My Name Is Not Chief: The Life of an American Indian

By Ben Blue and Kent Koppelman

Ben Blue is born prematurely on a kitchen table in Chicago in 1956. As the tiny Ho-Chunk Indian takes his first breath, he has no idea of the challenges that await him in life. Ben grows up amid poverty in his grandparents Wisconsin home where he learns how to fight, face bullies, and play football. As he is shuttled between his alcoholic mothers home and his grandparents, Ben must cling to hope that he can one day overcome the despair that has haunted the American Indians for generations.

When Ben moves to California with his mother, his life spirals downward after he is introduced to drugs and alcohol. After his mother dies, Ben journeys through the darkness of addiction and povertyuntil he commits to sobriety, causing his life to take a turn for the better. Even as Ben finds a job, earns a college degree, marries, and has children, he must battle the lures of his addiction. As his path leads him to explore his Ho-Chunk identity and address stereotypical images of Indians, he proudly makes a declaration that changes everything.

My Name is Not Chief shares the tale of an American Indians struggles as he attempts to overcome seemingly insurmountable obstacles and find his place in the world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 15, 2015
• ISBN: 9781504967815

Ben Blue

Dr. Kent Koppelman spent nearly thirty years teaching about diversity issues at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse. He is the author of four books on diversity, a memoir, and a book about grief. Now retired, he and his wife, Jan, live in La Crosse where they enjoy spending time with their daughter and two grandchildren. Ben Blue is a full-blood Ho-Chunk Indian who experienced poverty and addiction. Determined to rise above his hardships, he became sober and eventually earned bachelor and master’s degrees, and he currently holds a teaching position on a four-year college campus. The father of two is a passionate advocate for Ho Chunk and American Indian children.

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© 2015 Kent Koppelman. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse   01/15/2016

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6780-8 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6782-2 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5049-6781-5 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015920616

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

Contents

Preface

1. Against the Wind

2. Hope Town

3. A Lost Spirit

4. From First to Last

5. The Pursuit of Happiness

6. Big Soldier

7. The Commitment

8. A Fork in the Road

9. The Ho-Chunk Name

10. Indians and Chiefs

End Notes

Preface

Ben Blue

When my friend Kent first suggested collaborating on this book, I had reservations, including a lack of self-confidence and a reluctance to put my business in the streets. But on the positive side, my friend and I agreed that there are too few books about the life experiences of contemporary Native Americans. Long before my formal education was completed, I had already become exasperated with the stereotypical public imagery pertaining to American Indians and the paucity of meaningful information about my people. Like most Indians my age who went to college, I was a non-traditional student. During those years I fell in love with the liberating historical and sociological knowledge describing Native America in a way more congruent with reality. That it focused any kind of a light on the experiences of native people gave me joy, and after reading more research and its logical conclusions, my sense of self-esteem began to soar. It was largely the reason why I was able to graduate from college.

After graduating, getting a job in higher education made me feel obliged and even a bit enthusiastic to confer actual knowledge of what it means to be an American Indian in the United States today as an alternative to all that pseudo-knowledge of Native America that most often results in harm. Along the way I have encountered multifaceted resistance, the worst of which comes from those in power (white PhDs) who continue the old arrogant attitude of: we’re the experts; we’ll tell you who is a Native American and what that means. My enthusiasm has waned a bit over the years because too often I have found myself alone in the battle to debunk stereotypes and provide authentic images of American Indians, and at times I have backed off into a corner. Although I have many friends and allies, including white people, who have nurtured and supported the voices of American Indians, I have also encountered many professionals who induce laryngitis.

Recently I was literally knocked off my feet by a severe foot infection. The doctors do not know how my feet became infected, but they caught it before amputation would need to be considered. For about three months I was unable to stand, and having to spend so much time in my apartment gave me a lot of time to think and to reminisce. While limping back from the bathroom, I remembered going out to California in the 1960s and living with a large family of Ho-Chunk friends. There were eleven of us sharing a three-room apartment in a deteriorating building near downtown Los Angeles. We lived together because that’s what people in a collectivist culture do, especially poor ones. Since we had to use a shared bathroom down the hall and it was unacceptable for a child to use that shared bathroom at night, there was always a potty by the door for the little ones, and a urinal for the older kids in the form of a large pop or milk bottle. Funny, the things you recall when you have time for little else but remembering.

