Details

Storyteller: Carol
Tribe: Lakota-Oohenunpa/Oglala
Created: 2019
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Transcript: I am Two Kettle and Oglala. My dad is Earl Charging Thunder. He is Oglala Lakota from Pine Ridge. And my mother is Celeste Littleton. But my grandparents raised me since I was two years old. I was born and raised in Rapid City, South Dakota. My grandmother’s name was Zoe Little Wounded. That was her maiden name. Her father was the only survivor in his family at the Custer Battle field. He was given the name Little Wounded when he was a boy. Later on, when there was a census, he was given an English name instead of one of our Lakota names. His name is James Little Wounded. He was my grandmother’s father. My grandmother had Annie, Helen, and Mary, the three sisters, and a brother Jonathan. They are all Little Wounded’s but they all married and have different names. My grandmother spent a lot of time with her sisters and brothers as kids. My grandfather’s name was Paul Littleton. His name was Little Skunk but he changed it to Littleton. I don’t know when. Maybe it was because of work. A lot of people back then changed their names. My grandfather was a deacon in an Episcopalian church. My grandparents never really talked about their past but once in a while I would hear them talking about the boarding school. They were hard workers. My grandmother worked for a café. She was a dishwasher. My grandfather worked at an Air Force base. In the early 60s, we moved to the Cheyenne River Reservation. We went home in the summer for Powwows. I had a lot of grandmas, grandpas, aunties, and uncles. I have a brother named Ellery. We both speak Lakota – that was our first language. He graduated from high school and I moved to California when I was 18 as a part of a relocation program. I lived out there for 10 years. I was so happy. There were Navajos, Hopis, California Indians, Crow, and people from Alaska. I have Crow friends and people say they are our traditional enemies, but I have crow friends. And I have friends up in Canada. We have almost the same ways. We lived the old way. We lived picking chokecherries, picking tinpsila (turnips) from the ground, and papa (dry meat). My grandfather had a garden. We lived out in the country. We didn’t live in tee pees. We had ceremonies that were kept in secret but we didn’t know about them. We talked about the religion and how it was outlawed, but in Rapid City we had ceremonies. I remember the police arresting my Grandpa on my dad’s side. We didn’t know why he was arrested and why they came, but they took him. Later on, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act happened, all the memories came back about why he was arrested. My other grandfather, Felix Flying Hawk, would come from the Pine Ridge Reservation and we would have ceremonies then too. He was a whisperer. So I grew up with church and the Lakota ways. I was just Lakota all my life. No other thing. I never thought of myself as anything else except being Lakota. I knew my songs. I knew my ways. Now I’m at an age where I need to be more responsible in helping with naming, ceremony, and wiping of tears. I go to sweats. I sun dance. I feel a lot of women need to step forward, especially older women, to start teaching our young women how to be women. I’m still learning in my age how to do all of that. There’s just not one person who has to do everything, we all have to do our part. And I see that, even with the young women. We had a sweat with some young women here at Elders Lodge and it was just so beautiful. It was powerful. They were all working women. They all have their own mothers and grandmothers, and are teaching our language and our songs. Every month there’s different ceremonies. Saging your home. Saging yourself. Taking care of yourself. I share with my sons to sage their selves before they go and when they come back, so they don’t bring wherever they’ve been back into the house. I have one son in California who lives on the streets. And that’s hard for me, but maybe he’ll find himself. And I have one in jail. But I talk to them about being responsible. They’re Ojibwe, Arikara, and Lakota. We’ve been through a lot, my boys and I. We’ve been homeless five times since we moved to St. Paul. We didn’t get a lot of help from the Native community. We've got a lot of help from Black people and their community, and White people at church. I work with Blacks, Whites, Mexicans, Somalis, and we all get along. We all work together. They have their ways. I met a woman from Africa and she said they have their ceremonies too. I want our ways to continue. I don’t want them to be lost. I just want to be a part of that. And that’s what I focus on now, teaching our ways and our language.