Celebrating
the holidays with family on the reservation is a tradition that’s
familiar to most Native Americans living in the Twin Cities. For
Lorna Her Many Horses, known to most as Emmy, it’s an opportunity to
give back to the children and elders of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe.
It
started as a personal summer cleaning project that quickly progressed
into a relief mission for her home reservation. For the
second-poorest reservation in the country with an unemployment rate
as high as 85 percent, every day items like clothing can be a
struggle for some to provide for children and elders, particularly in
the more remote communities.
“Any
time I have gone back, I’ve taken things that were mine that I didn’t
want anymore to the the Spotted Tail Family Center. This summer, I
had a lot of friends who were just getting rid of stuff. In August, I
just put something on Facebook, asking if people had items to go to
the children’s home. At first I thought, no one’s going to give me
anything and I was going to be embarrassed. But the more people who
saw it, the more people contacted me about donating, I was
overwhelmed.”
Social
media wasn’t Her Many Horse’s only means of receiving donations. “I
was in the American Indian Center one day and a woman was taking her
son’s stuff to Goodwill, but she said she wanted to take it somewhere
where it was needed. I thought she was going to give me a grocery bag
full of stuff, thinking that anything helps, but she had two or three
giant trash bags of pre-teen boys’ clothing. And as things came in, I
thought, there was a lot of stuff here.”
After
that point, donations began pouring in from friends around the Twin
Cities. “After first carload, people said ‘I have stuff I want to
give you.’ From there, it became people bringing me carloads or truck
beds full of stuff.”
At that
point, Her Many Horses began deliveries to Rosebud. “I took a
carload of stuff back with me. My trunk barely closed, I couldn’t see
out the back window and passenger seat was filled. From there, I just
kept getting stuff from people. Primarily it was just people I was
Facebook friends with and as someone from home would come up here,
they would take a carload of stuff back.”
Soon,
she enlisted the help of her family and trying very hard to avoid
traffic violations. “My mom came in October and she started packing
stuff around my brother, surrounding him on all sides. There was
there was just enough visibility that she could check her blind spot
and passenger window.” Over the Thanksgiving holiday, Her Many
Horse’s high school choir teacher, Pauline Lanz, made a delivery as
well.
It
culminated in a Christmas holiday run, 400 miles one-way, complete
with a U-Haul trailer attached to a hitch on her 1998 Ford Taurus –
a family heirloom that was passed down from her grandmother to her
older brothers and to herself. Her adventure included a mismatched
trailer that was so heavy, it lifted her car’s front axle off the
ground by six inches.
Undaunted,
she made the decision to carry out her goal of helping. “Rather
than it being just one or two of those trips, I had to decide if I
was going to stop taking donations or renting a trailer. I think that
ultimately, after talking to various programs, there was still a very
strong need.”
The need
is what drives Her Many Horses to collect household and clothing
items. “Because this is something I’m capable of doing, it’s
something I felt was my responsibility to do. Being so far away from
home, I feel like I’m not fulfilling some duty to where I’m from. I
think the tribe and programs and people on the rez have given me a
lot of opportunities and helped me out a lot, I owe them something.”
Logistics
will always be a challenge for the Rosebud Sioux Tribal citizen, but
she keeps to her convictions. “This is within my means, it takes a
lot of time or gas money, it takes over my living but it’s something
that I can do that helps, so how can I not do it?”
Her
deliveries to the Spotted Tail Family Center and the Sicangu Oyate
Tipi Homeless Shelter and the St. Francis and Parmelee Community
Elderly Housing Complexes are based on the greatest needs for her
reservation through her experience. “When I was growing up, we
always took stuff to different places. My mom had friends who would
mail us boxes of clothes. From what we could tell, Parmelee and St.
Francis were some of the most-neglected communities. A lot of times,
when organizations come to the reservation, Rosebud and Mission are
the main communities that receive help as well as the communities
close to those two. St. Francis and Parmelee haven’t seen much of
those things, it’s still relatively close to Rosebud, from what we’ve
observed. There are farther out communities, but it’s harder for us
to get out there.”
Her Many
Horses readily thanks her friends in the Twin Cities who’ve helped
her in this cause. “My friend Adrienne Zimiga is from the Pine
Ridge reservation and Mark Adotossaway is from a Canadian reserve, so
they both know how great the need is for something like this. My
friend Cortez January is also just a really great helper. Mark also
helped figure out how to tow the trailer, getting the hitch on, doing
what was safe for my car so everything could get back while also
making sure that whoever was in the car was safe as the trailer was
being towed.”
Her Many
Horses also provides an channel for those who may not know where to
start with donations. “I think another part of it is that a lot of
people don’t know how to make an impact in different communities, so
when I put this out there, people wanted to help because someone was
saying, ‘this is a way you could help.’ I wasn’t asking for money, if
they wanted to donate money, I used it to buy canned goods for the
family center.”
For the
Augsburg grad student, working on her master’s degree in special
education and who plans on working with children, her cause is a very
personal one. “I look for what people don’t need or want anymore;
some may not know where those things can go, they want it to go
somewhere it’s really needed. There are families that can’t afford
cups for a kitchen or a coat for a child who is in not the best
situation who no longer has a coat,” she said.
“And
so when I put it out there to say you can donate these things, I’ll
do all the work, I’ll take it to where it’s needed, people didn’t
have to worry. They knew it was going to a place with very little
other resources, it made people feel like they were doing something
meaningful.”
In the
case of children, Her Many Horses expanded on the harsh realities of
life for some on her reservation. “There are some children who have
no ability to go out an find those thing, they may come from abusive
homes where they’re removed and they get to take nothing with them.
They’ve lost everything, they don’t have any of their toys, clothes –
they may get to take their shoes – they don’t have anything that
may have been a part of their life.”
For the
time being, she is still taking donations, but trying to slow down
until she can reclaim her living room and deliver the donations on a
regular basis. Her Many Horses can be contacted at
lorna.hermanyhorses-at-gmail.com.