Why She Cried

Larry Pankey

My mom cries at our kitchen table, our only piece of household furniture. One of those Formica-topped tables with chrome legs for support: matching chrome chairs covered with red vinyl seats embedded with tiny particles of sparkling glitter. A lone toilet paper roll substitutes for tissue beside her burning cigarette and ashtray. Her tumbler of scotch over ice sweats onto a folded paper napkin. Our house’s walls are round corrugated metal bending up off a concrete floor – – a Quonset hut home of semicircular corrugated metal. She dabs at her running mascara – – tears turn wadded toilet paper gray, then black.

When I was four, my single Native American mom took me away from the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation so she could go to college at the University of North Dakota. She studied to be a schoolteacher. I am a half-breed, born of a Native American (Hidatsa) mother and a White father. Off and on, I lived with my White grandparents (Geiser) and then with my Native grandparents (Fox). At UND, we lived in a trailer park, but after we were evicted, we moved to a Quonset hut in married housing. Once meant to house soldiers during wartime, the huts were repurposed for married couples attending college. Mom lied; my White dad was never around.

I remember her college textbooks. Words and pictures etch into your mind, never to be forgotten. Book covers, paintings, and portraits of long-dead Native Americans, and inside, words in tiny type impossible to read at my “See Spot Run” reading level. But still, I know these books are important: textbooks on our tribe’s history, myths, and religion. Images that small minds shouldn’t see until later.

She gave me history lessons and pointed out a book with a speech given by our famous Chief Four Bears while he died of smallpox. I imagine pus-filled sores and bleeding scabs covering his face. Another book has the Treaty of Fort Laramie, in which the White man promised us food in exchange for our land. Freezing Natives wrapped in dirty, tattered blankets huddle around a small fire, starving to death (Freedman, 26–29, 38–40). Those photos are juxtaposed with those of dead buffalo carcasses newly skinned only for their hides, the meat unused and left to rot. Then, White men pose atop piles of buffalo skulls, and train cars overflow with buffalo skins (Robinson 2016). Finally, a photo of an unarmed dead Indian named Spotted Elk, frozen prostrate in the snow with his hands up following the Wounded Knee Massacre, with yet more White men hanging around in the background (Rickert 2021).

And that word lawyer is there; all these books say lawyers write treaties and become presidents. Mom says lawyers fight with their words using pen and paper. If only I could be a lawyer and learn to fight back.

Somehow, I ended up going to college and then law school. I guess I always knew what I wanted to do without knowing what lawyers do. And one day in law school, while taking a course on Native American law, I saw a new concept: intergenerational trauma. Native “children may vicariously experience events via stories heard about the experiences of their parents or grandparents and, consequently, suffer from associated psychological problems” (Wohlers 2015). Or that traumatic events for Native parents “may lead to poor parental mental health or poor parenting styles, which, in turn, may increase stress in children” (Evans-Campbell, 328). And I started to piece together the broken parts of my mom, her parents, grandparents, and our people.

Sometimes, her history lessons turn drunken, angry, or sad. If you have ever been around an alcoholic, you know they like to talk. They talk so much they repeat themselves—drunken late-night conversations. I hear or overhear these things. She drinks and talks to her family and friends. Or she gets on the phone for hours, talking and crying to anyone who will listen. The phone company will cut off service by the end of the month when she cannot pay the long-distance bill.

She is drunk; she cries. She feels sorry for herself. She does not know how she will pay the rent.

*

I want to be a good mom, but it is so hard. Never rely on anyone else, Larry Allen. You must do it by yourself. You must be better and stronger than everyone else. Get your education. That is something they can never take from you. Be tough. You have to stick up for yourself. Your dad does not love us; he will not help take care of you. He is drunk in a bar somewhere, shacking up with some woman.

I am so ashamed, Larry Allen. I will have to take you home to Grandpa Geiser. I have failed you as a mom. I am so sorry. 

