SEM 248 Helene Johns Buster

Transcription

1 is a nurse at the Big Cypress Medical Center. This interview is important because Buster is personally and professionally involved in or has experiences with many issues central to this project. Born of mixed parentage, Buster discusses life as a half-blood among full-bloods, changes in the use of Indian names (e.g., 2-3, 15), and struggles between the uses of Indian languages and English. Raised in Brighton, Buster spoke Creek as a first language; now married to a Mikasuki-speaker, she grapples with the challenges of teaching her children Indian languages when their tendency is to speak English (e.g., 15-20). Buster worked with the tribe in their initial bingo ventures and then with the now-defunct emergency medical program. The majority of her work history has been with health, and this interview provides some very good information about diabetes and changes in health care at both Brighton and Big Cypress (35-40), which she see as tied to economic and social changes (43-44). Her experiences with drug and alcohol recovery personally and professionally offer important insights into a set of large problems that many in the Seminole tribe are and have been confronting over the last generation (40, 53-58). She discusses the uses of Western and Indian medicines, and how she as a health care professional reconciles them (40-42). She also mentions briefly what she sees is a connection between the Green Corn Dance and her work in health. Buster s memories of the Green Corn Dance as a child center around one episode where her mother became drunk; the shaped Buster s own participation in the ceremony for years, through attending it for the party-atmosphere and then avoidance of it. Over the years her attitudes toward the ceremony have changed from viewing it as a party to appreciating its import as a ceremony in which her cultural heritage and traditions are taught (46-52). Buster discusses her experiences at boarding school and in education more generally. She recognizes that her experiences are different than those in her parents generation and also different than those of her children s generation. She examines these transformations, including the push for her generation to attain education and be white at the expense of learning cultural practices, the move to and between public schools, and some of the practices at reservation (and public) schools related to teaching Seminole culture and Indian languages (e.g., 8-15, 20-23, 25-26, 33). Buster also discusses her concern about the role of dividends in education, both making education more accessible and creating a difficult atmosphere for it to succeed (e.g., 22-25). (There is a parallel in her discussion of economic development and health care.) Her desire to attend boarding school was tied to the transformation of housing, when her mother decided to leave the matrilineally-related extended family camp and enter a CBS with her children. Buster resented this, and she explains how she saw this as an assault on the family as she knew it. She discusses the form of the family structure when she was growing up and how it changed with this shift in housing (e.g., 26-29, 32-33). Near the end of the interview Buster gives her assessment of the economic changes in the tribe over the last generation, and she explains why she sees them as simultaneously a blessing and a curse (52-53, 58-60). SEM 248

2 Page 2 Interviewee: Interviewer: J. Ellison 11 August 1999 E: I am sitting in the Big Cypress Medical Center with Helene Buster and Daisi Jumper. I want to talk today with Helene about some issues related to the Seminole Tribe and to health matters and so forth. I guess we will start off with the basic questions, which we are asking everybody, and that is, your full name. B:. E: To what clan do you belong? B: Panther. E: The Panther Clan. That is a large, well-represented clan on Big Cypress. B: Yes, it is. E: Were you born here on Big Cypress? B: No. I am from Brighton originally. I am a transplant. E: Are there a lot of transplants here? B: Yes. We move from one res to the other. E: When did you move to Big Cypress? B: I have been here about a year and a half. E: That recently? And did you come because of the clinic? B: Well, actually, I moved here because I was getting married, and I was moving over there to the Miccosukee part of this reservation that is right down the road. I was planning on commuting back and forth to Brighton from here, but then they wanted a clinic supervisor here, and that is the job that I was doing in Brighton,

3 Page 3 so they just moved me here. I have been here since. E: For a year and a half. So, you are from Brighton originally. Are you a Muskogee-Creek speaker? B: I speak Creek. E: Was that your first language, or did you learn English first? B: No, it was my first. E: Do you have a Creek name? B: No, I do not. My oldest brother, he was about twelve years older than I, he had an Indian name, but I have another brother and a sister and we did not. I do not know why. I asked my mother why we did not have a name, why she did not give us an Indian name, and she said [it was] because the people that could name you there was not anybody that could name you. So, I do not know. E: Because it would not be them, it would... B: There was somebody else that would have to name you. They take you to somebody to name you, like an uncle or somebody like that. I guess their uncles it would have been her uncle, and all of those people in that family were already gone. I never knew my grandparents. They were already dead before I was born. E: Did you find, then, growing up that that was a big absence, not having an Indian name? Did a lot of your peers have them and use them? B: No. We all used the English names, so it was not. It actually did not become a big deal until I got older, and then I am starting to question why. Now it is like not

