Kristine Olson

Oregon Biography

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 in Oregon and the Navajos, Hopis, and Zunis in Arizona and New Mexico. When the tribal attorney asked me to preside at a repatriation ceremony for the Grand Rondes in 1993, I 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 intrigued me the most, though, was the tribal vice-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 of Native American and Christian spirituality. Kathryn Harrison reminded me of Vine 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 of Oregon's Anglo and intertribal rifts.

Kathryn and I grew close over the next decade, while she was tribal chair and I was U.S. Attorney for Oregon. I learned that her hair had been cut short in a traditional gesture of mourning when her oldest son died in 1991. I learned about her childhood and her years at Chemawa Indian School. And I learned about her abusive marriage and her struggles to raise ten children. I also heard her expound on feminist values while mentoring the young girls in the Grand 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.

Kristine Olson interviewing Kathryn Jones Harrison, former chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde

Jennifer Jasaitis, photographer

As I listened to Kathryn's life story, I became convinced that it demanded a wider telling. She could do for westerners what Vine Deloria had worked toward nationally:

... demythologize how white Americans thought of American Indians. The myths ... whether as romantic symbols of life in harmony with nature or as political bludgeons in fostering guilt — were both shallow. The truth ... was a mix, and only in understanding that mix ... could either side ever fully heal.¹

Because of her personal history, Kathryn was also in a position to inspire Indian people to find revitalized direction in Native values, "to instill belief in a culture [that] had been shattered by history, and by deliberate government policy."² I deplored what I understood of these policies; she lived through them for eight decades. We began weekly taping sessions that I dubbed "Mondays with Kathryn." I would show up in her office on Mondays on my way back from the beach where I had been working on chapters, and she would invariably quip: "I'm not dead yet!" Those sessions would eventually allow me to write Kathryn's biography, Standing Tall.

The story of Kathryn Harrison's life puts a human face on the suffering wrought by twentieth-century U.S. Indian policy. She was born in 1924, the year that Congress passed the American 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 in her path by both the government and individuals. She not only survived, but she triumphed, eventually leading the Grand Rondes to undreamed-of prosperity and prominence.

To drive this point home in the biography, I looked at the events in Kathryn's life next to the milestones in federal Indian policy. The interwoven motif was stunning, the whiplashes of the strands of vacillating national direction vividly mirrored in the waning and waxing of Kathryn's eighty years. In retrospect, the braided strands were inseparable. "Autonomy is achieved," writer Susan Faludi noted in her review of Wilma Mankiller's autobiography, "... only when it happens simultaneously in the life of the individual and the life of a people."⁴

The details of Kathryn Harrison's ancestry and life reflect the struggles of Indian communities across the nation. At the beginning is her father's great-Aunt Molalla Kate, who was uprooted from her tribal lands near Oregon City and marched on a branch of Oregon's "Trail of Tears" sixty miles to the reservation in the Coast Range, where tribal people from all over western Oregon were herded.⁵ It was the beginning of the forceful (and later fraudulent) taking of the First Americans' land base.

Molalla Kate defied convention. Married four times (the last two times to non-Natives), she spoke Chinook, English, and a smattering of French. In the 1930s, she spent hours with Smithsonian ethnographer Phillip Drucker, painstakingly ensuring that his notes contained correct details of tribal customs and language. Kathryn knew her great-great aunt as a fiercely independent nonagenarian who proudly bore the flattened forehead of her ancestors. Kate remained a lifelong role model for Kathryn.

Kathryn's father, Harry Jones, born on the Grand Ronde Reservation in 1892, was orphaned when he was six, he was sent to an oppressive Catholic missionary school and, when he was thirteen, to the Chemawa Indian Boarding School north of Salem.⁶ He graduated in 1910 as valedictorian and went on to college and business school. Yet, three years later a Bureau of Indian Affairs agent declared him "incompetent" to manage his family lands on the reservation. The lands were forfeited, auctioned to Anglo buyers, and he worked odd jobs until he died in the 1934 flu epidemic. During this same period, the BIA was turning over Indian trust lands at a rapid pace, leaving a fraction of reservations intact.

