They wanted to exterminate us, but they couldn't do that, so then they wanted to send us to
school and turn us into a white, and that's true stories.
When they took them to Indian schools, they made them cut their hair, if they talked their
own language, they washed their mouth out with soap.
Indians have always been very segregated.
They lived on tribally held lands or on reservations.
In 1940, only 8% lived in the cities, and most of what people knew about Indians was
from what they saw on TV.
Yes, they fought savagely, but they were a primitive people, and self-preservation is
a primitive instinct.
I was here per capita as far as different races, and then people volunteered more for
every war.
Which again is ironic because it was the whole effort of the federal government to make the
Indians who were the warriors of the plains and the warriors of the woodlands to be farmers,
so beating their spears and the plowshares, so to speak, and then turning around during
the Spanish-American War or World War I or World War II, expecting them to put aside
their plows and serve the United States in the time of war.
The need for workers was so great, they had used up about the whole supply of everything
in Kansas and surrounding territory.
Need went out to try to get the American Indian involved in it.
BIA schools of all places had training for students to somehow end up building airplanes.
We learned things such as painting of the plains, making of the parts, electrical work,
those kinds of things that were part of the overall process, and qualified, they were
able to get jobs.
So that was the influx of Indians from the number of tribes coming to Wichita at that
time.
We got a new house, my goodness, couldn't believe it, running water, inside bathroom.
There for everybody was it just us, everybody came into the new house and everybody come
from surrounding states, I'm sure, you know, poor poverty, probably situations, it was
a new town.
The Indians who came up here from Oklahoma were part of a group that migrated here, they
usually did it through a context from the family.
And then you start seeing the civil rights, they wanted the same things, they wanted that
white picket fence.
That's what they were fighting for, education, health care, to be able to live that life,
liberty, and pursuit of happiness.
We've survived, we're still here.