4 Page 4 too many people remember everybody else s Indian name; just the older people use the those names, and then they are like, who was that? E: That is interesting. So, you were raised on Brighton reservation; you have lived most of your life on either of the reservations? B: The majority of my life was in Brighton, but I lived on the Hollywood reservation for probably about eight or ten years. I lived here for a year, and then I went back to Brighton, and now I am back. When we had the million-dollar bingo, I worked there. E: When was that? B: Oh, gosh, that was probably about 1988, 1987, or something, with the big old building right down the road here. That was called the Million-Dollar Bingo. E: That is no longer there. B: No longer. It was a huge, huge bingo that we had only once a month for a weekend. People would fly in from all over into Fort Lauderdale and they would be transported out here and we had loads and loads of buses. But, it was under poor management; it was not managed under the tribe. E: It was contracted out? B: Yes. E: And you worked there for a time? B: Yes, for probably around a year. I worked for the time that it was opened, and I do not know what that was. It was different. E: I have seen the building and I have wondered what that is.

5 Page 5 B: My job at the time was to make sure that it was clean and ready and set up for the game, and all the paper packages were made for the game. E: That sounds like it would have been a lot of work. B: Oh, it was. We would put in ninety-nine hours in a week, the week prior to the game, to make sure everything was done. E: About how many people worked there? B: Oh, gosh. A couple hundred, I would think. E: Mostly people from the reservations? B: People from all the reservations came out here and worked on that one weekend; on that one day they would come out here. When I worked it, it was like eight to five, Monday through Friday, with doing the paper, making sure the place was cleaned, and all that. It took us a whole month in between, from one game to the next game, to get everything straightened out for the next game because it was so huge. E: I can imagine. And people would fly in from... B: From everywhere. They would fly in to Fort Lauderdale from other states just to play. It was interesting. E: It sounds interesting, big crowds all of a sudden descending. B: Yes. It was huge. That one weekend a month Big Cypress was busting out of the seams with people. E: People would stay it was the whole weekend? B: It was a Saturday, all day. It was way after midnight a lot of times when we

6 Page 6 closed the place down, so it was like a weekend. E: What did people do I guess they had food and so forth. B: Oh, yes, they had everything there. E: Nobody stayed? There was not lodging? B: No. It was just that one day, but it started first thing in the morning and it went until the wee hours of the morning. E: That is remarkable. B: I never could figure why people liked bingo that much but they did. E: It seems popular in lots of places. You worked there for about a year? B: Well, for whatever time it was open, I do not even remember. E: Have you ever lived on the reservation and worked off the reservation? B: Well, actually, the times when I have lived on the reservation, I have always worked on the reservation. But when I went to nursing school, then I worked at the clinics, too, but I worked part time at the hospitals just for the experience of working somewhere other than a clinic. I worked at the hospitals over there in Highlands county. E: Where did you go to nursing school? B: South Florida Community College in Avon Park, which is also Highlands county. E: How long of a program was that, the nursing program? B: I took my LPN [Licensed Practical Nurse] first. Actually, I got a GED [General Equivalency Diploma]; I did not graduate so I got my GED. I did not ever go to college or anything, so I had to take all my pre-requisites first. That took me a

7 Page 7 year. Once I had my pre-requisites, I was ready to go into the nursing program, which was one year for my LPN. I worked as an LPN for three years and then decided I wanted to go back for my RN [Registered Nurse license], so it was another year. E: When you worked as an LPN, that was back here or at Brighton? B: Yes, at Brighton. E: That is a lot of training. Worthwhile? B: Yes, really. I enjoy it. But I have worked probably about twenty years, off and on, with the medical facility because I worked as an EMT [Emergency Medical Technician] when we had an EMT program. I worked as an EMT and I was nationally certified as an EMT. And then I did CHR work, and then I worked with WIC. E: CHR? B: Community Health Representatives. It is kind of like a liaison between the community and the health department. They go out into the communities and do home visits and things like that. I did that for a while and then I worked with the WIC program, that is the Women, Infants, and Children program, and then I decided to go to school. I keep going in and out of work here. E: But you had been working in health and that led you to go seek further training. B: Yes. E: The EMT program you said, when there was one; there is no longer? B: No. We do not have one in the tribe. At the time and that was back in 1975 or

8 Page , somewhere around there we had an ambulance and all on the two reservations, this reservation and Brighton reservation, because we are so far from the doctors and the hospitals. It just was not feasible. It probably was more feasible here, and I cannot say because I was not here at the time, but their program stayed up longer than ours did in Brighton. We just did not have that many emergencies where we needed an ambulance, that severe of an emergency that we needed an ambulance to transport. We came to realize that it was with the insurance and everything that it took to maintain the ambulance it was taking a lot more of our budget. At the time the tribe was not as financially set as they are now. The feasibility was not there, for Brighton, anyway. So, they did away with the ambulance, and then we just used cars. The CHRs and the EMTs just used cars, and we made assessments and things, and it is only a half an hour away from Brighton to the nearest hospital, whereas here it is totally different. So, their program stayed up here for a lot longer time than ours did [in Brighton]. E: You were doing this work in the 1980s? B: 1976 and E: Where is the nearest hospital to Big Cypress? B: Clewiston, which is by flying probably about forty-five minutes away. E: That is what they do if they have a serious case? B: Yes. Flying means a high-speed vehicle, not flying. [Laughter.] Going eighty [miles per hour] you can make it in forty-five minutes. The ambulance, usually by