Kathryn's mother, Ella Jones, was sent to Chemawa from Alaska after her Eyak mother died. As the Eyaks were decimated by disease and their language virtually vanished, Ella lost track of her Native heritage and assimilated into the white culture.⁷ Wearing a long frock with an apron, she worked in the kitchens of Oregon State University faculty homes in Corvallis during the Depression. Shortly after she and Harry moved their family to the Siletz Reservation, she too succumbed to the flu.⁸ Her six children, ages one to seventeen, were orphaned and scattered among neighbors' homes, boarding school, and the Albertina Kerr Orphanage in Portland.

Molalla Kate, Kathryn Harrison's great-great aunt, in 1934

OHS neg., OrHi 101585

In the 1930s, there was no Indian Child Welfare Act that declared it national policy to place Indian children in tribal homes.⁹ Non-native people were given government subsidies to serve as foster parents, and many availed themselves of this opportunity to supplement their incomes. Kathryn and three of her siblings were taken to a remote foster home, where they provided household labor, doing laundry and building the log cabin where they lived. The girls were subjected to physical and emotional abuse.

As the oldest, Kathryn was able to "emancipate" in order to attend Indian boarding school after ninth grade. Following in her parents' footsteps, she entered Chemawa. Because she was fleeing a foster placement, she did not experience the gut-wrenching dislocation that many of her classmates felt.¹⁰ She had no home to long for.

At Chemawa, she was trained in the "domestic sciences" and sent out to work in white homes. Nevertheless, she drew strength and a sense of belonging from the "Indianness" she picked up from fellow boarders and the pan-Indian pageants the school sponsored.¹¹ She made some lifelong women friends at Chemawa, trusted intimates she would count on for support throughout her life. She also met her future husband, Frank Harrison.

Kathryn Harrison, far left, at her nursing school graduation in 1972

OHS neg., OrHi 101623

Frank began to drink excessively at Chemawa, but Kathryn turned a blind eye. Their first child, a girl, was born while Frank served in Europe in the U.S. Army during World War II. He emerged from the service a confirmed alcoholic. He was discharged into the 1940s culture, where stores sported signs reading "No Indians or Dogs Allowed." With Kathryn and their daughter, he began a life of itinerant logging, living with friends or in company camps.

Despite frequent relocations and Frank's drunken, abusive behavior, Kathryn maintained contact with her extended tribal family and her Chemawa friends. She knew she could always find someone to take her in at the Siletz, Grand Ronde, or Umatilla reservations. But the safety net began to fray as she bore ten children. Then came the ruinous federal policy called "termination."¹²

The Eisenhower Administration — especially the Department of the Interior, which had a "trust responsibility" to safeguard tribal resources — wanted to be rid of what it called the "Indian problem."¹³ Working with Congress, it eliminated tribal governments in rapid succession, shunting reservation Indians off to cities to be swallowed up by assimilation. Gone were their education and health benefits and the remnants of the Native land base. Their cultural heritage was nearly erased. Only three reservations in Oregon escaped: Umatilla, Warm Springs, and Burns Paiute, all on the east side of the Cascade Mountains away from population centers.

Displaced Indians wandered on city streets, often seeking the anesthesia of alcohol. While rumors circulated that Indians had been richly compensated for their land, Kathryn picked through dumpsters outside Portland grocery stores to feed her children. Her "compensation" for the official dissolution of her tribe was a BIA check for thirty-five dollars for each member of the family. The Harrison children remember finding maggots in a box of macaroni and cheese, but eating it anyway, and they wore hand-me-downs from church basements. Following the harvests as migrant laborers, they ended up barefoot in a shanty in Arizona, picking cotton. The two oldest girls escaped into teenage marriages.

