Seasons of Rita
Biography of a Sauk Woman

Carol K. Rachlin

 

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Preface

This is the story of a woman’s life, told as she felt and lived it. As nearly as possible it is told in her own words, and sometimes its English reflects the teller’s struggles with her second language.
Rita grew up between two worlds. She reflects, in her own person, the conflicts of a people who were in the process of change from one way of life to another; the puzzles and predicaments that Rita endured are those of many American Indians caught in the obligatory adaptation to the larger American society.
Rita’s tribe, the Sauk, is not a large one and has had limited impact historically on the larger picture of Native America life. The Sauk lived on the borderline between the eastern Woodlands culture, which extended from the Atlantic to the Great Lakes, and the classic Plains culture, which began on the western bank of the Mississippi and stretched westward to the foothills of the Rocky Mountains.
The Sauk combined an eastern agricultural lifestyle with annual buffalo hunts on the plains to the west of their farmlands. Their art was transitional, for they practiced both Woodland weaving and Plains parfleche painting.
Rita came to life at a time when Indians were being incorporated into the United States as marginalized peoples, and for Rita that marginality also had cultural roots. When she was an infant, she was given to her father’s older sister, in keeping with an occasional practice among the Sauk to give a child to a relative who is childless or to the grandparents if the mother feels she cannot provide proper care. Adopted children are told the identity of their own parents and their blood kinship to them. At the same time, they are taught their kinship role in the family in which they live, but they may not truly feel that they “belong” to either. Doubt, self-searching, and insecurity were a part of Rita’s life, which may have been caused in part by her experiences as an adopted child, as an Indian School student, and the external pressures toward rapid social change. Her fierce desire to keep her own son and educate him in the traditional ways is a reflection of her concern to establish stability in her life and his.
Ideal behavior demands of the Sauk man or woman complete emotional control with rigorous repression of all expressions of pleasure, pain, or anger. Politeness, amiability, and a middle-of-the-road attitude toward hostility and passion are the ideal. Actually, emotions do erupt, sometimes with a violence far from the ideal.
Physical attacks are not uncommon. Women battle with their fists and feet over men; in contrast men strike each other with axes, or use firearms in struggles for control of land or for the position of “head dancer” at a powwow.
Often witchcraft is employed for a less overt attack upon a rival. A man or woman may be “witched” because of exceptional skill at beadwork, and in some cases physical destruction may be intended. Young girls are taught to fear “love medicine” and are warned never to drink anything a man offers them or to drink when a man is sitting beside them. It is too easy to drop a pinch of powdered “white root” (Jimpson weed) into a bottle of pop or a cup of coffee, thus gaining control over the soul and body of the drinker.
The only security for the individual Sauk is in the family. When the parents have given the child away, where can he or she find security: only in the supernatural, in Our Father the Sun, and other spirits. Safety lies most of all in Mother Earth, Our Grandmother, who gives every Sauk the source of food and thus the source of life.
Deep attachments, spiritually encouraged by these supernatural concepts, inevitably develop between mother and son, and only slightly less intense emotional exchanges exist between daughter and father or father-figure.
Seeking and finding security from the supernatural, some Sauk are preoccupied with the questions of eternity. Where do their loved ones go when they draw their last living breath? How do they get there? What awaits them? Will they live as they always have with the same needs and wants, or will they become disembodied, needing and wanting only to be remembered, to be alive in the hearts of those who loved them?
Another source of emotional security is found in the institution of adoption. The dead person is believed to have gone on a long journey, and he will need everything he would take with him if he made a journey on earth. If the deceased is not given what he needs, he may return to get it. This would cause unhappiness, and perhaps destruction to the other members of his family. In the endlessly reiterated phrase in which the Sauk express every known and unknown fear “something bad could happen”.
Consequently, the biological family adopts another person to take the deceased’s place and to see him safely off on his journey. One who is invited to become a member of another family dare not refuse. For one night, while the adopting family sits in prayer, the dead one’s soul returns to the person who will replace him or her. The one to be adopted withdraws and spends the night of prayer alone. It is “dangerous” to come near that person while another soul is in their body.
In the morning, the person who is to be adopted is given a new suitcase, filled with everything needed for a journey: clothes, socks, perhaps a bottle of whiskey if the deceased had a taste for it, toothbrush and toothpaste, shaving lotion and razor, cosmetics for a woman, and cigarettes. The only aboriginal gifts in a modern adoption are the two pairs of moccasins, which will be needed for such a long journey.
Dressed in new clothing from the skin out, handed his suitcase and a bucket filled with food, the adoptee walks away from the ceremonial lodge without looking back. During the night watch he became the dead person, and his backward glance would bring sickness or death to anyone it fell on.
Sauk adoptive relations are taken with extreme seriousness. Kinship terms are exchanged between the adopted and the adopters even in everyday conversation. Such tabus as the rule against sexual joking between brother and sister are rigidly observed. At the same time the adopted member of the family must go with the rest of the family to clean the grave and mow the grass in the cemetery where his predecessor is buried every Memorial Day.
The kinship system has both matrifocal and patrifocal elements with both the sororate and levirate being preferred marriage patterns. Since fathers come and go, and the mother and uncle always remain, the mother’s brother has the important male role in his sister’s family, a matrifocal practice. In contrast, descent is reckoned through the father, a patrifocal practice. If the father is Sauk, the children belong to his clan, and their Indian names show that affiliation. If the father is not Sauk and has no clan descent to give to his children, they are assigned to their mother’s clan.
