Looks Like Daylight

by Deborah Ellis

  I like doing the same things other young women my age do, like shopping, hanging out with friends. I work hard in school and get good grades. My best subjects are math and science.

  The outside world is not so easy.

  I work at a fast food place in the city. Dealing with customers is a real challenge. They’ll yell at me because the taxes are too high! I don’t set the taxes! I just bring them their burgers. The trick is to stay calm when people are yelling at you, so that you can feel you are in control.

  I’m light-skinned. My skin is so light that my non-Native friends don’t realize I’m Native. I don’t come flat out and say I am. I just let them think what they want. I don’t want the hassle of having to answer their questions, but it means I have to put up with anti-Native comments ­— not from my friends, but from their friends.

  My mother wants nothing to do with white people. The world made her that way. She had it hard growing up. She went to a white school in North Bay and got bullied all the time for being Native. She’d get insulted, beaten up, shoved into walls and lockers. She hated being Native because she thought that was the root of all her problems. She turned her back on her heritage, got involved with a white guy, gave up her Native status. She wanted to be white so that she would be treated better. She learned though. Wanting to be white doesn’t mean that the white world will accept you as one of their own.

  I can get my Native status back through my grandfather. He’s passed away now. I’m wearing his cardigan. He was taken away from his family when he was very young because the Canadian government didn’t think that Native parents should raise their own children.

  I got into drugs and alcohol when I was fifteen. My mom was going through a rough patch then, and she started hitting me, so I started acting out. I moved out to a friend’s house. My friend was staying with her aunt who was an alcoholic, so you can imagine how that went. She got kicked out of her aunt’s house, so then I had no place to go. I got put into foster care. I stayed there for nine months.

  I was put into a foster home with another First Nations family, a single mom and her daughter. Really good people. I wasn’t used to living in a calm place where people were nice to each other and things were predictable, like meals on time. It was different. It was good, but I wasn’t used to it. My foster mom made me tell her where I was going and let her know if I was going to be late. That’s a normal parent thing to do, but it was strange to me.

  I had to leave the foster home because I was sexually assaulted. Not in the home, but in that general neighborhood. I went to the police about it, but the cops said I looked promiscuous and I was probably just claiming rape because I regretted a bad decision. I went to the women’s shelter. They believed me and let me stay there for a while, but a shelter is not a home. I couldn’t stay there forever.

  Children’s Aid put me in a group home for a few months. The people who ran it were okay, but it was a mixed group home, guys and gals. Why would they put a sexual assault survivor in a group home with guys? There need to be more safe homes for young women.

  All of that is behind me now. I don’t waste a bit of time looking backward.

  Being Native is an important part of who I am, even though I don’t talk about it a lot. I believe in the Creator and in having respect for the earth.

  I live on my own now, in a little apartment. It’s good I feel safe there, and it gives me lots of quiet to do my school work. I’m now in a school where it’s considered cool to study and succeed. Imagine that. I’m in the cool group!

  In the future I’m hoping to be a sexual assault counselor. I’m writing a book about my experience, about what I went through and the things others did that made it worse.

  I struggle not to be a downer. I don’t want to think negative thoughts. The Creator has given us a wonderful world, full of beautiful things. When we have a positive outlook, we honor what the Creator has done.

  Cheyenne, 9

  The horse has been an integral part of Indigenous culture ever since it arrived in North America in the 1500s. The Spanish, who brought the horses to North America from their battles in Central America and Mexico, originally made it against the law for Native Americans to ride a horse. In 1680, Pueblo Indians chased the Spanish out of New Mexico, keeping their horses. Horses spread from there into many other tribes.

  For community members who suffered through the ravages of residential school abuses, horses have provided a grounding in traditional beliefs and values. The Smithsonian Institution’s exhibit, A Song for the Horse Nation, looks at the connections between horses and Indigenous people.

  Cheyenne is doing her part to continue the tradition of respect.