The 1960s brought some relief when President John F. Kennedy disavowed the termination policy.¹⁴ More losses were prevented, but there was no means offered to recover what was already gone. The best Kathryn could do for her family was to accept the charity of her older brother, who had a home and job on the Umatilla Reservation in eastern Oregon. The family's time in Umatilla was a brief respite from their vagabond life, until their father's dysfunction forced them to move again.

With the advent of the tribal self-determination era, spearheaded by the Nixon Administration in the 1970s, Kathryn determined to leave Frank and return to school.¹⁵ At the age of fifty, she moved with her younger children back to the Oregon coast near the former Siletz Reservation, qualified for food stamps, and sought career counseling. By then toothless, she was unable to find a job even as a waitress. Despite these obstacles, she was admitted to Lane Community College in Eugene, where in 1972 she became the first Native American to graduate from the School of Nursing.

Then began a decade of personal, familial, and tribal revival. Re-establishing contact with tribal members who had stayed in the Siletz area, Kathryn founded an alcohol treatment program and got involved in tribal politics. To become "recognized" by the federal authorities, tribal leaders had to demonstrate that they had, in effect, defied the termination policy and statutes. Proof was required that they had continued governmental activities, stayed near their traditional lands, kept records of tribal enrollment, and otherwise preserved their "Indianness." Kathryn joined the effort to restore the Siletz, testifying at congressional hearings about the power of uninterrupted tribal ties. The tribe prevailed. In 1977, the Siletz once again became an "official" tribe in the eyes of the federal government.¹⁶ In 1982, Kathryn — accompanied by her oldest and youngest child — returned to her father's traditional home in Grand Ronde.

Kathryn's children were experiencing their own revival through participation in Indian Olympics, traditional spiritual gatherings (made possible by the passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in 1978), and the inspiration they derived from the tactics of the American Indian Movement, whose members painted Plymouth Rock red at Thanksgiving and later occupied Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.¹⁷ Kathryn's oldest son, Frankie, organized a Native sports competition in Coos Bay, and her youngest daughter, Karen, participated in an Indian naming ceremony in Oklahoma.

Kathryn and Frankie were elected to the "unofficial" Tribal Council. With sixteen-year-old Karen, they traveled to Washington, D.C., to testify on behalf of Grand Ronde restoration. Kathryn began by saying: "We are speaking up today for our right to exist," and she described the incalculable toll taken by Termination. She concluded:

You can look at me and see that I'm an Indian ... yet like my People, in the eyes of the government, I am not. My parents and grandparents were Indians ... [and] I learned to be proud of my heritage through their lives and their teachings. I remember the conversations ... using the Chinook Jargon ... the traditional foods and the sweat houses ... our People have endured much, but they have endured. We here today have walked through twenty-nine years of Termination but like our ancestors, we have continued to hold tightly to those strands of our heritage forever mindful of the coming generations....

Frankie followed, citing a 1982 report the tribal government had commissioned:

This study shows that the Grand Ronde Indians are lagging behind their white neighbors in health, employment and education ... The tragic irony of this is that not far from Grand Ronde is the Indian Health Services facility at Chemawa Indian School ... but our people cannot make use of its services because we are ... no longer federally recognized Indians....

Finally, Karen spoke

All my life, I have only known Termination. People ask me what tribe I am and when I tell them, they have never heard of it. That, in itself, would mean a lot to me: for people to know I am part of the Molalla Tribe of the Grand Rondes, and how proud I am to be a member of my tribe ... [We want] to be known again by our government as Indians.¹⁸

Recognition of the Grand Rondes came in 1983. After another long legislative battle, some land was restored in 1988.¹⁹ Kathryn commented: "Once it's ours, I'd like to just go up and walk on it. And when the time comes, there would be no greater satisfaction for me than to be buried on our land. My bones will mix with the bones of our ancestors. That's the way it's supposed to be."²⁰ During her sixties, Kathryn participated wholeheartedly in the national cultural resource protection movement, leading to the passage of significant federal and state legislation.²¹ She became the voice of the Grand Rondes.

