Tonight he travels without me
By Arne Vainio, M.D.
George Earth and I traveled across Minnesota and then across South Dakota so I could speak at a conference a couple of years ago. I was supposed to fly, but George told me he always wanted to see the Black Hills and at 79 years old, he didn’t think he had many chances left.
We took turns driving and spent the better part of a day in the Black Hills of South Dakota. We crossed the big sky country of Wyoming on the way to the Wind River Mountains and George told me stories about growing up, about boarding school when he was young and being released from school to pick potatoes with his parents in the huge potato fields of North Dakota. He told me stories of traveling all day on muddy roads with his dad’s Model T and his mother holding a kerosene lantern for heat and for the lights for the car. His dad put tire patches over other tire patches and even as a kid George was good at helping change tires. A good used inner tube was four dollars and one with only a few patches was two dollars.
His dad always got the two dollar one.
“The old people used to tell stories when the sun went down in the winter. It was still early and the kids would be in bed and the elders would tell creation stories in Ojibwe and they never spoke English when they told those stories. They could only be told in Ojibwe.”
One time he worked as a lumberjack on an island for a whole summer and he got paid over three hundred dollars and he bought a black Ford convertible with a white top. He and a friend got all dressed up and drove to a town close to the Canadian border. “Some girls started flirting with us and they got into the car and we were riding around. Some of the guys in that town didn’t like that and they followed us and I turned into an alley and I couldn’t turn around," he recalled. "There were too many of them and they beat us up. When I came to, the tires on my car were slashed and all the spark plug wires were gone and I didn’t have enough money to fix the car. I had to leave the car at a garage and we agreed to go into another logging camp and I had to cut wood for 3 months again before I had enough money to fix that car.”
He spent years drinking and working off and on. He and a friend lived in an old abandoned car for over a year in St. Paul and they would go to the shelter at the church every day to have breakfast and take showers and try to find work for the day.
He forgot about his traditions and his drinking spiraled out of control.
“One day I was drinking with everyone else in the park by Franklin Avenue in Minneapolis and I decided that was enough," he said. "I took all the beer and wine out of the trunk of my car and I put it on the picnic table in front of them and I told them I was done and they laughed at me.”
Someone in recovery gave him a vest and a bustle to wear and he started dancing as a traditional dancer at powwows. “It took me a long time to remember some of the things those old people tried to tell me and finding my traditions again saved me," he said.
George has been a traditional dancer since then and his dance outfit was given to him over time by friends and sometimes by dancers who were too old to keep dancing and wanted their regalia to stay in the powwow circle. “When I dance, every step is a prayer for healing for all Indian people," he said.
He had a guitar with nylon strings and recalled: “Man, I could really sing! I used to play at weddings, even. I played everything from Johnny Cash to Merle Haggard and people would really like it when I brought out that guitar.”
Last summer he was supposed to travel with me to the Association of American Indian
Physicians annual meeting just north of Seattle. He was really excited about seeing hundreds of Native American doctors and medical students and health professionals and he would have much to teach in return.
He was too short of breath to make the trip and his breathing problems were getting rapidly worse. He saw a lung specialist and it wasn’t long before he was on oxygen. He had more and more difficulty traveling and last spring he danced at a powwow and realized he couldn’t make it all the way around the circle.
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