9 Page 9 the time you call 911 it is forty-five minutes to an hour before they get out here. So, it is just as fast. We have all kinds of accidents over here on Snake road all the time, really, really bad accidents. And most of them are pretty life threatening. That is when the Medevacs come; you have to call them in. Usually they go to Fort Lauderdale or Naples, mostly Fort Lauderdale. E: To major hospitals. Did you receive your training for the EMT on Brighton reservation? B: No, I did not. Actually, my first training that I got for it was in South Dakota, Black Hills. I went out there for a program that they had, an EMT program. I spent a month out there in their training program. Then I came back and I went to Edison Community College because Florida does not accept national certification yet. They have a Florida certification, and so I went through that program over there. E: You went to South Dakota specifically to seek the EMT training program? B: Yes. E: Was it good? B: Oh yes. I really learned a lot. The health department was the one that sent us out there for it. E: You mean the tribal health department? B: Yes. There were two of us that went from the Brighton reservation. I think the ones that got the training on this reservation went locally. I do not know why they sent us out there, but they did, and we spent a month out there. E: You do not know what the decision-making process was.

10 Page 10 B: No. E: But you had contacted them about your interest in doing this? B: No, they had an advertisement out for EMTs, that they would train you and all that, and so I applied for that. E: Who was the other person who went with you? B: Agnes Bert from Brighton. E: Is she still practicing? B: Oh yes, she is still there. She is a community health representative out there. She probably has twenty-four years in with the facility over there. She has been there a long time. And hers is full time work; mine has been in and out over the years, going back to school, and some training or something, and coming back, or just not working and then coming back. But hers has been steady, probably twenty-five years. E: Your primary occupation is working here at the clinic? B: Yes. This is what I do. E: It is what you do. So, we have been talking some about the schools. Where did you begin school, in Brighton? B: Actually, the first school I went to was Okeechobee. I went to the Okeechobee system for the first two years and then the Glades county system said we had to come over there because we were in their county, because you get all of the assistance or subsistence for the amount of students that are there. So, they transferred all of the Seminole kids from Okeechobee to Glades county; they said

11 Page 11 we had to go there because we lived in Glades county. E: Because the reservation is in... B: Glades county. And so we went there for years. E: How old were you when you made this change? B: Well, I was in third grade, so whatever age that is; six, seven, or eight, eight years old. So, I went to school there until my eleventh grade. E: Was that a hard change, to leave in third grade? B: I do not think so. I do not remember it. You know, from the third grade I went to school with this one girl and her name was Sherry, in Okeechobee. We went to first and second grade and third grade together. When I left, she and I still stayed friends I mean, today we still know each other and we are still friends. She actually married a guy that I went to school with in Glades County, and so we have stayed in touch even over all these years, even though we did not go to school together. E: So, it was not that dramatic of a... B: No, because everybody that you went to school with and all that, they all went over there, too. It was just the white kids that did not go over there, but all the Indians went. Everybody that you rode the bus with and all that stuff, the people that were in your same grade, they were all there, too, so it was not like you were just thrown into a place with all strangers. E: Extracted by yourself. B: Yes, you were not pulled out and put over there by yourself.

12 Page 12 E: Were there white kids who lived in Glades county but who were going to Okeechobee schools? B: Way over on the side where Buckhead Ridge is I do not know if you know anything about that, but it is over on Route 78 those people lived right on the county line, and so they took their kids to Okeechobee. They had to drive their kids there; the bus did not come to them. That was our big thing; you see, we could have gone to school in Okeechobee, but Glades county would not allow Okeechobee busses to cross their line to pick us up. E: And they certainly were not going to take you by their busses to another school system. B: No. That was the whole thing, and back at that time you were lucky to have a car to go back and forth to town, whatever transportation you had. That was the one thing that they had over us, that our parents wanted us to be educated whatever it took to get you there, and that is what they did. The school busses were our main means of transportation. And so that is where we ended up going. But, then, it was years later maybe ten, I do not know, it does not seem like it has been that long ago, but it has been probably about fifteen or twenty years that the Seminole Tribe found out, the Brighton community found out, that we did not have to go to Moore Haven schools. The money would go to whatever school we decided we wanted to go to. So, from that point, because Okeechobee was a better school which I totally did not agree with. They had more to offer, but being a better school? I sent my kids to Moore Haven because it was a smaller

