Real stories of reservation life lie with people
Dorreen Yellow Bird Column from the Grand Forks Herald
http://www.grandforks.com/mld/grandforks/news/columnists/dorreen_yellow_bird

One of the residual affects of having the 24-hour god awful flu is that I had time to stare out my bedroom window and watch the snow melt on the rooftops. So, with time on my hands, some of the issues that I have struggled with this year bounced around in my brain.

For example: Are we Native people really the pitiful stereotypes that I keep reading in the news?

Perhaps, my thoughts were dark because I was struggling with the after-affects of the bug that almost emptied my body of fluids. Then again, it might have been flipping through the pages of the old 2002 calendar before it went in the trash can. The old pages reminded me of the night of a vicious thunderstorm last summer that had me sitting on the stairs to the basement wondering if my apartment would fly through the air like Dorothy's house in "The Wizard of Oz."

Last year was full of the threat of war and hate. I read hate every day and watch emergency people pick up bodies after a street bombing in some country far away. That is my weekday life. On the weekends, I usually spend time at home on the reservation, especially in the summer. So, I reject the idea that Native people are mostly poverty-stricken, undereducated alcoholics.

We do live in a different world, I thought. But we do face threats from old enemies.

At home, when we sit around the breakfast table talking, the conversation eventually gets around to a relative or friend who died from cancer. The word cancer used to make the hair stand up on the neck and fear twist the gut. Now, we listen to who has been diagnosed, ask what kind and wonder about their chances of survival.

Then there is diabetes. It is so common on the reservations that even little children know that the little black purses on the kitchen table contain the blood glucose meter for testing blood sugar. When the aunts ask for sugar for their coffee, the children know to offer only the sugarless sugar. They have grown accustomed to seeing syringes and small vials of medicine in the refrigerator, and they all know about kidney dialysis and amputations.

Nearly all the children also know how alcoholism has affected their lives. We live with it every day. The roads that led to the reservations are bloody spokes that have carried hundreds of our people to the next world in a fog of alcohol.

And, of course, there are few jobs on the reservation, so you'd never find a candidate for "Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous" there.

These are all true, I thought, as I stared at the haze that covered the sky that day. I was waiting for the sun. It is healing.

Yet, as many times as we are told how poor, disease-ridden and in need of rehabilitation we are, there are just as many that remind us there is a world beyond what outsiders see and read about in the newspapers. So many of the articles - for example, The Wall Street Journal's story on Dec 26, "A Principal Battles Legacy of Failure At Indian School" - are too predictable and don't say anything new. Few examine reservations other than Pine Ridge, S.D. That reservation has become a negative example of a "typical" Indian reservation.

If you combine their ages, my mother and aunt have spent a total of 165 years on the reservation. Neither they nor their deceased husbands indulged in alcohol. Not only did they raise big gardens and run cattle and horses, they also nurtured large families.

Like my grandmother, my aunt is a keeper of the traditions - it is her strength and law. But she isn't the only one. There are many older people on the reservation, and at Pine Ridge, I would say, who have a greater understanding of life and the world around them than even the great philosophers in history.

They have learned to live with what was dealt them, and they handle it quietly but with courage.

Many of these older people have a rich knowledge of healing, culture and ways of life.

Ah, yes, there is another story to be told about the people on reservations.

But those big-city reporters need to get past their own stereotypes first.

Then, they can find the real story.