Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (26 page)

The house enveloped in smoke and flames one night. I remember looking out the small window of the attic. People were running around outside. A fire truck came. The family was out of the house. They never came to get us. A fireman found us after fear had time to torture me, and I had screamed to them to get my brother, the one in the crib, and thereafter I remember holding the hand of a fireman, who was holding my youngest brother, running through the stinging slushy snow in bare feet. The house burned completely to the ground. How we ever ended up in this home, we don’t know, but we were so glad to be away from it.

We stayed briefly with some people in a very small apartment, and then Dad picked us up. We thought we were going to stay with him now. He bought me some things and packed a little suitcase, and took us to Ward Cove. I waited for months in that tiny shack at the window for his return. It would be a long time before he came back.

In Ward Cove, we bathed in water pumped from a rain barrel, swam in the bay polluted by the mill, and picked buckets of blueberries and caught fish upstream with our hands and ingenuity. We dug clams, and caught crabs, and sometimes my brothers went out on the boat with our foster parent’s son-in-law and fished or hunted deer. Her son would come back from logging camp sometimes, and he would drink a lot. She had two older grandsons, and one of them went to jail for stabbing his girlfriend to death. The other would “babysit” us at his parents’ home, and while doing so would torment my brothers and I, taking us down and tickling us until we cried, or blowing his breath in our face, filling our mouths and nose until we could no longer breathe. He thought it was funny. One day he started taking me into another room, in the dark, and put his weight on me, his hands between my legs. Each time he took me in the dark room, he was more invading. I was maybe six or seven when it began. Our foster mother let me have a cat around that time, and the cat was my best friend in the world. Her grandson told me he would kill my cat if I ever told anyone. It is too hard for my brothers to even think about it all because they couldn’t protect me. I can’t discuss it with them still, because the pain in their eyes clouds my recollections. Through those years, I often hid from morning to sundown in the woods, roaming about, much more afraid of home than of any four-legged animals.

My foster parent’s older grandson who killed his girlfriend was released one time, apparently in-between prison and institutionalization for the criminally insane. He showed up at the house, and time seemed forever, as the drinking went on, and everyone began the usual crying or screaming or drunken laughter. I felt his hands crawl up my young forming legs, and my shaking and gripping fear was only ended by another threat, from the brother who didn’t seem to care to have “his girl” messed with by his brother. I often slept with my back against the wall.

The world seemed insane. We went to church, because the church picked us up. Our foster mother had little or no money and so a drive to town seven miles away for church was out of the question. The poverty also forced us to obtain necessities from things people threw away at the dump or to buy rejected hand-me-downs from others for a quarter. Church usually followed a night of alcoholic horror. Nothing seemed consistent. The church told us to turn the other cheek, that God was coming back, and that with Jesus our lives would be happy. And the church told us we couldn’t wear any Native symbols. They were seen as heathen.

Shame about our tribal ethnicity grew. Kids on the school buses would pull my ears, hit me in the face, shove me on the floor, and push me out of my seat. I would turn the other cheek. Going home, or going to school, with a bloody nose was not unusual. The bus driver sometimes became angry with me for not being seated. We were called “siwash,” and “salmon cruncher,” and “dirty Indians.” I must have been in third grade when actually thinking that “dirty Indian” was my nickname. Then a principal would call me Pocahontas because of my long hair, and he would smile. The white kids laughed. Fellow students often knocked my lunch to the floor or shoved me into the wall. I would sometimes soil my pants in class rather than draw attention or go to the restroom where I was sure to meet more aggravation. These incidents were rarely discussed. I was too afraid to say anything, although teachers sometimes complained to my foster mother that I was slow and shy. It was all just part of going to public school in Ketchikan.

Sometimes our foster mother would send me down the road to take pies she made out of the blueberries us kids picked, to an old man who lived in the tiniest of shacks by the old run-down mill by the river’s mouth. Each trip I became more resistant to going, and my bare feet would kick up the dust in steps that became shorter and shorter. Why couldn’t my brothers take the pies? He would bounce me up and down on his knee and then his lap, until I knew it was a wrong and ugly thing that he was doing. The last time I was there, I pushed him away and ran.