13 Page 13 school, and the teachers there were my old classmates. They knew me and if they had a problem with my daughters, they did not have one problem calling me, whereas Okeechobee was a bigger system. They did not know me, they did not know who my daughters were, or anything like that. To me, that made a difference. Both of my daughters graduated from the Glades county, Moore Haven system. E: You went through the eleventh grade? B: I went through the eleventh grade. I needed a credit to graduate but I decided I was in love; I had to get married. So, that is what I did, promising that I would get my high school diploma but I did not, until about three years later when I got my GED. E: What year were you born? B: E: I am just trying to think about the changes in education and so on. Did your parents, had they gone to school? You said they were adamant about you getting an education. B: No. I only had a mother. And no, our parents were maybe I should not say parents. We lived in the camps when I was growing up. We lived in the camps, and so all of my aunts and uncles were there. They were the ones that took care of you all of our parents, because there were twelve of us kids that lived in the camp. They were the ones that you went to school with, you played with, and everything, and so we grew up like brothers and sisters. We were cousins, but

14 Page 14 we grew up like brothers and sisters. All of our parents there, in that camp that is what I was saying we did not have fathers; we just had our mothers and our aunts and uncles. E: And your aunts and uncles were your mother s sisters and brothers? B: Yes. E: And they were encouraging you to go to school. It was important. B: Oh yes. It was kind of like, to me and I always said that our being an Indian was kind of put aside so that we could go out and learn to be white, so that we could help them to be able to live in this life that was changing, because they had to go to Okeechobee to do their business and they could not because they did not speak the language. They always had to take one of us kids to town with them. And here we were, making contracts for cars and translating all this stuff for vehicles and just bills and things like that. And we were little kids, just translating all that stuff. It was very important to them for us to learn how to live out here in this world. E: Did they talk to you about that when you were going to school? Did they tell you, this is what we are thinking about your education? B: No, you just kind of knew it, I guess. But it was really pushed on us to get educated. E: And their generation, fewer people had education? B: Nobody, in our nobody. No. E: They did not have the same opportunities, I understand.

15 Page 15 B: Not at all. Nobody in my mother s family had any kind of education. Some of the families around here, I do not know how it happened, but some of them in their age group had gone off to school, but they did not. Our generation was like the first generation to get any kind of education. E: Was there any apprehension, do you think, on the part of your parents, your mother and your aunts and uncles, concerning their children going off to Okeechobee or Moore Haven to the white schools? B: I do not remember it, but they had the Indian school on the reservation and Mr. Boehmer taught them, and he was really instrumental in getting them into public schools because public schools would not take the Indian kids. That was the age when Mr. Boehmer was there that my older cousins and they are in their sixties now they went to Okeechobee. They went to school in Okeechobee and they were the first ones that went to school over there. That first bunch of people. But, I never heard anything from anybody in our family, anything negative about going to school. It was always pushed to get there, that you needed to go to school and to learn whatever you could. That was really pushed on us. I never felt like it was a negative to be going there, being mixed with the non-indians and stuff. I know a lot of people talk about that and I never felt that, I never felt like that. It was always pushed on us, and today I think about it; it was more pushed on us to be white than to be Indian. Because, like I said, I never learned how I mean, they never sat down and taught us how to do the crafts and things like that. And we were pushed more to speak English then to speak the language so

16 Page 16 that we would be able to handle things. And the majority of us were half-breeds and so that was a problem. We were always called half-breeds and we were probably more... E: Called that by whom? B: The Indian kids. The full-bloods. We were probably more prejudiced against, on the Brighton reservation, for being half-breeds than we were in the white community for being half-indian. That is the way I always felt about it. It is funny to me today and I laugh about [it] that the full-bloods were always down on us because we were half-breeds. But today, when you go to the community meetings and stuff like that, the full-bloods are up there asking us half-breeds to interpret for them to the community because the full-bloods do not know how to speak it but the people in my family know how to speak it, because we hung on to it, the language. But the full-bloods out there did not. I do not know why they did not. I always have a hard time with that because both parents and most of them had both parents they both spoke the language and everything, but the kids all spoke English. And they did not pick it up well enough to or where they feel comfortable enough to speak to the community in the language. So, they always get [people] like my cousins to interpret for them. E: To interpret in... B: Into the community, like at a community meeting or something. It is always one of the half-breeds that interprets from the full-bloods to the community. E: Going from Creek to English? Going from English to Creek?

