Common Ground

White Indian

Despite discrimination from both whites and Indians, Clint Parrish’s quest is to find unity on the reservation

Clint Parrish, 33, is currently the pipe carrier for his class level at the Montana State Prison. Parrish has been an inmate at the prison for the past 13 years. Photo by Ashley McKee.

By Vendula Krizova and Mary Rizos 
Prague 2007: Common Ground

With blue eyes and fair hair, Clint Parrish looks like a white American, except for his tattoos with Indian motifs and his Indian accent. Parrish does not look like it, but he is Native American.

And not a typical one. In the community he lives in now, he is greatly admired and has spiritual power. For all the Native American inmates in the high-custody section of Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge, Clint Parrish is their connection to Indian culture. He is a pipe carrier.

“I have spent most of my adult life in prison,” says the now 33-year-old father of a 14-year-old son. Parrish was in prison for thirteen years for burglary but was released last April. “I moved to my reservation, the Flathead reservation, and I went to Salish-Kootenai College,” he says. Then he explains how he got into trouble again.

‘We remember where we come from’

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.

By Mary Rizos and Vendula Krizova 
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.

‘I was not born in a teepee, but I am Indian’

As head of Montana Peoples Action and Indian Peoples Action, Janet Robideau is determined to help not only American Indians but all people who need it

By Vendula Křížová and Mary Rizos 
Prague 2007: Common Ground

Janet Robideau is a Northern Cheyenne from southeastern Montana. “I was born in San Francisco,” she says, beginning her life story. “People still ask me and I have to tell them that I was not born in a teepee down by the river. My mother was in the Army; my father was in the Air Force."

Robideau spent her school years in a boarding school. “Everything became a sin; even bubble gum was a sin. And I love bubble gum to this day!” Her family moved to the Northern Cheyenne Reservation in Montana when Robideau was 10. And about the time she was 12, she started to learn the Cheyenne language. “My grandfather told me: ‘You are a Cheyenne. And you need to know your language.’ And he stopped talking to me in English. And that is how I learned. I would listen to him and go and point things to find out what he was talking about.”

Her Cheyenne name is “Hatha-o-hio”, Standing Out Woman. Her daughter is 36 years old and her name is a Lone Pine Tree Woman; Robideau’s son is 32 years old and he was named Little Wild Wind by his father, James Robideau.

What people are saying…

These are all short interviews with people in Vsetin.  We asked what they thought of the Roma housing situation as it was before, and what they think about the way it is now.

JARMILA, 48, non-Roma: It certainly does look much better here than before. It used to be a very ugly apartment building. I’m happier now that it’s no longer here. It looks completely different here now; one cannot compare it. 

KAREL MRÁZ, 52, non-Roma: Well, I am very glad that the building is not here any more. It was almost falling anyway. And those Roma – there aren’t that many of them now. There are fewer robberies, the window of my tobacco shop is not broken that often and I’m very happy that it is like it is. They (the town of Vsetin) should have put them on the street. You think they would offer you some compensatory housing? Certainly not. They (Roma) destroyed a house by Vsetin’s brewery, they destroyed an old historical building in Rokytnice. Wherever they went, they destroyed everything. What do you want to do with people like this? I would rather give my money to my grandsons or to ill people, but not to them. I would be much harder on them. I would give them some convict labor and put them in some dugout, where they belong. Well, ok, maybe I am too harsh, I certainly do not know what would I do being a mayor. But what they (the town of Vsetin) did, I fully agree with. They are unable to save a crown, they are reconditioning for too long… 

Look at us:

“Are we the same Roma who rob you on the street?”

Petra Horvatova reaches over to squeeze the hand of her five-month-old son, the youngest of her three children, who's being held by Zhaneta Kandrachova, Petra's cousin.  Both are Czech Roma, and are pictured at a Roma settlement just outside the town of Vsetin in the Czech Republic. Photo by Mary Rizos.

By Vendula Krizova and Mary Rizos 
Prague 2007: Common Ground

Stefan Ziga is forty years old, is Roma, and the father of two sons and one baby girl. He is one of more than one hundred residents at a locality called Poschla in Vsetin, in the eastern part of the Czech Republic. Standing in front of two colorful metal buildings he now calls home, he plays with his daughter. What may look like a family idyll is more a story of living unwanted: most Roma families are not welcomed into Czech society.  The people at Poschla know about problems with racism, unemployment, and the difficulties of trying to become part of a society that doesn’t want them.

Where did they go?

Eviction of Roma families from the town of Vsetín

By Vendula Krizova and Mary Rizos
Prague 2007: Common Ground

The town of Vsetín has, over time, followed a policy aimed at what some called “socially unadaptable” families. Before 1998, these families all lived in several buildings in various parts of Vsetin. The buildings, owned by the town of Vsetin, deteriorated badly.  Between 1998 and 2006 most of the residents of these buildings were moved to just one of them, a five-story apartment building next to an emergency clinic in the city center. In the end there were 64 families living in this one building—more than 300 people. Most of the families had defaulted on rent payments (37 families had problems with paying the rent). Sixty-one percent of them had never worked, according to David Zarsky, who works for a charity that supports Roma in the area.

The building by the clinic in Vsetin was badly damaged; it caught fire several times, and an official report from the town of Vsetin says disease was spreading there. People from the city and the clinic were unhappy about that.

Rožnov pod Radhoštěm

Rožnov pod Radhoštěm is a town close to Vsetín. “The town decided back in 1980 to relocate Roma families among other citizens. And since then the mayors have continued more or less in this process,” says Karel Klepsa, deputy mayor.

Valašské Meziříčí

In Valašské Meziříčí, which is also near Vsetín, the Roma are living among non-Roma, according to officials responsible for social affairs. There are no ghettos because that has been a town policy for quite a long time and also because there is a much smaller number of Roma there. “But you have to understand that it is not easy to live next door to a Roma family. Not every Roma family, but in general it is hard. The way they did it in Vsetin? Well, it’s quite okay,” one official says.

Bohumín

In Bohumín, the situation is different. The town is near Ostrava and is in a region where unemployment is among the highest in the Czech Republic. A building called “A Hotel House” (which has since been rebuilt) was mainly inhabited by Roma families in 2005. Most of them were rent-defaulters and unemployed. Because the city of Bohumín, together with the owner of the building, did not extend a rent contract, these families were forced to “go to the street” or find help from their relatives. “This was something like a precedent to what happened in Vsetin and now the city may do it again,” says Kumar Vishwanathan, who runs an NGO helping disadvantaged people to deal with the system. Bohumín officials did not comment about this.

Village of coexistence

From the floodwaters rises a new “co-existence” community in Ostrava

By Vendula Krizova and Mary Rizos 
Prague 2007: Common Ground

In the Czech-Roma Coexistence Village in Ostrava, there are 30 houses and a community center for long-term social programs.  About 150 people live in the coexistence village. Half of them are Roma, half of them non-Roma. Of the thirty families, 10 are Roma, 10 are non-Roma and 10 are mixed (one partner Roma, one non-Roma).

After the floods in 1997 (which almost destroyed parts of Ostrava—Hrušov, Muglinov and Přívoz) there were many families living in conditions completely lacking in hygiene and dignity.  Several projects to build new apartment buildings or houses were begun, but they remained unfinished.  In 1999 the government of the Czech Republic gave 16.5 million Czech crowns to support an Opavian-Ostravian diocesan charity project to build the Coexistence Village. This was a precedent which has never been repeated, because money for building housing usually is given only to the municipal governments, not to charities or other organizations.