Seasons Greetings

Happy Holidays and Happy New Year from Ani and Jackie.

Photo taken at Waupun Correctional Institution on 12/25/2009.

To all of you who follow this blog and support our efforts to find meaning and relationship under difficult circumstances, we send you and your families our very best wishes for a happy and healthy 2010.

We are grateful for your presence in our lives.

Ani and Jackie

Guest Blog From Jackie – Day of Conception

Ani’s day of conception took place in Chicago, in the early spring of 1966.

The story that I tell now I learned mostly from Ani’s birth father when I met him for the first time in 2002, and from Ani’s birth Aunts and Uncles, and from history books that tell the story of the Indian Relocation Movement in the 1950’s and 1960’s. During that time, people came to the reservations and told wonderful stories and showed pamphlets about life in the Cities for Indians. The pamphlets said that people would be taken care of and they would get wonderful jobs and make lots of money, and that life would be better in the City than on the Reservation. For many reasons, Ani’s family was a prime target for these ads. They were intelligent and ambitious people, and the eldest family male had for generations left the family at an early age to explore the world. And they were not afraid to try new things. Ani’s father said that his family was the first one to have a radio and that they always had a car when he was growing up – in the 30’s and 40’s, when most others did not.
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(what follows is quoted from PBS.org)

In 1950, the average Native American on a reservation earned $950. The average black person earned $2,000, and the average white person earned almost $4,000 — over four times more than Indians.
So, in 1952, the federal government initiated the Urban Indian Relocation Program. It was designed to entice reservation dwellers to seven major urban cities where the jobs supposedly were plentiful.
Relocation offices were set up in Chicago, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Jose, St. Louis, Cincinnati, Cleveland and Dallas. Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) employees were supposed to orient new arrivals and manage financial and job training programs for them. Other BIA officials recruited prospective "Relocatees" from many of the reservations around the country. ….
Relocatees were supposed to receive temporary housing, counseling and guidance in finding a job, permanent housing, community and social resources. The new migrants also were given money to tide them over on a sliding scale based on the number of children in the family. A man, his wife and four children got $80 a week for four weeks.
That's what they were promised. Some found that the promises were not kept. Not every relocatee found a job, and those that did were generally at the lower end of the economic ladder. Others succumbed to alcohol and those who were accustomed to drinking in public on their home reservations got into trouble with the law when they drank on city streets. Many more were simply homesick so far away from their families and familiar landscapes.
Still more decided to return to their reservation. But over the years, it's estimated that as many as 750,000 Native Americans migrated to the cities between 1950 and 1980. Some came through the Relocation Program. Others came on their own.
Those who stayed eventually found other Indians although they usually were members of another tribe. By now inter-tribal marriages created a new generation of Indians who's identity was split between two or more tribes. But still more came.
In the 2000 Census, 79 percent of all Americans were living in cities.
For American Indians, the urban population had risen to 64 percent — a huge increase over the 1940 urban population of 8 percent.
While Indians still lagged behind non-Indians in economic power, in the 1960s urban Indians found a new political activism. They developed a sense of identity that was less tied to the reservation or tribe and more connected to the vast array of tribes in the cities.
2006 Native American Public Telecommunications
http://www.pbs.org/indiancountry/history/relocate.html
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So Ani’s father went to Chicago, and so did Ani’s Aunt May, Aunt Betty, Aunt Yolanda, and Uncle Mike. In Chicago they looked for jobs, and socialized with other Indians, and became politically active in AIM for a time. A lot of this socializing went on in bars on Chicago’s near north side - Clark Street. It was in a bar that Ani’s father met Ani’s mother, who was from a different reservation and a different tribe. But in Chicago this didn’t matter so much as being Indian was what drew people together.

Ani’s mother, Betty Pierce, came to Chicago from the Menomonee Reservation in Wisconsin in 1966. At first Betty stayed with her sister Shirley and her husband who had come to Chicago to find jobs in 1959. Betty soon started hanging out on Clark Street, which her sister Shirley referred to as "ghetto," and Ben's sister referred to as "skid row." But that was where the action was, even if some of it was on the rough side. That was where you could meet people and that is where Betty Pierce from the Menomonee Reservation met Ben Chosa from Lac du Flambeau. Before long they were living together and about 9 months later Ani - or "Baby Ben" as he was called then - was born.

Ani didn’t know any of this story or who his parents were until a few years ago when he met his father for the first time in 35 years, after losing him at age 7 months. Ani never saw his mother again after he lost her, too, along with his father. By the time we found his father in 2002, his mother had died.

Guest Blog From Jackie – Family

Ani has difficulty talking about the subject of family. So maybe it is premature or inappropriate for me to start with it. Ani lives mostly in the present which is delightful, but family is often about history. Ani mostly likes to talk about things that are fun for him, and family is not one of those things. My goal in talking about family is to create a structure for Ani’s story that is somewhat chronological and thus satisfies my need for linear organization. This is not a better way to tell a story, but I hope it will add a dimension and thus give Ani’s story greater depth and create more understanding in some ways. I have learned more about relationship and family from Ani than I ever dreamed possible and I would like to share some of what I have learned.

