Frank Merrill Oral History

[00:00:00] Elizabeth Uhlig:
This is an oral history with Frank Merrill. Today is December 15, 2004. I'm in Frank's office in the Multicultural Center at Lane Community College.

Frank, to start with, could you tell me where you were born and raised?

[00:00:19] Frank Merrill:
Yeah, I was born in Northern California on the Croup Indian Reservation in 1938. It was my own hunting trip, and so there was no hospitals, there was no stores and stuff there at that time. I got to grow up just like my ancestors living off the land, and I only spoke one language until I was about third grade. Then I started switching over to this new life I'm living today. In 1949, me and my family moved to Oregon, and I went to school at Triangle 8 until I joined the service in 1955. I turned 16 first, and then I went in and then they sent me back home, so I went back in when I turned 17 in 1955. I spent four years in the sub-service, and when I got out in 1959, I got married to my wife I was going with in junior high, and we've been married for 45 years.

[00:01:35] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is she also from the Croup?

[00:01:38] Frank Merrill:
No, she's from Triangle 8. Her parents, who was at Triangle 8, and I met her when I was going to school there.

[00:01:49] Elizabeth Uhlig:
In one of the news clippings I read, it said you were an enrolled member. What does that mean when it says you're an enrolled member?

[00:01:58] Frank Merrill:
Well, the federal government, a long time ago, they gave us all a roll number, every Indian in the United States, to keep track of us. Even up to today, we still have to carry that number with us to show that we belong to a tribe. I'm a full-blooded Karuk Indian, so that's why I come in as an enrolled member of the federal government, a Native American program.

I went to two different roll numbers. The first one was the federal ones, where they had federal area offices all over, and Sacramento was our office. In 1968, the federal government decided they were going to terminate all the tribes in the United States, so they started on the west coast. Almost every tribe in Oregon was terminated, not every tribe, but one in California was terminated, and that was the Hupa Indian Reservation. In the same way with Oregon, the Warrensburg Indian Reservation was the only one left. Until 1973 or 1975, we reapplied and got our Native Americans status back. Now we have a tribal roll number instead of a federal roll number. They turned everything back over to the tribes when we came back. From being a quarter where they used to allow us to be an Indian, we dropped our blood column down to an eight.

It really helped my family because now my grandkids and great-grandkids that have married non-Indian people could still get on the roll. That's what the roll number is all about.

[00:03:52] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Where did you grow up in? You said it was in Oregon, California?

[00:03:59] Frank Merrill:
Yeah, it was between Wairika and Eureka, right on the river, the Calamas River. It's about a hundred miles down, it's called a little place called Soames' Bar, or Happy Campus. It's a bigger, it's got a grocery store and something, but that's about what it was. We had a schoolhouse there. I started school when I was in the sixth grade because they forced everybody to go to school. I still didn't go to school until I was about half of the first year when it started to snow, then I went to school because I didn't want to change this language I was speaking of. I spoke my Indian language and every time I spoke English, it was just like choking me. Now, it's the opposite. I could speak English really well, and now my Indian words choke me when I speak it, so there's a difference.

The things that I can't figure out is that my mom was forced to go to the Indian boarding school a long time ago where they were whipped and beaten for speaking their language, and yet, she spoke her language up until she passed away, but when my mom was forced to me to speak the English language, they took it out of the household. We didn't speak it, Indian. We had to speak English, and gradually, by gradually, I got to learn how to speak this. I know when I was going to school at Trang Lake, my third grade, in them days, they used to have spelling bees, and I would never, ever get up in front of a crowd and speak. I'd miss the first word so I could sit down. It wasn't until I came out here to Lane in 1970, and the only reason I came back to school was that my GI Bill was coming due, and everybody says, well, go ahead and use it. I was working in the mill and logging all my life since I got out of the service,

and I didn't really want to go back to school, but anyway, I started back here at Lane in 1970. The school was just like two years old, and from that, that's where I started my education program. I came here, I talked to a few counselors, and I wanted to be an elementary math teacher because I was really good in math.

Over the first term, I went nights, because I just got on days from working 12 years in the mill. I finally got on day shift, and I didn't really want to go to days and go to school on days, but the second term, I started to get interested in school, so I had to switch all my classes over to days, and I took one more term of math, and then we started our first Native American Student Union on this campus, and there was like five Indian students that just hung out. We found each other on this campus, and we started hanging out together, and somebody says, oh, you guys could start a club, and so we started the first NASA on this campus.

[00:07:14] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What year was that?

[00:07:15] Frank Merrill:
1970. 1970, yeah. And so from that, I spent two years on this campus taking classes. I also become a counselor's aide, and now they're ambassadors, I think they call them, but back then it used to be the counselor's aide, and Patrick Fraley was my boss. He was one of the head counselor members at that time, and Jerry Sororit.

[00:07:44] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Sororit?

[00:07:46] Frank Merrill:
Yeah, he was my first teacher on this campus because me and him worked the front desk, and from that front desk, I learned everything on this campus. So then when I graduated from here, I went over to the University of Oregon and graduated in community service and public affairs,

and after I graduated from there, I went to work for the city, the state, and the feds, and I didn't like it. I was really disappointed in my degree because there was nothing I could change. Everything was locked in, programs. If you try to change something, you almost have to know somebody in the top end because nobody would change, because everything was run by federal programs at that time, and so I went quick, went back to the mill and logging, and I went to Portland State during the meantime, commuting back and forth from here. I get off at seven in the morning, catch the bus, ride to Portland, go take classes till four o'clock, come back home, and then work, swing shift. You said when you started, Lane, and you were interested in becoming a teacher,

[00:09:04] Elizabeth Uhlig:
how did you then make the switch into public affairs or community service?