1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie

The Hidatsa live on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation in North Dakota. Before the White man arrived in the Americas, Indigenous people were estimated to number from 50 million to 100 million (Taylor, 40). “The discovery of America was followed by possibly the greatest demographic disaster in the history of the world” (Dennevan). Native populations plummeted by 90 to 95 percent following the arrival of the White man (Jones, 9).

On November 4, 1804, the Lewis and Clark expedition stopped in North Dakota and picked up a pregnant Hidatsa woman named Sakakawea. She helped them navigate the Rocky Mountains to the Pacific Ocean and gave birth along the way on February 11, 1805 (Lewis). By all accounts, Sakakawea saved the expedition on many occasions. She was a tough Indian woman who gathered up food supplies when the boats capsized.

The first significant recorded event in Hidatsa history is the coming of smallpox. The 1837 Great Plains smallpox epidemic came from an American Fur Company steamboat, the SS St. Peter’s, which brought smallpox up along the Missouri River (Jones, 72, 108–22). On July 30, 1837, one of our chiefs, Four Bears, lived through the smallpox epidemic and, on the day he died, described its effect:

I have Never Called a White Man a Dog, but today, I do. . . . They have deceived Me, them that I always considered as Brothers, has turned out to be My Worst enemies. . . . I do not fear Death my friends. You Know it, but to die with my face rotten, that even the Wolves will shrink with horror at seeing Me, and say to themselves, that is the 4 Bears, the Friend of the Whites – Listen well what I have to say, as it will be the last time you will hear Me. Think of your Wives, Children, Brothers, Sisters, Friends, and in fact all that you hold dear, are all Dead, or Dying, with their faces all rotten, caused by those dogs the whites, think of all that My friends, and rise all together and Not leave one of them alive. (Chardon, 124–25)

Over half of the Hidatsa died, many killing themselves after seeing their reflected pockmarked faces. The United States said they should all band together with the Mandan and Arikara for mutual protection. So was born the Three Affiliated Tribes (TAT), or the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara Nation (Bowers, 36–37).

In the 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie, the US wanted peace and invited the Hidatsa and other tribes to meet with their lawyers in Fort Laramie, Wyoming. In Article III of the Treaty, the US promised “to protect the aforesaid Indian nations against the commission of all depredations by the people of the said United States”; it stated that all the land covered by the Treaty was Indian territory and that the US would never claim any part of it. In Article VII, the Treaty promised “provisions, merchandize, domestic animals and agricultural implement . . . to be distributed in proportion to the population of the aforesaid Indian nations” (National Park Service 2021).

However, the ink was barely dry when the US unilaterally changed the Treaty’s terms to ten years. The original Treaty promised approximately 12,500,000 acres for the reservation, but by 1910, that number was whittled to less than 640,000 acres. According to Congressman Ben Reifel, “Since their first treaty at Fort Laramie . . . they have relinquished title to an area greater than that of the states of Massachusetts and New Hampshire combined” (Reifel, 4).

*

When I was little, my mom and my Fox grandparents would take me to town, and we would drive up to an old warehouse building where they would give us food—dry and canned goods called commodities or commods. The warehouse was once painted white, but weather and time had stripped off the paint and aged the wood to a metallic silver. We would wait our turn and then drive into the warehouse, where people checked our names off a clipboard and loaded cardboard boxes of food—flour, sugar, salt, and canned goods—into our pickup.

I asked my mom why we got this food. She said it was because of the treaties. The Whites promised to give us food if we would stop fighting and stay on the reservation. Commods are just for Indians and not White people.

Some of the food was great, like the US Department of Agriculture cheese in big five-pound blocks—packaged in a cardboard box block printed with the label Pasteurized Process American Cheese (Blakemore 2018). The cheese was old; the outside edge of the block had turned a hard, dark orange, but cutting it off revealed the edible bright-yellow inside. Everything you make tastes better with commod cheese.

Years later, I played hide and seek at a White friend’s house. I went through his kitchen and into the pantry to hide. I saw all this commodity food stacked up.

I confronted the kid’s mom and asked her, “Why do you have that? That is for the Indians. You’re not supposed to have that.” 

“Larry, what are you talking about? We get that food because we are poor.”

