Racing Toward Recovery. Lew Freedman

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СКАЧАТЬ and missed out on getting a high school or college education and they wanted things to be better for their children and grandchildren. Their thinking was: You guys have to go. Go and try to get your degree because you are going to be dealing with these tough issues. It was important to my dad and my mom and the Elders for people like me to get that western education. They were concerned about the future and they had every right to be.

      Even though I liked Chemawa more than Wrangell and I had some good experiences there, I was still homesick a lot. When I came home during the summers I got jobs either working in the canneries in Dillingham fish processing, or working as a firefighter. Alaska always had forest fires in the summer when it gets dry and lightning strikes. Most of the fires start that way. I got to see my family, but I had to work for money during the summer for my expenses at school.

      In Akiak we could live from hunting and fishing and berry picking, but I needed cash in Oregon. My entire four-year high school experience was a lot like going to college for four years. My schedule was structured the same way. Go to school in the fall, come home in the spring and visit with the family briefly, and then go make some money to have at school. I couldn’t really depend on my mom or my dad for money because they didn’t have any. My dad was a businessman by then, though, running a grocery store. The store was called the Tim Williams Store. My grandfather Peter Williams had his own store that was just down the road from where my dog yard is now.

      My grandfather was a very good businessman. He traveled to Seattle, to San Francisco, to Japan as part of his business work. I don’t know how he did it with his limited education, but I believe he did very well as a businessman. After my grandfather Peter died, his brother Joe took over. He ended up selling it to a Native cooperative, so we didn’t have the store in the family anymore. Then my father started his store. I never worked in the store. My father pretty much took care of the store on his own. I wasn’t that interested in working there. I worked, but I did other things that interested me more.

      When I became the president of the student body at Chemawa it opened a lot of doors to opportunities and experiences. That afforded me the chance to visit with the Yakima Indian nation and to travel to the Navaho nation. The goal was to visit tribes and learn how they operated. That was part of becoming a leader and I learned quite a bit. Looking over the tribes had a big influence on me. It was a good political education and taught me lessons about leadership.

      By being elected president of the student body I got an entirely other kind of education at Chemawa. I learned a lot of politics and I learned about other Native tribes and cultures. My advisor, Clement Azure, was the one who suggested the training prior to my term as president. He was one of the best student advisors.

      Up until then I didn’t know how to run a meeting or carry out the directions or rules that the student body made or the student council passed. I’d say the school benefitted from me attending that program in Missouri. I learned about much more than overseeing meetings. I learned how to do something. For me alcohol was already an issue to be looked at. When I traveled I heard that “drunken Indian” phrase a lot. I heard people say that if they just looked at the way Indians were portrayed in the media, they were all drunks. The portrayal in many places, certainly the movies, did show all Indians as drunks who didn’t know what they were doing. The image was that they are all killing themselves and that they’re always drunk.

      At that time the activists Russell Means and Dennis Banks were making speeches and they came to our school. They talked about the American Indian Movement and sovereignty. They really got me thinking when they talked about the history of how the federal government had treated Indians and Alaska Natives. They said, “It’s not right. We need to change that. We need to take our land back. We need to take our rights back. We’ve lost them so far.” What was interesting was that the United States was involved in a war in South Vietnam at the time and they seemed to be making waves.

      I was wondering, Gee, how come these guys are saying that? I was strongly affected by it. Most of the Native people I knew were not like that. Our people were healthy. They weren’t like that stereotype. I thought, We’re better than that. I also did a lot of reading, books like Custer Died for Your Sins, and read about the Wounded Knee Movement.

      Russell Means and Dennis Banks made a big impression on me and they were right. American Indians had lost their land and they wanted to reclaim some of that land. The American government broke every promise it made to Indians. It broke every treaty.

      My senior year was a turning point for my life. It raised my consciousness. I became much more socially aware. I had liked playing sports and I had fun doing it. When I made the change to becoming student body president my last year in high school that one thing became a big part of my life. That time period led me to the rest of my life. Yes, I do like dog mushing and remain involved in that sport, but becoming student body president and having those experiences helped me for the next thirty or forty years.

      That year I threw myself full blast into politics and government and issues. I gained so much awareness. It was never the same for me after that.

       CHAPTER 4

      What I learned during that year, after being student body president, after starting those programs, after the reading I did, and after hearing Russell Means and Dennis Banks, was that if I invested my time in good programs I could change attitudes. I wanted to change the idea that drunken Indians were no good. I wanted to overcome that image. We did a good job of it there at school, but I wanted to continue it.

      To me it meant that if I am a drunken Indian I am a loser. I wanted us to feel good about who we were and who we were as Eskimos and Alaska Natives. That year was empowering.

      I graduated from high school at Chemawa in 1972 and at that point I wanted to become a coach. I wanted to coach a football team, a basketball team, or become a physical education teacher. That was my goal. That was my thinking. I thought I could use my athletic background in a career and do good things for young people, as well. I wanted to work with young people and help others.

      My plan was to attend Oregon College of Education in Monmouth, Oregon, which is now Western Oregon University. I wanted to earn a degree in education so I could teach and coach at the high school level. I thought I would be able to play football there, too, which I wanted to do. I wanted to get back to football. My junior year in high school I had made All-State. But I knew I could still play at that level.

      Only one thing happened. I got drafted right after high school. By then my brother Ted was in the army. He had been drafted and sent to Vietnam. I was very close to Frank because he tutored me so much when I was a boy. He influenced me in everything, hunting, fishing, and everything else. He was a mentor. But Ted was, too.

      Ted was another tough kid. He was the one who taught me how to box. We made boxing gloves out of socks and were hitting each other. We grew up boxing a lot. My mom got tired of us using the socks that way so we bought some boxing gloves from one of the catalogs.

      We got pretty serious about the boxing and one time I punched Ted really hard and loosened his teeth. He fell backwards and was kind of knocked out for a while. Even if you are boxing with your brother you have to protect yourself at all times—that’s the first rule of boxing—and you’ve got to fight to the max or you’ll get it. You don’t back down on anybody. You fight. You don’t let them beat you. You beat them. That really helped me.

      Only we were doing all of this fighting in the house. My mother was not thrilled about it at all. Later, Ted and I were in high school together. He was two grades ahead of me. He had some wonderful friends from Hydaburg in Southeast and we always had good friends from Akiak with us in high СКАЧАТЬ