[00:09:08] Frank Merrill:
It seemed like all my life, every place I ever went, I was always pushed out as a leader of something. Everybody followed me, and so I become the first Native American president out here for the club and started building on that, and so my ideas from math switched to helping people, and so that was probably my first helping job, and then, like I said, I got into the counselors' age where you started helping everybody, and that's what I started doing. I started working towards that way, and everything seemed to be pushing me into the community service type programs, because that's what I was good at. I always wanted to be a teacher, but teaching wasn't that important at that time because my whole life was shifting from education into the service area, but then when I got into the service area, after I graduated, I couldn't do what I wanted to do, so I went back to the mill until 1990,

and I had it totally replaced because I tore out all the ligaments in my right knee, and so they sent me back to Lane in 1992 for rehab, and I met Mason Davis in the cafeteria, and he says, hey Frank, because I knew him from being a counselor's aide, and this is like 15 years after I graduated, and he says, they're looking for Jack Shatwick a few years ago, and somebody's running to help with the Indians. Well, then I got hired through the counseling department, because I think Lee Prez was president, just coming on board, and she hired me to kind of keep track of the Indian students, so the first meeting I had, I had two Indian students show up, and I went from there down into the cafeteria and tried to get, look for Indian students, so I was grabbing Oriental, Latinos, anybody with brown skin, I'd go up and say, are you Indian? And from that we got like 10 Indians on the next meeting, and at that time Jocko, who passed away last year,

was our first president of my club. He was a veteran, and we just happened to sit at the table, and I asked him if he was Indian, and he said, yeah, and I said, well come on, you're going to a meeting, and I said, because I want to get this Indian club started, and from that it grew up to now where there's over two or three hundred going to school here. When you moved to this area back in 1949,

[00:12:00] Elizabeth Uhlig:
why did your family move here, and were there many Indians then in this area?

[00:12:07] Frank Merrill:
We was the only Indian family here. What happened was there was a non-Indian family that moved on our reservation in Oregon, and they came down there.

Back in the old days, we never seen the difference between color of people. Everybody was the same, it was people. And so they got hung up with my family, and one day, this guy says, hey, they're hiring loggers back in Eugene, Oregon, because his brother lived up here, and he was a logger, and they had some logging. Well, we went through the foreshores, CD camps, staying with him, and the kids were all our age, you know, about the same age as my family. And so we got really hung up with him. Well, my dad left, and he was gone for like six months or a year, and then one day he'd come home, we loaded everything up in the 39 Chevy pickup. It looked like the Beverly Hillbillies coming up to Eugene, all of my 14 brothers and sisters, and my grandparents were all in the back end, and we ended up in Triangle 8. About three o'clock in the morning, we never ever seen electricity, so everything was new to us.

Running water in the house, the bathrooms in the house, and even when my grandmother moved up here, she wouldn't even use the bathrooms in the house, we had to build an outhouse out in front yard of our house, and people was always talking about that Indian family, because we lived on wild game. I was about in the third grade, and all I did was hunt, because I had that many brothers and sisters, so once a week I had to kill a deer for that family. We didn't eat no kind of meat that you buy over the store, because we never knew. And then one day we went to Triangle 8, and they had a little restaurant there, and somebody bought us a hamburger, and that was like the first beef I ever tasted. And from that on, we got to utilize into the things on the outside world, but there for a long time, we was the biggest outlaws, we was, you know, you name it, my family and my brothers and sisters went to it when we went to school.

It was new, we did everything off the wall, but all we knew was how to survive, and almost every day of my life, the game wardens would be at my house early in the morning trying to catch us with the meat, but we made our freezers because we didn't have freezers on our reservations or electricity. We knew how to use a natural stream to make our coolers, and so we hung all our deer meat in the coolers, and they never even knew we had it, because we never used the refrigerators, we never even used electric stoves until later on in my life, I think it was 1955 when I joined the service, my family moved from triangulate to Eugene into the city, and so my brothers got to grow up more into the city life, and then when I came out of the service in 1959, me and my wife got married, and we moved here in Eugene, and one of the things about Indian families, they never separate too far, they stay within like a hundred mile radius,

and mostly within miles, just like right now, all my kids and grandkids and great-grandkids live between here and Eugene, we don't live in California, we didn't live in Washington, so we're not that type of people, we're an extended family, and so when I came back here to the lane, this is what I started, you know, I wanted to build a family situation down here at Lane, and I think things turned out really well towards that way because this whole college had been working towards that since the time I came here, and when I first came here, it was really bad because counselors couldn't even get along together, you know, we'd go to the staff meetings and there was like two sides on each side of the wall, and it was really hard, but Lee Phez was here, and I was just coming aboard, and we got talking about building a family, and next thing you know, you know, these people that was hating each other for,

who knows how long, they've been here at Lane, they've been here since I was here in the 70s, a lot of them that were still here, wasn't working together, but gradually, by gradually, everything seemed like they fell into place, my program grew because what I've seen from programs is that you have to have visibility. If you're not visible, nobody on this campus knows where you're at or who you are, and so we started doing fried bread. The day before Columbus Day, I would take a drum out and set it up because that was the last day of my freedom as an Indian person. After that ship landed, all the changes started taking effect, so on the 9th or 10th or whatever Columbus Day fell on, we always drummed the day before to celebrate, and I used to do that on this campus, and I picked up a lot of Indians, and then we started putting on the powwows, and our powwows become big, and it was supported by every Indian program

in this state and northwest, and so from that, you can know what my program has grown to. You said when you first were here as a student, there were just like five Indians, I think. Well, that's all we could find.

