Finding an Indian Role Model in Life

In the spring of 1976, 32 years ago, I had an actor named Will Sampson as my guest on the weekly television show I hosted, The First Americans, which aired each Sunday morning on KEVN- TV in Rapid City, SD.

Last Thursday I was the commencement speaker at the South Dakota State University/Flandreau Indian School Success Academy. The Success Academy involves students from freshmen to seniors from Flandreau Indian School in a unique and unprecedented educational adventure, in collusion with many staff and faculty members of SDSU that has been building its success every year for eight years.

I asked the audience comprised of faculty and students if they knew of or remembered a Creek Indian man named Will Sampson. Not a single hand went up. I reminded them that Sampson was a man who starred in a movie with Jack Nicholson called One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Sampson was eventually nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor.

In the movie Sampson played an Indian that was incarcerated with Nicholson in a state mental institution. Sampson because he was an Indian man fighting assimilation and Nicholson because he was a rowdy guy with little respect for anything normal. In different times both would have lived normally in the world outside of the institution. And now, because they were different, they were judged to be insane.

I brought Will Sampson into my commencement address because of what he said when he was my television show guest. We were talking about the Indian youth of today (1976) and he said, "Indian kids today have no heroes. All of their heroes like Red Cloud, Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse are dead."

I told him that what he said is only partially true. The children can still admire and emulate these great chiefs as a part of their history, but there are still many modern day Indians they can hold up as role models. I mentioned Indians like N. Scott Momaday, Vine Deloria, Jr., the longtime president of the Red Lake Ojibwe, Roger Jourdain, and the activist president of the Mescalero Apache, Wendell Chino.

I made this a part of my address to the students of the Success Academy to encourage them to find modern day role models and to follow in their footsteps. Women have such stalwart role models as Wilma Mankiller, the first female Principle Chief of the Cherokee Nation and Ada Deere, the former chairwoman of the of the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin and the former Assistant Secretary of the Interior.

The boys have military Medal of Honor winners like Woodrow Wilson Keeble who was finally awarded the Medal of Honor this year for his gallantry in Korea. They have Mitchell Red Cloud, Winnebago, who was killed in action while saving the lives of his platoon in Korea in 1951. They have great athletes like Billy Mills, Lakota, who won the Gold Medal in the 1964 Tokyo Olympics in the 10,000 meter race and of course they have the man named the best athlete of the 20th Century, Jim Thorpe.

And the list goes on and on. I told them I would never have become a journalist if it was not for the admiration, support and friendship of the great Cahuilla Indian publisher and journalist named Rupert Costo. He built the largest independent monthly Indian owned newspaper in America in the 1970s, a paper he called Wassaja after his hero, and mine, a man named Carlos Montezuma, a Fort McDowell Apache physician who turned to publishing a newspaper after returning to his Arizona home and observing the poverty and injustice faced by his own people.

Another hero of mine is a lady named MaryJo Lee. She is the Coordinator for the SDSU/FIS Success Academy based on the campus of South Dakota State University in Brookings, SD. More than 20 years ago I'm afraid I lectured her and her husband, Richard Lee, the retired former head of the School of Journalism as SDSU, about the lack of support and recognition of Indian issues at SDSU.

The Lee's did not take my comments as an insult, as have so many newspaper publishers and professors in South Dakota. Instead they took it as a challenge to do better and over the years they have advanced the cause of Indian students at SDSU in what might be described as a "Pilgrimage."

According to MaryJo Lee approximately 1,000 Flandreau Indian School students have been served by the Success Academy since its inception and more than 250 faculty and staff at SDSU have been involved. Lee said, "The program has been good for the Flandreau students, but it has been just as beneficial for SDSU."

Success in Indian country can be measured one small step at a time and when MaryJo Lee asked me to be the commencement speaker for the Success Academy I felt it a special honor to do so. I hope the students do as I have requested and find themselves an Indian role model to help guide and encourage them along the paths they have chosen.