17 Page 17 B: Yes. Well, it is from the English language to the Creek language to the community. E: Do your kids speak... B: No. They do not, because I married a Mikasuki-speaking person. Well, my first husband was an English-speaking person, and he was white. The second husband was a Mikasuki-speaking person, so I did not understand him, and he did not understand me, so, of course, we spoke English. And that is what my child speaks. I have really been thinking about it back then, they should have learned both languages. They should have been tri-lingual, but they are not. They speak English. My daughters try hard now to learn the language but they do not speak it. My grandsons speak more than they do. E: Do you understand Mikasuki? B: I am catching it a little. [Laughter.] It is hard for me. With some I can sit in a conversation and I can hear talk and I can catch things here and there and by the time the conversation is through I kind of think I know what they were talking about. Then I will lean over to somebody and say, did they say this?, and they will say, yes. Sometimes I think I know a little bit more than what I am comfortable saying I know, I think, because I do not want to say yes and then be totally wiped out. It is hard. It is a hard language for me, and when I was working with one of my cousins teaching her how to talk, she would say, how do you say this? And I would say, you can say it like this or you can say it like this, but if you say it like this, it means this and all this. And so now with Andy [Buster]

18 Page 18 I am saying I just want to learn phrases that I can use in the clinic. He will tell me something and I will say it and he will say, no, you do not say it like that because if you say it like that, then it means this. You need to say it like this. He says it changes the whole thing, just the emphasis on the word. He says, you do not want to be saying that at the clinic. I always tell him to record it so when I am riding down the road I can practice saying it over and over. But he has not recorded it; he keeps talking about it but he has not, yet. E: You run into a lot of people here who speak Mikasuki. B: Oh, they all speak Mikasuki here. I think I have only run into two two of the elderly women that speak the Creek language, too. But, then they determined that I am going to learn how to speak Mikasuki, so they quit talking to me in Creek. Every now and then when it is serious business they will tell me what they are saying in Creek. But most of the time it is all in Mikasuki and I might have to get an interpreter. If I cannot pick up the gist of what they are saying, then I have to get an interpreter. E: In fact, we were just looking at this poster outside about language training for young kids and we were speaking to someone else who is doing some language stuff through broadcasting. I guess up at Brighton there are people who are working with language training with students. B: They go into to schools and do it. E: That is what I had heard. I was wondering about, for example, here, there is the Ahfachkee school, and I do not really know what they do with language here.

19 Page 19 B: They teach it in the school; I think they teach it in the school. E: What ages are your children? I forgot, but they are grown and past school. B: Oh gosh, yes. Twenty-six and twenty-three, I think. E: So, they have already gone through the education. B: Yes. They are on their own education now. [Laughter.] I said, you know what, you can blame me forever for not teaching you, but if you do not ever learn it, you have to blame yourself. You are on your own; you have to learn it on your own. E: Do you get the impression that if they were going to have kids that they would want their kids to have an education in the language, in Creek or in Mikasuki? B: Oh yes. Well, I do have three grandsons with my oldest daughter and my oldest grandson went through the Head Start. 1 First he stayed with my mom, and my mom talked to him in the language all the time. So, he knew it very well. Then he went Head Start. He is a little redheaded, freckle-faced boy and he does not look one bit he is not a tribal member. But they would laugh at him because he was the only one among the other little kids that were half or more, they did not know the parts but they could say, how do you say this? and, how do you say that?, and he was the only one that knew because my mother had taught him. Up until four years old he was with her. She taught him. She was the one who took care of him, so she taught him the language. 1 Head Start is a child development program that has served low-income children and their families since The Head Start program is administered by the Head Start Bureau, the Administration on Children, Youth and Families, Administration for Children and Families, Department of Health and Human Services.

20 Page 20 E: His great grandmother. B: Yes. He went there, where they just spoke little bits at a time I do not know how often in a week they went, but it was not an everyday language that they were speaking at the Head Start. Now he is in a private school and there is none spoken there at all. But they told my daughter because they take the language into the public schools now they told her that if she would bring him over one afternoon a week, over to the culture building, they would work with him and teach him. E: How old is he? B: He is six. E: He expresses interest in that? B: Oh yes. He thinks it is pretty cool to speak a different language. It is something that his mother does not know. He says, me and uncle can talk about mama and she will not even know. I said, why do you want to talk about mama? [Laughter.] E: At the Ahfachkee school, my understanding is that they teach other things beyond just linguistic materials, that there is an emphasis on cultural learning. You said something about that, you did not have that kind of education, it was not emphasized in the public schools you were going to in Okeechobee. B: Yes. In Okeechobee, they have a certain day of the week or something and they have all of the Seminoles meet in one classroom and they are exempt from their other classes at that time. They come and they meet and they either do language or they do a culture presentation, like somebody in the community goes