[00:18:08] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Yeah, but now, why has it grown to 200, 300?

[00:18:16] Frank Merrill:
I mean, is it more Indians coming into this area

[00:18:18] Elizabeth Uhlig:
or the program has attracted them?

[00:18:21] Frank Merrill:
Well, this program here at Lane's, in the last 14 years, has done everything you can imagine in any life. I have performed weddings, I have performed memorials here on this campus. I did two weddings in the cafeteria, I did two memorials, one out there outside and then one in the performing arts here on this campus, but it was a place to find everything that you needed in our Indian world. I had families come clear from Montana, had lost seven of the men within six months from alcohol, come over here to have a memorial done by a medicine person, and that's what I've become. I've become that healer of all situations, and so from that is why I want to have this long house, because whoever sits in this chair now, it's got a long ways to go, to cover all the bases that I have covered in 14 years, and they're going to continue to come here because they know Lane is the place you can get all the answers. From roll numbers,

I get roll number calls from Oklahoma, the biggest Indian country in the world, looking to find their ancestry. BIA has sent me forms here just to help them gather up Indians, and so every changes that they made, I would know about it here on this campus because they knew I did these types of things, and so Lane has become a program that spread, that spread it all over the United States and Alaska, and it's still being used in that same fashion. I have students that travel clear from Point Hope, Alaska, and I got one that's coming from Point Hope tomorrow, used to visit with me and my family, because they stayed at my house when they was here. These families, they send these kids and students here from all over the world, and when they come here, they come in many, many different forms, whether it's loneliness because they've grown up in a big family, it's just like me, I can't have quiet, I have to have kids, noise, family noise,

TV, radio, that stuff don't work for me, I can have life around me. My wife is opposite, she can sit down in the room and read a book and she'd be very happy, but life has to be around me all the time, and so I see a lot of these students come here, and they really come here, go to class, and head right back home. Well, I know there's something wrong with that situation and invite them home for dinner, they play with my grandkids and they're happy, and half of them live with me. That one boy from Point Hope, he stayed with us for two years while he was here, and so these are the type of situations what builds a program. It's not just hiring up for a job, come sit in your office, you have to have something that attracts the outside world to know you're alive, our powwows being as big as it is on this campus, reaching out to so many people, and so many tribes, and it's northwest, everybody knows about this program.

I can't even walk any place in the United States without somebody hooking me up with Lane Community College, and it will always be that way. Even after I leave here, I'm going to still be asked by students, hey, I got going to school, or my grandkids are going to school, what they need to do, and I'd be standing in the grocery store or shopping, and people are coming up, I need a healing ceremony or a song,

[00:22:25] Elizabeth Uhlig:
could you and your family do that for us?

[00:22:27] Frank Merrill:
So we're always going to be able to help in that situation, and it's always going to be connected to this school.

[00:22:36] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Well, was there a model?

[00:22:37] Frank Merrill:
I mean, the program that you built here at Lane, is this, I mean, this was your vision,

[00:22:42] Elizabeth Uhlig:
or is this, you have similar programs at other community colleges?

[00:22:47] Frank Merrill:
If you were brought up where there's life in a circle, everything in that circle you take care of, because you're connected to it, and the connections you make in life is the only thing that keeps you going. You can make good connections, the Creator gives you a way of discarding, most of us walk with it, but most of us know how to discard it, and that's what I become. I become a connector. I know all the connections from the past, from my Indian way of living, they showed me all that. I know all my language and mastered that, because we mastered our language, we didn't have words where we add a word every day into that dictionary to meet some need. We didn't have that in our Indian way. So my job today is mastering that dictionary, so all my grandkids, great grandkids, and all the ones that fall on me, don't have to live them words, and this is what it's becoming. If you get into an area where you're living these words,

then you become that killer, that hater, that anger, whatever it is that words are in that book, we seem to live it, and the more that we have balanced our life off so that we can recognize all these things and have answers for them, then my people and my family will always be in balance. We're so far off balance in our outside world that it's wonder that we could even survive, because we don't all walk in that balancing way to support or look at things of helping each other. We were to take and to give, and my program is one that showed you how to give, how to extend your families, because if you don't extend your family, you won't survive. Indian people were survivors, we know these things, and so it's nothing new that I brought onto this campus. It just extended from the way I was brought up, and I'm looking at today's society. Most of the young kids I see is very, very working towards that goal,

but there's still some families that are living that hate, that over and over and it's rolling over in families, and if we don't turn that back around so that we could start enjoying life where you're supposed to have been put on this Mother Earth, then my kids are going to be in a world of hurt, and this is why I did these things, because I don't want your grandkid killing my grandkid 20, 30 years from now because there's a misunderstanding between us, so if I could break down as many barriers while I'm here to move away from my grandkids and great-grandkids, then I have done my job while I'm here on this Mother Earth. And so that's why I look at life, and I think that's where my program is built. It's built around that same type of ideas and same type of energy where we support one another, and like I said, we come here in many, many different forms, whether it's in the dark hole or alcohol and drugs,

well then we need to give it light, and if you don't give it light, that one individual that come here has lost because you can't do things when you're mad or hurt, or there's no way to learn. I have learned that myself, so if I can't learn, nobody else can learn when you're mad or hurt. You can go sit in that classroom, listen to the people talk, and just go bounce off, because I have experienced that type of stuff, and the way the Indians do it, we teach in a circle, and what you haven't learned today, they'll come back around, and that's how you learn all the things and the way of living, is to bring it back around in a circle so that we could understand. We teach in a straight line, and chapter after chapter we go through, and if you pass the test, you get big old stars above you, but if you don't, you're going to walk on that straight line, and then you'll never ever get ahead,

