But not everyone who leaves the reservation comes home
Mary Baker sits outside her home in the University Villages with her two children, Anthony and Joslyn. She grew up on the Fort Peck Reservation, and has lived in Missoula for three years. Photo by Mary Rizos.
Prague 2007: Common Ground
“I would never go back.”
Mary Baker is adamant that she has no desire and no reason to go back to the Fort Peck reservation where she grew up. Missoula is where she’ll stay, and where she’ll raise her family. She is strong, clear-minded, independent. She is a full-time student, a Sioux, a wife, a mother. Twenty-six years old, she says that moving to Missoula from Poplar three years ago was, for her and her husband, a matter of life and death.
“We had to get away from the reservation so we could save ourselves,” she says of her struggle against alcoholism and inertia in a place of poverty, unemployment, and violence. Of Montana’s seven reservations, nearly all have unemployment rates over 50%, and alcoholism is a serious and all-too-common problem.
"It’s so hard because it’s so dangerous . . . what can happen to us if we start to drink, and start to lose our goals." Her goals have brought her to Missoula, the University of Montana, an undergraduate program in psychology, a full-tuition scholarship and stipend for her junior year, just completed, and a summer seminar for Native American psychology students.
Mary Baker and her husband and two children are four of the 19,600 Native Americans in Montana living off the reservation—more than a third of the state's Native American population, according to the 2000 U.S. census.
Mary Baker knows that moving to the city has been the right decision for her family, but it's not without its challenges.
“A lot of things that work for the western culture don’t work for Indians,” says Mary. For example, Alcoholics Anonymous can help, she says, "because you have the support of other people, but they tell you you need to be selfish, you need to focus on yourself, you need to quit for yourself, they say don’t try to quit drinking or doing drugs for someone else; do it for yourself. But that’s the western culture. What motivates me to go to school is other people. It’s not really something I’m doing for myself. It’s something I’m doing because they need it, we really need it, and I want to do it for someone else."
And though she's now very successful at the university, she didn't just walk off the reservation and onto the UM campus without a hitch—there were loan applications, electronic registration, how to find housing on her own.
"When you're from a small town and nobody expects you to go to college anyway, they don't teach you those things," says Mary. Because of those and other differences between reservation and city or college life, setting up a new life in Missoula was a struggle for Mary, as it is for many others.
Janet Robideau's goal is to help people tackle just those kinds of problems--to bridge the gaps in resources, information, and communication between communities. Robideau is head of Montana Peoples Action and its daughter organization, Indian Peoples Action. Janet is Northern Cheyenne and says that being an urban Indian doesn't mean that cultures or traditions or identity are lost. "I am still a traditional Cheyenne woman," she says, "'urban Indian' does not mean 'assimilated Indian'."
Few opportunities
The reasons that Mary Baker had for leaving the reservation are the reasons that Native Americans always have for leaving reservations. That's what Janet Robideau says, and that's what the officials and academics and statistics say too: on the reservations, there are few educational opportunities, there are no jobs, there is little hope.
“It is about access to better education,” says Janet. And there is the fact that reservations aren't seeing much economic development. Unemployed and isolated, many people live in despair and end up involved with drugs, alcohol, and crime, and have families that are falling apart.
But living in a city is not automatically easier. “We face a lot of problems here,” says Janet. “We have to fight for affordable housing, for health care and against racism." Indian Peoples Action and Montana Peoples Action are linked through these goals: "We want fair and equal treatment for everybody, not just us," says Janet.
Originally from the Northern Cheyenne reservation, Janet moved to Missoula in 1984. She finished her degree in psychology at the University of Montana and stayed because her two children were in public school in Missoula and she didn't want to pull them out of school and take them back to the reservation.
Janet joined Montana Peoples Action in 1980 because she was so impressed with the organization and how it was working for social change. Today, as its director, she says it continues to address problems caused mainly by a lack of information about minorities.
“It's been my experience that people are not deliberately ignorant. A lot of times they just don't know," she says.
“I remember going to the Missoula Wal-Mart one night. My daughter was with me. I was just wandering around, and as I was wandering, everywhere I went I noticed that this girl was there, and she was doing inventory, or something, and then I started deliberately going different places... and I can't remember what part of the store it was, but I circled back around her, and she was looking looking, looking, looking, I told her ‘Here I am.’ She turned around and she dropped her clipboard. And I just said: ‘I just want you to know, if you lose me again, I am going over here to shoes…’ And she stopped following me.”
Fighting stereotypes
Besides dealing with racism and the difficulties of finding work, urban Indians also have to fight against stereotypes and myths about Native Americans. “It is always the same,” Janet says, “People think we don't pay taxes, we just sit at home and get welfare checks every month or we have free medical care.”
Native Americans' access to tribal or governmental health services depends largely on where they are living. Moreover, free health care can be a double-edged sword when you don't have access to anything else. "Free health care--who wants it! It's really, really bad," says Janet.
“It’s bottom-of-the-barrel kind of stuff," Mary Baker says, "And we pay for it. We pay for it with our health."
But as the reasons for leaving are the same for nearly everyone –poverty, unemployment, and alcoholism— so too is the reason that people choose to live on the reservation, or to return after living away:
“Family,” says Janet Robideau.
“It’s all about family,” says Mary Baker.
