My Life on the Road

by Gloria Steinem

  In 1991 she was reelected with an unprecedented 82 percent of the vote. In 1994 President Bill Clinton invited leaders from all the Native nations to meet in Washington, a first in history. This almost totally male group elected Wilma as one of its two spokespeople.

  Six years after that, I went to the White House with Wilma and watched as President Clinton and Hillary Clinton presented her with a Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian honor.

  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.

  —

  IN WILMA’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.

  —

  FAITH SMITH, AN OJIBWA 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

  IV.

  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.

  V.

  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.

  —

  ON 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 internal
ly, 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.