and so all the education that you can get will be no use. So if you heal your students while they're here, they're not only going to get an education, but they're going to take that same type of healing back into their communities or back home where they don't have it, and so this is my idea of what a program should look like. Now it may be all wrong, and probably is, according to education, you know, whatever it is, but if you set up a program to meet all the needs of everything that you serve, then you will get the outcome like I did. The students nominate me for one of the biggest honors I had to have my name put on a wall with all the Indians that have served this country and their people, and that's my name back on that Washington DC wall because of my students and the people here at Lane, and this is what I was so proud of, you know, that I had achieved something that the ones that I served finally looked up and said,

hey, thank you. Tell me a little bit more about this wall in Washington DC. Well, it's an honor wall, and when they built that new museum, they had requested that people from whoever wanted to be honored put on that wall, and there's grandparents, there's leaders, there's Chief Joseph, you name them, the ones that serve Indian people, their names are up there, you know, and I may never, ever see it again, but my grandkids may want to go back and take a look at it someday, or somebody may be back there and maybe one of my great-grandkids' kids will say, hey, I seen your great-granddad's name on that wall back there. You know, that shows my family and my relatives that, hey, this is what you do, and this is the outcome. You know, if you keep serving and helping, then maybe one day you'll walk, namely, right next to mine. One of the questions Jeff Harrison asked was, he asked me what you had done this past summer in Washington DC.

Is that what he was referring to, Dan,

[00:29:20] Elizabeth Uhlig:
your trip back there?

[00:29:22] Frank Merrill:
I mean, there were ten of us that went, me and Connie and eight students, and we're going to do a presentation here in January on that performance that we had. The banner that we took, we donated to the school at this last powwow. It was an experience, you know, and this is the things that I see this college is really good at doing, is helping, learn, and teach our young ones a good way of looking at education, because they send them back there to see that if you follow the ways that I did through education and pushing education, that they can someday be in the table, and this is what's the great thing about it. Could you tell me, the classes that you've taught here, the formal classes that you've taught,

[00:30:17] Elizabeth Uhlig:
they've been a Monday night course? What do you teach in the field?

[00:30:22] Frank Merrill:
The thing really is, I'm not a teacher. I don't see myself as a teacher, because a teacher is somebody that teaches you something and then tests you on to see how much you learn.

I gave back everything that I have gained through my life, and that's what Indian people do, is the generosity of giving back to the ones that follow you, or your way of living, and give it back to the people for free. I didn't charge for my Monday night class, but what I gave back was everything that I had and my connections to my Native American living. That's building family circles, that's learning how the families live in them circles, how to use the connections that don't cost us nothing. There are so many natural things out here that we could use when we're hurt, when we're lonely, when we're all kinds of different things. People that have bad dreams don't even realize that they could take that glass of water and offer it to the sun, and all them crystals would come alive, and when they drink it, all the things on the inside be lit up so they could analyze it, and you no longer have bad dreams,

you have bad visions when you're walking around, bad thoughts that go through your head because you could see them before they attack you, and these are the things that I give back to the people. Different ways to look at life, different ways that life should be looked at, different ways that we use life, because I believe that everything in that circle was given to us in that fashion, and the more circles that we could build with that, you build your communities. Without our family circle, we wouldn't have tribes.

[00:32:19] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Can we get back to the powwows?

[00:32:26] Frank Merrill:
I'd like to talk more about those. You said you started the powwows 14 years ago,

[00:32:33] Elizabeth Uhlig:
and what was the process and how that all developed?

[00:32:38] Frank Merrill:
Well, the process is that me and my family, and my family have been connected to this college just as much as I have. We have been doing powwows. We travel all over this, California, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, you name it, in this Northwest we travel to, and the way that we have, and I know of, if I go and support you, then you're going to support me. If I don't come to support you, then you don't know nothing about my program. You may read it about in the paper if you're good enough to get that program that people on the outside will recognize, but if you build a program that serves in people, then you have to gradually go to them communities and be part of them. And through my drumming and the way that I did my Monday night class, everything fell into place. We can go to powwows. We do all the healing ceremonies. We do all, because when you become a healer, you heal. And the more people know that you're a healer,

and the things that you do is in that positive way of thinking, then your program is going to look like that, because we've become visible on this campus. I brought in all nine tribes, every educator that we had in our Indian coalition here in Oregon, brought them to this campus, let this campus know that they existed, and let them know that we have a role going to each one of these tribes. And I started with the Oregon tribes, but our program grew really fast. We've become a model of every Indian program that's built in Oregon. We was the first model to be how you do all about it. Every time I went to a coalition where all the tribes and the educators met, these are the things we bring back every time we did something new. And a lot of the tribes right now, the four-year colleges are getting longhouses built before I am, because they took my ideas, and they were writers, and they were grant writers, and all this.

