American Indian Culture and Research Journal

It was 1951 when my wife Bobbie and I moved to San Francisco with three hundred dollars in savings and all of our possessions in three suitcases. We rented a tiny apartment and set up housekeeping on the forty-eight dollars per week that I earned after taxes. I endured the mindless racism of being called “chief” and “blanket-assed Indian” on the job, but a year later, at the age of twenty-one, I had passed the state test to become a licensed termite inspector. A decade later, I was vice president and general manager of a major East Bay termite exterminating firm. Those early years in the Bay Area were a period of financial struggle and hard work, but I was on my way to becoming financially successful. In fact, by the late 1960s, I owned my own business, the First American Termite Company; employed fifteen people; lived in a comfortable, suburban house with Bobbie and our three children; and even drove a Cadillac. Nothing would have been easier than assimilating into middle-class America. Not only was assimilation tempting, but it was encouraged in a society that preferred its Indians to be caricatures. There was no easy path “back to the blanket,” as it was termed, but, for my young family, there was reason—and need—to explore my heritage, and theirs. We took trips to the reservation at Red Lake or to Bobbie’s family home on the reservation in Nevada, but these trips were touring excursions among relics of something that was no longer a real and daily part of our lives. Perhaps we would have lost even that much of our past had the times not brought it back to us.