Oregon Biography: Humble Dignity: Tracing the Lifeway of Kathryn Harrison

Abstract

Oregon Biography Kristine Olson Humble Dignity Tracing the Lifeway of Kathryn Harrison Until I met Kathryn Harrison, all of my experience with Native people was with traditional, reservation-based tribes ? the Warm Springs and Umatillas inOregon and theNavajos, Hopis, and Zunis inArizona and New Mexico. When the tribal attorney asked me topreside at a repatriation ceremony for theGrand Rondes in 1993,1 anticipated ancient reburial rites. Instead, I encountered a political gathering in the state capital in Salem with a crew-cut tribal chair ? Mark Mercier ? whose business card featured cartoon dinosaurs. What intriguedme the most, though,was the tribalvice-chair, a diminutive curly-haired grandmother in suburban-mall attire,who held the assembly spellbound as she described, teary-eyed,what her ancestors would have done with each bit of rock and bone that had been unearthed by the Columbia South Shore developers. In her eloquent prayer for the remains, she voiced a powerful blend ofNative American and Christian spirituality. Kathryn Har rison reminded me ofVine Deloria, Jr.,an elder of the Standing Rock Sioux in South Dakota and the author of Custer Died for Your Sins, who had been trained as a seminarian but was also a preacher of Indian ways. Like him, Kathryn could span cultural divides. I immediately imagined her as a potential reconciler for some ofOregon's Anglo and intertribal rifts. Kathryn and I grew close over the next decade, while shewas tribal chair and Iwas U.S. Attorney forOregon. I learned that her hair had been cut short in a traditional gesture ofmourning when her oldest son died in 1991. I learned about her childhood and her years atChemawa Indian School. And 658 OHQ vol. 106, no. 4 ? 2005 Oregon Historical Society Jennifer Jasaitis, photographer Kristine Olson interviewing Kathryn JonesHarrison, former chair of theConfederated Tribes ofthe GrandRonde I learned about her abusive marriage and her struggles to raise ten children. I also heard her expound on feminist values while mentoring theyoung girls in theGrand Rondes' "royalty" competition for the "court" at powwows. As I drove her on field trips to visit the places of her past, we often sang along to oldies on the radio. She knew all the lyrics. As I listened toKathryn's lifestory, Ibecame convinced that itdemanded a wider telling. She could do forwesterners what Vine Deloria had worked toward nationally: ... demythologize how white Americans thought ofAmerican Indians. The myths ... wheth er as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in foster ing guilt ? were both shallow. The truth ... was a mix, and only in understanding that mix ... could either side ever fully heal.' Because of her personal history,Kathryn was also in a position to inspire Indian people tofind revitalized direction inNative values, "to instillbelief in a culture [that] had been shattered by history, and by deliberate government policy."21 deplored what Iunderstood of these policies; she lived through them for eight decades. We began weekly taping sessions that Idubbed "Mondays with Kathryn." Iwould show up in her office on Mondays on my way back from thebeach where Ihad been working on chapters, and shewould invari Olson, Humble Dignity 659 ably quip: "Im not dead yet!" Those sessions would eventually allow me to write Kathryn sbiography, Standing Tall. f*T"?he story ofKathryn Harrison s lifeputs a human face on the suffering I wrought by twentieth-century U.S. Indian policy. She was born in -A? 1924, theyear thatCongress passed theAmerican Indian Citizenship Act, which finally conferred on Native people the rights that immigrants and even former slaves enjoyed.3 Over eight ensuing decades, Kathryn overcame the obstacles placed inher path by both the government and individuals. She not only survived, but she triumphed, eventually leading theGrand Rondes to undreamed-of prosperity and prominence. To drive this point home in the biography, I looked at the events in Kathryn s lifenext to themilestones in federal Indian policy. The interwoven motif was stunning, thewhiplashes of the strands of vacillating national di rection vividly mirrored in thewaning and waxing ofKathryn's eighty years. In retrospect, the braided strands were inseparable. "Autonomy is achieved," writer Susan Faludi noted inher review of Wilma Mankiller's autobiography, "... only when ithappens simultaneously...