A tale of two native people

Many years ago when I was first moving to these parts, I struck up a conversation with a security guard at an Alabama interstate rest stop. He asked me where I was headed and I told him Louisiana. He also asked my profession and I could have told him I did honest work for a living but confessed to being a writer.

I got drawn into a conversation of how the media doesn’t cover everything it should cover. I went along because I feared blurry eyes on the interstate more than I feared the insects.

But it was an informative conversation nonetheless.

The guard told me that he was a Native American and showed me his driver’s license, with the little “I” on it to denote Indian.

“I’ll bet you didn’t have to prove your race to get it put on your license, did you?” he asked me and I told him that he was correct. He then told me that his situation is different.

Knowing I was Louisiana bound, he asked me to remember him, and to remember the Native people in my work, because they need help wherever they happen to be. I told him I would.

He was actually the first person I ever met that I knew was Native American. But the first person to ever teach me that the story of Native Americans involved a lot more than western movies and games I played as a kid was a woman named Buffy Sainte-Marie, who is of Canadian Cree heritage and whose song “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone” introduced me, as a mere child, to the concept of broken treaties and the idea that a century after Custer a lot of wrong was still being done

I had the pleasure of meeting her last week at Ellender Memorial High School, where she joined the Rev. Kirby Verret of the Terrebonne Parish School District and Brenda Dardar Robichaux, a former United Houma Nation chief, and a whole lot of students. She told her amazing life story and recited song lyrics – she also was prompted by the students to sing and she did a little of that – for an absolutely mesmerizing afternoon.

Her appearance was in connection with the New Orleans Jazz and Heritage Festival and whoever decided to have her visit down here should be credited with genius. Few of the students at Ellender knew who she was. But they walked out of the auditorium knowing full well her message for them. The main thrust was that no matter the injustice suffered, they can rise up from it and use their innate talents and abilities to succeed in what way they choose. Recognize the wrong. But don’t give the wrong power over you.

On my way back to other duties after attending the assembly I thought about various times I had covered events and issues involving native people here, and how hard that can sometimes be. We have a number of different groups and their leaders are all fine people, but they have disagreements among themselves. If not for European intrusion much of the discord between native groups here would likely not be. But the past cannot be undone, and now we must cope with the present, and the knowledge that again, because of the decisions of mostly white people, native folks are having to leave ancestral land on Isle de Jean Charles if they don’t want to drown.

The Kinzua Dam in Pennsylvania, which this great woman sang of in her initial version of “Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,” afflicted native people because they were forced out of the way of its construction. The Morganza to the Gulf here in Louisiana, again forces Native American movement, not because of a building but a refusal to build, out of perception that somehow the lands of the native people here are not worth protecting. Either way, it is all due to rules dictated by non-native people. And in either case native people lose.

The time will come for me to write about this issue again, which I must because of what a man on the Interstate once said. And I will have the memory of a strong and eloquent woman who took the time and trouble to meet with a bunch of kids here to remind me of why it is so important. •

Buffy Sainte-Marie