What really stands out for me in my 27 years of knowing Ani is how deeply the subject of family is embedded in his story while at the same time Ani cannot bring together any coherent sense of family for himself. “Relationship” is an abstraction of difficult meaning for Ani and “family” has shades and multitudes of meaning and innuendo galore. While many abstractions are frustrating to him, this is even more so. Many of the words that we might take for granted such as “aunt” or “cousin” or “grandfather” or “child” or “parent” leave him confused or frustrated or overwhelmed. Yet in practice, Ani is all about relationship. And in my own way, so am I. Yet often when it comes to family, he and I stand with fists clenched, eyes glaring, squaring off in opposition at opposite corners of the ring. It’s as if we speak a different language.

It’s as if Ani wants to start at the beginning, as if we are talking about learning the times tables before trying to learn algebra. So that’s where I’ll start. Ani and I go over and over the fundamentals of relationship almost every day – consistency, trust, reliability, honesty, respect, listening, understanding the other person’s point of view and taking it into account as much as possible. Ani has always demanded these things of me and been extremely sensitive when they were compromised. Relationship as a concept in practice has always there between us. As Ani and I learn about relationship together, it spills over into all of my relationships: consistency, integrity, non-judgmental listening, openness to the other’s experience, being responsive rather than reactive…all of these lessons benefit my relationships with family, neighbors, colleagues, clients. For Ani, these lessons seem to be about exploring and re-writing his own history. He doesn’t say this in so many words; rather he acts it out. He lives it. I am not saying he is an expert at relationship by any means, only that he is acutely sensitive to it and this sensitivity has been my guide and my teacher.

What is any child’s first knowledge of family? Being inside mom. What’s it like in there? Warm? Squishy? Patterns of light and dark, patterns of sound, patterns of movement? The baby starts to organize his world around these things. It’s what is known, predictable, survivable. Then comes birth and a huge change occurs. All of a sudden the baby is thrust into a topsy-turvy world that must at first seem terrible strange and alien. Before, the baby had to do nothing in order to eat. Now, the baby must find a way to get food. Before, the baby had to do nothing to fill his blood with oxygen and to get rid of waste. Now, the baby must breathe, pee, and poop. Not all babies make this transition, and if they don’t, they die.

The baby must learn to become aware of the sensations within him and then communicate them to his care-takers in order to survive. Hunger, thirst, wet, pain, fright, happy, content, irritated. The baby needs to learn the distinct differences between these internal experiences and then find ways to communicate each of them differently so that another person understands him and then responds to meet the need underneath the communication. Wow. What a huge task. Newborns' brains are working furiously to learn to do this, and good care-takers can do much to help it along by being consistent, listening carefully to another’s experience, responding to their understanding of what is being communicated by another person, and checking to see if their understanding was correct by carefully observing the baby’s reaction.

We never stop learning to do this. If we’ve made it through childhood with some glitches in this process, we continue to go back and re-learn it throughout our lives within all of our relationships. Human beings were built for relationship. We can’t survive without them. We start learning about them from the day of conception.

The Story of My Life...

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Guest Blog From Jackie – Introduction

Ani has invited me to post something on his blog. It has taken me awhile to figure out how to do this, what to say, what to talk about. I am very proud of Ani for going ahead and putting this blog out there. It takes a lot of courage to tell the world one’s story, especially when you know that the reception could very well be negative. I give Ani a lot of credit for doing this.

As Ani says, we have had a somewhat confusing relationship over the last 27 years. It doesn’t fit neatly into any one category. It has always been “friend”, but it has also always been something “more than friend”. It has gone very deep for both of us. It has spanned the generations of his family and mine, of how his family has come to live on a reservation that my family clearly benefits from and what our awareness of that fact means to us on a daily basis. It spans all of the ages and stages between us, from infancy through adulthood, and enriches our understandings of our own make-up as we see some amazing similarities in temperament and values reflected in how we each reacted to things at all of these ages. Knowing Ani has taught me more about my own family, my own history, my own personality than any other relationship I’ve had. Knowing Ani has brought me a steadfast friend. Knowing Ani has enriched my life and made me a better person.

As Ani embarks on this journey to describe himself to the world and in so doing describe himself to himself, I wish him well. I will attempt to bring another perspective to his travels, at times a very different perspective. And we will just let that be what it is without arguing about what’s right or what’s wrong. Every person naturally sees life from a different perspective and there is great richness and wisdom in acknowledging that truth and learning to benefit from it. However, since this is Ani’s blog, anything that I have written here will have been first cleared by him. I encourage him to disagree and to share his own perspective on anything I talk about.