Garrison Dam

I play outside in the snow when Mom yells at me to come in for dinner. Impervious to the cold in my full-body snowsuit, I make snow forts and tunnels out of the snowdrifts piling up on the rounded walls of our Quonset hut. Mom drinks scotch from a tall glass wrapped in a paper towel as she prepares dinner. She talks on the phone with one of her siblings while smoking a cigarette.

Grandma Fox is in the hospital with complications from diabetes. Mom blames the Whites for diabetes. “It’s those damn commodities. They gave her sugar diabetes.” Before she ate, Grandma Fox would measure insulin and give herself a shot in the stomach. It is dinnertime, and I think of her preparing insulin. She points the needle up and taps it to remove any air bubbles. A tiny spray of insulin shows it is ready.

Mom made my favorite meal: grilled cheese. She pulls the slicer across the block, and a slice carves out. The yellow rotary phone’s coiled rubber cord pulled tightly across the room, her tilted head pressing the phone into her neck as she flips a grilled cheese sandwich—spatula in one hand while taking a drag or a drink of scotch with the other.

I am hungry, so I try to get needle shots to the stomach out of my mind as I take a bite of my commod cheese sandwich. Diabetes was scary to me as a kid. Other relatives were in wheelchairs, some with amputations and others blind. And Mom is in a bad mood about Grandma.

Watch what you eat, Larry Allen, or you will get sugar diabetes.

After the White man stole our land and put us on the reservation, they decided to build a dam, but the White farmers didn’t want to flood their land.

And then they built the Garrison Dam, which flooded all our good farmland. Our people lived in a town called Elbowoods. We had schools, businesses, and hospitals. Our communities were together. We lost everything because of White people’s greed. My parents divorced because of that dam.

And the Whites were jealous of us because the Hidatsa made farming look easy. We had good food; we grew the Three Sisters: corn, squash, and beans. Our people had never even heard about diabetes. Now, we take shots with every meal. People go blind and have their legs amputated.

And it broke our people. Our men no longer had pride; they felt they could not provide for their family, they felt hopeless. And women can’t rely on these useless, broken men with their drinking.

My parents drank and fought, and now I drink and fight with your dad. I am so sorry, Larry Allen. I wanted better for you.

*

The Missouri River is natural and untamed. Depending on rain and snowpack, come springtime, the icy river overflows its banks for weeks at a time. Native people learned to live with the inconvenience. Like, don’t build your house on a flood plain or next to the river—common sense living. And why was the land fertile to begin with? Flooding brings new soils and nutrients back to the ground (VanDevelder, 26–28). But downstream, the white man built cities and farms right next to the river that flooded every spring. So, Congress passed the Flood Control Act of 1944 to tame the Missouri River. Various plans came from different constituencies, and a compromise was reached—the final version of the project planned for a series of dams (VanDevelder, 26–27, 98, 142). But where to put these dams?

Natives then and now have no political voice. They are an afterthought. Populations were so small that, by 1940, the US Census estimated the total number of Americans in the continental US was 131,669,275. Still, only 334,000 Native Americans remained—less than .0025% of the total US population (Truesdell, 4). But Natives owned the land. The 1851 Treaty of Fort Laramie promised them their land forever—that is until the White men decided to break the treaty (VanDevelder, 98).

The US built the Garrison Dam on the Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, thereby flooding Native farms and ranches along the Missouri. Every single piece of farmland used by the Three Affiliated Tribes went underwater. Of all the flooded tribes, the “most devastating effects suffered by a single reservation were experienced by the TAT . . . whose tribal life was almost totally destroyed by the army’s Garrison Dam” (Lawson, xix, 25).

When the Garrison Dam started to backfill the Missouri River, it displaced approximately 2,000 people, or 357 families, of the TAT. Of the remaining 583,000 acres on the Reservation, 153,000 went underwater, and the other 430,000 acres were fractured into five different segments (Reifel, 3–4). No longer simply separated by the river, the Reservation segments had miles of water between them with no bridges. The sense of community was gone.

