Strangers for Ancestors #2: Beginnings

As I noted in the introduction to this blog series, my family’s history on this stolen land we call ‘America’ is a good representation of the stains, scars, and misdirection the country was founded on, as well as the powerful belief in working to ensure truth, equity, and justice that has existed and grown alongside it; and the complex relationship between the two.

I begin this series by giving readers a window into who I am and the lens from which I will narrate my family’s American story, the nightmares and the dreams.

I grew up in the seventies and eighties in Billings, Montana, the largest city in the state with a population of 100,000. It’s an isolated place to live with the nearest metropolitan area being Denver, eight hours away - not considering that everything is now so readily available via the internet, which didn’t exist when I was a child and teen.

L -> R: me surrounded by my brothers/younger kids; with my best friend Carolyn (her father was Sioux and her mother was white); at dinner at the home of my parent’s best friends, Bob and Roxy Lee - my mother would end up having an affair with Bob, which led to my parent’s divorce. Bob would stay married to Roxy for eight more years before he left her for my mother; not that this was the story of undying love, rather it was the story of a desperate, broken woman and a brutal, controlling man.

In some ways, Billings is much like a suburb, with its relatively small downtown, few buildings over five stories, several four-lane main streets, one museum/art center, five high schools, sporadic strip malls, and a larger one-level mall with multiplex theater built in the seventies. However, rather than lying on the outskirts of a large city, Billings is bordered by the Crow/Apsáalooke Indian reservation and surrounded by a breathtaking natural environment with plains to the east and north, and the Rocky Mountains to the south and west. The city is lined with rim rocks across the northside, housing a myriad of caves and wildlife. The culture of Billings is a mix of the painful and violent history of “manifest destiny” that annihilated much of the indigenous peoples and wildlife of the West and gave justification to the white elitism that now primarily runs the state. This culture of American exceptionalism is accompanied by cowboy culture, the struggles of American Indian tribes (seven-percent of Montanans are Native American) to maintain their cultures and dignity amidst the brutality of the West’s white supremacist history, outdoor adventure, and a desire to emulate a modern cosmopolitan lifestyle.

Crow/Apsáalooke reservation outside of Billings

Keeping in mind that Montana only has a little over a million residents, some of the attributes the state ranks highly among the other 49, include:

Hate Groups Per Capita #1

Suicide #2

Gun Death Rate #2

Most Alcohol Consumed #5

Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls #5

Whitest State #6

Rapes Per Capita #10

My experiences growing up in Billings mirrored this characterization in a number of ways:

1) My father’s family has been in Montana since the late-1800’s and includes my Jewish ancestors who moved to the state in the early 1900’s (there were 2500 Jews in Montana in 1899; today there are only 1,395). The Western/cowboy heritage was always a part of our lives – going to rodeos, Western attire, and listening to country music;

2) my closest friends and boyfriends from elementary school through high school belonged to the Crow, Sioux, and Oneida tribes (their families often took me in for weeks at a time when I was having problems at home);

3) my parents were great outdoor enthusiasts and every weekend we/they were either hiking, biking, cross country skiing, fishing, or rafting;

4) my mother was obsessed with the design and decoration of our home;

5) I was a full-blown alcoholic by the age of 14;

6) I was forced to move out on my own at 16 after being assaulted by mother’s married, alcoholic boyfriend, which followed on two suicide attempts (my parents divorced when I was 12 and my father and his new family moved to Red Lodge, an hour from Billings). I moved into an unfinished concrete basement of a house that had little light and acted as the laundry room for the owner of the house, a woman my father knew through church. My living space was an area of approximately 7’ x 10’; I had an area rug, a bed, and a dresser. To support myself, I worked at Burger King 30 hours/week, while also attending high school; and

7) Also at 16, I was raped by the boyfriend of the woman whose house I moved into, and subsequently ended up in a romantic relationship with him for over two years, he was 32. Of course, at the time I didn’t consider it rape, I was just more mature than other girls my age, and I looked older, or so I thought, rather than grasping I was an extremely vulnerable kid who was alone and desperate for any sign of love and/or affection from an adult.

At Burger King with my friend Tana, I was a junior in high school

This all took place within the affluent white community of doctors, lawyers, and businessmen in Billings. My father was a partner at the largest law firm in the state - as was my mother’s boyfriend, the married man who’d brutally assaulted me.