I built programs. I'm not a fundraiser. And so all this stuff got stuck in my lap. And so this is how things started, and this is how it went, you know, and this is how the outcome went. Everybody started looking at my program and said, hey, we want our program just like this. So I started going to other colleges, helping set up, making sure that every Indian was hired in a college or community college where there is Indian students. We've got everyone but Lynn Benton. Lynn Benton is the only one in this state, but we don't send no Indian students there because they don't get the service that they do when we have an Indian person sitting in these offices. And it's very hard because what I've seen while I was here, you have so many different types of Indians. You've got Indians that just found out that there was Indian yesterday. They lived all their lives, maybe up to 40 years old,

never known there was Indian grandmother dies or great grandmother dies. The bag comes open and, oh, I'm part Indian. Next thing you know, they're part Indian. We bring them in entire circles, and next thing you know, they're a running program. You take the people on this campus, don't have that roll number I was talking about. Half of them want to be Indian because it's a good thing to be, you know. And it's really hard for me as an Indian person to see these non-Indian people, even if they have that little bit of Indian blood in them, they're still non-Indian to me because they have never ever lived it. And they're trying to take our Indian programs and make it work like the rest of the programs out here. And that's why mine stands out so different than everybody else's, is because they had never ever lived the Indian way of living. They may be Indian, they may have roll number. If you never ever live it, you can't teach it.

And the stuff that I teach on this campus, or give back to the students here, other Indians that have come on this campus have tried it, and it sounds just like you learned out of a book. Like a teacher would do in a class, a sociology class, or any other class, you know. And I've seen a lot of these non-Indians teaching Indian study classes, teaching our language classes, teaching classes that it's not even their tribe, and that's a no-no. I don't ever speak another Indian's language because I don't know what them words are, and I look on this computer and I see Indian Words of the Week. That man has really ruffled a lot of the feathers because he's speaking. He should be only talking about his tribe. If he knew it, he would talk about it. That's what I do. I don't talk about slits, I don't talk about grand rounds, worm springs, because I'm a guest here. You're a guest here. Whether you believe it or not, you're a guest here in Eugene.

And the people that lived in these Indians that lived here, I'm a guest. I'll help them, but I don't take over their tribe and say, I'm going to run your program. So these are things that, as an Indian person, I look up to and respect and honor, where a non-Indian that just learned he was Indian, he'll grab onto anything he can because he's still looking for visibility. He's still looking for recognition. I don't need recognition because everybody knows. And there's, I don't care who people talk about, because when my dad was still alive, alcohol was just coming onto my reservation. And he went off in 1942 into the service. When he came back, he brought the alcohol with him. And so, up until he passed away and he's 78 years old, he's got stuck in that bottle. And so, I grew up in a really alcohol abuse home. But I, when I went in the service, I drank for seven years and I threw the bottle away when I got out.

And so, my kids are now hearing, watching your dad on TV during the ceremony.

[00:39:21] Elizabeth Uhlig:
I see him blessing somebody.

[00:39:23] Frank Merrill:
Something positive, where I grew up watching your dad and laying on the street, or he got in a fight in the tavern, these type of things. So, there's a whole lot of difference in how we look at life and the things that attack us. And some of them memories are really harsh, but as Indian people, we knew how to take care of that kind of stuff. So, it never bothers me. I could talk about it every day of my life, about my dad and how he did abusive things and don't have any effect on me because we make medicine. They protect me, my family, and my kids and grandkids. And so, we're always making this medicine to help them, guide them, protect them. And so, that's what I do. One of the articles I read said you're a storyteller.

[00:40:13] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What kind of stories do you do?

[00:40:15] Frank Merrill:
Well, I used to go, I'm not really a storyteller. I tell stories because I was brought up with stories. And when you're brought up with stories to show you different parts of life, a lot of the stories where I tell to my grandkids stories that relate to animals and let the animal take the burden. One of them is when we was gathering a long time ago is that my, the kids in them days was right at gathering time in the fall of the year. Well, there was a big heat wave came down to our reservation and down there where we gathered we had an acorn tree and we ate a lot of acorns. Well, under that tree we always did, we'd go there first before we gathered and did our praying. Well, they went down to do the praying, all the family came around. Well, the heat at that time started making the grasshoppers pop up like popcorn and so they had big mounds of it. And as they went through the coyote, he got in there,

he was the first one because he's the trickster of all things. And he started playing, eating and playing and rolling in these, looked like a ball of popcorn. And so all the little kids got in there and the grandparents couldn't get them away because the coyote said, look at the food, it's this big, it's always there, you'll never have to gather food again so the kids get playing. And pretty soon, one by one, the kids would drop off and go help and the grandmothers gather the stuff for the wintertime. Well, it happened like this for like five days. On the fifth day, a storm started to come in and as soon as the first rain came in, all the grasshoppers become soggy and nobody could eat them. And so today, the coyote, he will run around with skin and bones why all the other animals are nice and fat because they went ahead and helped with that. And the coyote, he become the trickster and he become the victim.

And nobody wants to be skinny and steal food from other people so we tell these stories to our kids to make sure that they get done with their chores. And so there's stories like that I tell. I'm not really a storyteller, but when I really get down and talk to kids, it's not the same as I'm talking to the machine. I use my gestures and all that kind of stuff. But I'm not known as a storyteller. I do tell stories. I knew all the old Indian stories that I was told when I was a kid and I relate them back to the people. So I guess in some ways, I am a storyteller. That's something that keeps the legends going. Why do we do these things? Why we don't do these things? The legend becomes.

Again, about the powwows.

[00:43:18] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What are some of the most memorable memories do you have of the powwows?

[00:43:24] Frank Merrill:
Well, like I said, over 14 years, our powwow, every year will grow just a little bit, something different. And when I first started putting it on, I made sure that everybody was taken care of equally. I wanted everybody to be treated the same. I wanted somebody to come in here that had a big name for himself and the drumming like Black Lodge or somebody that you could seen on TV or in the records all over the place. To be coming here and have my drum is not as equal as theirs. So I paid all the drums equally. I don't care if you had a kid's drum that had all sixth graders on it and only knew one song. He cut the same out as the one that was paid. And so the things, when things are done equally like that and taken care of as the best you can as a host, tribes start looking at that. They want their kids to come and gain that same type of energy. And that's how my program started growing through these powwows.