“It’s always family. What draws you back is family,” says Eleanor YellowRobe, who, like Mary and Janet, knows both lives, the urban and the reservation, has chosen the latter, and hopes one day her children might choose the same. She has always known she would live on the reservation, although she spent years commuting to and half-living in Missoula to attend the University of Montana. She has a bachelor’s degree, a master’s degree, an advanced certificate in accounting, and a job as controller at the new casino on Rocky Boy’s reservation.
Familiar cycle
The cycle that Eleanor's life has taken is one familiar to many Native Americans. Joe McDonald is president of Salish-Kootenai College on the Flathead Reservation, and he too moved away from the reservation and came back. “Many people go to the city just to be in the city," he says, "They believe in finding a better job, they are excited about the city. But the reservation is their home, they have family buried there… they want to be there. Being around elders, to give my kids this experience--that is why I came back.”
And Darrell Kipp, a leader on the Blackfeet Reservation and founder of a Blackfeet language school there, has returned too, after traveling to all corners of the globe.
“They taught us at school the typical American dream," he says, "Get educated, get careers and be individualistic. The most shameful thing was to stay on the reservation. When I was leaving at age 17, I swore: ‘Never again.’ But I was really homesick." Darrell says he feels biologically bound to his people, the people the Creator put in that place, a people with a common oral history and spirituality, a linguistic continuum.
Eleanor YellowRobe is from one reservation but is now rooted on another. She is Gros Ventre, originally from Fort Belknap reservation, but now her home is Rocky Boy's reservation, where her husband's family is from. Rocky Boy's, the reservation of the Chippewa-Cree, is the smallest in Montana, and the youngest in the nation. One guidebook proclaims that "it is graced by the Bear Paw Mountains, which provide a dramatic contrast to the flat bottomlands of this area," and it’s right. The landscape on this reservation looks in some places like a postcard-picture of the Scottish highlands; it’s all green grass, trees and beautiful valleys. Compared to the dry and dusty nearby town of Havre, it’s a little paradise.
Eleanor YellowRobe is full of energy and never stops smiling. She loves taking pictures and most of all is proud of her two children, who are now fifteen and seventeen years old. Growing up, Eleanor lived all over the state, in Havre, Great Falls, and Butte. Her studies, her degrees, and her big decisions have all been geared toward getting her back to and getting her successful on the reservation. She talks today of her “four-year plan,” and of her goal of opening the first Indian-run CPA accounting firm in the state.
The same reasons that Mary Baker has for beating alcoholism and leaving the reservation, Eleanor has for getting her education and coming back. Eleanor grew up with parents addicted to alcohol and so did her husband. “We decided that what we went through as children we didn’t want to go through with our children," she says. "We never drank; we never had alcohol in the house.”
Eleanor recently celebrated her fortieth birthday, and when she went back to school for her third degree a couple of years ago, people at home (on the reservation) made fun of her for it, and there is still the usual joking about her being a “professional student,” but Eleanor just smiles. “They ask me ‘what are you going back to school for? What are you going to school for?’” she says, “But some of them don’t see the economic value in education.”
Long commute
For the past two and a half years, Eleanor commuted weekly between Rocky Boy's and Missoula to complete her accounting courses. She had done her research, found that Missoula's program had the highest pass rates (better than Bozeman or Great Falls), and so every week she left the reservation in the early hours of Monday morning, spent all week in classes in Missoula, sometimes getting just an hour of sleep a night, and then returning to Rocky Boy's every Friday to spend the weekend with her husband and children.
It’s her family, her children, that motivated her to leave, to seek a better life, but it’s also her family, her extended family, that's the reason she always knew she’d come back. “There’s an obligation to your family that you have to come back and help out,” she says.
There are tensions between those on the reservation and those that have left, and they center around those feelings of obligation and betrayal—even in organizations like Janet Robideau's.
"It took us seven years to get the tribes to want to work with us," she says. "We've had reservation leaders tell us: 'You've turned your back on your own; you're trying to live in a world that doesn't even want you."
"I will always remind people that I know where I come from," Janet continues. "As urbans, we really need to show that we remember where we come from."
Eleanor YellowRobe recognizes the good in both kinds of life. "What I like about Missoula," she says, "is that it treats you just like a human. You know, white, black, gay, transvestite, they don't care what you look like, what you are." She finds more racism in Havre, the smaller city closer to her reservation.
Eleanor grew up with the problems of the reservation, and does nothing to excuse them or romanticize life there, but she returned to embrace what is there, the responsibility and the difficulties too. “There’s somehow more a sense of beauty being poor with all your friends and family than being poor on the outside. It has its greatness, but sometimes it's not as good as it could be,” she says.
And perhaps Mary Baker, too, feels the sense of family, responsibility, and community as strongly as the urge to stay away. “When I said that I would never never go back, I guess I didn’t really mean that. Right now I would never go back, no way." But she plans to continue to a Ph.D. in psychology after her bachelor's degree is done next year.
"My goal is to actually go back and help the people there. Right now we don’t want to go back, but eventually we’ll have to make ourselves stronger so that we can, because those are the goals that I have: save myself, first of all, then get my education and go back and help other people.“
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Posted by: Alcoholism | August 27, 2007 at 01:13 PM