Clan affiliation can remain constant or change with adoption. The person who is adopted may become a member of the clan of the adopting family. When a child is given to a relative, his clan affiliation may be changed. Clan membership may even be changed to avoid illness or death. If a clan is believed to be unlucky, its members may request that they be admitted to other clans.
It seems probable that the present clan structure has a diminished importance from its role in the past. It would be safe to guess that with the emphasis on the role of the mother’s brother, the Sauk originally possessed the matrilineal clan system found among many North American agriculturalists. The emphasis on descent through the father may have developed in the post-European contact period.
At the same time it should be noted that descent through the father is not uncommon in the classic Plains culture. A man proved his virility by fathering children, as well as by reciting war deeds on ceremonial occasions, and the Sauk retain those attitudes and customs.
Rita’s life reflects these mixed influences. She was taught the taboo between a menstruating woman and any contact, by word, look, or motion with a man, but she was never given an opportunity to practice menstrual seclusion. She was taught a European-based system of sexual morality at government school, but the system had little hold on her. In Rita’s own society men and women were neither moral nor immoral sexually,
“just natural”. Stealing or lying was wicked, sexual relations were not.
Rita made an honest attempt to follow the mission principles taught her at government school, and to live, legally-married, with the White husband who stripped her of everything she owned. When her efforts to please him with land and money failed, she returned to the old Sauk ways, and set up a household with her half-Indian, childhood lover, and her half-Indian son. The man she had chosen came and went as the whim struck him. Rita and her son remained the family nucleus with her mother’s sister also coming and going within the family.
With her rejection of other parts of White culture, Rita included Christianity. She turned her back on missionary teachings. She was inducted into the Grand Medicine Society by the man she had adopted to replace her deeply-loved uncle.
From childhood Rita had occasional visions, many of which she did not recount until this book was in preparation. That Rita sincerely and whole-heartedly believed her visions cannot be doubted. With each vision she told the songs and prayers that came to her with it, for to Rita dreaming, singing, and praying were one and the same thing. Never before, to this writer’s knowledge, has the complete vision-sequence of any Sauk been recorded.
How long the Sauk have been familiar with the Medewi-win (the Chippewa name of the body Rita described as the Grand Medicine Society) is impossible to know, and it is equally impossible to know what the “Old Religion” was like that preceded it. The principal distinction seems to be the secrecy of the Medicine Society; the series of degrees through which its initiates pass; and the fact that it emphasized healing.
The last Medicine Society ceremony among the Oklahoma Sauk was held, probably, in 1942. Most of the members of the Society are dead; most of their paraphernalia is scattered among museums outside Oklahoma. Only because knowledge of the Grand Medicine Society is almost lost and forgotten, was Rita willing to discuss its philosophy with someone who is not a member of the Society. She discussed philosophy, more than ritual, because to her philosophy was more important.
The “Old Religion” survives in certain ceremonies: the Spring Squaw Dance, the early summer First Fruits ceremony, and the Ghost Feasts which are held to feed the dead. Traditionally, children have been named in “Old Religion” ceremonies, but today the clan name maybe conferred just as frequently in a peyote ceremony.
Whatever ritual the Sauk perform must be accompanied by a feast. Their preoccupation with food is as real and as deep as their preoccupation with death. The high rate of diabetes, duodenal ulcers, and stomach cancer among modern Sauk may be a reflection of the feasting habit.
So, in this book, when Rita, her aunt, and her man wanted to hold a ceremony to celebrate her son’s return from war, all they could agree on was that it must be a feast. Traditionally, the Sauk welcomed and honored their returning warriors, but how? With remembered bits and pieces of ceremonies they had observed in their childhood, and the inevitable feast, they patched together a ceremony, and Rita cried and “felt pitiful” when her son could only eat a little food because of lingering health problems from the deprivations of the Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.
This was creative tradition. A similar ceremony now is held each August at the Sauk powwow, “to honor the veterans”. From a primarily social gathering, the Sauk powwow has become a pseudo-religious event in which tribute to tribal heroes is the most important part.
Let it be repeated: This is Rita’s book. It is told as she told it, dwelling more on the crisis situations of her life than on humdrum events and details of everyday events. If sometimes the investigator felt that she was listening to an unfolding soap opera, she could find verification for each of Rita’s experiences in State and National Archives, where the “Agency” papers are still preserved, and where the life of any Sauk since the removal to Oklahoma can be traced.
Rita wanted to tell her story. She wanted to tell her grandchildren what she had suffered “from not ever knowing who she really belonged to,” and how fortunate they were to have a closely united father and mother. She wanted a record made of beliefs and ceremonies that were being forgotten, so her grandchildren would know “the right way to do things.”
Above all Rita wanted her songs to be remembered. As she sang each one into the tape recorder, she translated it from Sauk to English. Sometimes she made three or four translations of the same song until she was satisfied with the exact wording and shades of meaning. Like most Sauk, Rita is extremely sensitive and responsive to language. The philosophy and belief, as well as the sorrow of her life were expressed in her songs. Each song must be precisely expressed and recorded before Rita could say “let it go.” Another saying is. “It must be true.”
While this is the story of a woman, it is also the story of her people. Rita saw Sauk life as she lived it, and so it was that she described the world. “They were hard days,” she said once. “Children are lucky today. They can stay at home and still go to school. They know who their people are. But those children won’t know how lucky they are unless they know what their people went through before them.”
This is Rita’s telling of what she went through.

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