Details

Storyteller: Mary
Tribe: White Earth Band of Ojibwe
Created: 2018
Location: Minneapolis, MN
Transcript: My Mother Lois Marie Roy was born in 1936 on the White Earth Nation reservation located in the upper northwest section of Minnesota. My grandmother Mary told me once that her daughter was a kind and generous person throughout her life and loved others unconditionally.

She was tall and thin in high school with long black braids. She wore black horn-rimmed glasses. She and her brother, Marty, spent time wrestling in the house much to the chagrin of their other three siblings. My Mother was two years older than Marty, so she won all the battles until he was big enough to start winning. Lois gave up wrestling with him then.

Mom initially attended the small village school near her home in Nau-tau-waush which translates from Ojibwe to English “as the eagle soars.” She excelled in her classes especially math and science and she decided she would like to attend nursing school after high school graduation.

Following middle school, Mom went to the high school in the small town of Mahnomen, Minnesota. She was bullied and harassed for being Native by the Caucasian students and she sank into a deep depression. Mom would sleep all weekend at the end of the school weeks. My grandpa and grandma were very concerned about her melancholy as it was called back then. 

My Mom’s teacher Miss. Goodwin said she was smart and a capable student, but she wasn’t earning good grades due to the bullying. She acted as an advocate for my Mom but with little success as bullying was hard to break in a town with institutional racism taught to children from their parents and families.

My grandmother heard of a Native boarding school in Lawrence, Kansas called the Haskell Institute. She sent a letter to the school applying for admission for my Mother and she was accepted. Her best friend Ellie Mae Robinson also attended the school and my Mother was less lonely with Ellie there as she missed her family and they were too poor to have Lois take trips back to the reservation,

Mom completed calculus, anatomy and physiology, and chemistry to prepare for nursing school and her grades went from a 2.0 average to a 4.0 grade point average while attending Haskill. She graduated in 1953 and went on to St. Francis School of Nursing in Breckinridge, Minnesota. Mom became a nurse after the three-year program and practiced in Portland, Duluth, Rochester, and White Earth before moving to Minneapolis and working at Abbott Northwestern Hospital

In 1959, Lois met her future husband when she went into his hardware store to buy a light bulb. They had a whirlwind romance and eloped after a year of dating to Davenport, Iowa. My Mom and Dad raised four children together. She divorced him after 22 years because he had untreated Bipolar Disorder and that was overwhelming to her.  But they remained close friends until his death in 1994 from lung cancer.

I grew up in Minneapolis but visited my reservation often and worked with my Medicine Man and Spiritual Advisor throughout my growing years and at present. I am active in the Twin Cities Native community as well. I love my culture and Native people, traditions, and spiritual practices.

My Mom and Dad and us four kids spent time on the reservation learning cultural practices and traditions; going to pow wows, hunting, maple syrup gathering in the sugar bush, picking fruit to make jams, wild ricing, and sweat lodges and ceremonies. I would like to learn my Ojibwe language to preserve it within the culture.

I am very close to my brother John who I live with and we share American Indian cultural activities such as daily laying of tobacco to open our prayers to the Creator and spirit world. We also smudge ourselves and our home daily with sage for purification of ourselves and our home.

My Mother talked about how her father and aunts and uncles were taken from White Earth and put into government boarding schools where they were stripped of their language, had their hair cut, and were dressed in clothes that the Caucasian colonists wore. She said that many of her aunts and uncles were beaten and sexually abused by the nuns and priests. Two of the ancestors died in the Carlyle school and their bodies were not returned to the reservation and were not buried in their Native homeland. She was tearful and sad when she talked about the government boarding schools.

I've experienced some survivor’s trauma and guilt for the suffering of my ancestors. I can’t believe the way they were treated and never seeing the Post Traumatic Stress Disorder they must have suffered from but never talked about.

My Mom was diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease in 2012. She became progressively ill from the illness until she passed away in August of 2018. I lost my best friend and the most gracious and kind woman I have ever known. Words cannot touch the grief I feel since her loss. But as Black Elk said, “There is no death only change of worlds, “and I will meet my Mother again on the other side.

We held my Mother’s funeral with drummers and singers who performed her traveling song. We also laid down tobacco to open the spirit world for prayers for my Mother, smudged ourselves and her urn, and burned sweetgrass.

I will miss my Mother every day and my favorite season was fall when she was in it.