In her seventies, Kathryn presided over the Grand Ronde Tribal Council, first as vice-chair, then as chair. She held the state accountable to its government-to-government relationship with the tribes. After Congress passed the Indian Gaming Regulatory Act and the Grand Rondes had their designs and financing in place for a casino, Kathryn was prepared to negotiate a compact with the state.²² The Spirit Mountain casino was built in 1995, and Kathryn and the Tribal Council established endowments for tribal education, health care, job training, housing, and elders' benefits. She also cautioned about the need to diversify investments and not depend on gaming revenue.²³

Kathryn Harrison in regalia at a powwow when she was sixty-five years old

Courtesy of Kathryn Harrison family collection

An informal coalition of Native women leaders helped bolster Kathryn's resolve and determine the direction of her policies. They named themselves Heart of the American Indian Women's Network. Meeting annually, they compared notes and encouraged one another to maintain their visions for their tribes. These gatherings buttressed the women's traditional roles as culture-keepers. A powerful model was the Braveheart Society of the Yankton Sioux, which took the traditional name for women who rescued wounded warriors from the battlefield and restored them to health. The factor that forged their connection was the link between women's rights and tribal rights. They adopted a "lest we forget" stance, laboring to ensure that culture, language, and the attributes of sovereignty are not shortchanged in a rush to capitalize on recent successes.

One of my challenges in serving as Kathryn's biographer was determining how much to invade her children's privacy and how much to reveal about tribal governmental issues. With respect to her children, I told just enough of their lives in Standing Tall to illuminate Kathryn's struggles. As to internal tribal matters, I decided to describe what could be publicly documented either through tribal newsletters, court cases, or reprinted Tribal Council minutes. I taped and transcribed hours of interviews with state and federal officials and combed through the BIA archives in Seattle. I participated in some of the recent history myself, as chair of the Spirit Mountain Community Fund. Throughout, I subscribed to Kathryn's maxim (again echoing Vine Deloria): "Only by sharing can you make a whole."

In 2001, Kathryn decided not to run for a fifth term on Tribal Council. Now, at eighty-two years old, she sits on the sidelines, "practicing being an elder," watching and waiting to see how it goes. While the non-Native world recognizes her with honorary degrees, speaking invitations, and board appointments, she chafes at her dwindling influence within her own community. She is disheartened by politics at the national level, where, except for proposals to curtail Indian gaming, Native issues are considered a "diversion." She longs for an opportunity to focus national attention on the concept and practice of tribal sovereignty, which she labored so hard to attain.

Calling upon her lifelong blend of Native and Christian upbringing, Kathryn often cites a biblical passage from Matthew 16:25–26, with a Chinook Jargon slant: "[Translated] What shall it profit us if we gain the whole world but lose our own soul?" She also harkens to the saying repeated often by her friend and colleague Wilma Mankiller, retired Principal Chief of the Cherokee Nation: "A nation is not defeated until the hearts of its women are on the ground."

When I first wrote Kathryn Harrison's biography, the title I suggested was "Humble Dignity," because that was how she had been described as carrying herself. Then I discovered Kathryn's sassiness and sense of humor. "Humble Dignity" did not quite convey the persona of a woman whose favorite songs (while vacuuming) came from The Beatles and Credence Clearwater Revival. I knew I needed to add a touch of the irreverent to avoid being accused of writing a hagiography. What better reference than writer Sherman Alexie who remarked upon meeting Kathryn: "Why you're just a halfpint! We need to add water!" Hence, Standing Tall is about a fierce, larger-than-life woman whose heart towers above the ground.

Notes

Kristine Olson's biography of Kathryn Harrison, Standing Tall: The Lifeway of Kathryn Jones Harrison, Chair of the Confederated Tribes of the Grand Ronde Community, was published by the Oregon Historical Society Press, in association with the University of Washington Press, in 2005.