The best part of those early years was when we were sent to stay with dad at logging camp. We lived at Freshwater Bay for a spell, or at Twelve Mile Arm, and even at a floating camp off Prince of Wales Island. We would race out of the one-room school at lunch time and put a
skiff
in the water and paddle around, or chase the bears or camp foreman’s horse away from the tiny travel-trailer we lived in, or run through the woods and climb trees. We smelled the cedar and the spruce and felt their limbs embrace us. It was our country. It didn’t last long and we were hauled away back to Ward Cove.

Our foster mother was a sad woman who smoked incessantly. I sometimes felt she knew that odd and awful things were going on but she would shake her head and say nothing. She did decide that I should have my own room rather than sleep on the sofa, so she boarded up the old porch and it became my very own room. I once found the nerve, in a fit of rage, to tell her that her grandson had been molesting me but she wouldn’t hear of it. By that time, he had left for Germany as a serviceman. I hid in my room. Shame consumed me. At church, I began to distrust everyone. The minister had his body so close against mine one day that I trembled uncontrollably. He would say he was filled with the spirit as he delivered the message of God. At the church, rumors about in-church sexual misconduct were spreading, and I felt compelled to leave church behind. I was twelve years old and alone. I would make my own rules.

One night, with two new friends from school, one Tlingit like me, and the other white, but poor like me, I stole a bottle of Calvert’s Extra whiskey and smuggled it into my room. A white girl at school had told me that she couldn’t be my lockermate anymore because her boyfriend didn’t like Indians. I had gone on the attack that very day and burst into houses of two white girls from school, letting them know my hate and rage. I was no longer turning the other cheek. We mulled over these things as that southern bourbon went down our twelve-year-old throats like water. Over half that bottle saturated my ninety-pound body and I went into blackout. I woke up hours later in a pool of vomit. Fortunately, I guess one of the girls had moved my head to avoid asphyxiation. For three days I vomited, sweated, and ached, unable to eat or function from this obvious alcohol overdose. Some school official inquired about my condition, but the girls just told her I had the flu. The police came to my home, searched my room, and found the empty bottle. They said booze had been stolen from the liquor store up the way. I was never again able to drink bourbon after that, but I managed to consume many other things. But the good news was, other students were now afraid of me. The bad news was, I got charged for stealing.

So, my new friends and I began a gang. I went to jail for running away and for stealing a blanket to keep warm and to wrap tightly around me to keep the rats away. I slept that way under some stranger’s house. When the police arrested me, cold and hungry, they asked me why I ran away. I sat silent, in stubborn refusal of emotion. I wondered why they didn’t get my real mother now. Didn’t they have to find her? Instead, I was sent to jail. Being the youngest in the jail cell, since the juvenile facility at the time also housed adult women, I pretended to be crazy and capable of anything. It seemed necessary, given the stabbing in the cell the night before. The other inmates left me alone, and it was like I found my calling. I could act like anything. The gang, “The Charity Cats,” a name in celebration of our impoverished but resourceful ways, pranced through the streets in stolen green wool jackets and newly found identity and freedom. I got out of jail, released to my foster mother, and thereafter committed myself to the gang.

The Charity Cats grew rapidly in numbers, and crews of ten- to fourteen-year-old girls roamed the streets and schools with the commitment of protecting one another and punishing anyone who got in the way. We practiced running from cops by baiting them with curfew violations, and throwing booze bottles at cop cars. We had escape practice sessions, as we proudly knew the city’s boardwalks, trap doors, stairwells, and a multitude of hiding places. Typical tensions caused a few light rumbles on the docks with others who felt slighted by us. We began to pack weapons. We stole No-Doze pills from the drugstore and hung out all night, wired, looking for more things to “catch a buzz.” We began sniffing gas, cooking spray, paint, glue, anything. At thirteen, I organized another run-away plan, and the story ended up in the newspaper.

Eighth-grade teachers at the school were probably tortured by the endless taunting and mean pranks of classrooms mixed with Native and primarily white students full of 1960s rebellion and race-based animosities. After being pumped full of power from successfully harassing a math teacher to tears, we ran into the woods and smoked our cigarettes—daring the world to do anything about it. I told some other “Charity Cats” I was running away and showed them my packed bag. My plan was to catch the ferryboat to Seattle. I just needed to take some time to scrounge some money. After school, word had gotten around, and several of the Charity Cats and “J.D.’s” decided to join me. The J.D.’s (acronym for juvenile delinquents) were our newly organized male counterpart. In total fourteen of us kids, all Native except for the two white girls, hid in the boiler room of the old abandoned Ketchikan hospital. For a week we fed each other from bomb shelter rations, food bought with stolen money from rolling drunks, robbing citizens, and from flirting shamelessly with sailors. It ended with gunned police and a paddy wagon.

