Girls confide in ‘Grandma’

By Jodi Rave, Lee Enterprises | Monday, September 25, 2006

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FLANDREAU — It can take months before some of the boarding-school girls trust Leona Kitto enough to tell their stories of abuse.

She won’t reveal details or names. But she cries when she thinks of their stories and how they mirror her own.

She holds the girls, and she tells them: “That feeling will never go away. But we still got to heal, and we got to go on.”

Leona wiped tears from her eyes as she sat in the Wholeness Center, a domestic-violence and sexual- assault shelter in Flandreau.

“I went through that in my younger days,” she said. “It’s a hard feeling. I’ll cry every time. But that crying kind of heals me. I learned to think that way. We have to let the hurt feelings out.”

Most of the students at the Flandreau Indian School call this 66-year-old woman Grandma. They have come to know the dorm assistant who covers the 3 p.m.-to-midnight shift.

Leona isn’t a counselor, but in the evening hours, it’s just her and the girls, alone with their feelings.

Leona understands their stories of sexual and physical violence at home. She was beaten by her mother and sexually abused by male relatives.

And even though her mother hurt her, Leona embraced the opportunity to establish a relationship with her before she died.

And now, she misses her.

But she could do without memories of living in an old car tucked away in the woods. Or of the times when social-service workers took Leona and her brothers and sisters away.

She lived at relatives’ homes, where they told her to be good, or they would send her back to the “papoose house,” an orphanage on South Dakota’s Sisseton-Wahpeton Lake Traverse Reservation.

As a young woman, her future seemed to be bright. She went to work at the boarding school and married. She had her first baby at 21.

Then, she settled into a life of domestic violence with her husband, whom she described as much older. He kept her confined to the house when she wasn’t working at the school.

“I used to sneak out the window with the kids,” she said. “And I learned to drive real fast.”

Each time, she would go home to the reservation. After a week or so, her husband would show up to return her to Flandreau.

“It built up on me,” she said. “So when he died, boy, I had something to do — go and get drunk.”

Those days were wild and boozy, and they lasted for 11 years. But it became a lifestyle that she and her boyfriend, Norman Kitto, could no longer sustain. She married the man, 30 years her junior, on Valentine’s Day 14 years ago. They have been sober since.

Both credit American Indian spirituality for changing their lives. It began unexpectedly: A brother-in-law asked Norman to loan him money. In exchange, he gave Norman a pipe bowl, an item to be filled with tobacco and used for prayers and ceremonies. After the man repaid Norman, he told him to keep the pipe bowl.

An uncle in Nebraska told him to come visit when Norman had a stem that fit the bowl. The elder said he would help bring the pipe to life.

“The night before we went back, we went out and drank,” Norman said. “Then, we got down there to Nebraska and went into a sweat. From that point on, we never drank.”

Norman and Leona now participate in Sun Dance and fasting ceremonies.

“I’m inspired by her,” said Paula Clary, the shelter director who sat with Leona at a dining room table in the Wholeness Shelter. “When you look at all the terrible things that can happen to a child, … Leona’s gone through a lot of it. Boarding schools. Sexual abuse. …”

Leona said: “Papoose house.”

Even now, Grandma still hurts. Her husband knows when the pain has settled like nails on a chalkboard. “Norman always says, ‘Do you have that hurt feeling?’”

“Yes.”

Let’s talk about it, he tells her.

“It’s a cruel world,” she said. “But you can survive in it as an Indian lady.”

But now, she’s more worried about the young Indian women she sees every day, the ones fearful about going home for the summer or the ones who will attempt to make it through the first year in college.

“It’s really pitiful what those girls are going through.”

Jodi Rave covers American Indian issues for Lee Enterprises. She can be reached at 1-800-366-7186 or at jodi.rave@lee.net.