Far up north in the coldest regions of Indian Country, winds blow steadily like a haunting song. So lonely can that Alaskan wind chant be that some look for forgetfulness in bottles of alcohol and spend confused nights in the local jail trying to come back to themselves.

Still others are teaching the young ones how to be self-reliant by hiding recipe ingredients and holding a type of scavenger hunt. The kids will run around the gym or classroom searching for cleverly hidden things that they will use to bake or cook with.

I learned this quite by accident listening in on a conference call for Indian child care givers. Listening is a skill that I think I am only now sharpening. But since I have figured out how important it is, sometimes the most glittering gems surface when both ears (not just one) are attuned.

As I heard this story, I felt that old familiar clicking. To me, the click signaled that the order of things is busily at work even when we are seemingly unawares. As it was from the oldest of times, Indian elders (here I mean grandmothers) are making sure that the youth have a life line they can clutch onto even if folks get distracted from time to time.

I had the benefit of three grandmothers in my life. My maternal Wichita one, my paternal Anglo and my adopted Caddo-Delaware grandma who lived down the road when I was growing up in Caddo County; all three still have brain room in my mind. I didn’t have the same relationship with all of them and that seems quite natural as I look back on it. My Anglo grandma flutters at the edge of my childhood because she lived in another state.

My brown grandmothers were as different as day is from night. My Wichita grandmother had a feminized version of the school superintendent’s name at Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. I figure my great-grandmother was suitably impressed with the boarding school experience. That is another story.

Like other folks of that time, my grandma had an incomplete education having only attended school until eighth grade. She married a Pawnee man who worked cotton fields and would later become the pastor at a local Indian Baptist church. My strongest memories of her (she died when I was in junior high) were her love for a good, strong cup of coffee, unsurpassed skill at making skillet bread and reading her Bible.

Her strong beliefs imprinted on me. She was not very demonstrative but I attribute this to the historical trauma of having a mother raised in boarding school. On the other hand, my adopted Caddo and Delaware grandma oozed affection. She made dolls, Indian versions of those Cabbage Patch dolls that were in fashion back then. She’d outfit them with their traditional clothes and was meticulous down to the last detail. I never once heard her say my name calling me simply baby.

The seeming random grandmothering that I received helped shape how I view myself. Past is prologue. Whether on the Northern Plains, Texas border or Great Lakes, Indian grandmothers today help mold who the children will become. They do it with songs, hair combing and cooking. Or they tie shoe strings, rub runny noses on shirts and referee fights.  It’s all the same.

Right now, legions of Native grandmothers are raising or have raised grandchildren across Indian Country. Mainstream viewpoint attributes it to social ills wherein Indian parents are characterized as deficient. I recently heard a Comanche man explain that grandparents raising children hearkens back to the old times when the parents were busy trying to fashion a decent existence for everyone in the camp.

The fathers attended to that business of hunting while the moms were usually out gathering diet staples, tanning hides or planting crops. It was, in essence, the natural order in our former world.  So now, this same practice is ironically a way that Indian people rebuff the total cloak of assimilation. It doesn’t really matter what the parents are up to; a grandparent (adopted, appointed or kin) will raise.

Up in the Flathead Reservation, I found out (on the same teleconference) that they want to open tribal day care centers because they now contract out for that service. They see an Indian-run daycare as a conduit to culture and language. To me, it seems that their reach for culturally sensitive child rearing is a natural outgrowth for recreating their own upbringing. Probably shaped by a grandma.

Because that’s also what Indian grandparents do, they mirror the little ones’ Native self-concept. It may not be a prescribed or conscious effort but I know children follow whatever example set before them--good or bad.  Whenever self-esteem or self-sufficiency shines through, I am certain I hear whispering echoes of grandmothers (my own included) cheering us on.