The Garrison Dam became the fifth-largest earthen dam globally. Lake Sakakawea filled up with a surface area of 368,000 acres and became the second-largest reservoir in the United States (Army Corps of Engineers 2021). By 1953, the US loaded all the homes and buildings onto truck trailers and moved them up onto the arid plains, away from the river. Natives knew better than to live up there. It was too cold and too windy, and nothing would grow.

My mom was born on July 8, 1946, in Elbowoods, North Dakota—a child of the White man’s flood. They uprooted her home and trucked it to a new town called Mandaree, North Dakota—a portmanteau of the Three Affiliated Tribes: MANdan, hiDAtsa, and REE, another name for the Arikara. At seven years of age, she was a flood survivor. Adding to her misery, her parents divorced in 1954. With ten children and the school destroyed, her family had little choice but to send her away to boarding school.

Boarding School:

When I was just a little girl, they sent me to boarding school, Larry Allen. They took me from my parents and put me on a bus. I had a piece of cardboard with my name on it with a string around my neck telling people who I was. I got off the bus, and the nuns were waiting for me.

They put me in the car and drove me out to their school. They took my clothes and threw them away. They gave us baths, and my skin burned from the lye soap. They cut my hair and poured white powder on my head. They said it was to kill lice. I didn’t have lice; I was a clean person, Larry Allen. How could they do that to me?

The nuns would not let me speak Hidatsa anymore. If I did, they spanked me. One time I did not fold my dress neatly, so I had to clean the entire hallway with a toothbrush. I scrubbed and scrubbed for hours, and my fingers started to bleed. 

Imagine that little girl, Larry Allen. Cleaning an entire hallway with a toothbrush, they were being cruel. I was just a little girl.

I cried; I was so homesick. I kept asking myself, Why do I have to be here? Why are they doing this to me?

*

In 1892, Captain Richard Henry Pratt gave a speech in which he uttered the now infamous words, “Kill the Indian in him, and save the man” (Pratt, 47). His address described the US policy of assimilation of Native Americans. Pratt’s speech set out his ideas about the Carlisle Indian School for civilizing all Native Americans (Pratt, 46-49). Within twenty years of Custer’s Last Stand, the US settled on a strategy of destruction and assimilation. “Of all the malignancies embodied in twentieth-century U.S./Canadian Indian policy, the schools were arguably the worst. . . . Their destructive effects upon Native people, both individually and collectively . . . was and remains by any reasonable estimation incalculable” (Churchill, xlv).

The adult savage is not susceptible to the influence of civilization, and we must therefore turn to his children, that they might be taught to abandon the pathway of barbarism and walk with a sure step along the pleasant highway of Christian civilization. . . . They must be withdrawn, in tender years, entirely from the camp and taught to eat, to sleep, to dress, to play, to work, to think after the manner of white man – Commissioner of Indian Affairs, 1866 (Dept. of Health and Human Services, 2).

Eventually, these underlying policies formed the mantra on how to deal with Native Americans: kill the Indian, save the man. 

Native Americans are barely mentioned in the US Constitution and, under its original provisions, are not even citizens. Indeed, Article 1, Section II of the Constitution excluded “Indians not taxed” from inclusion in the census count. In other words, Indians do not count. Native Americans were not even granted citizenship until Congress passed the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924. “The right to vote, however, was governed by state law; until 1957, some states barred Native Americans from voting.” (Congress 2024) Even Adolf Hitler praised US policies, stating in a 1928 speech that Americans “gunned down the millions of Redskins to a few hundred thousand, and now keep the modest remnant under observation in a cage” (Whitman, 9).

At boarding school, Native students endured extreme hardships. When they arrived, they would have their mouths washed out with soap for speaking their Native language. They were given a haircut, a uniform, and a new White name (Adams, 108–31). The boarding schools also doused them with DDT to kill lice, whether real or perceived (Haaland 2021a). The students were forbidden from speaking their language or practicing their culture, and the schools meted out harsh punishment to anyone who broke these rules (Adams, 131–35).

