In 1961, when I came to
Browning, Mont., to teach, I emerged from my little rental —
all dressed up — to investigate the town. A path headed
towards the main street across a weedy empty lot. A tall Indian in
a wide-brimmed hat started towards me. Was I going to have to walk
into the burrs and ruin my nylons? Not to worry. The Indian swept
off his hat, held it over his heart, stepped off the path, and
said, “Mawnin’, teacher.” How could he tell I was a teacher?
It never occurred to me that I was a white, dressed-up woman in a
reservation town.
The next year, I took a speech and
drama team to a competition in Havre, Mont. All were Indians, and
we did pretty well. At suppertime, I asked the bus driver, also an
Indian, to take us to the Main Street cafe. He didn’t say
anything, but the kids protested that we wouldn’t get served
there. “Nonsense,” I said. We were all dressed up, and clearly the
kids were chaperoned.
But we sat for a half-hour without
being served. “Now do you believe us?” they asked, and, hungry, we
left for the “Indian cafe.” The bus driver, of course, knew where
it was.
Havre can be a tough town, even though it is the
home of Northern Montana College. James Welch Jr. wrote his
bleakest novels about that part of the world. Yet, when my van
broke down there late one evening, the auto mechanics instructor
who moonlighted at a service station stayed until midnight to put
me back on the road. It’s the kind of place where people can
be generous but guarded against certain “types.”
Audra
Pambrun was a Blackfeet nurse who gathered many national awards and
honors during her career. If someone needed help, she put her
nightie in her giant handbag and came to see you through. Our white
family was helped by her over and over. She told me that as a young
woman, traveling across the country by bus with her infant son in
her arms, she was refused service in the small-town cafes. Some
wouldn’t let her enter or warm the baby’s bottle. I was
indignant on her behalf.
Audra brought some white friends
over to visit us. We were nicely settled and enjoying the
conversation when there was an awful banging on the door. “Oh,”
said I unthinkingly, “probably just another drunken Indian.” Then
Audra caught my eye, and I shriveled.
Racism is
unthinking. It slips into your head when you’re annoyed or
threatened some way. On the Blackfeet Reservation in those days,
the worst insult between the students — even the Cree
ones—- was “You Creeeee!” which goes back to when the Cree
were landless and the Blackfeet were forced to accept them, pitiful
and needy though they were at that time. Now, they’re settled
on a reservation near Havre. But what the kids meant was “you
loser.”
Recently, it seems, racism has become more tied
to economics. Poor people are assumed to be different and therefore
fair game. As a “wide-waisted woman” who wears jeans and work
shirts with the tails out, and who doesn’t sport a real
hairdo or bother with lipstick, I am sometimes seen as a dubious
character. When I stand in the hardware department trying to decide
which hinges to buy, someone is at my elbow to make sure I
don’t shoplift.
My first school superintendent used
to say that when television came to the “High Line” of Montana, it
would bring a modern view of the world. It did, but that world,
both on and off the reservation, is so mercantilized that we now
judge each other by clothes, brand-name belongings and cars. If you
have the right things, you can treat everyone else as losers.
Now retired, I’ve changed. I’m no longer
interested in “things,” and I stand up for myself and anyone else
who is unfairly treated. If I were chaperoning kids today who were
refused service in a public cafe, I would raise holy hell and call
it a communications project. Today’s kids, the grandchildren
of my embarrassed speech team, would surely join me in protest.
They are not losers, which they prove by bringing home trophies and
scholarships. Their pride is hard-won.
Mary
Scriver is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of
High Country News (hcn.org). She lives and
writes in Valier, Montana.
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