A Letter To St. Joe

A Letter To St. Joe

May 18, 2011

Fr. Stephen Huffstetter, SCJ
Director
St. Joseph's Indian School
Chamberlain, South Dakota 57326

Dear Steve:

(You signed your letter “Steve,” so I guess it's okay for me to address you that way)

Thank you for the wonderful package I just received from you, enclosing gifts, including personalized labels, note pads and a dream-catcher, all of which I can keep to be my very own with the compliments of the Lakota children of your school. I gotta tell you, Steve, I'm still blubbering over the thought that those great kids are being so beautifully taken care of by you and your staff, and that the least I can do is pony up $8, $12 or $15, or “other,” depending on whether I prefer to contribute food, clothing, bedding or perhaps kick a little gratitude upstairs to the Vatican.

Your covering letter carefully explained that my generous gift saves these youngsters “from poverty, illiteracy and despair – a nightmare fate that befalls so many Native Americans.” That worries me. I thought that we had been giving them the benefit of white European kindness and the tender loving care of the Roman Catholic Church for 500 years or so.

You also point out to me in my ignorance that the dream-catcher, which is usually hung over a kid's sleeping area, allows the good dreams to “pass through the center hole” to the sleeping person, while the “bad dreams are trapped in the web.” That's a relief, Steve. I'd heard stories about hundreds of Indian residential schools in North America, where what passed through the center hole was a nightmare for thousands of children.

Most of all, I liked the way you put in those Lakota words in order to show that this message is really from the kids and not composed by some kindly priest or tender loving nun. Wopila tanka right back at you, Steve.

I do have one problem, and maybe you can help me out with it. I recently heard a radio broadcast by Ken Bear Chief, who has been in your area trying to win compensation for native graduates of schools like yours, and he said that three schools in South Dakota, including St. Joseph's, had hired an attorney who actually wrote the legislation that was recently passed by the South Dakota state legislature, creating a four-year statute of limitations on any class action or other lawsuit against any person or organization that had committed rape, sodomy, murder or as you say, “poverty, illiteracy or despair.” In other words, if an Indian kid was abused at the age of five, he/she would need to get their legal act together and hire a lawyer by the time he/she was nine years old. Folks mature fast in South Dakota, according to the brain-dead legislators of that good old-boy State. Of course they didn't WRITE the legislation, they just voted it in. I thought that kind of write-in legislation by lobbyists only happened in Washington.

So Steve, my problem is why do you need a silly old statute of limitations for abuse cases if – as it says in your letter – St. Joseph's is only making Lakota children's “lives happier and their futures brighter?” Seems to me a good shot of compensation would make any kid's life happier and future brighter.

I tell you what, Steve. Since you've already sent me a certificate I can hang on my wall proving that I made a donation to those wonderful kids – and possibly your car payments, I will send you, not $8, not $12, not $15, but I will send you $1,000 IF you will do one little thing in return: persuade those friends of St. Joseph's in the South Dakota legislature to trash that law applying a four-year statute of limitations on child abuse lawsuits, sending a copy of that repeal to me and to Ken Bear Chief. I'm sure Ken left his contact information around the Pine Ridge area somewhere.

Wopila tanka, Steve,

William Annett

Peddling Tupperware for Propane, Erez Fund 2011

Peddling Tupperware for Propane, Erez Fund 2011In Honoring of The Republic of Lakota

Over the last few years I have been witness to many heartbreaking truths about the accuracy of how Natives on certain reservations are forced to live. I have heard the cry for funding to help prevent youth suicide, which runs rampant in Native Communities. The voices for treatment centers, for areas such as White Clay, South Dakota that exist only to profit from the sale of alcohol to Natives. I have seen the tears of generations of ancestry in the suffering from the atrocities of Native residential schools. I have felt the sorrow that the life expectancy on these reservations is merely 46-48 years old. I have heard the pleas when they ask for Justice for the missing women and children who still today disappear, with no investigations. 

Many people believe these are injustices from the past and we as Nations, people, human beings should move past this and live our life. Our Spirituality is our life, and our connection to our ancestry and all things is our Spirituality. So you see it is hard for a Native to understand that concept, to just move on and forget about the past, that it was so long ago. Yesterday was not so long ago and neither is tomorrow. So we must continue to empower our sovereignty and treaty rights. If we don't, we as the First Nations will have no future.

Today is the day we can begin to do something to help those in need, who suffer for whatever the reason. Today we should be helping those in need, in honor of our Ancestry and our Spirituality. We as human beings should work together to make sure people are not living on the streets, in homes infested with mold, or no running water or plumbing, without insulation in the walls to bring warmth from the harsh winter temperatures below zero, senseless cases of freezing to death, dirt floors, boarded up windows, no food, no clothing, limited education, no jobs, divided communities living under a separate set of laws known as the "Indian Act." 

My ‘Today’ started a long time ago, when I became involved in many non-profits and charities in my community. I opened my eyes and my heart and saw the need for help and began to work towards bringing people what they needed. I work with a great team of volunteers who give of themselves and their time to assure this happens. This, my view, is Traditional, in a Native sense.

