"I was never a reservation Indian, I was one of the landless Shoshones. All my family, my mother, my dad, weren't reservation Indians, they were from the Hot Creek Valley, then they moved to the Smokey Valley. My dad worked mines and things there- light enough to get away with it, passed himself off as white or something, said that he was English. They wouldn't give Indians jobs. We got washed out, almost got drowned once. It was an old forest service barn we was sleeping in, and this here flash flood came down through, washed us out of there. There was this little cave, we stayed in it for a week or so. I showed the family the cave- it's still there. It really wasn't much of a cave, but it was a place to stay. We were cave people. Hahaha.

"I remember one time there was a big pow wow down there, the Great Smokey Valley. I remember I was having trouble breathing, I was down low and they was stirring up all that dust, you know. And most things, I don't hardly remember. Just that and I remember this elevator in this building in Tonapah, I walked up with my other.... And I remember being in a funeral parlor there, being in my dad's arms and seeing my mother in her casket. I lost my mother when I was about four, five years old. We were staying in Reno at that time, that was during Prohibition. They hauled all the liquor up to the dump, my dad helped on that. So anyway, we moved from there, moved to California, ended up in Bakersfield around 1931-32.

"I'm just getting my roots back now, coming back and learning our ways. I spent most of my life in California, working on farms, farmworker, worked in the fields, grapes, cotton, the last 22 years of my working life I worked for one man, 16 years I was his foreman. I spent most of my life in Bakersfield. I went into the military in Bakersfield, came out then went back into the Marine Corps. My brother got drafted, and a month later I went down and reenlisted, wanted to see if I could be with him, take care of him. It didn't work out that way, I passed him up going through boot camp. I went on overseas, sent on to Guam for jungle training, and instead of that we went in as replacements at Okinawa. Right after Iwo Jima. I spent 20 days there altogether, actually 28 days, because I went in there 28th of May 1945 and I got wounded the 18th of June, and the 26th of June I was off the island, when they secured the island. Got a piece of shrapnel about that long- it was the only souvenir I got. I think it was off of one of our naval ships. Didn't know how I would take it, getting wounded and all that stuff, but I managed all right. It wasn't that bad.

"That was the last fighting they did before they dropped those bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was in the hospital in Guam at the time they dropped the bomb, and heard about it just as soon as they dropped the first one, and then the second one. There was a lot of cheering going on, a lot of celebrating, but it wasn't much of a celebration, there was so much rain going on. I've always felt that they didn't need to drop those bombs, that it was more of a test. They didn't want the Soviets to declare on Japan, didn't want Japan to surrender to them, and so this is what that hurry-up was about.

"I came in on one of those hospital ships, it was one of those converted Liberty ships, made of wood, and boy, coming across, you could hear that thing creak and groan like it was coming apart. Anyway we made it there; I celebrated my 19th birthday on the ship. I stayed in San Francisco three days. We got out one night, walked downtown, man every time a car backfired, I was hitting the ground. I didn't recuperate too good, I guess, because I wasn't too good in the Veteran's Day parade. Couldn't keep up with them. ...they had to give me a medical discharge, got discharged December 13, 1945, my lucky day, 13.

"I went back to Bakersfield, stayed there, trying to work the fields, then I ran across her (his wife, who was sitting next to Bill as he talked). Her and her sister happened to be walking across the fields one night, asked her if she wanted to go to the movies, she didn't want to go to the movies, kept on talking to her, I don't know how I ever done that. Met her in April of '46, just a little bit before her birthday, her birthday's April 6. Then I went back and asked if I could see her again, and her car broke down and so we had to leave it down there, battery charging, and walked up there where she was supposed to live, and we talked, had a soda, down at one of them drugstore fountains, and by June 9th of '46 we were married. Didn't waste a lot of time. So our first child was born in '47, July 22 of 1947, that was Bill Jr. We had four boys, two girls, and then three more boys. It was a nice sized family to raise. At the time I was making maybe one thousand dollars a month, which wasn't a lot of money, but was pretty good to raise a family, feed 'em, clothe 'em. Farm work never did pay very much. that's one of the reasons I left, if I was white I would probably be getting two or three thousand dollars a month. I'm a good friend with him (his boss on the ranch) anyway.

