Street Roots vendor Harold wants his profile to focus on two things: “that I’m Native American and my heritage.”
When Harold was 3 years old, he was part of an assimilation program that moved him and his adopted mother from their reservation in South Dakota to Los Angeles.
The program was part of the Indian Relocation Act of 1956, and the federal government wanted to encourage Native Americans to leave reservations, gain job skills and blend into the general population.
However, researchers found that away from the reservations, the relocated families had increased problems with alcohol, depression and family dysfunction that rippled through three generations.
His family eventually moved back to South Dakota.
“I’m from Sisseton-Wahpeton. The reservation is called Lake Traverse,” Harold said. “(My tribe is) the Dakotas. We used to live all over. We even had people that were in Nebraska. We were a big tribe. That’s the way it was, way back then. Our ancestors had everything.”
Harold served two years in prison for drunken driving. After his adopted mother died, Harold decided to travel.
“I got to see every state when I was in my 30s,” Harold said. “Whatever state I was in, I’d do work for a while there and then I’d just leave. I know how to do street construction, roofing; I can even build houses, and I know landscaping. That’s when I was younger, you know.”
Once, Harold walked all the way from Texas to South Dakota. He found the wild areas in Oregon, New Jersey and North Carolina especially beautiful.
Now he divides his time between South Dakota and Oregon. When in Portland, Harold sells Street Roots newspapers near Salt & Straw at Northwest 23rd Avenue and Kearney Street.
“It’s beautiful country up this way. But right now, what I’ve seen in the paper, it doesn’t look good with that fire,” Harold said about the Eagle Creek fire in the Columbia River Gorge.
Harold mused: “It will grow back. My people, what we call Earth, she’s our mother, and she’ll provide. She’ll put everything back again what the fire destroyed."
“I’m used to the smoke because I’ve been in a lot of sweat lodges. I’ve done them when I was in prison. We built our own fires where we put our rocks with a tarp over it. We got to practice our own religion.”
Now Harold is clean and sober, and his son tells him that he has 18 grandchildren.
“They always say in the history books that they tried to exterminate the Indian people,” Harold said. “But we’re going to be here. We were the first ones here, and we will always be here. Our generations are just going to keep going.”