My first marriage was an unfunny joke that lasted one year. My second marriage might have lasted far longer had it not been for my familial/personal dysfunction, but there were some positive outcomes – the two most important ones being my daughters Beverly and Lieba. They are the main reason I want to tell my story. Another primary motivation is that my story relates to the story of the ongoing survival of the Ho-Chunk people. In the movie adaptation of Pearl Buck’s novel The Good Earth, one scene takes place in a refugee camp where a father had returned to the family tent to discover meat cooking in a pot. Elated, he asked how they were able to procure meat. His son proudly proclaimed: I stole it! Outraged, the father pulled the meat from the pot, threw it on the dirt floor and proceeded into a moral tirade. When he was finished, the mother, sitting next to the cooking pot, calmly picked up the meat, brushed it off and threw it back into the pot saying: meat is meat. As a Ho-Chunk, I grew up with this attitude toward resources, especially when supply didn’t meet demand. Over a lifetime, most American Indians have experiences we didn’t choose, but had to work through to survive.

My people often refer to themselves proudly as survivors because we understand that we beat the genocidal odds stemming from a combination of direct physical assaults and the transmission of diseases that have, over the course of many generations, dramatically reduced the numbers of our people. The resulting denials of this reality found in typical American literary or historical descriptions of American Indians have taken a massive toll on an individual Indian’s self-esteem. I like to think of this book as a legacy – not mine but of the group I represent – American Indians today who are about my age. It is a legacy largely untold. In order to be a legacy, it was important to me that the stories were not romanticized, fictionalized or sensationalized. Rather than simply producing another anthropological account of a past people still living on reservations, I wanted to provide a warts and all portrait that was contemporary and realistic. I like to think that the lens I have used to look at my experiences was neither cracked nor rose-colored, but came as close as possible to 20/20 vision.

Kent L. Koppelman

I first met Ben Blue as a student in one of my graduate classes at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. After Ben graduated, we stayed in touch, and for a while he lived in my neighborhood. Over time we became friends, and I began to learn that Ben was a gifted storyteller. Frequently when we would meet, the subject being discussed would remind him of a story. The stories were incidents from his life, and after hearing many of them, I told him I thought they would make a fascinating book. With all of his professional and personal obligations, Ben had little time for writing such a book, so I asked if he would be willing to sit down with me every week or so for the next few months and talk about his life experiences while I recorded the conversations. My task would be to organize this information into a chronological account of his life.

Ben was interested, but he wondered what the ultimate purpose would be. I said at the very least we could produce a written account of his life to share with his two daughters, but I also said there were few books available that accurately described what it was like to be an American Indian living in the United States today. As we did some preliminary research for this project, Ben shared statistics from American Indian communities on issues such as alcoholism, drop out rates, drug addiction, domestic abuse, and poverty. It was because he had experienced all of this that Ben had always insisted that his life was very typical for an American Indian, reflecting many of their experiences. A lot of people have read statistics about the problems with which American Indians struggle, but numbers are easy to ignore or forget. In this book, Ben represents an Everyman, a figure that should be of interest not only to American Indians, but to all readers who appreciate a compelling story.

So our project went forward. After taping discussions with Ben, I transcribed them into notes and used those notes, with Ben’s help, to write the manuscript and revise it over several years. While writing this narrative, it was frustrating to discover that there was always interesting information in the interviews that didn’t fit easily into the narrative. After finishing the draft of one particular chapter, I incorporated some of this unused but relevant information into a Postscript. Given the wealth of information gathered from research and in the unused portions of the transcripts related to chapters already written, I decided that using Postscripts at the end of each chapter was a useful way to include significant information that related to each chapter.