Tim Giago, an Oglala Lakota, was born, raised and educated on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. He can be reached at [e-mail] or by writing him at P.O. Box 818, Rapid City, SD 57709

Comments

[digoweli]

Tim,

Part 1 of 2
For such a small population base, there are tremendous numbers of success stories, especially from before and for a couple of generations after the Christian church movement on the reservations. Today it is harder. I wonder why? Today the reservations are like a third world unless there is capital from casinos. How did such nice people in the churches accomplish that in so short a time? Once there were men like Ohiyesa who became Christians but their training was in the old developmental patterns. The five prima Ballerinas, the Hightowers, Larkin, Tallchief and Chouteau were also two generations away from the old culture. Remember, the old culture was forbidden in the 1883 religious crimes codes until 1978. Also the children, as you know, were taken away and brain washed in government schools. But just as the old agricultural ways were superior to today, so were the old pedagogies that emphasized development of the whole individual within the context of responsibility to the web of life. Do we need "Heroes" if we are responsible? These "Heroes were doing what they were supposed to do. They learned it fasting on the mountain for four days and nights with no food or water. They learned when they gave away everything and realized that they had the power to come back.

[digoweli]

Part II
Ohiyesa, raised traditionally in a tipi, learned it so well that he excelled in such things as ancient Greek at Dartmouth and science and medicine at Boston College.

But you don't need him as a model. The process is the model! You need to grasp your culture, pay attention and really know yourself.

What about people like yourself who have gone to Harvard? These are not the old "particulars" but the processes beneath those particulars that are still alive and relevant today.

Like those farmers in the Iroquois Nation and the Mixtec in Mexico. We had and have a great culture and the general parts of it are shared by most Indian Nations with local particulars. The traditional teachers are still alive. Our traditional teachers are amazing for their excellence and their sophistication.

Today we can dance in the Sun, fast on the hill, create our Art and teach our children. The problem is whether we will do it or just keep asking others for an extrinsic motivation that has nothing or little to do with who we are. We have always been a self motivated people. The beginning is to know yourself and appreciate what the Creator has given and to throw away anything that is not relevant to that truth.

digoweli

[PatA]

My fear is that alot of the students that you spoke to don't know about the people that you presented as "role models" today. And I fear that right now we don't have many who qualify in the young people's minds. That comes from the warped belief that you have to do something "spectacular" to get noticed.
I was on theMescalero reservation, photographing an Indian rodeo, and met a young man who knew who Bob Jackson was (Bo Knows) but didn't know who our Vice President was at that time.
I am sometimes afraid that Indian students are being shortchanged, when it comes to successful Indian people.
Of course, there is the situation where a friend of mine became the Navajo Nation President and was booted out because of his many trips to Paris and the fact that his assistant accompanied him. I have never been so disappointed in an Indian man as I am in him.

[Podcast]

Digoweli: I think you missed the part where I wrote that I would not be a journalist today and would not have built the largest Indian newspaper in America if I did not have a journalist and newspaper publisher like Rupert Costo, a Cahuilla Indian, as my role model. Wilma Mankiller overcame many hardships to rise to become Chief of the Cherokee Nation. Billy Mills was born into a family of alcoholics and steeped in poverty and yet went on to become the first and last American ever to win the 10,000 meter race at the 1964 Tokyo Olympics. White and Black kids have their role models and it is very important for them to have a President Roosevelt or a Martin Luther King, Jr. I was raised on an Indian reservation and I grew up without role models except for my parents and it wasn't until I saw what Rupert Costo did to change things in Indian country that I truly understood what a role model was all about. Tim Giago

[digoweli]

My Elders were beacons throughout my life. Elders mentoring the young is a cultural system, an act of individual endurance that we prepare for throughout our lives.

My people have always said we chose to come here. I grew up in Picher in the Quapaw Nation although I am of Cherokee lineage. The spirit of the people of Picher has been evident over the last few years as the community reconciled and worked together to help each other succeed.

My life has completely changed for the better since we can no longer be jailed for praying or dancing in ceremonials. (1978) Relatives are no longer afraid although they are sad for what was lost.

I prefer to focus on the structures that support vision. Teach our history - use the names as signposts to the success of our uniqueness. The holistic pedagogy that springs from our relationship with the world.

Relationship is individual. We all come individually to sacrifice, give thanks or seek a vision for our lives. We "separated and individuated" at birth. Our sacrifice, our offering and our vision is our own. No human can give or take it from us.

We do not sing in great choruses before the feet of an Angry God but instead enter into a relationship with the Lifegiver that springs from the clues left in this world for our growth.

Even when the circular wind removes all proof of our ever having been there at all. digoweli