21 Page 21 over there and they talk about something. One of my cousins is very knowledgeable about how the tribe was developed and all the process that it went through and the changes over the years, and he goes over there and talks to them about that. Or just different things in our culture, they go in and they have that captured audience in the school and they can teach them. E: Right. There was an interview that was done with Louise Gopher and she spoke about some of that. B: Yes, Louise was very instrumental in setting that up. E: I gather. And do you think that is a good idea? B: Oh, I think that is a wonderful idea. I think they ought to do that in all the [schools]. In the Hollywood area I think it would be difficult because they are all in private schools over there, so you could not go to all of those private schools. But you have the Clewiston system here and they could do that, too, for our kids. I do not know how many kids go over there, but they could still do it over there. E: Do you have an idea of how many kids the percentage, or the ratio go to the public schools versus the ratio that attend Ahfachkee school? B: No, I really do not know. It is just the older it is like [from] the eighth grade on up, and there are not that many. Plus, they do have a high school here, too. So, the majority of the kids are here, I think. E: The whole school, I do not know enough about it but it sounds like a pretty interesting project, and what they are doing up in Okeechobee and the public schools up there.

22 Page 22 B: Well, I know more about that the goings-on there, because that is where I was, mostly than what really goes on here at the Ahfachkee. As far as the immunizations and things like that, I can tell you what is going on. But as far the other, [I am] not involved because I do not have children there in the school system it makes a difference, with my knowledge to what is happening there. E: If you could point to one or two things that you see as the dramatic changes in education since the early 1970s, what would you point out as the major differences for a kid going through grade school now versus a kid going through grade school in the 1970s. B: The opportunities they have are so different now. Even in the sports and things like that; when my cousins and my brothers and them wanted to be in sports, they had to have somebody because we were very poor back then and we did not have transportation and things like that. So, the school, in order to have the Indians play ball, which they wanted them to, because they were very good ballplayers, they would have to have transportation from school, from practice, and all that after school, and back home for them, every day. And they would set that up. Now, today, every kid, just about, has their own vehicle. To me, that is a big difference. Now they do not play in sports and things like that because they have so much more material things that that stuff is not important anymore. E: So, it makes school a lot more accessible? B: It makes it accessible, but harder for them to get to because they have so many other things. Do you know what I am saying? It is more accessible because the

23 Page 23 parents have their own vehicles and the kids have their own vehicles and the money is there for gas to go back and forth. It is more accessible that way. But, because of the materialistic things that our children are more involved in today, it makes it harder for them to get to school. They have other things going on in their life that are more important than school. E: The motivation is not the same. B: It is just not there. The whole motivation for going to school that I remember was that because you did not want to work out in the tomato fields and you did not want to be a field hand and be in the sun forever. You had to get an education so that you were out of that and that you had some kind of a profession. That was the motivation to get you out. But our kids never worked in the tomato fields. They never had to harvest any kind of food or anything. So, they do not know what really hard work is and having to work for your clothes or anything. Everything is given to them. E: And their parents, your generation, is away from that. You have made it through the education system and stepped out of the tomato-field days. B: Yes. Our kids, they have dividends, and from what I see today the majority of the kids have the control over their dividends, whether they are eighteen or not. They have the control, or that is the hold they have over their parents, their dividends. They have the kind of clothes they want, I mean, they wear the $200 tennis shoes and whatever is in style and all this. We were doing good to have tennis shoes from the dollar store. And when we had a Saturday and Sunday off,

24 Page 24 we were in the tomato fields working for $8 a day so we could help pay the bills at home so we would have electricity and things like that. When prom and things came up, I remember my mother going to the tribal government to get a loan so that we could have prom dresses and the guys could have tuxedos to wear. Now, those boys wear them, and the girls wear those things, all of the time now and things that cost twice as much as those kinds of things do. E: Do you think that has really changed the whole attitude toward education? B: I think so. I definitely think so. I mean, the thing to go to school was so that you could learn how to make money and have a job. Hell, when you have money coming in that is probably more than what your teacher is making in a month, what is the motivation to go to school for just being Seminole. Hopefully, it changes one day. You would like to see people as this given money, this money that we get for being a Seminole and I feel that it is rightfully due to us. It is kind of like newfound money. You buy all of your playthings and all of the things you always wanted with that. And then after you get all of that stuff you realize, hey, there is still a life, I still have to live a life, even with all of my toys I still have to go and make a life for myself. Hopefully, we are going to get, as a tribe, into that place where we say, oh, okay, we have all our toys now. Now I need to learn how to invest this money. I need to think about my future. We are not at that point yet. E: I hear some people talking about things like that. Do you think it is still in the formative...

