Sharing Our Stories of Survival: Native Women Surviving Violence (21 page)

and on the week end
she is a pow wow princess

little girl scared
she can not run
can not hide
she wonders how this
can be
Native Pride

and on the week end
she wears her beaded crown

mama stands bruised
preaches

her word
convincing herself
the child’s
not hurt

and on the week end
she watches her girl dance

locked in the violence
of distorted
tradition
the old way is lost
by the choice of
omission

carnage revealed
in denial
is cloaked
the cycle continues
on the truth
we have choked

and on the week ends
We Dance

we nod at each other
like this is
the way it should be
ignoring the sound
of a jingle dance
plea

and on the week ends
we are Indians

jingle girl grows
continues to dance
she loves
a grass dancer
she takes a
love chance

and on the week ends
they owl dance

married traditional
she wears
her white skins
it was not long after
the hurting
begins

and on the week end
she watches her tiny tot

pulling the blanket up
hiding
her eyes
she screams silent
to her own mother’s
cries

Tracie Jones Myrick Meyer (Kalapuya)

Chapter 6

From a Woman Who Experienced Violence

ANONYMOUS

The New Family in Town

T
he kerosene light glowed its warm yellow softness against the red-and-white checked oilcloth. Supper was finished and each family member had completed evening chores. My dad let me help him shovel the ash into a bucket from our wood cooking stove. It was dark outside and the flashing northern lights could be seen from our kitchen window as my little brother and I climbed onto our grandpa’s lap. His chair was off-limits to everyone, except us when he was sitting in it! Most nights the women gathered to talk after dinner dishes were done. The men, including my grandpa, dad, and uncles, went to their favorite chairs at the perimeter of the kitchen as the women gathered around the kitchen table.

My brother and I knew that when the grandmas, aunties, and our mom completed their evening discussion that it would be time for card-playing, jokes, and stories. My uncle Walter would cook fudge as my uncle Alan would pop popcorn. My brother and I played our usual evening games. As we played, we would listen to the grown-ups and argue about who would be the one to scrape fudge from the side of the pan!

The women had been talking for a short time when my little brother and I were called to the kitchen table. They looked stern. We wondered if we had misbehaved in some way. As we stood by the table we were asked if we knew the family that had just recently moved to town and were now living at the end of our street. We answered that we had met Patty, the girl our age, but we hadn’t met her older teenage brothers. Patty’s family wasn’t very friendly. Their mother was cranky and she looked mean with dark circles around her eyes. Their family had a mom and kids but no dad or other family members in their home.

The women in our family instructed us to take food to them the next day and to continue to do this until they told us to stop. Each of them would cook something. We followed their instructions. On the first day, the mom reluctantly took our gift of food. We could barely hear her when she thanked us.

Taking food to a family is a custom commonly practiced when someone dies. Other people in the town weren’t taking food to the family, so we wondered why we were treating the family as though someone had died. What was important to us was that our family was asking us to help. We were being treated like big kids and not babies!

Over the next several days as we heard the women in our family talking, we learned that most of the townspeople wanted nothing to do with the new family. Other children were told not to play with them. Others wanted them to be told to leave our town. The reason why the family was not welcome in our community was very serious. We learned that the mom had shot and killed the dad. During a fight they struggled over a gun, and she shot him.

The second day, when we were bringing food, we saw two women from our family go to the new neighbor’s home. They brought the mom to our house. We were instructed to play outside while they talked to her. She left with puffy eyes and a red face. The women gave her hugs as she left our house. Eventually, the new family moved to another town. My family befriended them for the brief time they lived near us. My brother and I learned our first responsibilities to neighbors. I was four and he was two.

Running a Train

A group of boys at school had lied about “running a train”
¹
on me. They threatened to tell that lie throughout school if I refused to be a “girlfriend” to one of them. I laughed at them because I didn’t expect that anyone would believe them. I had often been teased about being one of the last virgins in my class. I was into books—not boys! I was wrong because everyone at school believed them. My friends’ parents didn’t want them hanging out with me because of their lies! Eventually, I sought out new friends and became involved with a boyfriend that would become my husband. He was fifteen. I was sixteen. Our relationship was cemented because he believed my side of the story. We married when he turned eighteen.

The first years of our marriage included some minor violence. I didn’t fear him and I didn’t believe him to be a violent person because of a slap or a push. I slapped him back. I played football as a teenager and wasn’t fearful of physical aggression. I wasn’t easily intimidated. I was accustomed to fighting with my brother and his friends as we were growing up.

My husband grew more muscular with age. I, on the other hand, grew into my nurturing role as a mother to our daughter. As I became economically dependent by being a mother, he became increasingly disrespectful and demanding. By the time our daughter was two, he was even more violent. I left him and enrolled in college. He took my act of emancipation as a personal insult and retaliated by making me a target for more violence. Unfortunately, I could not afford a divorce at the time and was worried about dooming myself to hell for an eternity just to divorce him!

Although my family knew about some of the violence, they were willing to let me make my own decisions about my life. They wouldn’t interfere! In the midst of the divorce dilemma, I knew I needed economic freedom and I couldn’t get that without an education. Working for minimum wage would keep me at a dead-end job or in poverty. Neither one would provide me with an escape from him.