We become very, very well known throughout this Northwest in our powwow.

[00:44:38] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Every year people will say, are you having it the same year?

[00:44:42] Frank Merrill:
If you want to have it on the same day each year so that people that really enjoy it will put in for their vacation. A lot of people put in their vacation just to come to our powwow from Montana to come back into South Dakota.

[00:44:58] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Why is that? Why is this powwow different?

[00:45:02] Frank Merrill:
Because it's not a contest powwow and what you bring, you bring to share. And if everybody brings something to share, the outcome of that powwow, everybody is taken care of. You come there with a need, it's taken care of because everybody brings that type of energy to this powwow. It's a no contest where you don't have competition between each other. You have learning because I have grown ups and little kids all dancing at the same time. So that they could see how the big people dance and they could dance the same way. I make sure that there's a big meal and I try to get it as traditional as I could. And the laws and rules and regulations of the school system was very hard. For four or five years, me and my wife did all the cooking at home because the school wouldn't allow us to do the meals. So we're feeding seven to eight hundred to a thousand people, staying up, cooking all night long. And I'd be cutting meat, she'd be cooking it.

One roast after roast after turkeys. And we had a full course meal. I had other people on this campus that's why when you start building your programs you have so many supporters and so you let your supporters help. And I sent potatoes, turkeys home with staff members and they'd cook them overnight, bring them back next day, we'd warm them up and serve them. And for four or five years and then one day, Clyde came aboard and said, hey, why are you guys doing this? But it took somebody from the outside to come on this campus because all we know on these campuses is rules and regulations. Don't break the rules. That's all you hear on this campus. And I never ever tried to break any rules. I found out that these rules could be bent. And they've been really easy and they fit when they bent.

[00:47:08] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Will you, after you retire, will you continue to be involved with the powwow?

[00:47:15] Frank Merrill:
Well, it was mentioned in one of our interviews as I was telling me that I need to get out today that I may be still connected to this powwow in some way. The students want me here as much as they can because they're used to the way this program's run. I think they're still kind of afraid of what's going to become of this program. They don't know yet. A lot of them know James because he's been here for quite a while. But he's been caught in the university system and over there you can't. Your hands are tied. You're only allowed to do so much. So we don't know what he's bringing here yet. And I'm hoping, you know, that he continues to care about the students because if it wasn't for these students, this job wouldn't be here. And so all my energy is based around the students, what the students need. So that's why I look at life and that's why I'm going to be missed here at this college in some ways. But everybody knows where I live.

I mean, I get more calls at home than I do in my office for healing ceremonies, weddings, memorials. They know both addresses, so they're going to find me anyway.

[00:48:27] Elizabeth Uhlig:
So you'll continue to be involved with the students and the past students?

[00:48:31] Frank Merrill:
Well, I'm going to be involved in a way that's what they want me to be. You know, I'm not going to be out here looking to help because I want to make sure that this person here has all the lead way as of building his own program. I built the foundation. He just needs to extend it. You know, and there's many different ways that we can extend it. One of the things I wish they'd have on this campus is an Indian study program because we're getting too many people teaching Indian stuff that a non-Indian comes to study program. If it's a study program, then the outside Indians will see it as that way. But if you're an Indian trying to teach a language course that ain't yours, you're going to be attacked, the school's going to be attacked, and I don't want that to happen. That's why when I was here, I kept all this type of stuff off on the campus as much as I could.

I didn't want to have no big uprising by the federal government coming in here and tearing this program apart because if non-Indians doing things they ain't supposed to. But like I say, I don't know who this person is and how much authority is going to force on the campus. I'm just hoping that the people that's here will continue to see what's right and wrong. I know the college has a lot of the lead way and they don't know. If there ain't nobody here like myself to correct them and tell them don't do this, you're going to get in trouble with the other Indian tribes if you do this. If you don't have that type of guidance, then who knows who might attack this college. You don't want that to happen when you've got such a good program. You want this program to continue to build and continue to be strong. When my great grandkids come here to go to school 18 to 20 years from now, I want this program to be still here.

When I built that program and run the Native American Student Association back in the 70s, 80s students went through here and lost everything we had. The social science department in the 70s, that was our club, that whole world windows. If we had an Indian club that was active and strong, the college would never, ever took that space away from them. Now we're doing things in the classroom, we're doing things in the cafeteria. We don't have a home, but if they build a longhouse, then that home will come back.

[00:51:17] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Were you involved with the move into this new student services building? With the planning of your area?

[00:51:26] Frank Merrill:
Well, a little bit, not too much. I just wanted to make sure we had windows. Because to me, I use so much of the outside. I use the sunlight. There's so much things that you could use when people walk through this door with whatever it is that they walk through with. Some with a heavy heart, some with all kinds of different problems. If there's ways that you could use the energy that's already here, then I could do that. That's what I used, so I wanted a window. Other people didn't make much difference because they carried their program the same way. I also wanted to have an open door policy so that students could come and go. If you were here last week, I don't know if you were here when all the stuff was stacked in my office. The new coordinator came and he stuck his head in my office and just shook it and walked off. That's why I went and cleaned this thing up as well as I could

because I wanted to make sure that he had an opportunity. If he wanted to help the students, then maybe he'll still let them store stuff here, but more in a neater fashion than I did. My problem was, how could I help these students?

[00:52:43] Elizabeth Uhlig:
What use or what part of me or my program was there for them?

[00:52:49] Frank Merrill:
That's why I look at life. The more I can help, the better I feel.

