Beloved Child: A Dakota Way of Life

Kids Today

“I seen your ma,” she said, a young Native woman with the long legs of a basketball player and the face of an irreverent angel. She was looking at her friend from the corner of her eye, her hands moving restlessly among the baskets of fresh vegetables spread on the table in front of her: a bushel of tender potatoes, trays of sweet green beans, a mound of endless summer squash. “Oh yeah?” was all her friend said in reply. Her voice was flat, uninterested . While the two were inseparable, she was better suited than her tall friend for working with the people who walked past, who were unaware of their need for fresh vegetables. Then she called out, she sang to them, “Hey, hey you, yeah, you look like you need some carrots, boy, lucky for you, we got carrots.” More often than not, they stopped and came over to the table. “Okay, I’ll take some carrots. Yeah, I guess I’ll take some of them cucumbers, and throw in a couple of tomatoes. I never heard of kale. Organic? Have you got any regular eggs?” Sales at this tiny farmer’s market were clearly up on the days when these two young women worked together. In the lull between customers, when traffic was slow at the Wolves’ Den, the Native-owned coffee shop next door, the two girls chatted. The tall one, Sierra, who drew admiring eyes with her honey-brown skin and statuesque body, at eighteen was already Kids Today 13 The women’s names have been changed to protect their privacy. 01_Layout 1 6/6/2011 10:18 Page 13 14 Beloved Child the mother of a two-year-old and lived off and on with her boyfriend. She wanted to make a better life for her baby, she said, and go back to school. Her friend, Laura, wore her wiry hair pulled back tight from a heartshaped face, a pair of glasses framing intelligent, observant eyes. She was book smart and street smart, and she knew what needed to be done without anyone telling her. When we needed to ask one of the teens in our program to help run the market, she was our first choice. “Where was she,” Laura asked, seemingly not interested in the answer. “A couple of blocks from here,” Sierra replied. “Her makeup was all smeared, and she wasn’t walking too good.” “She’s probably looking for me,” Laura said. She had been removed from her mother’s care and placed in a foster home, with her birth mother forbidden to contact her. While physically safe, Laura struggled with the tight restrictions placed on her by her foster mother, who tried to control how she spent her time after school and when she could see her friends. Even participating in this summer program at the Dream of Wild Health farm, where she learned to grow organic vegetables that were sold at this farmer’s market in the Native community, was hard for her to do. Sometimes we would hear that she had run away, disappearing for a few weeks and eventually returning home. The two teenagers fell silent, their young bodies outlined by the cars and buses that rumbled behind them on Franklin Avenue. A steady stream of people walked past, enjoying the warm July sun. A young man loped through the parking lot near our table, glancing sideways at the two women, nearly running into an old man who was hobbling toward the Dollar Store, his knobby fingers wrapped tightly around his cane. At the clinic on the other side of the coffee shop, an anxious mother held her son’s hand as she opened the door. Like most of the people passing by, she barely glanced at the vegetables on the table. Here in the center of Minneapolis , this was Indian Country, within walking distance of the American Indian Center and a mile away from Little Earth, one of the largest housing developments serving Native people in the country.  01_Layout 1 6/6/2011 10:18 Page 14 Kids Today 15 I was sitting behind these two young women as they talked, a few weeks into my new job as a “desk farmer” at the Dream of Wild Health farm in Hugo, Minnesota. This was my first experience working with Native youth. Until I overheard that conversation, I had seen only two attractive young...