Billee Willson grew up on a Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation between two rivers — a place that drew her back, time after time, a place she refused to completely leave behind.

By the time Stella Vaughn was five years old, she had three identities. It took a few more years to discover that Cherokee, Choctaw and African American was a good thing to be.

Ramona Almodovar had been told so many times in so many ways she wasn’t acceptable, that by the time she was a teen-ager, she believed it.

These three women were among representatives of Cherokee, Choctaw, Pueblo, Apache, Huastec, Yurok, and Miwok tribal nations who accepted an invitation to come together in late January for an unprecedented meeting with Auxiliary Bishop Richard J. Garcia.

The meeting was part of the diocese’s effort to initiate an ongoing relationship with representatives of the Native American community to better understand their life and culture, learn their gifts and address their spiritual needs.

“We feel there are a lot of Native American Catholics who we haven’t reached out to in the past,” Bishop Garcia said. “We wanted to do so now.”

These are some of the stories told by the eight women who attended that diocesan meeting — stories of human rights often ignored or trampled, a hunger for the cultural traditions of their ancestors, and a spiritual bond with the Catholic faith.

* * *

Wind blew right through the tiny 100-year-old wood-frame house where Billee Willson grew up, on a ridge of land where the Klamath and Trinity Rivers meet. The home was on the Hoopa Valley Indian Reservation that had been home for her grandmother and Yurok tribes for generations.

Life on the 12-square-mile reservation was a bittersweet adventure for Willson, whose parents left her as a young child to be raised by a grandmother so her father could search for work as a lumberjack. She remembers her grandmother rocking her to sleep humming the language of her ancestors, telling stories of how the Yurok hid in the mountains when government troops relocated Native American tribes onto the Hoopa reservation in the mid-1800s.

“Since the government couldn’t put (the Yurok) on a reservation, the reservation was put around them,” Willson said.

Willson lived on the reservation until she left to attend college at the University of California at Davis at age 17. During what Willson calls her rebellious time, she experienced “a massive culture shock.”

“I was looking to fit into this dominant culture where everything I did wasn’t the appropriate,” she said. “I only knew how to do things the way we did on the reservation.”

Her lifeline consisted of two Indian friends, one whose family was involved in performing native ceremonial dances which she began attending, and the other who introduced her to cultural events at the Sacramento Indian Center.

After two years of college, Willson returned home to the reservation to help her grandmother, who was in failing health, and to care for her three brothers following the death of her mother.

Then when Willson married and became a military wife, she packed up her three brothers and moved to Georgia where she started a family of her own. It was a life that would break her marriage.

“I wanted my kids to know where they came from, where the two rivers come together,” she said.

After living for a few years on the reservation, Willson moved in the early 1980s to Sacramento and went to work as a child care coordinator for Sacramento County’s Department of Human Assistance. She became active in the department’s Native American Caucus, a cultural advisory group which broadened her knowledge of civil rights abuses against Native Americans.

“We’ve lived in the trauma of having our homelands invaded, having everything we value eliminated,” Willson said. “To go from living in a tribal community to living in this individualistic society, we learn it’s about me performing, not about us performing.” While her roots are in a Pentecostal religion, Willson said her faith is built on a belief that there is one God, whether God is called the Great Spirit or the Holy Trinity.

A few years ago she found her way to St. Patrick Church, located near her current home in Grass Valley. She remembers the impact of the words of Father Simon Twomey, who was then pastor, as he delivered the homily.

“I thought this man is filled with the Holy Spirit and the tears flowed,” Willson said. “I thought, how can the creator of all things care about me?”

She sees in the diverse cultural traditions that share the Catholic faith a seamless garment that can be worn by everyone.

“We want to keep our traditions and we want our children to enjoy what little tradition we’ve managed to hang on to, but we don’t want to give up Jesus either,” Willson said.

* * *

For Stella Vaughn, affirmation in life was provided by a Catholic father who read the Scriptures every day to his children, and a mother who told stories passed on from Cherokee ancestors were about the Great Spirit that lived in all God’s creatures.

Vaughn was raised on a small farm in northeastern Oklahoma near Mingo. Her father, whose ancestors were African American and Choctaw, worked in the coal mines to support his wife and four children.

When Vaughn and her siblings were of school age, since their neighbors were primarily black, her parents tried to enroll their children in the segregated school for African American students.

“The teacher couldn’t accept us because she said we looked like white children and we were told to go to the white school,” Vaughn said, “but the white school wouldn’t accept us because they said we were Indian.”

Her parents were instructed to send their children to an Indian school that was 32 miles from home.

Fortunately one of Vaughn’s relatives protested the decision with the school board in Tulsa so the children could attend the (black) school that was a mere three-mile walk from home.

Prejudice was still the name of the game for Vaughn at the public high school she later attended in Tulsa.

“I lived three nationalities,” she said. “Where I lived was what I was.”

It wasn’t until several years later when Vaughn was married and entered a nurses training program at St. John’s Hospital in Tulsa staffed by the Sisters of the Sorrowful Mother that she felt accepted for who she was. It would be a major turning point in her life.

“I admired the sisters so much because they were so caring, so humble,” said Vaughn, who remembers one nun who took her under her wing and encouraged her to attend a retreat. Shortly after that Vaughn and her husband began taking instruction in the Catholic faith.

“I always knew what the sign of the cross was because I saw it made by my father,” she said. “I knew the words (of the faith) but didn’t know the religion. Listening to the priest and reading the Scriptures made it all come together.”

