The Native Club

I was walking the main hall in West High and I saw the hand-lettered
sign for the West High Natives, every Tuesday after school. "Come join
us", it said. At once I began to wonder whether I could come.

There are some barriers. The first is that I am not a student at West.
I am a volunteer and donor. I am a West High graduate and the son of
two West High graduates. I was even a substitute teacher on three
different days, back in 1974. But I'm clearly not a current student.

Then, too, I'm not a Native American. Maybe the Native club wants to
include non-natives in a dialog; maybe I'm not excluded on just that
ground alone. Besides, there is an unsubstantiated tradition in some
distant parts of my family that our French-Canadian ancestry is just
euphemism for some unspecified and undocumented native heritage. But
clearly I am not in the target audience.

The more interesting conversation is why I experienced this impulse
to come to their meeting next Tuesday afternoon. It's the same as the
question of why I tend to relax whenever I bike into the reservation
or why watching the movie "Frozen River" felt to me like coming home.

I have had many connections to the local native nations, many of them
at second hand through my father. My father moved to Oneida a century
ago. Before his parents took him into Green Bay in 1920 they had lived
for a time across the road from Robert Bennett, later Commissioner of
Indian Affairs, and his sister Prudence. (My father's life is narrated
on my website at https://PivotRock.net/Cardinal/AltonCardinal.) When
he died, my father's casket was decorated with two eagle feathers he
had received for his work with the Menominee.

One time, my father decided to take me on a two-day hiking trip in the
Menominee Reservation. We set off from Keshena toward Big Smokey Falls
carrying all our food and supplies. Along the way, we met some people
who knew my father through his work as a state highway engineer. They
took him aside for a minute and later I learned that they were warning
him they had just seen a bear a few miles up the road. Never mind; we
continued our hike to Big Smokey. We were confused, however, about the
location of a public camping area and so (with unofficial permission
from the man running the concession stand) we set up our camp on the
rock right next to the falls.

I learned about native issues in the 1960s not only through family
conversations but also by being brought to some statewide conferences,
most held in the summer on college campuses. As teenager I actually
sat through some of the sessions and listened to some of the speeches
-- as many as I could stand, which was about the same amount of
speeches I can stand today. That era was notable for activism in the
native community, particularly for being the years leading to the
Menominee Nation "de-termination", and I remember hearing Constance
Deer stand up repeatedly to say, "I am not an Indian but I married an
Indian," and ask (after a long-winded speech) when the Menominees
would regain their rights.

Meanwhile, my father was also connected to the local native community
in Brown County. That he was known when we visited the Oneida United
Methodist Church was not remarkable; my parents seemed to be known in
every United Methodist congregation we visited in the state. But I was
impressed when, as an old man, he asked me to go with him to a dinner
at the homeless shelter. (The shelter was then sponsored by the Oneida
Tribe; it later evolved into the NEW Community Shelter.) People I had
never seen called him "chief" and invited him to step to the front of
the line -- which was a little embarassing for me, because I needed to
go ahead as well in order to help him.

I had direct connections to the native community as well. The most
important were summer youth programs led by Harriet Alicea and her
sister Karen Skenandore, along with Amos Christjohn and other people.
One program was a week-long event at a United Methodist summer camp,
where they even let me tell the Iroquois creation story. The other was
a day camp utilizing my woods and designed for urban youth.

Amos Christjohn was well known for his linguistic contributions. Once
the two of us happened to be alone and he undertook to teach me some
Oneida. I understood as he had explained the centrality of verbs and
their varied forms, but when he gave me an example I was completely
stymied. Even though I knew what to listen for, I could not hear the
words; I knew the examples were different and yet I couldn't actually
distinguish them in my head. So I never learned even a word.

All in all, I don't think I'll probably go to the Tuesday Native Club.
But the thought did inspire some interesting reflection on life.


                                               November 2016