Although this work does not avoid addressing social problems affecting many American Indians, Ben’s effort to find a place in a society largely shaped and dominated by white people has been successful. His achievements have affirmed his worth and dignity, and that of his people. His story includes domestic violence but also the bonds of family; it is about suffering but also redemption. During his life, Ben has had to struggle with such issues as poverty, domestic abuse and addiction, and he has told his story without embellishment or fabrication. I believe there is a large audience that will enjoy reading his story. As I wrote the book, the primary audience for me was always Ben Blue. I was glad that he approved the work that I did, and I feel deeply honored that he trusted me enough to let me help him tell his remarkable story.

1

Against the Wind

I was born in 1956 on a kitchen table in Chicago.

The baby’s mother was Beverly Rivers. She was not originally from Chicago but had grown up on the Winnebago Reservation in Nebraska before moving to Wisconsin as a teenager. She graduated from public school at Black River Falls, and then returned to the reservation and began to date Charles Cramer. Chuck had also grown up on the Nebraska Winnebago reservation, but he was much older than Beverly, almost ten years. There were few jobs available on reservations, but there were federal programs that encouraged Indians to leave their homes and relocate to an urban area, based on the assumption that Indians would be more likely to find gainful employment in a city. Beverly applied for and received an Eisenhower Grant that provided her with enough money to travel to Chicago and rent an apartment while she looked for work. Shortly after she found a job, her sister Alice came to live with her and was also able to find a job. There was a large American Indian community in Chicago, so in their free time the two sisters socialized with other Indians and made many new friends.

This was when Beverly got reacquainted with Chuck Cramer. He had lived in Chicago years ago trying to find work as an artist. Most of the time he had to be content with jobs requiring menial labor, but he received a few commissions to paint murals in libraries and city halls. He had decided to try his luck once again. Chuck was dark but not tall or especially handsome. Beverly liked him because he didn’t push himself on her like some of the other Indian men. In time the two became intimate, but the relationship ended when Beverly became pregnant. Chuck’s amiable personality underwent a dramatic transformation. He accused her of promiscuity and denied his paternity, forcing her to deal with the unanticipated dilemma of being a single mother.

Beverly was glad that she already had a job, but once the baby was born she would need help. Her salary gave her enough money to provide childcare, but she needed to find someone to take care of the baby while she was at work. In accordance with Indian ways, the word went out among the Winnebago that a baby needed someone to care for it. Most Winnebago elders knew at least one member of each other’s families, and their orientation was collective not individual. A history of acting in the best interests of the community had helped them survive years of poverty. Although they usually found a family member or friend to take care of a child during hard times, it was not a choice made lightly. For American Indian families, most times were hard times.

The woman who offered to take care of this baby was Germaine, the sister of the baby’s biological grandmother, Lula. Germaine lived with Milford Blue who had fathered six children with Lula. Germaine and Milford lived in the Wisconsin Dells near Beverly’s older brother Leroy, whose wife Ellen was also pregnant. Ellen and Beverly joked about competing to have the first grandchild in the family. Before she married Leroy, Ellen had been with a white man and given birth to a son. She was more comfortable with her pregnancy and was confident that she would deliver first, but since Beverly’s baby was born two months premature, she won the competition on March 23, 1956, giving birth on the kitchen table in her Chicago apartment.

Fortunately, paramedics arrived in time to deliver the baby before taking the mother and child to a hospital. Weighing less than four pounds, the fragile baby was put in an incubator for six weeks before the hospital would send him home. When he was older, Ben’s mother would tell him how small he was: If I put an orange next to your head, the orange was bigger. According to their custom, the last name on the birth certificate for this Winnebago baby was Blue, to recognize the person offering to raise him, and Beverly liked Ben for a first name. Shortly after Beverly brought her baby home, her sister-in-law Ellen gave birth to twins. Beverly would continue to live and work in Chicago for a couple of years. This would be her only prolonged absence from her first child, but Benny would never have any contact with his father from the time he was born through his childhood and adolescence.

