Remade

Life is hard on the reservation.

I should know. I’ve lived most of my 63 years here. A third of my people are unemployed, more than half living below poverty level.

People drink and abuse drugs, sometimes passing out in the street. It’s a legacy many Indians wrestle with, a legacy of broken promises and dreams.

Especially at Pine Ridge, the poorest of America’s reservations, set aside for the Oglala Lakota Sioux nation, whose members were later massacred at Wounded Knee almost 120 years ago. You don’t have to look hard to find despair. It’ll find you if you’re not careful.

Yet I don’t despair. I live each day with hope and love in my heart. You might wonder why, since I get by on little more than a military pension and my ancient van’s about to fall apart.

I have this dream about building a little church in my community, but I know it will take an act of God to make it happen. So why do I hope? Why do I wake up each morning glad to be alive?

Because once I was one of those angry young men passed out in the street, giving in to despair. I was—until something happened to remind me of a strength I’ve been given to weather dark times, a strength that goes beyond our legacy, something reaching back through generations of my family.

By the time I hit my mid-twenties I had a lot going for me. I’d married a wonderful woman named Rose Lone Elk. I’d been honorably discharged from the Army after two tours as a combat engineer in Vietnam. I’d found work at a moccasin factory on the reservation. That’s where I met Rose.

Yet I was ruled by something dark and powerful—an anger running deep in my soul. Anger at my parents for being drunks and abandoning me before I turned a year old.

Anger that the faith my aunt Ollie and uncle Lawrence instilled in me—they even sent me to a Christian school—seemed empty when I got back from Vietnam and found the reservation to be as depressed as ever. What had I fought for? Did God care about my people? Did he even exist? Religion no longer held any answers for me.

Most deeply I was angry at myself. I knew what I was doing, throwing opportunities away, drowning my anger in bars, ignoring Rose’s pleas to stay sober and go to church with her.

I told myself I needed an outlet, and only drinking and fighting would do. I made enemies with everyone from the tribal authorities to my own relatives.

“You bring a bad name to this family,” said another of my aunts, Martha. “Your grandfather was an Episcopal priest. He survived Wounded Knee! Look how you disrespect him. Just like your parents.”