^1. Kirk Johnson, "Vine Deloria, Jr., 72, Writer who Pursued Indian Causes," New York Times, November 16, 2005.

^2. Ibid.

^3. Indian Citizenship Act, 43 Stat. 253, 8 U.S.C. 3.

^4. Faludi on cover of Wilma Mankiller and Michael Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1993).

^5. For a description of this forced march to make way for white settlers, see Terence O'Donnell, An Arrow in the Earth: General Joel Palmer and the Indians of Oregon (Portland: Oregon Historical Society Press, 1991), 234–67.

^6. In 1902, when Harry Jones was a fifth-grader at Grand Ronde, the Bureau of Indian Affairs sent these instruction to the school superintendent: "You are therefore directed to induce your male Indians to cut their hair, and both sexes to stop painting [their faces].... Indian dances and so-called Indian feasts should be prohibited. In many cases these dances and feasts are simply subterfuges to cover degrading acts and to disguise immoral purposes. You are directed to use your best efforts in the suppression of these evils." Letter from the Commissioner of the Department of Interior, Office of Indian Affairs, Washington, D.C., to the Superintendent, Grand Ronde School & Agency, Oregon, January 11, 1902.

^7. See Elizabeeth Kolbert, "Last Words: A Language Dies," New Yorker, June 6, 2005, 46–59.

^8. A brief obituary appears in the Lincoln County Leader, December 20, 1934, 7. Her death certificate is in State File #133, Lincoln County Archives, Lincoln City, Oregon.

^9. Indian Child Welfare Act (ICWA) of 1978, 25 U.S.C. Sec. 1901–1963.

^10. See Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900–1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998).

^11. See Sonciray Bonnell, "Chemawa Indian Boarding School: The First One Hundred Years, 1880–1980," M.A. thesis, Dartmouth College, 1997.

^12. See Josephy, Alvin M., Jr., A Walk Toward Oregon (New York, Random House, 2000), 261–62.

^13. See Kenneth R. Philp, Termination Revisited: American Indians on the Trail to Self-Determination 1933–1953 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999); and Karl Kroeber, ed. American Indian Persistence and Resurgence (Durham: Duke University Press, 1994).

^14. Vine Deloria, Jr., and Clifford Lytle, American Indians, American Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983), 15–21.

^15. Indian Self-Determination and Education Assistance Act of 1975, 25 U.S.C. Sec. 450–451n, 455–458e.

^16. Senate Bill 2801 was introduced in March 1976, referred to the U.S. Senate Committee on Interior and Insular Affairs, Subcommittee on Indian Affairs, and passed in November 1977.

^17. The Indian occupation of Alcatraz occurred in 1969. See Mankiller and Wallis, Mankiller: A Chief and Her People, xx–xxi.

^18. Testimony Before the House Interior and Insular Affairs Committee, October 18, 1983.

^19. The recognition bill is Public Law 98–165, signed by President Reagan on November 22, 1983, and codified at 25 U.S.C. Sec. 713(b). The restoration bill is Grand Ronde Restoration Act of 1988, Public Law 100–425, codified at 25 U.S.C. Sec. 713(f).

^20. Grand Ronde Smoke Signals, November 1988, 11.

^21. Federally, there was the Archaeological Resources Protection Act of 1979 and its implementing regulations (1984), the Native American Grave Protection and Repatriation Act of 1990. For Oregon, Kathryn was part of the intertribal Senate Bill 61 coalition (1993). See also Testimony of Kathryn Harrison before the Oregon Senate Judiciary Committee in Salem, Oregon on March 31, 1993.

^22. Indian Gaming Regulatory Act of 1988 (IGRA), codified at 25 U.S.C. Sec. 2701–21. For a discussion of IGRA, see Charles Wilkinson, Blood Struggle: The Rise of Modern Indian Nations (New York: W.W. Norton, 2005), 329–51.

^23. "Jackpot Nation," Willamette Week, December 22, 1999.

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