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AI: So, now then, you were, in the meantime, you're continuing here in Kansas, establishing yourself and getting to know the local area.

RS: Uh-huh.

AI: And as you had mentioned earlier, you were buying furniture, going to auctions, and experiencing reactions from the local townspeople.

RS: Right. As I was saying earlier, there were a lot of incidents that I became rather sensitive to. I remember one that happened right after we got there at a department store called Weavers, and it was Bea's birthday. And at the time, maxi coats were stylish. And I went to Weavers department store and found a maxi coat. And I said, I told the people there that I wanted to buy it on credit. And they said, the woman at the counter said, "Well, we don't give credit to Indians." And I said, "Well, I'm not an Indian, first of all." And she said, "Well, I doubt that," she said, "you look Indian to me." And I asked to see the manager, and so they sent me upstairs and I saw the manager. And he says, "Can I help you?" And I said, "Yes. I want to open up a charge account here." And he said the same thing: "We don't give credit to Indians." And I said, "Well, I'm not an Indian." He said, "Can you prove you're not an Indian?" And as I'm reaching for wallet to pull out my ID, I says, "Why am I trying to prove to this person that I'm not something?" And do I really want to buy this coat from -- you know, and I just excused myself and left the coat there and walked out. But that was one of the first sort of strange incidents. And I found that frequently I was being mistaken for being Indian, because, in addition to the University of Kansas, Haskell, it was called Haskell Institute at the time, or Haskell Indian Junior College, is located in Lawrence. And it's a, it's a free, if you're Native American, junior college experience, which has since changed to a four-year university, and it's now called Haskell Indian Nations University. But at the time, that was my association, was I must be Native, because I wasn't white.

And I would go and... I remember one time I went to Woolworth's, I think it was, and they had all these Halloween masks that I thought were really neat. And I bought one of every kind just to have. It's that collecting thing. And I got to the counter and they charged it to Haskell without even asking me. And they punched it all up and they gave me a -- and I knew I didn't have a credit card. I looked at him and, "What are you doing?" And they says, "Well, we're charging it to Haskell." So things like that, and there were a lot of things like that, that came up that was all part of that kind of growing awareness of -- because this was really, other than Syracuse, it was the first time that I had been in an area that was predominantly white. Syracuse was like that, too, but there, there was more of an ethnic mix of other kinds of immigrant white people. Whereas the Midwest was very Anglo. And so all of that contributed to a growing awareness of my non-whiteness. Which leads into the auction.

<End Segment 47> - Copyright © 2003 Densho. All Rights Reserved.