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Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 23.2 (2002) 109-116



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A Healing Process

Michelle LeBeau


I was born into an Indian world. My father left my mother, who is five-eighths California Indian, soon after I was born. I grew up without a real father, and only recently have I realized how much I hate that fact. I was born in the hallway of a hospital in the Bay Area near San Francisco, California—even then it seems that I wanted to do things my way.

I remember the best times were spent with my sister and my mother, when I was about four or five and we lived in Truckee, California.

Bridgette was doing cartwheels on the lawn and she got beestings on her hands and feet. Dad was gone by then, and we lived in the Village Green trailer park. One day Mom told us that Indians never went out looking for eggs and that Easter is really supposed to be about this guy named Jesus—he died, or was born, or came back to life, or something important like that on that day a long time ago. We colored the eggs anyway for fun

The trailer park was not near a reservation, though it was possible that our ancestors once lived near there. The Washos from the Donner Lake area were unable to establish a recognized land base after they were pushed out of their homeland. The old Indian fighter William Phipps went down in history because he successfully moved (killed) the Native people in the Lake Tahoe Basin. I am part Washo along with many other things. My grandmother is Washo, Pit River (Achomawi), and Maidu, all native to northeastern California. Her Pit River great-grandmother, Wilis-Kol-Kold, or Susie Jack, was supposedly related to Captain Jack, one of the great warriors from northern California. Wilis-Kol-Kold had three children, and her daughter, Edna, married a Maidu man named Bob Lowry. Their daughter, Viola, was my great-grandmother, whom I was blessed to know as a young girl.

Grandma Viola, whom I called Grandma Ola, considered herself Pit River, though she was also devoutly Christian. She and I would sit and watch the [End Page 109] gospel television shows, and she eventually gave most of her little money to those strangers. She was born in Susanville, California, on the rancheria where my grandmother, mother, and sister were born. I would listen to Grandma Ola remember her grandmother Wilis-Kol-Kold, who was considered an "Indin" doctor. Some of her grandmother's habits were blended with her Christianity, like the way she would heat up a big river rock on the wood stove and put it in my bed before I slipped in for the night. I remember rubbing the smooth, warm stone with my feet.

Grandma Ola died when I was about seven. I remember the day distinctly because that evening something unusual happened. By this time, I was living in Grass Valley with my mother who had married a non-Indian man. We lived on a large ranch, and my sister and I were always outdoors. That day I had climbed up a big oak tree near the creek. I climbed too high, and I was scared to climb back down. I hollered and cried, and my sister just teased me like a big sister does. "Just climb down. Don't look, just climb!" I was making a huge spectacle of myself until I heard a strange noise, and then my sister was crying. I climbed straight down that big oak like a squirrel to see what I had missed. An owl had flown straight at her and screeched at her. We ran inside and told Mom. Not more than an hour later the phone rang. Grandma Ola was gone.

My Grandpa is from the Cabazon Band of the Cahuilla Indians, who live in the Southern California desert. He is half Cabazon/half Indian of some other tribe. He didn't know his father, and his mother Rosina died when he was a baby. He...

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