25 Page 25 B: Oh, I do not think we are there yet. No. You see too many things going on. We get a dividend and we have people out here that actually do not even have a car anymore, and two years ago they had a brand new car. E: And they do not have one? B: They do not have one now because they either drank it away or had an auto accident or something. And it was through a loan through the tribe that they got it. It was not building their credit or anything like that. It was not repossessed or anything, but they just do not have it anymore. They put it up for collateral for another loan or something like that and lost it. E: And these, of course, are situations we see in communities all over the United States, people working with credit. B: Yes. I said the one good thing that could happen with the year 2000 they talk about these computers going down and all that was that that system would go down. That system, instead of maybe the banking system and all that, but that credit bureau system would go down and give everybody a new start of credit, a clean slate. If that would happen, that would be a miracle. I work so hard to keep my credit up, and I have lost it and I have built it back up, but it might tick you off to find out that somebody could get the very same thing you could and they do not do shit. But, I always think that if something had to fail, why couldn t it be that just to give people an equal chance again. E: It would be quite a gift. B: Yes. Just one more chance. Then if they screwed it up from there, hey, it is your

26 Page 26 fault. E: Well, they talk about debt relief to foreign countries and rightfully they should, I think to foreign countries that have come under colonialism and so forth and now are living in tremendous debt, and they could just project that kind of thing to people within the United States. It used to be, it seems to me, that two generations ago people were going to boarding schools and a lot of people went to Oklahoma. Do you know people who did that or do you know people who still do that? B: Quite a few people, actually, in my family went to Chilocco, Oklahoma. It is on the Kansas/Oklahoma line. I went one year. All my friends, everybody that I hung out with, either graduated and were going to be going to college in Oklahoma, or they were going off to boarding schools. I ran around with a bunch of guys in Hollywood and they were all going to boarding school, so I felt like I was all alone here. And back then it was kind of like, if you were not having a problems in school, if you were going to school okay and you were not having truancy problems, they did not send you out there. It was if you were having problems in school or you just could not get to school and things like that, they sent you out there. I put in an application to go and they could not understand, my mother did not want me to go. I got my brother, my oldest brother, to make her sign the paper so I could go to Oklahoma. I wanted to go because everybody was leaving me, in my group they were all going out to Oklahoma. Even though I was not going to the same schools as they were because they

27 Page 27 were going to Sequoia, or the Choctaw one, Mississippi. They were going some to Mississippi, some to Sequoia, and the only place I could get into was at Chilocco. I did not care that I was not going to school with them; I just was not going to be left in Florida. And so, that one year, I went out there. I did. I went out there one year. Actually, that was the last time that I really lived at home. And that was when we were moving from our chickees and our camps to the homes, when we first got brick homes, the CBS [concrete block structures] homes. E: That was when? B: In 1969 or 1968, somewhere around there, because I would have graduated in To me, when that break-up happened, with the camps and the stuff, and we moved into the CBS homes, that was probably the biggest, the most sorrowful time in my life. E: How did that work? You say the last time you lived at home was about that time and you discussed that you were going away to Oklahoma. When you came back, people had been moving? B: We had already moved into the homes when I left. It was the first year probably the first couple of months. I remember it was a summer that we moved into the CBS home. I was not happy because we were a family there. And then, all of a sudden, my mother decided she was going to get a home and pull us out there were three of us at that time because my older brother was about twelve years older than we were. She took us out of there, out of the camp, and

28 Page 28 put us in this house and became a mom. E: Before, you had been living with your mother and with her sisters and brothers B: Yes. and their children. E: And maybe her mother? B: No, their parents had already passed away; I never knew them at all. E: So, she and her siblings and their kids were all living together in this camp. When you moved into the CBS structures, did everybody move into one? No, they could not have done that. H: No, we moved into different ones. That is what I am saying. She took the three of us and put us in a house over here with just her. E: And she was the first of that group to... B: Well, actually, I think it was three of them at one time that got the first set of homes that came in. I think there were three families from there that got the homes and then a couple of more got in the next round. But, I was really I felt like everything was kind of destroyed at that time, when we got into those homes, because then we did not have that bonding like we had. We were all very close to each other there, and then we got pulled out and taken with our moms, which at that time you knew who your mom was but everybody disciplined. It was not just one person, just your mom, that you listened to; it was all of your aunts and your uncles that were there that you had better listen to. We had one aunt, the oldest aunt, that basically took care of all of us. She did not work; she did not

29 Page 29 have her own children, and my mother and her sisters and all, they went out to work in the tomato fields and things like that. They were gone from daybreak to nightfall. My aunt was the one that took care of us, so we called her Mama. She was Mama to all of us. We all looked at her as if she was our mom. So, when they decided to break up into these homes, move into the CBS homes, they just kind of broke up that structure that we were used to. E: When you moved into the CBS home with your mother, this aunt, the woman you called mom also, stayed... B: She stayed in the camp. E: How far were the CBS homes from the camp? B: Not very far. They were just right around the corner, really. E: Spatially separated. B: Yes. It was. We had different chickees where the girls slept in one and the boys slept in another, and we all had our mom. Then we had a whole bunch of chickees around there. It was not that I did not like the home. [End of Tape Side A] E: She [Merwyn Garbarino] talked a little bit about that in her book about Big Cypress. It has always struck me that that would have been a really tremendous transformation. B: And I think, not only because all of my friends or the people that I hung with were going to Oklahoma, but that was one of the main things, too, was that I was not happy with that. Even though my brother and sisters lived there, it was still like

