The San Francisco Examiner from San Francisco, California • 239

she and her sisters lived with her grandparents. The strict older couple never liked her father, never wanted her mother to marry him. But Sacheen looked Indian like her father even with the perm, even trying so hard to please her grandparents, to look and to be as white as they wanted her to be. "When they were angry they'd say 'You may look like him but you don't want to be like him. He's a worthless And I was always afraid of my father.

He'd hurt me, so in many ways I bought into it." Sacheen's parents were attacked several times walking down the street hand-in-hand in California and Arizona. She remembers stopping at a restaurant once and her mother, sisters and grandparents going inside, everyone except her father. "He sat in the car alone. I remember feeling very funny about it. My mother brought him a sandwich, sort of the way you would the family dog." In high school, her grandparents allowed Sacheen to date only white boys, so there were no dates.

Once a white girl refused to play with her younger sister because she was Indian. "It made what my grandparents were trying to do to us a lie. But it just made them more determined to make us Anglo." She remembers being deeply depressed as a child, keeping everything inside, suffering migraine headaches so severe she had to stay in bed. She tried to kill herself the first time when she was 9 years old by throwing herself in front of a car, but someone pulled her back at the last minute. Her father died of cancer soon after she graduated from high school.

Her mother seemed to turn on her, blaming her, accusing her of not loving him enough. She felt ugly, unwanted, unloved. She was seeing a school psychologist who visited her family and asked them to lay off. Her family was furious, told her never again to tell anyone outside about her troubles at home. She began to fall apart.

The last straw was when she was 19 and her grandparents paid for her and her two sisters to have nose jobs. "It didn't do it. It didn't Anglicize me. God, did it hurt." She tried to kill herself, mutilate herself, ended up in the hospital with a nervous breakdown. She was catatonic, didn't eat, didn't talk.

"I didn't appear to have any feelings, but I had the worst migraine headache of my life." The suicide attempt touched something in her grandmother and her mother. They started talking to her. They apologized. "There was this realization that all of my life I was put down for who I was and if at that point I wanted to explore being an Indian they would allow me to do this with pride. "For more than 40 years I never really worked on this issue of being raised by white people.

I think I couldn't because it hurts so much. I'm only doing it now because there are other children out there being raised by white people, and I know they are being hurt the way I was hurting, but I was silent and said nothing." with Aunt Alice. Betty believes she was never taken because their home near Bethel was so isolated. It was an Indian-style adoption a familial arrangement frowned on by white authorities and Aunt Alice never tried to formalize it because she was afraid she would lose the children. Betty's mother recovered briefly, had a baby boy named Tony and ended up in another TB hospital.

Tony was placed in an orphanage outside Anchorage where white people shopped for babies. Betty often wondered about him. Was he healthy? Happy? Did he go to Vietnam? Did he survive? She didn't find him again until he was 36 years old. But Betty prefers to discuss the situation in more general terms. She cites the statistics: Indian children in some states are 10 times as likely as non-Indians to be placed outside their homes.

Nationally they are six times as likely and in California two-and-a-half times as likely to be taken. "It's a universal experience for us so painful we don't talk about it." It's so painful, Sacheen Littlefeather agrees to talk only because she doesn't want it to happen to anyone else ever again. With the talk come violent tears, screaming anger, a hurt so deep and obvious it's nearly unbearable to witness. The former Indian activist, now a nutrition counselor who specializes in traditional healing, became famous in 1973 when she turned down an Academy Award on behalf of Marlon Brando. She's been interviewed countless times, but never about this.

The first day, while photographer Fran Ortiz shoots pictures, she talks around it, afraid if she tells the story she'll cry and her eyes will swell up and she'll ruin the shoot. A day and a half later, she calls in tears. She's been crying off and on for 36 hours, thinking about what she hasn't ever really talked about. She wants to get it over with. "I was a child, an innocent child.

It wasn't my fault. You meant well. You always meant so well. But you, the dominant society, were hurt by seeing the examples of racism and repeating them. In oppressing others you want everyone to be exactly like you.

You are the ones who need to change, and I won't own your sickness. It isn't mine." As with Stella, who lost her braids at the white boarding school, and Tom, who had his hair cut every week at the French Canadian foster home, the first thing Sacheen Cruz lost when she went to live with her white maternal grandparents was her knee-length black hair. "My grandmother gave me a perm. She wanted me to be white. I cried and cried because she wouldn't let me have my braids." Sacheen's father, an Apache A' aqui who grew up in an alcoholic, abusive family and a series of non-Indian foster homes, beat her so severely when she was a baby that she has developed glaucoma and cataracts thatjcently required painful eye surgery.

Sacheen's parents lived next door fo He house where Joan Smilh is an Examiner staff writer. Sunday, July 3, 1 988 I A 1 1.