"In 1973 I decided it was time to start for home, and moved here in 1974, gave my boss a year's notice. Trained one of the young Mexican guys to run the ranch. I was starting to learn my heritage again, finding out I got a lot of kinfolk, all over the country, mostly in Duckwater. Just about everyone over here is related to me in a way, cousins and such. I didn't realize I had so many kinfolks. Indian ways, you got a lot of kinfolks. My kids all followed us, except my daughter who still lives at the rancher's place. They kind of come back to the land and come back to the native ways a little bit. They're still learning, like me, how to be with the land and how to take care of Mother Earth and everything, and they're learning pretty good.

"I was adopted to this tribe, because I was never from this reservation or anything, I lived here for a year before I could get adopted to it, that was 1975, and then in 1981 I became tribal chairman. That was when I started in, I guess- fighting the MX missile deal, because one of my first duties was to go over to Duckwater. They was having a meeting, and one of them people was talking about the MX missile they was going to put in there. Anyway I got involved in it like that. I got to thinking, well it ain't going to be bothering us down here, but they was getting to putting it into Ione Valley and Smokey Valley, here, all these valleys that they was going to put this MX in, so we started to fighting it. We fought it until it came to a standstill.

"It's been a real struggle all the way through, and then the Soviets finally give up. All this time the United States saying, no you can't believe them, and you can believe all those other people better than you can believe the United States. They talk double talk all the time, they say one thing but they mean something else. You can start believing them when they start honoring all these treaties, maybe you can believe them then. But until that time, no. We'll fight them tooth and nail for everything that's there. Marine Corps taught me to pick the biggest opponent and fight that one, if you win that one, nobody else want to fight you. Who's bigger than the US government?

"Pauline (Esteves) and I went down to the Test Site in 1986. They (the Western Shoshone) weren't involved at all until I came back and said, we talk about owning all this land here, but not a thing have we done about the Test Site. They're testing on our land, they're bombing us. They made me chairman of the environmental protection committee. We got involved in that there testing and all, and people all over the world know about us now.

"I feel like the Creator been keeping me here for a purpose. Probably this is what that purpose is, what I'm doing now. Cause it seems like he's always seeing that I get to where I need to be. Then he puts the words in my mouth, I don't know what to say, the words are there, I can't write 'em down because I can't control 'em.

"It's interesting how he works. Because there's so many times I wasn't supposed to be here. In terms of my health, in terms of accidents and other things that happened to me. One of the first things that ever happened to me was that flash flood. I was about 4 years old and my brother and I got caught in it, another time when I was about 7 or 8, we played hooky from school and dug a hole in this sand hill bank. It collapsed on me. All that was sticking out was my legs from the knee down, and my brother finally dug me out of that. I was in a boating accident, was the only one that survived that, Santa Maria we went in at and San Luis Obispo I ended up at.

"It was about 1957, about September the 28th, 1957, we went out to go fishing. We went out there in the morning, out into Morro Bay. When we seen it get rough I threw a couple of life jackets back for the other guys and got one for myself, and we was hanging onto the keel, every time a wave came it knocked us off, two or three hours. I floated into shore. Good thing the tide was going in. There was a couple of times I almost got shot. When I got wounded, it was an overhead burst, a naval shell, bust overhead at treetop level, shrapnel rained down on me, I was running bent over, how it hit me here and not in my head I'll never "know.

"It seemed like it was his work that I survived all that."

Info about Spring Mother's Day Gathering, May 7-10, 1999 at http://www.shundahai.org/HGW/

Healing Global Wounds: PO Box 420, Tecopa CA 92389-0420 USA Phone 760-852-4175 Fax 760-852-4151 email: hgw@scruznet.com Coordinator: Jennifer Olaranna Viereck

HGW is a multi-cultural alliance of organizations and individuals seeking restoration of respectful sustainable living with the Earth. We coordinate a Spring and Fall Gathering at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site. Events combine education on issues, community and skills building, daily spiritual ceremony and taking personal nonviolent action to break every link in the nuclear chain.