I work with some amazing people at Aramark Sports and Entertainment, in Las Vegas, Nevada. These people are the most generous people I have ever known in my years of fund raising and charity work. They have supported me and donated freely to my causes over the last 10-12 years, within both the employees and management classifications of our business. Together we put aside any differences and personal feelings, and continue to work towards being a team who does make a difference, in the lives of people.  

In November and December of 2010 I kept wondering how I could raise money locally to help people in another state. The general rule of small non-profits is that they are basically community based for the need in that area. There is need is everyone’s community. But the cause for propane to keep Natives ~ another human being ~ warm in the winter was compelling. I expressed this to one of my co-workers, Juanita, and she gave me the idea that allowed us, as a team, to donate a total of $630.00 Dollars to Whisper n Thunder’s EREZ Fund 2011.

The Idea was simple, Juanita was a Tupperware Representative and proposed a fundraiser to me. The Idea was I would peddle Tupperware to anyone who crossed my path for 30 days, in January of 2011 and we would be given 40% of the total sales to the charity of our choice.  

It was a welcomed idea, a gift, presented to me in a way where I could raise money locally and then donate the funds to a certain cause outside my area. To help people that we may never cross paths with, never know what impact was made on these people's lives, or to ever see the results that would encourage more involvement and participation.

I work with an amazing and compassionate group of people, who believe in working together to bring hope that all things can change, change for people who only need a chance. I also have been blessed that I work for a Company who sees a need in helping it's employee's reach out into their communities and be that difference. 

Billie Fidlin, the President of this publication then wrote a personal letter to my Company, Aramark Sports and Entertainment, that has since "passed it on" and is currently reaching out to the fundraising team and is sponsoring its current fund raising efforts. We live in a circle/hoop and all things come back to us. My Circle is bright, giving, compassionate and in doing so, I carry on my Nation’s Traditions and Culture.

I now reach out and ask that if you are reading this article, that you go to the main page of www.whispernthunder.org and you donate, what you can afford, to be part of an on-going team of people who want to make a difference for someone less fortunate then themselves. That is the true meaning of Spirituality.  

Woliwon, (Thank You)

Russ Letica

Madawaska Maliseet First Nation

A Slave by Any Other Name: Shawn Atleo Fiddles with Words while his People Burn

A Slave by Any Other Name:
Shawn Atleo Fiddles with Words while his People Burn
By Kevin Annett

The so-called government of Canada has just changed the name of its “Indian Affairs” department to “Aboriginal Affairs”, and their top token red skin wants to know why.

Shawn Atleo heads the government-funded “Assembly of First Nations” – lovingly known to most Indians as the “Around the Fort Natives" – and he’s mildly concerned about the name change.

Shawn’s a pretty mild guy, with his fancy suit, closely cropped hair and $120,000 a year salary, which of course doesn’t include the free hookers and first class air travel. Calmly, he told reporters today that it is “incumbent” on him to find out what his employers intend by officially calling Indians “aboriginals”.

Shawn, my boy, I’ll save you the time and effort. Just open any dictionary. “Aboriginal” means “not of the original group”: in short, somebody like you. If your family in Ahousaht hadn’t have spent all their time selling off their peoples’ land to logging companies like Weyerhauser for lucrative kickbacks, they might have taught you that.

I think the change in name fits, actually, and is a surprisingly honest thing for a Canadian government to do: simply telling it like it is. Indians in Canada have by and large become thoroughly ab-original, thanks to smallpox, compulsory sterilizations, and the general massacre of their soul, language and children’s lives in the Indian residential schools. They are not who they were.

Take a look at your own life, Shawn. Instead of bringing home your relatives’ remains from those murderous schools, or going after the police who keep killing native men and women, you’ve spent your time demanding more money from the feds so you and your AFN buddies can go on pretending you represent something.

But I’ll be fair. Life can get pretty insular and bizarre from the inside of a private jet, or in ceaseless $500 lunches with other bureaucrats.


And it’s best you stay in that world, anyway, Shawn. The last time one of you guys tried hobnobbing with actual Indians – when your predecessor “Flying Phil” Fontaine did a half hour photo-op stroll through Vancouver’s skid row – the mostly homeless native guys there ended up jeering at him so much he just scurried away.

So stick to what you know best: talking. In the meantime, let the real, remaining indigenous people find their own voice, and way. Most of you may have become as thoroughly ab-original as my own people; but let’s not make things worse by pretending you’re still Indians.

That word, after all, has nothing to do with India. It’s taken from the Diary kept by Christoper Columbus, who referred to the original peoples of this continent as “In Dios” - People of God – because they shared everything with one another, and were strangers to private property, poverty and warfare.

Once upon a time, all of our peoples were like that. Maybe we can be so again – but only if we start speaking the truth of what we have become, and of who and what made us that way.

In the meantime, Shawn, why not use this sudden trend towards honesty by the Tory government to everyone’s advantage, and start naming things as they truly are?

Try calling Indian Residential Schools the Christian Death Camps.

Or the RCMP the License to Kill Indians Police.

Or Weyerhauser and the other rapacious logging companies who you’ve signed secret deals with The Eco Terrorist Corporations.

Maybe the Tories could even gain the appropriate appellation Suppositories.

Who knows? Enough such honesty, and our words may begin to actually mean something, Shawn.