That's pretty much what Frank Murrell's on.

[00:53:04] Elizabeth Uhlig:
About the longhouse, what has been the process?

[00:53:08] Frank Merrill:
I know it's been many years since you've had the idea to have a longhouse. It's been about ten years ago when I first came up with this idea of building a longhouse. The reason I thought about building a longhouse wasn't even thinking about the day I retire and the things that need to be carried on at this college. What I was thinking about is, how could I reach the ones that I'm missing? If I had a longhouse, then all the programs that they need could be done in that longhouse. Or anything that they need to survive or their families to survive will be there in some kind of program. That's what I'm hoping for. I couldn't reach everybody. I had some students that came out here, and I had one student that was shocked by the police a few years back. He wasn't connected to college because he already left, but if I had kept him here, and he kept him out of the alcohol and drugs and kept him here on this campus,

it was activities that might have met his needs. Maybe he would not have been still around. These are the things I'm looking at. I'm only one person. I can only reach so many. If there was a longhouse, then all the programs that they need will be here. It will be here way after I'm gone, and it just helped this college. That's why I went to the longhouse. The process of getting it, it was really hard because, as Indian, when we say something, we're going to do it, it happens. When I came here with this idea, it was a good idea to both sides. So we agreed it was going to come. At that time, the construction crew, we still had logging on this campus and the construction crew said, oh, I can build this longhouse for you. But it's going to take you seven years, five, six, seven years, and we had to do it by class, by sections. Well, I figured two years at the tops of the longhouse would be here.

What they asked me to do seven years ago, this longhouse would have been here, but they did it in sections. I also didn't know that, because when me and him had this agreement about this longhouse, and he didn't tell me we had to go to the board to get approval. That didn't come until about four or five years ago. So once we got the approval for the $250,000 to land and the upkeep of the building approved by the board, then things started moving forward. Then they set up committees, they started setting up all kinds of things to help me. But it was like after I had eight years of hard labor, sweat, giving up, all kinds of different things going through my mind that nobody wanted this building. Now I'm leaving, everybody seems to want it. So maybe now it could be built. Maybe now the people will see what I was trying to do and carry on that tradition that had this longhouse built.

[00:56:27] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How will you design the longhouse? What are some of the elements? Will it be one big room? What kind of architecture?

[00:56:35] Frank Merrill:
Well, what you want to do is have one big room in the kitchen, because everything that we do usually has a food, because that's how you build a relationship. You first meet and make your connections, and then you bond it together with a meal. It seems like a meal is always there for all our events, and the more meals that we have and the more things that we do together in that fashion, we become stronger. So this longhouse is going to have a kitchen, it's going to have a fire pit where storytelling could be told. I'm also having, I got some carvers here on campus, so if anybody wants to look at the carving, I'm going to have all the service people that have tended lane. What I'm really looking at is hoping that all the service people, Army, Navy, and whatever service they went through, from the tiniest colleges built, couldn't be put on the names, put on these plaques.

And once we start looking at all the things and all the people that we serve, then your picture here at Lane will become full of what we're offering as Indian people in connection with this college and in connection with the college to us. And I think once we get that longhouse built, where it's being used in a community setting, that we become stronger as people, where we'll break down the barriers for people of color and all that kind of things. So that's what I'm looking at. How do we do this in a good way? We're working hard at diversity, we're working hard at looking at people of color, and we're looking hard at harassment and all these things. We ought to have a place where everybody feels safe. The longhouse, of course, will be mainly for Native Americans.

[00:58:37] Elizabeth Uhlig:
But do you see?

[00:58:39] Frank Merrill:
Because what I look at, I'm trying to put the setting back like it was when I grew up on my reservation, where there were just the two-legged ones that's walking. We look at the trees, that's the one-legged one, then we look at the animals, that's the four-legged one. And the more we could see ourselves as a two-legged one, the less that we have of harming one another. We, as ourselves, like I said, we put ourselves in classes, we put ourselves in categories, but if you've ever lived like an Indian person, all them things never, ever existed. And that's what I'm trying to look at now.

[00:59:21] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Where could we have a place where everybody feels comfortable with?

[00:59:25] Frank Merrill:
And a longhouse is just one of the places that we believe that everything could come together, where it's with one another, if it's with whole programs, or it's with whole communities. We could come and grow together and break down barriers and use it for whatever we need to use it for. There's a lot of things on this campus I could see it being used for. There's no place on this campus where people could go set up a drum any time they want and just start drumming, because somebody may be hurt or maybe sick or maybe have a family member that's sick. Somebody in their family might be ready to pass over, so they're feeling these types of energy. There's no place on this campus that I could just, if somebody walked through this door right now, to break out this drum right here to do the healing ceremony. I'd have to go find a safe place or take it outside,

and then I'm still interrupting the thoughts of people that's trying to come here for an education, not realizing that we're really helping somebody in a better way than what they gained out of that little bit of energy that took. But some people are really down, well, I went to that class and I'm going to get this, and you're drumming and pounding on that drum. I heard that stuff before on this campus, but years after years of breaking down these barriers, working with people, trying to find what classes fit, and that's why I got into the cafeteria. I had to go and talk to everybody in there, so everybody on Monday night don't have their test on Monday night. They don't have something very important that has to be done. If they did, they'll come to me and we'll settle, or I'll change the drumming through a different time. So there's ways that we could cooperate and work together, but we need to communicate.

If we don't communicate, then we're always going to be yelling, screaming, and always have these bad feelings about each other. So the more that we can show that we're not here to interrupt, we're only here to help break whatever it is that we have connected that don't belong. And so if we had a longhouse and that building could take care of all of that, then we have gained a big percentage of our life.

