again in defiance to the braided gargoyles who were panting heavily in their training bras. “Corn Mush!” I answered myself, pointing. “He is looking at you with one eye!” The lunch-table leaders scrambled to their feet and walked away from me backward and open-mouthed.

  From the back of the bus, John Louis, the juvenile delinquent who drew the “chicken soup” diagram—the principal’s male reproductive system—classified the failed ambush as “a case of the nearly raped visually raping the would-be rapists.” Neither I nor my classmates understood what he said. We appealed to the grown-up wisdom of Pat Red Hat, but it didn’t matter. Everyone cracked up uncontrollably as I pulled the wet shirt from my back, giving it space to air-dry. They had seen everything; showing my bare chest and stomach was nothing. For a riotous hour the orange school bus shook from laughter en route to the Colonial Bread Factory in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

  The Great Flood of the Iowa River

  In 1920, almost thirty years to the day her older sister, Dorothy Black Heron, was raped and murdered by my paternal grandfather, the One Most Afraid, aged twenty-two, met her own tragic end. Like the sister she never knew but had heard a great deal about, the One Most Afraid would perish on the western edge of the Black Eagle Child Settlement under bizarre circumstances.

  This was the one story I asked Carson Two Red Foot to tell in detail. There were historic implications and a flagrant abuse of justice. Evidently, according to Carson, the One Most Afraid had been waiting in the late evening hours for a young man who supposedly summoned her by note through a female intermediary. She was advised to wait at a particular fallen tree. As she sat near this designated area, however, three people who had been waiting snuck up from behind and clubbed her lifeless with blunt objects. The assailant’s tracks were followed by the authorities to the Iowa River, where they became lost. Eight to ten miles up- or downriver, no swimmers had emerged. “By all appearances,” wrote the Tama County authorities, “the female Indian subject was about to commit infidelity but someone caught her and punished her swiftly as required by ancient tribal custom.”

  On Weeping Willow Elementary School field trips to the Tama County courthouse, I would lean my face against the glass case that held the plaster footprints of the One Most Afraid s killers. There were three of them. While their footprints have long been removed from the exhibit, I now believe that whoever assaulted the One Most Afraid dove from the dirt cliffs of the river and changed into the three owls who have for centuries decimated our own through witchcraft.

  Three times in my own lifetime the three owls would make their presence known: once at Liquid Lake; second, at the Iowa River bottoms; and third, through the voice of Junior Pipestar, medicine man extraordinaire. The fourth time, I suspect there will be more than a trivial light-and-sound display. The next time they will be coming after me. Judging by the frequency of their appearance, they will arrive a lot sooner than I expect.

  For Dorothy Black Heron and the One Most Afraid, there was a short but remarkable life. Their stories intrigued me for a number of reasons. Of utmost importance, obviously, was the older sisters murder: Dorothy forever altered the course of the tribe.

  With regard to the One Most Afraid, who was set up by her own friend and confidant, there were tales of her extraordinary beauty and the tragedy it brought. In 1908, the One Most Afraid, at fourteen, was sought after by many suitors, including my grandmother’s adopted brother, Carson Two Red Foot’s father, John. Carson s father was so smitten that he left his wife, Mary, and, five children.

  In my research of events surroundin
g the deaths of these two well-known sisters, I once came upon an old photograph taken of the One Most Afraid.

  Looking into her alluring, slanted eyes, held in suspension back in the summer of 1919, I saw that everything they said about her was true. For hours in the public library I gazed into this woman’s face, wondering how she could be so perfect. To this day the One Most Afraid still inspires lively talk among the elders. They bemoan the fact that this incredibly beautiful young woman’s murder, like many others, remains unsolved.

  I recalled the first time I asked Carson Two Red Foot to talk about her: Among the many to be captivated by her looks, Carson recounted certain events involving the One Most Afraid and his beloved sister, Bent Tree. Their fates, he would say, were hopelessly intertwined.

  In 1913, as a result of his mother’s marital frustrations and the failure of their self-imposed exile from the Black Eagle Child Settlement,Bent Tree committed suicide. Seven years later, still devastated that the One Most Afraid had stolen her husband, Carson’s mother sought the services of a witch, the one who was captured while crossing the Iowa River bridge by Jack Principal Bear and Alfred Pretty-Boy-in-the-Woods. Against the One Most Afraid, the strongest night-enemy medicine was unleashed: a trio of cackling owls who had the ability to control the behavior of vulnerable human beings. The three owls, for as long as it is necessary, wear the minds of people who are not mentally in control to accomplish their heinous deeds or requests.

  CARSON TWO RED FOOT (AS TOLD TO EDGAR BEARCHILD):

  One winter day while spearfishing for catfish, tte qwa me qwa ki, with my sisters and brothers at the confluence of the two Settlement rivers, my oldest sister Wa ki me te kwi, Bent Tree, confided a terrible secret. The knowledge was so powerful that I will always remember that particular day: e tti ya ki-i ni na i-ka o ni-e tti be ma te si ya ni i ni na i, the way the weather was and the way I was feeling then.