30 Page 30 the rest of your family was not there anymore, that extended family that was just like your immediate family. E: So, that was also a reason to go to Oklahoma? B: Yes. I was kind of angry at my mom because she was the one that finally decided to be a mom in my head. I can look at it today and it is a whole different story. I can see why things happened the way they did and all that. But, at that time, I remember thinking, who the hell does she think she is? Now she is going to be our mom. She is going to take us away from mama and move us into this house with her; and she is going to act like mom? Those were the thoughts that were going through my head. I was very angry at that time. And that is what I said, I got my older brother who did not even live with us; he had his family at that time I had him talk her into signing the papers so that I could go to Oklahoma. And she was totally against that. I mean, it was against everything that she always they always preached to us, about getting education and everything. She thought, well, why would you want to go out there? We have schools here, just as good, and all of this. Anyway, I went out there. And I did really good there because I was a straight A student there and then I got into the Upward Bound program out there in Oklahoma. Then during the summer I went to Dartmouth College. They had a summer program there and we could go and take the English courses and the science and all that in the Upward Bound program. I spent the whole summer at Dartmouth. I went to Dartmouth College, and then I got accepted I did not

31 Page 31 apply, but somehow I got an offer to go to a private school there at Burlington, Vermont. I went to Rock Point School for girls there, a private school. I finished my eleventh grade in Moore Haven, the last part of it. So, I went from like the tenth grade there, the tenth and eleventh, part of it, there. E: How was that? B: It was different. It was with just girls, for one thing. It is like the movies, where they have the boys school and the girls school, and then they have dances together. That is the way it was. Just like that. The boys come from over there, the girls come from over here to the school. That is the way it was. It was a boarding school. E: Where did they come from; the people who were at the girls school, were they from the northeast mostly, or were they from all over? B: Mostly from that area. It was a private school for that area. E: Was anybody else with you from down here? B: No. E: How was that? B: I have always been pretty good by myself, even when I was in Oklahoma. At Chilocco there were other people from Florida that were there. I had my cousin Timmy, who was the president of the senior class when he was there, and Cecil and Archie Johns, and they had made a pretty good name for themselves there. I went there and they found out my name was Helene Johns, and Johns from Florida. So, the dean of the school called me in and he said, you have a heck of

32 Page 32 a reputation to hold up for your family here. They have all done really good here and all have been really good students and all this. From that, they put me in a totally different dorm than the other Florida kids, and I [wondered], why can t I be in there with them?, and they said, before the year is out, before half a year, most of them are going to be sent home. They will be going home on their own or they are going to be sent home, and you just do not need to be a part of that. At the time I thought they were crazy, too. E: They were tracking you, in some way. B: Yes. So, here I was, over here. But, it made a difference because I did not get sent home; and they were right, most of them were gone home. I think two of us finished out the school year there. It was Esther Cypress, she stayed and finished out the school year there. She was from here. And I finished the school year and then I went to Dartmouth. That was the last time I went to boarding school well, to Oklahoma. Then, I was in a private, a pretty uppity, school up there. It was pretty cool. I really had a good time there. From there I came home. I decided I was tired of being gone and I wanted to come home, so I came home probably about three months before school was out and finished out my eleventh grade there. And I met my husband-to-be. Actually, I met him in April and we got married September. E: You were pretty sure of it. B: Oh yes. Actually, things did not work out well, but not he passed away. We were married in September; he died in July the following year. I was two months

33 Page 33 pregnant with my oldest daughter at the time. I guess it worked out but it did not work out not what I thought. But I think if he did not die, we would probably have still been married today. That is how sure I was of it at that time. E: That is tragic. B: I was seventeen. E: Some of things you were describing about going away to school and so forth, and then getting married, but the fact that you were seventeen and being widowed, a lot of people... B: And two months pregnant. That was one of the main things, probably in my whole life; I was not going to have children without knowing who their fathers were because we were all raised that way. That was a goal in my life. That was not going to happen to me. And that was very acceptable at that time, to have children whether the father was there or not. That was not the major thing. The major thing was to have children, and that was how we were produced. But, I do not think they ever realized how traumatic it was for us, for everybody else to have fathers and us not I mean, even though we did, not [to] know who they were. Or not being a part of our lives; they never realized how traumatic that was for us. But then, I think that kind of makes us who we are today, too, because we struggled a little bit harder, a little bit more, because we did not have that other parent. And then that made us half-breeds and that was another thing that made us struggle that much harder. But, anyway, my goal was not to have children without a father for them.