Unci Laura came to tell the children stories that looped back and made points you didn’t think you were coming to. She was small, and her voice was on Valium. It talked around things instead of describing them, or even more rare actually saying them, and it squeaked, just the teeniest bit. She was old, we all knew, and had survived the boarding school system. It must have been hard for her to work with the all-white camp staff. She was being encouraged and paid to tell stories about how white adults had treated her as a kid. The staff tried to make it easier but she just looked past us. Of course she did. We were trying to help but wouldn’t. We were there because the kids’ parents weren’t.
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In the traditional way, we offered Unci Laura water when she took a seat on the deck, the only permanent structure the camp could afford to build. In the traditional way, she took it without looking at or acknowledging us. She started by telling us of her upbringing: Relatives killed at Wounded Knee, growing up in South Dakota when it was still a forest of cottonwood trees, speaking Lakota at home with her parents. She was 80 years old and didn’t particularly want to live much longer. “But uncis, grandmas, they live a long time,” she said. “They know everything before it happens.”
“I didn’t want no Christian upbringing,” Here Laura’s voice became loud and even insistent. “I didn’t get to see my parents again no more. And I got in trouble. I got in a lot of trouble. One time, when I still didn’t speak no English, I made a friend. I had no friends, because everyone else had been there for a long time, and I just started at the boarding school. So I was happy to make a friend.
“Teacher cut off all my beautiful hair and she didn’t know my name so she gave me a new one, Laura. I have been Laura so long I forgot my first name. The elders called me, ‘Dora.’ Later, I found out what those words mean, shut up and bitch. I would never have said those words if I knew what they meant. It does not show respect.