Trapped

The snowplows provided a road lined on both sides with six-foot-high snow piles. Even though the wind was blowing coldly, it didn’t swoop down into the roadway. I walked a mile down the road to his house to get my daughter. I was in school, so weekends were really the only opportunity that I had to be with her. During the week, I needed to study each night. As I arrived at the house my husband shared with his sister, I was anxious to pick up and leave with our four-year-old daughter. However, she was having a good time and didn’t want to leave her new toys or kitten. So I sat down to visit with my sister-in-law while she played. After half an hour, she left for the evening. As soon as she left, he was on top of me! I was five months pregnant and unusually big! I didn’t want to be intimate with him. He became extremely angry about the rejection and dragged me into his bedroom, beating me severely, stripping my clothes, and raping me. I was concerned about my unborn child, because he punched me in the stomach repeatedly. I was so badly bruised that I was unable to move. After raping me, he hid my clothes at his mother’s house; boots, coat, keys, everything! He locked me in his room for several days. Our daughter was taken to his mother’s house.

I wondered what his family thought as day after day he brought food to me and I stayed in his room. A few times a day he would escort me to the bathroom. He would stand guard outside the bathroom, then escort me back to his room. Wrapped in a sheet, I considered jumping out the window, but I was on the second floor and was uncertain about what harm that would bring to my unborn child. I realized that he was waiting for the visible bruises to disappear before he finally let me go. His final remark to me as he handed me my clothes was the threat, “Don’t forget, we’re still married! You are still my wife and have to behave like one!”

Walking back home, I thought of the coldness of this freedom. Each week I would be expected to bring our daughter to him. If I didn’t, he would come to my place and break in. The police would back him up even if he came to “visit” in the middle of the night because we were married and our daughter was his child.

This was not the first time he raped me. My unborn child’s very existence came from his rape. A few short months after I tried to separate from my husband, he came to my place around midnight on the pretense of visiting “his” daughter. After threatening to break down the door if I didn’t let him in, I opened it to appease him. He assaulted me for not letting him in immediately. He dragged me up the staircase to my bedroom where I was brutally raped. Throughout the rape a pillow was held over my face as I fought and tried to scream for help. No one heard me, and no one came to help. After the rape, I was kicked and punched until he lost his energy to continue.

The following day I couldn’t walk and was in extreme pain when I moved. My fifteen-year-old brother-in-law stopped by to visit my daughter and me as he usually did on Saturdays. He played with her for a few hours. Every so often, he would call to me and ask if I was coming down. Eventually, he came upstairs and knocked on my partially open bedroom door. I asked what he wanted. He asked if he could come in. I told him no. He stepped into my room anyway. Shocked and silent as he looked at me, he walked over and gently kissed me on the cheek. He left angrily saying, “He did this to you! I know what he did!”

After two years of extreme hardship, I went back to my husband. I knew that it was safer to be with him than without him. I knew he wouldn’t rape me if I lived with him. I would experience less violence and less severe violence.

Whenever I would try to leave him or when I lived away from him for a few years, I experienced attacks that included him breaking into my home during the middle of the night, raping me when he claimed to come to the house to visit our children, or abducting me as I visited friends or family. After so much abuse, his direct threats meant little to me, so he began to threaten me with violence against my sisters if I didn’t return to him or if I threatened to leave him.

When I reported the violence to the police, I was told that there was nothing that could be done since there were no witnesses. It would just be my word against his. Eventually, when I became frustrated with the police, I went to the prosecutor’s office for help. He told me that as long as I was married there was nothing I could do. After all, “You can’t testify against your husband. However, if you insist, I will consider pressing charges if you initiate a divorce within two weeks.”

I was sent to a police photographer who instructed me to strip nude. He proceeded to take at least thirty pictures of my body from all angles. All my bruises were below the neck. This experience was both degrading and humiliating. I was further humiliated when I returned to the prosecutor with the sealed envelope of my pictures. He leered at them for at least ten minutes with a grin on his face. He reminded me of my two-week deadline for initiating a divorce and said he might consider pressing charges then.

No one would stop his violence. The police gave him a green light by giving him permission to keep acting violent. Only one of numerous protection orders was ever enforced. Even when a violation included an assault, I was given lame excuses by law enforcement like, “You let him in!” or “He was just visiting his children!” or “Why don’t you divorce him instead of calling us!” and “We can’t do anything!”

My femaleness was often targeted in one form or another, including the numerous rapes. Most of his assaults didn’t involve outright violence but did involve sexual assault because I was in too much physical pain to fight back, resist, or take any other action. When I was raped, I would include a description in a protection order. No one in the legal system ever said anything about it. Eventually, I stopped telling them. I was invisible to the legal system. Their protections were not for me. It didn’t matter if I called the police or if my neighbors called the police. If I had visible injuries, if he used weapons, or if I was raped, none of it mattered to them. I believe that I was invisible to them because I am an Indian woman. The legal system wasn’t designed to protect me, or anyone like me.