  I’ve just started fourth grade. I go to a Montessori school in Alpine, Texas. It’s a small town, but I don’t live in town. I live on a four-hundred-acre ranch with my mother, Rachael Waller, who is a wild horse photographer, and my dad, Rod Rondeaux, who is an actor and does stunt riding in the movies. He was in over forty movies, like Cowboys and Indians, Into the West and Meek’s Cutoff. He’s away a lot because he gets a lot of jobs. But he comes home when he can.

  I’ve always loved horses. And horses can tell when somebody loves them.

  When I was really small, just a baby, my dad was holding me. Mom was going to take a picture of us. Up walked my father’s stallion, Roach. He came right over to me and put his head near me to say hello, and his head was bigger than my whole body was then! Roach liked to avoid most people. But he came right up to me as if he knew that I was his and he was mine.

  I’ve been riding horses ever since then. I have fifteen horses including Roach. Dad gave him to me a long time ago. The mare I ride most came from an auction. She was pregnant and if nobody wanted her they were going to send her to be slaughtered.

  Three of my horses came from the Nebraska 200. A terrible man named Jason had two hundred horses. He was starving them and not giving them enough water. Someone reported him and all his horses were taken away from him. Sixty of them were too sick and they died. He went to court and even got sent to jail. Now he can never have another animal, not as long as he lives.

  I don’t know why he treated them so badly. He didn’t need to do that. If he didn’t want his horses anymore, he could have given them away instead of starving them.

  So I have three of his horses. One of them is named Lazarus. This is an amazing story. Lazarus is from the Bible. It’s someone they thought was dead but he stood up and wasn’t dead. My horse, everyone thought he was dead. The vet had him on the table to look at him, and the vet said, “Put him outside. This one didn’t make it.” So they put him outside on the ground, but the horse decided he wasn’t ready to be dead yet. He got up and surprised everyone. So they called him Lazarus, and he is one of my horses. And he can live the whole rest of his life in happiness and freedom, with no more torture and being scared.

  My pony, Dancer, is going blind in both eyes. He runs into stuff. When I ride him I’m his eyes, and then he’s fine.

  I have a donkey too. Her name is Penelope. She likes peppermints, carrots and apples. She’s got a good nature if you’re kind to her, but if you try to be rude to her she’ll go all stubborn and refuse to do anything. We found her on Freecycle.com. Her previous owners couldn’t care for her anymore, so they found her a good home with us.

  Mom and I went on a trip a little while ago to see the wild horses in northern New Mexico, by the Jicarilla Apache Reservation and Carson National Forest. Our friend Lynne Pomeranz went with us. She did a book called Among Wild Horses. It was a picture-taking holiday. Mom’s teaching me about photography. We saw two stallions fighting and I was the only one who got the shot.

  What can I say about wild horses? They’re amazing. They are my favorite animal and I love them dearly. The mothers are very protective of their children, and the babies will come right up to you and smell you. I love watching them play and have fun.

/>   And they are living the way they are supposed to live, running free. But they are being rounded up all the time. Sometimes they are even shot by helicopters. When Mom told me about what was happening I decided to do something about it. I want to be able to still see wild horses running around when I’m really old.

  I started out doing drawings on posters about it. Then I did a drawing that my mom found a way to put on T-shirts. So now we sell the T-shirts. We have a web page on Facebook. We’ve raised over a thousand dollars for wild horse rescue.

  There are so many things I like to do. My parents taught me to drive their Toyota pick-up truck. I don’t drive it on the roads of course, but the ranch is a big place. Sometimes I take the truck down to the stream where the horses like to drink, just so I can watch them. Sometimes I drive the truck while my mother sits in the back and tosses out hay to the horses. When I’m not doing that and when I’m not in school, I do martial arts and Tahitian dancing.

  I’m in a documentary film too. It’s called She Had Some Horses, and it’s about women and horses and feeling better.