I never really knew my biological father; we met three times before he died. Most of my life I resented my father’s absence. He wasn’t there as I was growing up; he wasn’t there to celebrate my school achievements; he wasn’t there to cheer for me at football games. He wasn’t there for me, or my mother. It would take me a long time before I could forgive my father for just abandoning us like that.

The first father Benny Blue would know was a stepfather, Eddie Oakley, an Ojibwe. He wasn’t Benny’s legal stepfather because Eddie and Beverly never married – a common situation among Indian couples. Eddie and Beverly loved each other, but both drank heavily and they had many battles. They also had four children – Ken, Walter, Karen and Roger. Although Eddie was a decent father to his own children, he never viewed Benny as his son and did not treat him as he treated his own children. It was not unusual for Indian women to have children with multiple fathers, so it was strange that Eddie was not more accepting of Beverly’s first child. The first three children that Beverly’s mother Lula brought into the world had three different fathers. Lula had six more children with Milford Blue. After she left Milford she would have one more child with another man for a total of ten children with five different fathers.

Because Benny was the first grandchild, Beverly believed it would be good for him to live with her family in the Wisconsin Dells. She did not believe that Eddie was going to change his behavior toward her oldest child, and she knew that her family would treat Benny well because he was the first grandchild. Duncan Rivers and Lula were his biological grandfather and grandmother, and people often said that their grandchild looked like Duncan. As he grew up, Benny would refer to four people as grandfather and grandmother – not only Duncan and Lula, but Milford and Germaine. He was not only the first grandchild, but he was the baby of the family because Milford and Germaine were also raising three older children who were Benny’s uncles – Jake, Forrest, and Monte. The three boys were only a few years older than their nephew, so they treated Benny like a younger brother.

It didn’t bother me as a kid, but as I got older I became aware that white society was very critical of people who had children without being married. Since there were so many Winnebago children born out of wedlock, I began to feel ashamed, but I kept asking myself why Indian people in general seemed not to be concerned about women giving birth to children with multiple fathers and without ever being married. I finally drew the conclusion that it had to do with Indian people today being the remnant of groups that were almost exterminated. For them, any child being born, no matter what the circumstances, is a good thing.

Benny did not learn much about Winnebago culture from his grandparents, but all of the old people could speak the language so he learned a few words. Primarily he was taught how to treat people such as elders or visitors. As in all Indian cultures, he was taught to show great deference to elders when he greeted them or talked to them. In some Indian cultures it was even considered rude to look an elder in the eyes. Benny was not taught that, but he would occasionally encounter an elder who would say, What are you doing looking at me? Sporadically over time, Benny was told about certain cultural beliefs, like not stepping over people who are lying on the floor or the ground.

Not stepping over people who are lying on the ground is a cultural teaching, actually cross-cultural because I know the Ojibwe believe this as well. As a young man I was visiting a friend, and as her children were lying on the floor watching television, I stepped over them to go into the kitchen. When my friend’s mother saw me, she said, What’s he doing? She said if I was thinking properly I would never have stepped over those children. It is the older people, you see, who still have our culture intact. When she scolded me, I remembered what I had been told as a child: stepping over people when they are lying on the ground is considered disrespectful. You step over people when they are dead and buried, lying in their graves; to step over a living person is to imply that they are dead to you, as dead as if they were buried in their graves, and that you have no respect or concern for them. I had forgotten that, and I felt ashamed.

Benny would learn certain aspects of the culture from experiences where he had to know what a person was expected to do or not do. As a child, he would attend enough funerals to learn how to behave at these events. Funerals for most Winnebago people involve a ceremony that takes place over four consecutive days, but funerals may be conducted in different ways depending on the person who died. If the deceased had been a member of the Medicine Lodge, the funeral would be elaborate. Being a member of the Medicine Lodge is like being orthodox, an extremely holy person, and because there is such respect for members of the Medicine Lodge, their funerals are special.

