Details

Storyteller: Eileen
Tribe: White Earth Band of Ojibwe & Winnebago
Created: 2018
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Transcript: My name is Eileen Hudon. I’m Anishinaabe from white earth. I grew up in minowin mn. I’m from the Crane clan, and my Ojibwe name is *speaks language* which means strong river woman. After I got my GED, I wanted to go to college. I was 22-years old and needed a loan. I went to the office of the Bureau of Indian Affairs in downtown Minneapolis to see if I was eligible. I was told that I didn’t qualify because there was no father listed on my birth certificate and I didn’t have enough blood quantum. They could only go by my mother's blood quantum and she wasn't native enough for me to get a loan. She was enrolled and my six siblings were enrolled, but I wasn’t.

I dropped my head on the desk and cried and cried. All the people in the office were around me. I didn't know how to stop crying. This man who worked there asked me to ask my mother who my father was and which tribe he was from. I’d asked her so many times before and she would never answer me. But if I could get this information, the BIA could contact his tribal office to see if I was eligible. I continued wailing and took a taxi to my mother's house. I walked in and all of my siblings were sitting around the dining room table. I asked her who my father was. She was so shocked she answered me. I then asked which tribe he was from, and she told me.  

I went back to the BIA office to give them the information about my biological father. They called his tribal office. The man who answered knew him and my aunt. He said my father was deceased. He had died in 1965. I was given the enrollment information about my father and the contact information for my aunt. I was found eligible for a loan for college. I walked out of there crying. I was overwhelmed. I was embarrassed. I didn't expect any of this to happen around getting a student loan.

I knew some of this before, but not all of it. When I was 9-years old, I was put on a train with my brother and sister to be relocated to Minneapolis from White Earth. My parents were driving down the next day with the other three children and a small trailer full of our belongings. I was going from being raised with an extended family to a nuclear family. I didn’t want to leave the family and experiences that nurtured and sustained me behind. At 9-years old, I knew I lived a good life. The following year, I found out that my father wasn’t my biological father. My mother and father sat me down and said that it was true. My mother was so upset that she couldn’t talk, and my dad was so worried about her that he took her upstairs.

That’s how everything was left. We never talked about it again until I went to the BIA office, which was the only time it was ever mentioned. I knew that I was 10-months old before my mother and dad got married. I knew that they were engaged from the time my mother was 16 and that I was born when she was 17. I also knew that when my mother was pregnant with me, my dad was a solider in World War 2, and was part of freeing the people at Auschwitz. I didn’t know my mother was raped while he was in the war. When I moved, I was physically separated from my extended family, but now I felt emotionally separated. I was left with the question, are they my family? I never called my grandma, grandma again.

I ended up going to college for two years. I was in the midst of a divorce from an abusive husband who was stalking and harassing me. I was estranged from my family, as battered women often are isolated. Despite this, I was on the dean’s list. There were only a handful of native students on the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities’ campus. There were 5 [Native]students, but I couldn’t find the other 4. I got pregnant while I was in school and then a second time with twins. I now had four children. I was so overwhelmed with four children and the violence that I quit school.

I had gone into a shelter for battered women for the first time in 1973. This was my first exposure to women's rights, women's freedom and women's justice. As I mopped the floor of the shelter, there was a meeting with women’s advocates upstairs. I thought to myself, “I want to be upstairs in a meeting and not mopping the damn floor.” So I worked with three other women and co-founded Women of Nations, a grassroots group of Native women working to end domestic violence against Native women.

We’ve trained over 360 Native women to be advocates. Throughout my life, I’ve been pulled to address sexual assault and domestic violence. In earlier days, I was the only one willing to discuss it. It was clear that our Native people weren’t ready to talk about it and still aren’t today. The change that’s happening is happening through community. The women in our community are going to make a difference. In my last stage of life, that’s where my efforts are, with our women and healing the community through culture.