  My father is a full-blood Crow Indian. My mom is a mixture of a lot of tribes, so that makes me Sioux, Cheyenne and Crow. But my nation is the Crow nation.

  My father was born in Los Angeles. The government sent Indians to live in cities, so his mom was there. She worked in a court house. When Dad was six months old, his grandmother came and took him back to the reservation so that he could grow up there. His reservation was the Crow Reservation. It was where the Pryor Mountain Wild Mustang Center is, so I’ve been around horses a lot, even before I was born.

  My ceremonial uncle was Floyd Red Crow Westerman. He was an actor and was in a lot of movies like Dances with Wolves and a lot of others. He took me to my first sweat lodge. I prayed very hard when he was sick, but he still died. He taught me a lot of things, like how to pray and how to burn sage. It’s real quiet out here, so I have lots of time to think about things.

  There’s lots more I want to know. My dad is going to teach me how to speak his language. English is his third language. Before he knew English he spoke Cheyenne and Sioux.

  I want to spend all my life around horses. When I get older, I’ll either be a horse trainer or a big cat specialist. There’s a lot I can do, and when I get older, there will be even more things to do.

  * * *

  Cheyenne’s Wild Horse and Burro Fund is on Facebook.

  Rose, 12

  The General Allotment Act of 1887 — also known as the Dawes Act — was a law that was supposed to eliminate whatever was left of Native cultures in the United States. It called for reservation lands to be divided into plots on which individual families would farm and make a living. Once all the plots were handed out, the rest of the land was sold to whites. Everything was managed by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. The goal was to end government responsibility for providing what it had agreed to under treaties (such as rations, medical care and education), and to free up lots of land for white settlers.

  At the time the act was passed, Native American land totaled over 250,000 square miles. Fifty-three years later when the act was repealed, less than one-quarter of that was still considered Native territory.

  Darla Thiele still lives on land plotted out to her ancestors by the Dawes Act. On it she runs a program called Bringing Back the Horses, which trains at-risk youth in the skills of horseback riding. Part equine education, part cultural centering and part life-skills training, the program gives kids confidence, strength and a sense of their own amazing abilities.

  I met with Rose on Darla’s land on the Spirit Lake Indian Reservation in North Dakota.

  All the horses here have different personalities. Sundance is the Appaloosa an FBI agent gave to us. Sundance is stubborn. Diamond is brown with a white stripe on the nose. Diamond is the best listener. Lily is a paint. She likes to show off. She jumped a fence once! Lily will let kids get on her back — even beginners — but she doesn’t like adults and she throws most of them off. And Jack is a horse that everybody likes. The problem with Jack is that a man came here who wasn’t supposed to and took Jack out for a ride and treated him badly, so we’re not riding Jack for a while, not until he trusts us again and isn’t hurting from what happened to him.

  The horse who thinks he’s the boss of everybody isn’t a horse at all but a little Shetland pony named Ho Ho who chases the other horses around the field. He’s always grouchy but I don’t mind that.

  I didn’t know anything about horses when I started coming here. Our ancestors had horses. We are Dakota Sioux, and so we were horse people. Horses were everything to us. They could talk to us and we could talk to them. Kids would be the first ones to see the horses every morning, taking them food and water, and they would be the last to see them at night, making sure they were all right. So no one was afraid of the horses. They were a part of what was going on.

  Some kids are so afraid of horses when they first come here they don’t even want to look at the horse when they’re grooming them, and if the horse sneezes, the kid screams! But they soon get over that. Horses are just good, and if there is a mean one, it’s because someone has treated him badly.

  We used to all know about horses, but the government didn’t want the Sioux to be powerful, so a lot of what we knew got lost. But not forever lost.

  Before we started working with the horses we had indoor time. We sat in the double-wide trailer and had lessons from Darla and Mr. Holy Bull about our history, our culture, lots of sacred things. It’s not just about getting on a horse. We can’t tell a horse what to do unless we really know who we are.

