A
MEMOIR AND A PAST HISTORY RELATING
TO
NATIVE
AMERICANS {INDIANS}
AND
ALASKA
NATIVE PEOPLES©
William
Armour-Yardley Murdoch
August 8, 2006
No
part of this document may be printed in any manner
without
the specific written approval of the author.©
FORWARD
The history personally observed or researched by the author is presented with humility and with the admission that even as late as the year 2005 my knowledge about the broad spectrum of the Native American Indians and the Alaska Native worlds is still deficient. I will write in this personal and historical treatise about my twenty-three years of observations from 1960 until I retired from the United States Public Health Service, Indian Health Service in 1983. One has to consider the national breadth and diversity of the overall American Indian and Alaska native societies and their unique and dissimilar environments. Only the Native Americans living today can relate their true stories as only they can and should. Nevertheless, to the best of my ability I must speak of the past as I have researched or viewed it lest it may be lost to history.
As a gay man, the author, after three years in South Korea as a civilian military construction contract administrator, became a naïve United States Government Civil Service employee observer and participant in to me the unknown world of the Northwest Indian peoples. By fate I would find myself administering programs within the Department of the Interior, Bureau of Indian Affairs. I would also become an employee of the Office of Health, Education and Welfare, United States Public Health Service, Indian Health Service. That department would become The Office of Health and Human Services. These were two hierarchical federal agencies directly involved and mandated to serve the Indian Nations within America and the Alaska Villages with their managements. Other federal agencies had programs that the native peoples related to, i.e. by the receiving of other federal services as all citizens of the United States. Later I would learn of other American Indian Nations and the Alaska Native Village governments. I suggest that the reader’s view of this history that may be unknown or known will be evaluated and judged based on their own education and experiences. I would find in the 1960's the reservation peoples of Western Washington State existed in a dismaying environment familiar to or worse than that experienced by my family and me back in the 1930's during the great American Depression. But first, I would experience a vision that may have set my personal course toward the world of the Native American and Alaska Native peoples.
My Prophetic Native American Vision
On a beautiful spring day the dirt was dry on the road in front of our coal miner’s house in Colver, Pennsylvania, the mud was gone. It was the year 1935. My two brothers had gone up the hill to play baseball; my father was at work in the coal mine. My mother was away at the coal mine-owned grocery store with the neighbor lady. I was in bed and had apparently imagined my first walk into the front yard, during a severe and almost deadly bout of scarlet fever. Later my mother told me I had been hallucinating from a high fever.
That day I alone noticed a tall Indian man pacing down the dry dirt street. To my recollection, no one else saw him and no one in my family ever mentioned him to me. He wore cream-colored buckskin moccasins and leggings with beaded tassels. He had a loose-fitting bead-decorated and tasseled buckskin jacket with fringe and pants. On his head he wore the colorful feathered headdress of the mid-western plains Indians. As he paced along his hands were raised to his mouth playing on a short wooden flute. The tune he piped was, My Bonnie Lies Over the Ocean. No one else was on the street as, like the Pied Piper of Hamlin, his playing and his presence tugged me onward behind him. How and when we parted or if we parted is a mystery today but never would that Indian vision be lost to my mind over the intervening years. Could I have seen it all in a dream of sleep or hallucinating with the very high fever? In the distant future from that time I learned more about Indians and Alaska Native peoples, thoughts of seers, medicine men, shamans, and sacred spirits from “beyond.” Native peoples would not question the validity of my vision, although I am a non-Indian. This vision may have prophesied that later in my life I would relate somehow and for some purpose with our Native American and Alaska Native brothers and sisters. Like all the others in this great land, my family and I were immigrants. I was born in Scotland, which may have had some significance, as My Bonnie lies Over the Ocean was written in America as a Scottish tune. In 1960 my career was to be launched into a world unknown to me, the world of the Northwest Indian Nations and the Alaska Natives.
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