Common Ground

Indians and Roma

Foreigners in their own lands?

By Vendula Krizova
Prague 2007: Common Ground

The histories of the Roma people and American Indians are not the same, but there are similarities.  Roma, or so-called "Gypsies," came to Europe from northern India in the 9th or 10th century. They lived there as nomads, traveling from place to place, playing guitars at markets and dancing for people. More or less they lived without any problems. In the 20th century, during World War II, most of the Roma minority in the former Czechoslovakia were murdered as were the Jews in Nazi concentration camps.

Those who survived were shortly after that forced to leave their traditional way of living--traveling with caravans--and were moved to apartment buildings they weren't used to at all. "Wandering" became a punishable crime.

Although Roma people no longer tear out parquet from the floor and make fires in the middle of the living room, they are still torn from their roots. The Roma who live in the Czech Republic now are mostly from all over the former Soviet Union or the Slovak Republic.

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.

From meth to grant writing: Joshua Butterfly says prison was a rescue

Inmate gets another chance to rediscover his traditions

By Martin Brodsky and Vendula Krizova 
Prague 2007: Common Ground

“Hi, I am Butterfly,” a six-foot tall and muscular Indian with calm, nice eyes said as he shakes our hands. He wears glasses and his ponytail sometimes hides under his blue jacket.

His white T-shirt and blue jacket are the clothes that inmates in the low-custody section of Montana State Prison in Deer Lodge usually wear. Joshua Butterfly is one of those inmates.

His youthful forays into illegal drugs and crime eventually led Butterfly, 29, to the prison, where he is currently serving 20 years for sexual intercourse without consent. He’s been at the prison for about five years, he said.

‘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.