  Getting on a horse isn’t like getting in a car. If the horse doesn’t want to go, it won’t go. If it feels that you are mad or upset, it won’t want you on its back. So you have to leave all that behind when you go up to a horse. Whatever happens at school or at home, if you have a bad day, you take that off and leave it on the ground when you go in the corral. There’s you and there’s the horse. The horse doesn’t care if you are a millionaire.

  When you first meet a horse, you’re strangers. You have to take it slow. Get to know each other. It’s great when the horse recognizes you.

  The horses are mostly loose in the big meadow behind Darla’s house, and we have to go and get them when it’s time to ride. Sometimes a horse is not in the mood. They’ll let you walk right up close then they’ll run away. I’m pretty good at getting them to come to me. I go into the field and wait and they come trotting over to say hello.

  Darla has a lot of rules we have to follow. You can’t talk on a cell phone when you’re on the horse. You can’t be on drugs or booze. You are responsible for whatever horse you ride, for looking after the tack, for grooming, all that.

  We do lots of games with the horses. Horses don’t like it when they can’t see. We blindfold them and Darla has us lead them around a sort of baseball diamond she makes in the corral. We have to talk softly to the horse and keep touching it gently so it will trust us and go with us. Then we talk about it — what the horse might be feeling and if we ever feel like that. Like, if the horse’s ears are back, it’s a sign he’s afraid, and what do we do when we’re afraid?

  I live with my grandmother. I have other brothers and sisters, but they live in Fargo with my mother. I didn’t want to move to Fargo because I wanted to stay here with the horses, so my grandmother said I could live with her. We live on the reservation. It’s a big reservation, with some little towns, a casino, schools, churches, some stores, usual things.

  I don’t go to the Christian church. I’m a member of the Peyote Church. It’s a Native American church. It’s Native spirituality. We meet every month at the beginning of the month. The meetings are to celebrate our being here. We drink tea, eat medicine, sing and pray all night.

  I was baptized into it when I was a baby, maybe two weeks old. It happened at sunrise. They shaped ashes to look like the horizo
n, then used sage leaves to make an X over it, then they burned the sage with some cedar, smudged everyone, including me! It’s a blessing. We have rituals, prayers, sacred objects like beaded gourds and drums made out of animal skins. Things like that.

  My dad is in prison. I had another sister and brother. Destiny was nine and Travis was six. They died. Dad was looking after them in the house in Saint Michael, a little village down the road from here. My dad was drinking a lot and they ended up dead. So he’s in prison. I went to visit him there, when he was in jail in Rugby and again when he was sent to another jail.

  It’s not a nice thing, to see him there. I don’t know when he’s coming back. He used to work for the fire department. I don’t know what he does in prison. I don’t know what there is to do. Probably just sit.

  Nothing’s really changed with them gone. The rez is still the same old rez. But I don’t like it when men drink too much. I was riding just down the lane from here when the horse decided to stop for a while and didn’t feel like going again when I wanted it to. A drunk guy came up and started throwing stones at the horse to make it go. Then he pulled me right out of the saddle and got on the horse’s back. The other girls had to run and get Darla. Darla was mad. She said he’s a nice man when he’s sober but does stupid things when he drinks. We had to give the horse a rest after that and Mr. Holy Bull smudged to take away the bad spirits of the drinking.

  I come here every day, almost. Even if we don’t ride there are things to do, things to take care of. Darla always has food for us. It’s a special place. There’s a little cemetery by the corral. Some of the people buried there are Darla’s ancestors. Others are Native people that the Christian cemeteries wouldn’t bury because the Christians didn’t think the Natives were good enough.

  Next week we’re going to be part of a memorial ride with some Canadians. We’ll be remembering a massacre that happened two hundred years ago. There will be lots of different tribes speaking lots of different languages. Dakota, Cree, Ojibwe. It’s a four-day ride. We did a memorial ride for war veterans a few weeks ago.