It was painful and embarrassing to me that while my parents/family and their friends’ families all had large homes (relative to that era), fancy cars, cabins in the mountains, and plenty of money etc.; my friends’ families did not. Yet their parents worked just as hard, often much harder - holding down two or three jobs, as well as my friends having to work and contribute their incomes to their family households. The only difference was that most of my friends were brown and/or their parents were working class laborers, service providers, or clerical support.

‘The Factory’, Patricia Elich, *The Billings Gazette*, April 1983, article about the Crowley, Haughey, Hanson, Toole & Dietrich law firm

As a kid without agency, who had never had close friends from money because I had been ostracized by them, being told I was ugly, I loathed those kids and avoided them as much as I could. My best friends and later boyfriends were from working class families, which is where I felt the most at home. Except when I found myself lying on the bed of my first boyfriend, who is Oneida, in the room he shared with four of his brothers. He told me that I was different because of where I came from. We were in 10th grade, and he had to work at restaurant as a dishwasher to help support his family, I did not; however, a year and a half later I would, out of necessity to support myself. And when I found myself taken in by my two best friends, also American Indian (Crow/Apsáalooke), sisters who lived with their single mother in a small apartment. One day we were making tuna fish sandwiches for lunch, and I went to make a second one. The elder sister had to tell me that we could just have one because we needed to ration the bread and tuna for the next day. I felt so ashamed and ignorant because our family always had way more food than we ever needed. Both experiences were crushing to me. I felt so alone, even though I wasn’t, and my friends loved and cared for me; I was different. My family had money and social status, yet they had abandoned me - I was different from them as well, and really didn’t belong anywhere.

With my friends, senior year of high school, I’m drinking a Bloody Mary. As a sophomore and junior, I would drink a half pint of vodka and up to a six pack of beer in one night; however, I cut back after I moved out of my mother’s and began working while finishing high school.

By the grace of some larger force, and lots of support from my friends, I did get into college at Montana State University, where my dad had done his undergraduate work. However, I knew that I needed to get out of Montana. I applied to the University of Oregon through the National Student Exchange program and thankfully was accepted. It allowed me to transfer and pay the same in-state tuition as MSU. It was game changer. My life opened to new possibilities and perspectives. There were people who lived off the grid and were creating realities outside of mainstream culture; they valued the health and wellbeing of all life, understanding that we are all interconnected and deserve loving kindness and dignity. Additionally, while I had spent the first three years of college as a business and communications major, I realized in my third year I loved art, I could write, I could be political, I could help others, I could be an organizer. I could be myself.

My first woodcut book, *The Cycle of Humanity*, 1990

My second woodcut book, *The Bottom*, 1991 inspired by Toni Morrison’s book *Sula*

In 1991 I officially changed my major to fine art with an emphasis on printmaking. I loved the highly graphic nature of the medium and the ability to create multiples, allowing the expression of social/political views and experiences in a form that could easily be reproduced and used as tool for social/political justice.

1991 was also the year of the Gulf War’s Operation Dessert Storm, during which the United States began a massive bombing campaign against Iraq that resulted in the deaths of 100,000 - 200,000 civilians. In response, I worked with a multigenerational group of women, who were a mix of University of Oregon students and non-student activists to form the organization Women For Peace. WFP held weekly support groups for women and organized public events (film screenings, talks, forums, concerts etc). I was in charge of creating the bi-monthly newsletter, which was primarily a compilation of news articles from various sources (Ms. Magazine, Z Magazine, The Nation, Mother Jones, among others); I would also include images from my political print works.

Women For Peace newsletter, March/April 1991

My first monoprint book, *Thou Shalt Honor Thy Father*, 1991, a reflection on our culture of misogyny and how religion is used to keep women as second class citizens

These early experiences as a child and youth in Montana are what shaped me and how I understood the world, its inequities and the cruelties of capitalism as a system rooted in racism, misogyny, ecocide, and white male dominance. I wouldn’t fully understand those structural and systemic connections until far into my twenties; however, at an experiential level, I knew it, and lived it, either directly or as an observer. Those beginnings subsequently led to my early days as a young artist, writer and organizer in Oregon, and to today, where I continue working for justice.