When Vaughn moved with her husband and three children to Sacramento in 1967, she found her way to Our Lady of Lourdes Church.

“I’ve always been treated with great respect at our church,” said Vaughn, who credits the parish with helping her find her first nursing job at a Sacramento County hospital.

For the past 20 years, Vaughn as been on a mission of her own to trace family roots as a Black Indigenous Native American. She attends powwows and other Native American cultural events and takes along her daughter, Stella Robbins, who attended the diocesan meeting with her mother.

“The main thing I want for my children is that they’re accepted for who they are,” she said.

* * *

Born and raised in Sacramento, as a child Ramona Almodovar only heard bits and pieces about her maternal grandparents, Sacramento Valley Miwok who lived on a rancheria near Auburn.

“My mom was not proud of being Indian, she was ashamed,” she said. “Being Native American in this culture was not particularly a welcoming experience.”

It was pointed out to her more than once that Indians were those people you saw on the street corner with a bottle of wine.

As a teen-ager, Almodovar discovered a way to deal with hurt was to become totally numb and alcohol helped with that.

“I had no spiritual life at all,” she said. “I was isolated and empty.”

Her substance abuse escalated to the point where it took a DUI charge and a 90-day placement in a recovery center to turn things around.

Almodovar began attending bible classes at the recovery center where she started “learning about God.”

“I knew there was a higher power but wasn’t sure where it could be found,” she said.

The answer came in the form of a counselor at the recovery center who was also a member of Immaculate Conception Parish in Sacramento. The two began going together to parish bible study classes, Mass, prayer and charismatic group meetings.

It was at Immaculate Conception that Almodovar met Deacon Gerry Pauly, parish steward.

“Everyone is put in our life for a reason. We’re all linked, and Gerry Pauly is one of my links,” said Almodovar, who has traveled to charismatic conferences with Deacon Pauly.

Over the past year she has also started attending Indian cultural events and has discovered in Indian bear dances a spiritual link with the Catholic faith.

“Putting bears to sleep signifies healing, like healing Masses. I felt the Holy Spirit at both,” she said.

It is the same healing that takes place at the purifying sweats Native Americans have held for centuries to symbolize the cycle of creation, death and rebirth.

“No matter who we are, we have one creator and we are all one in church,” Almodovar said.

* * *

Carol Britto had dreamed for years of the time when the Catholic Church would be a more visible spiritual partner in the lives of Native American Catholics.

She was among the first to sign up for Bishop Garcia’s Jan. 29 meeting with Native Americans at the Diocesan Pastoral Center.

For most of her adult life, Britto, who is a member of the Cathedral of the Blessed Sacrament and a Secular Order Discalced Carmelite, has worked as an advocate for the Native American community. As a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, she worked as a counselor in the university’s educational opportunity program with Latinos and Native American students.

She has taught ethnic studies at California State University, Sacramento and most recently worked as a counselor at Sacramento County Adult Protective Services, where she is a member of the Native American Caucus.

It is her educated opinion that there is no mystery behind statistics that show high mortality, suicide and drug abuse among Native Americans.

“Society continues to treat them as marginal people and has not done much to help them survive physically, mentally or spiritually,” said Britto, who added that the church must “share that wound.”

While her maternal grandparents were Huastec, a tribe of Indians indigenous to areas of Mexico, Britto feels a close bond with Native Americans, “the beauty of their spirit” and “the kinship of sharing one creator.”

“We really need a healing, a forgiveness, a thanksgiving and hope for the future,” said Britto, who endorses two recommendations to come out of the meeting. The first suggestion was to explore ways to incorporate some Native American tradition, art and music into the celebration of the Mass. The second was to plan a diocesan seminar to teach the Catholic community about the richness of Native American culture and spirituality.

“We need to be able to communicate on the same level,” Britto said. “We can’t evangelize if we don’t understand.”

* * *

Paulette Marshall has spent a lifetime of living and teaching the American Indian experience.

Marshall has worked as coordinator of the American Indian Education Program for the Sacramento City Unified School District for more than 25 years.

In that time, she has worked with thousands of junior and high school students representing 160 Indian tribes. Marshall has become immersed in their cultural traditions and spirituality and taken part in Native American dances, ceremonies and prayer rituals.

Her own maternal grandparents were Jicarilla Apache and Taos Pueblo who lived in northern New Mexico.

The family relocated to Denver, Colo., in the 1930s, the urban environment where Marshall grew up and was raised in the Catholic faith. But while she was attending a Catholic high school she had an experience that pushed her away from her faith for a time. A priest who was teaching a religious education class engaged her in a negative discussion that forced her to defend her faith.

“Finally I said, Father, this is who I am and if you start messing with it anymore, I’m not going to believe anymore,” she said.

The flip side of that experience occurred several years later when Marshall went to a powwow in Oklahoma. There she saw a “white man” dancing with the Indian dancers and upon asking who he was discovered the man was a priest.

“I was told he was a medicine man,” said Marshall, who remembers the event as being a kind of epiphany.

“I thought sure, a priest is a medicine man, taking care of spiritual needs,” she said. “The world needs more priests who are medicine men, healing the spiritual make-up of native people.”

It is one of the reasons Marshall hopes there will be more meetings and that the Catholic community will come together to gain a deeper understanding of Native Americans as individuals and as a people.

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