If the Native kids survived and got to go back home, their people thought the school made a White person out of them (Zitkala-Sa, 47–80). As was said to one father, “Your son who calls himself Rafael has lived with the White men. He has been far away. . . . He has not . . . learned the things that Indian boys should learn. He has no hair. . . . He cannot even speak our language. . . . He is not one of us” (Josephy, 434–36). These returning boarding school Native Americans were now neither Indian nor White. For almost one hundred years, the US shipped off tens of thousands of Native children to these boarding schools. By 1926, 83 percent of Native children were in the system (Haaland 2021a).  

My family attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School. My great-grandparents, Ed Bracklin and Minnie Blackhawk, met at Carlisle and married on June 4, 1914. My grandmother, Julia Bracklin (Fox), was born on October 30, 1915. Great-grandpa Bracklin played football for the Carlisle Indians alongside legendary player Jim Thorpe and Coach Pop Warner (Line 1913). He was also captain of the lacrosse team (The Red Man 1910).

Great-Grandma Minnie’s father, Blackhawk, was a famous chief of our people (Black Hawk 2007). He had multiple wives, but White people said he could keep only one. So, he picked his youngest wife, and our family line breaks away from Blackhawk through our Great-Grandma Mink Woman, who, by all accounts, was the older and meaner of Blackhawk’s wives.

My grandparents, Albert Bad Brave and Julia Bracklin, married in 1932, divorced in 1946, and remarried in 1954. They had ten children together. My Grandpa Albert’s birth father, David Bad Brave, died before Grandpa was born. Grandpa Albert’s mother, Hannah Levings (Mink Woman), famously modeled as Sakakawea with a baby on her back for a photograph. She was Sakakawea’s granddaughter. The picture is of my Grandpa Albert as an infant (State Historical Society of SD 2022).

The Fox family adopted Albert as one of their own. My mom was born in 1946, and out of ten children, she was the only one who went to college. As a young girl, she went to these boarding schools. She often spoke of the poor treatment and abuse she endured at them—when she was drinking when she let her guard down.

The historical treatment of young Native American students is something the US is only now fully understanding. As recently as June 22, 2021, the US Secretary of the Interior started the process of apologizing for and recognizing their past assimilation policies:

The United States enacted laws and implemented policies establishing and supporting Indian boarding schools across the nation. The purpose of Indian boarding schools was to culturally assimilate Indigenous children by forcibly relocating them from their families and communities to distant residential facilities where their American Indian, Alaska Native, and Native Hawaiian identities, languages, and beliefs were to be forcibly suppressed. For over 150 years, hundreds of thousands of Indigenous children were taken from their communities (Haaland 2021b).

My mom worked for the U.S. Department of Interior–Office of Indian Education in Washington, DC. As an education specialist, she helped individual tribes with their paperwork for their local reservation schools. She worked on a new model of Native American education that helped reservations across the US educate Native children at home and on their reservations (Dept. of Education 1993). She did not live to see these recent apologies or recognition, but she always knew that taking children away from their families was wrong.

*

The phone rings in the middle of the night. She is drunk, crying, and wants to talk. 

I am mad at her; I am impatient. I forget about intergenerational trauma or showing compassion. She is a terrible grandmother. She has no interest in my four kids or their lives, but they are the most important thing in my life.

I tell her that I have court tomorrow, that the kids have school, and that it is four in the morning.

I tell her that I have heard all of this before, many times when she was in her 40s, 50s, and then 60s. Sometimes, she gets mad at my rudeness and hangs up on me, and sometimes, she just wants to talk.

I regret being rude to her to this day. I wish I could go back and appreciate her middle-of-the-night calls. They are one of those things we cannot undo and carry around with us for the remainder of our lives.

What are you doing, baby? I just wanted to tell you I love you, Larry Allen. Do you remember when we lived in that Quonset? Do you remember when you used to play outside in the snow tunnels that you made while I studied for college? You would come inside frozen after playing outside all day in your snowsuit, and I would make you a grilled cheese sandwich. We made it, Larry Allen.

It was just you and me, baby, do you remember?

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