[01:01:54] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Where will the longhouse be built?

[01:01:56] Frank Merrill:
It's going to be set out here right on above the soccer field. It'll sit right in between that strip where them two trailer houses were set.

[01:02:06] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Okay.

[01:02:08] Frank Merrill:
And they're breaking ground. They already moved the trailer houses. So the process, they have a plan, and the plan is by maybe by June they'll start putting in for all the permits, and by August they may break ground. And so that's the plan we're looking at, and I only hope that it is fulfilled. Not for my estate. I know I hear around this campus that, oh, it's Frank Merrill's building. It's not Frank Merrill's building. It's the idea of how to serve everybody on this campus. Not a building that should be named after me because that ain't the purpose of it. If it wasn't named after me, then that building better be what I believe in. The services, the connections, and how do we treat people. But if it's not, then the building will be here for whatever this college needs it for. And I hope it's not used for classrooms because it's not made for classrooms.

As we finish up here, then, what do you,

[01:03:19] Elizabeth Uhlig:
what have been the greatest challenges you faced here at Lane?

[01:03:24] Frank Merrill:
The greatest challenge I have seen here on this campus is learning the procedures of going through the chain of command. Because when I build my program, I have stepped on a lot of toes, and it wasn't for people like Bart Berlanski, some of them that picked up the slack and said, well, you know, Frank's building this, doing the best he can. But I'm not a person that makes plans and not get it, follow through to make it complete. And that was my greatest challenge because I wanted to see things happen here. And this school just came in and allowed me to do the things that I wanted to do. So I was the first one here out of the Multicultural Center to break down a lot of the barriers. Now they have an opportunity. Maybe some of the other clubs or the other programs will have an opportunity to cook their meals in that cafeteria and get the same type of support. Maybe they could bring on campus 3,000 people in one day and feed over 1,000.

Maybe another program may want to do that, so they have an opportunity. But if it's never, ever brought on to this campus, then you'll never, ever get to bend them rules that I'm talking about. Because the more rules that you could bend, the bigger your program would become. But if we come in here looking at statistics and building a program, that computer could, you feed it to statistics, it'll build you a program. So what I brought here was from my personal heart, my personal belief, the things that I see through my life, so what I guess you could say is all my life, for the 60-some years I've been here on there, 66 years I've been here on this Mother Earth, I gained a lot of knowledge. And with that knowledge, I put it all into wisdom. And so that wisdom becomes who I am. And that's where I want to be looked at, not analyzed or anything, just looked at in that fashion.

In the 30 years you've been here at Lane,

[01:05:41] Elizabeth Uhlig:
what do you think have been the biggest changes that you've seen?

[01:05:46] Frank Merrill:
Well, you see so many changes here on this campus. And one of the things that I see that's really helping everybody out here is finally finding a way that we can all work together. There's so many different things on this campus because our budget is very, very low. There's our limits to what we could do, but if you can get programs to help each other, and this is what we tried here on this campus in our program,

[01:06:20] Elizabeth Uhlig:
is how could we help other people out there that's going through the same situation?

[01:06:26] Frank Merrill:
And that's how my program got built. The staff started looking at my program, volunteering to help me with the powwow.

[01:06:36] Elizabeth Uhlig:
How many programs did you know a vice president with washing dishes at any event?

[01:06:43] Frank Merrill:
And there was Donna over there at this time washing dishes

[01:06:46] Elizabeth Uhlig:
right alongside everybody else cleaning the kitchen up.

[01:06:51] Frank Merrill:
Directors standing right alongside of her helping teachers. These are the things that I see is so important, and there's so many people on this campus. If you just throw out your ideas, the support's there. And they're willing to help. They just don't know how to start it themselves. But once it gets started, you have a lot of people to jump on your bandwagon here on this campus. And that's what I see about Lane. It gave me an opportunity to do what I do best with less friction as possible. I mean, we both had miseries, but the outcome, if they've seen through the miseries that they went through and see the outcome of what this program becomes, all them miseries and all them rules that I broke, I forgot. And they only could look at a program that says, hey, I wish my program looked like yours, and that's what other colleges are looking at. And if other programs on this campus could say the same thing

about this Native American student program here and the way the students do their stuff here on this campus, I only hope that they continue to support them because you're only going to get bigger, stronger, and better with the support of the people that you're serving and working with.

What would you like to see happen in the next 10 years,

[01:08:27] Elizabeth Uhlig:
from this college or from anything?

[01:08:38] Frank Merrill:
Well, if I had, in 20 years, if I had the way of saying, hey, Frank Merrill, you have the opportunity to take a look at what's out here and build a program to fit all them needs, then I would look at it in that fashion. Because 20 years from now, the needs are going to be changing. I just hope that maybe that somebody would say, Frank, you could change everything right now. And what I would do, I would start with every baby that was born on today and start reprogramming. And if you reprogram to where they fit all the needs that we're looking at, build families in a circle that they know the balance of their life and have all them connections, then we have made a change. But if we continue to live and add and change our program, then we'll never ever get any better. So what I'm looking at is we want this whole world to change in 20 years if we all start reprogramming our kids with love, caringness, tenderness, carry on family life

the way it's supposed to, look at life as life's supposed to be, I think.

I think you're getting down to where I'm feeling things now.

[01:10:15] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Is there anything else we haven't covered that you'd like to add?

[01:10:19] Frank Merrill:
No. I think I covered everything that needs to be put in here.

[01:10:24] Elizabeth Uhlig:
Okay. Well, thank you very much.