I was sitting on an oil drum, sharing some bite to eat with the other kids in our dungeon-like shelter when the police burst through the door and chaos erupted. I jumped so hard from the fright, an officer stuck a gun straight in my face and told me not to make “a f—ing move or I’ll blow your head off.” Other than a liquor-store owner charging out with a gun and firing (after we stole a couple bottles), I had never had a gun aimed at me, let alone in my face. I was stunned. All I could think was that I was thirteen years old and I had a ten-year-old boy beside me, and we were going to die. The officers put handcuffs on the guys and since they wouldn’t stay on us girls, tied us together with ropes. We were loaded into vans. Us girls kicked our shoes out the back door of our van, flirted with the drivers, and basically did anything in an attempt to get them to stop in hopes of escaping. It didn’t work, and a couple of us lost our shoes, and most of us were booked on charges of breaking and entering, minors in possession, and illegal weapon possessions. Thereafter police would stop me whenever anything occurred, since I was now referred to as a “ringleader.” We all went to jail.

I ran away several times after that. One time me and two Charity Cats caught a fishing boat to Metlakatla, the only official Indian reservation in Alaska so it was said, twenty miles away, and got into mischief over there. It was great being there. All Indians, feeling welcome, and not feeling afraid all the time—it was a great place to be. But, the State Troopers caught up with us, and threw us all in the City Jail. I spent the Easter of 1968 in jail there, spending hours sitting with my skinny legs through the bars, wishing I were home, at my foster mother’s house. She would leave an Easter basket at the end of my bed for me to wake up and find each year before church, and I ached to be home. I didn’t let on much to the others. My foster mother did care for us I realized, but her miserable family was so troublesome for us. I wished I had the warmth of my own bed. Instead of dwelling on it, I helped the others flood the toilet and set the mattress on fire. It got us some attention anyway.

Other kids on the reservation felt the injustice of our expulsion from the community and when the State Troopers were hauling us down to the floatplane to fly us back to Ketchikan, they lined the streets and pounded on the car. We were so jazzed by the sight of it all, that one of the Charity Cats hurled herself off the dock, into the water, to keep us from having to get on the plane, prolonging our departure. Nevertheless, we were sent back to our dark and private hells. Jail was often a reprieve.

In jail, we played chicken, a game where you wrap a towel around your neck and choke yourself until you black out, and if you did it right, went into a kind of convulsion. We called it the funky chicken. It caused one of the Charity Cats to be institutionalized. Brain damage or something we were told. Cynically, I wondered if she faked it, just to get out of jail. One of the kids, a twelve-year-old boy from Metlakatla that hung out with us sometimes, died from sniffing gas. Nothing stopped us from killing the unspoken pain however. If it was death, so be it.

One of those trips to jail cost me my boyfriend at the time, a nice slightly older student, Tlingit, and someone who really tried to keep me out of trouble until he finally gave up and went out with a white girl. Stinging from the insult, I decided to date my first white boy. He was the president of the senior class or something, and his father owned a contracting service. He invited me out one day, and I agreed. We would go to a movie and a school dance. My foster mother made me a cute dress out of a pink stretchy material. Early on in the evening, he said he had to stop by his parents’ place first to check on something. He invited me in, I went in, and he shut the door. He offered me a drink. I said no. In no time, he was throwing me onto the bed in the apartment, and I was kicking him off, and we struggled back and forth until we heard a knock on the door. A couple other white guys came in, with tequila. It was clear that we weren’t going to any movie, and that I was intended for their evening’s amusement. I made the decision to drink hard. I would drink until I felt nothing, determined that if I was to be gang-raped, I would not feel it, or, I would drink them under the table. We drank and drank, and they eventually passed out. Bruised and sore from the assaults, I walked the seven miles back home through the wet night, and upon arriving home at sun up, took off my dress and burned it in the burn barrel. The next morning my foster mother asked me how my date was, and I didn’t have the heart or soul to tell her. I said it was fine.