ADVICE FROM UNCLES

Darrell Kipp stopped by on his way home from a flying trip to St. Louis to tie up loose ends on the Lewis & Clark Bicentennial. In the past when asked to fly over early in the morning, participate in events, and fly back in the evening, he went through Valier too late at night to stop. But in the last week or so Darrell, his wife and myself have all had birthdays in our sixties. As we age, things have to change a bit, so this time Darrell insisted he needed more time to adjust on that end and when he landed in Great Falls he stayed overnight, arriving here just as I was backing out to go do the laundry in Shelby. I would have left earlier except that for a while the sewer project meant I couldn’t get out -- which now seems very fortunate.

We had a few hours to talk and Darrell was tired enough to let down his guard a little more than usual. Aside from plotting and analyzing what’s going on, I love to play Boswell to Darrell’s Johnson and always jump on an opportunity to question him, especially about the early years. What I want to know most of all is how he made the transition out of the failure paradigm that traps so many people here, including three of his brothers. My entering premise was that kids here fail in school and engage in other self-destructive behavior because they WANT TO. They see no percentage, no attraction, in success. So what made him different? What made him want to succeed?

This time his answer was mentoring. (Sometimes it’s slightly different.) We had been talking about the early split between full-bloods, who stoically withdrew to wait for the end, and the half-blood boys, esp. the ones with white fathers who had connections, pushed their boys into their family businesses, and provided other means for success. (Not the girls.) Darrell is full-blood but he said that when he was a boy, his uncle (on his father’s side) would say to him occasionally, “Get that chair and bring it over here.”

The two of them would sit facing each other so they could have a serious, intense, one-on-one talk about life. (The uncle was a WWII veteran.) “These are things you need to know to protect yourself,” he would say. The emphasis was on protecting oneself. This is what you should do if you are completely broke somewhere you don’t know anyone; or in a bar when a brawl starts; or someone wants to fight you personally; or you’ve made a woman very angry. None of the advice was censored or dumbed down for a little boy. The uncle said, "This is what it's like to be in bed with a woman." It was hard-won man-knowledge from the wider world. This is how to act around blacks; this is how to protect yourself in a big city or while hitch-hiking.

I’ve heard Darrell give graduation talks and I realize this is the source of those talks. He tells graduates to always be nice to women because they will remember that and help you later, to rat-hole $500 so you’ll have enough money to get out of town if you have to, to never get into a hole too small to get out of. Things to do to protect yourself. They always listen closely. These are not the shiny lies and half-truths they are usually told.

When Darrell went off to college in Billings, somewhat bolstered by the faith his English teacher had in him, he flunked every single class he took. In those days anyone who graduated from a Montana high school was automatically admitted to college and somehow his tuition was paid. He didn’t know he would have to pay for room and board, but work/study and grants took care of that. He learned that he could petition to keep his enrollment and subsidies and so he did and they always granted him permission to stay.

"Why did you want to stay?" I asked. So many of the kids go to college, even in Montana, and can’t bear to be away from familiar friends and places for as long as a month. They come back before there is a time to recover from homesickness. (I figure six weeks is about what it takes -- I'm convinced it's physiological.)

Darrell said, “Are you kidding? I thought the dorm was the height of luxury! I only had to share my room with one other person, a guy from New Jersey who I thought was Mafia, and once he got over thinking I might scalp him in his sleep, we became best friends right up to the present. I thought cafeteria food was wonderful and I could have as much as I wanted. My dorm was assigned all the Indians, East Coasters, handicapped, Butte and Anaconda characters and we meshed into a community. The talk was great -- constant banter and quips -- in every accent and from every point of view. I loved those guys. I didn’t want to leave them.”

Even now, whenever Darrell turns to talk about utopias, he wants to create a little village of those good friends, or at least people like them. But now kids think it’s low-class to have to live in a dorm. They think cafeteria food is beneath them. (As Darrell says, they don’t know that modern cafeterias include salad bars, Mexican food, burgers and fries, and pizza.) The Indian kids in those days didn’t clump up, but rather distributed themselves among the others. They didn’t pair off except for events but Darrell, because he was dependable, good-looking, and earnest, was sometimes asked to be an escort for banquets or dances where smart, ambitious Indian women wanted to appear. The friendships he formed with those “pals,” as he calls them, have turned out to connect him to some pretty high places when he needs a little help for a program or a student.

More than that, when he went to petition the dean, the man he talked to was Ben Surwill, a big handsome Polish man who had made his fortune back east and came looking for a small community where he could do some good and have some fun. He liked Darrell and put his feet on the European immigrant’s path: hard work, education, and good company. Because he took Darrell along as a sidekick -- also entrusted with the duty of getting the Dean home if he were drinking and a fight looked imminent -- he sent Darrell to a Billings tailor for a fine suit and a nice sports jacket. (I know of Unitarian ministers who operate this way.) This was one of the big secrets: Darrell accepted -- at least to some degree -- the ethos of the first and second generation immigrants who built the infrastructure of the state.

Sometimes I wonder whether the post-modern deconstructive approach to Native American issues hasn’t done as much mischief as good. Much of their jargon is unintelligible to both Darrell and I. The rage that goes with it gets in the way of forming contacts and community. Their strategy for protecting themselves seems to be to eliminate all opposition or criticism. Anyway, I think maybe the wave of it is mostly ebbing.

I can imagine someone’s Mexican uncle (or maybe aunt) saying (and I should really say this is Spanish), “Child, bring that chair over here,” and sitting down with their four knees together to explain, “This is how you must protect yourself! Go to school! Learn all you can. Make amigoes wherever you go!”

You know what? Some of those uncles and aunts will have learned this stuff in the Middle East battles. Of course, others didn’t live to bring back what they learned.