When someone dies, a family member will talk to friends from another clan about taking care of the funeral arrangements. If someone from Thunder Clan asks friends from the Bear Clan to help with the funeral, they should accept that responsibility. Of course, helping means that members of the Bear Clan are responsible for all of the planning required for the funeral such as contacting a mortician to have the body embalmed, bringing the coffin to the house, watching over the coffin as people come to view the body, preparing the room for the fourth night of talking and telling stories, being in charge of the funeral ceremony that takes place on the fourth and final day, and finally, making and serving all the meals during this four-day period.

At suppertime for each of the four days, people come to the home where the ceremony is being held and they eat. Anyone who wants to come is welcome, and the host clan prepares and serves the food. If it is warm enough to eat outside, blankets are spread on the ground; if not, blankets are spread on the floor of the house. Everyone sits on the blankets when they are eating. No tables or chairs are provided because that would distance the mourners from Mother Earth. The food is served on large plates and placed among the seated people. Usually there is a wide variety of food because the host family is supposed to include every kind of food the deceased person liked.

Protocol requires people to eat a little bit of each type of food prepared because they are not eating just to satisfy their own hunger, but to honor the spirit of the deceased. Since everyone is supposed to sample each kind of food, each person’s first plate typically contains a mouthful of every food served. After that first plate, people will usually look over the food to see if they missed something, and if they did, they go over and take a portion of that dish. Once a person has eaten a little of everything, it is now appropriate to go back and take more of the food that he or she really likes.

Some members of the host clan will function like waiters: they help to serve the food, make sure everyone has a clean plate, and take away the dirty dishes. As more people come, the waiters find a space for the new arrivals and make sure that each one has a plate for their food. Most people tend to smoke at these meals, so there is a strong smell of cigarettes throughout the house. If there are mirrors in the house, someone will cover them with a veil during the four days of feasting. I have read that other cultures do this as well; I believe it is customary for the Irish, and for some Jews as well. We do it to discourage vanity. If someone you love has died, it’s not appropriate to be thinking about how you look. For the same reason widows are not allowed to brush their own hair.

On the fourth and final night, the host family might set up a tent, but if they are going to use their house again, they will take the furniture and everything else – even the wall hangings – out of a large room until it is completely empty. People come into the empty room, sit on the floor and talk. Some might tell stories about the person who died, but veterans will also tell stories. Winnebago people have such great respect for veterans that they use this occasion to ask veterans to share their stories. It does not matter if the deceased was a veteran or a male or female. The funeral might be for a grandmother who was a pacifist; nevertheless, veterans will be encouraged to talk about their experiences, especially the combat veterans. The storytelling goes on throughout the night. In the morning, the clan members in charge of the funeral fix the final meal; after people have eaten their breakfast, they leave. They will come back to attend the funeral service later on during that fourth day, followed by the burial.

In contrast to funerals, the traditional Winnebago wedding ceremony was fairly simple, as it was for many indigenous people. A male elder would take the couple out to view a sunrise, give them some advice, and place a blanket around them. Afterwards, the man and woman were considered to be a married couple. Some Winnebago couples today choose to have elaborate wedding ceremonies that include aspects of what is considered a traditional American wedding. Similar to other Indians, Winnebago people have made a number of concessions to the dominant culture, and increasingly Indian children are not taught many of their people’s cultural beliefs. Even when it occurs, cultural teaching is often presented in a piecemeal fashion. As a child, Benny was given minimal instruction about his culture, but what he was taught, he remembered. For example, he was told why he should not run if he happened to be outside when it started to rain.

Not running in the rain is a religious teaching. In our language, the term Mah-oonah is the name for God, and I was taught that the greatest gift Mah-oonah gives us is water. It is the source of all life and sustains life, making plants grow and giving you food to eat. So if you are outside and it starts to rain, the worst thing you can do is to squeal or complain about getting wet or to run inside to get out of the rain. It is okay to come in out of the rain, but when a rain shower comes, you are insulting Mah-oona if all you care about is not getting wet. Such behavior suggests that