Murphy Parkhurst

The advice I have for you is keep on learning. It ain’t like the old days, where a size 2 hat and a 52 inch shirt will get you a job. You gotta have education just to lean on a shovel, so.… So, don’t quit school, stay in school.

Murphy Parkhurst

Hello, my name is Murphy Parkhurst. I was born in Red Lake, Minnesota back in 1947; kinda a long time ago. Back then, they didn’t have that many cars. They had a lot of horses where I was growing up. As far as the tar roads go, they didn’t have any tar roads. They went into the village and they stopped. We lived a half a mile east of the Red Lake village going toward Redby.

Red Lake is largest gated community in Minnesota. You hear these guys saying, “Oh, I live in a gated community,” like North Oaks, they have a little guard there. You can go and drive through there in about ten minutes. Red Lake, it’ll take you a couple days to see it all. It’s kinda large. If you’ve seen Red Lake, it’s the biggest lake in Minnesota. We own most of the lake. We used to have all of the lake until they had ah…what would you say…they were checking the boundaries and when the guy drew the boundaries that’s suppose to cover the lake, his hand slipped and he cut off part of the lake. That’s up there by Washkees and that’s where them guys go fishing now. We’ve been trying for years to get it back and hopefully we’ll get it back someday, we’ll have the whole reservation.

I have a map here to show you, or give you an idea where Red Lake is. As far as Minneapolis goes, so when I go home, it’s about a four-hour drive. There’s Red Lake. The closest big city to Red Lake is Bemidji. And then you have Black Duck and all these other surrounding little communities.

It was…I was born and raised a Catholic. I don’t know what religion you guys are, but I went to a parochial school for eight years. Back then they had nuns. Ladies that would walk around with a habit on and they’d look like…we used to call ‘em penguins, but not to their face. They were…you learned a lot. Discipline was a heck of a lot of stricter than what it is today. If you misbehaved in class, they’d, I don’t if they exercised their hands, but they’d grab you right here in the shoulder. You could stand up on your tip-toes for a while. They’d lead you back and make you sit in the corner.

When I was growing up, they didn’t have kindergarten. You just went and stood on a road and jumped on the bus. I was five years old when I started school. I watched my brothers go to school and the bus driver said, “You’d better get on here,” so I got on and that’s how I started school. I wasn’t acclimated to school, I guess you’d say. Back home my grandmother used to speak Ojibwe all the time, even our dog knew Objibwe. Really a long time ago and as you progress, if you don’t use it, you kinda lose it so I been taking classes to get it back.

In the first grade, I had an experience. It makes me chuckle now, but at the time, it was kinda scary. I didn’t know when you had to go to the bathroom you had to raise your hand. You raise your hand like that and the teacher just say, “Where do you wanna go” and you’d say you had to go to the bathroom and they’d ask you want you wanted to do. So I told them I had to meezee. She said, “What is that?” And one of my classmates by in the classroom there said, “He has to take a shit.” I didn’t know you had to say stuff like that, so they took me off to the side and talk to me for a while and told me I wasn’t suppose to use that kind of language. But that’s one of the things that happened to me when I first started going to school.

I had two brothers. To go to parochial school, you had to go to Mass every morning. And they had servers. I don’t know if any of you are familiar with servers. My two brothers were altar boys; I never made it. I learned all the Latin and all the moves in the Mass, the different kinds of Masses they had. But I smiled too much, I guess you’re not suppose to be happy when you’re up there. You’re suppose to sit there looking all crabby and stuff ‘cause I’d grab that book and I was smiling and they grabbed me by the arm and they sent me back to class. So I never got to be an altar boy. I didn’t miss it that much, but I was the only one in our family that didn’t make it.

I think that little school went to ninth grade and as I kept going, it went to eleventh grade. By the time I got to the eighth grade, the other top three grades had been dropped. I don’t know if was for funding, but. I graduated from, I guess it’d be like Sanford right now, like middle school. Then went over to St. Cloud for about six months to go to school out there and then I went back to Red Lake.
Red Lake is an all-Indian school. We had a couple Caucasians that would be sitting in there and you could pick them out right away. We weren’t the minority at that school, we were the majority. It was kinda different.

As far as going out of the Reservation, when I was running around, growing up, all the way up ‘til about the ninth grade, I never used to wear shoes in the summertime. We used to have, what they call, a fishing camp. School let out in May and by June 1st you were already in your fishing camp and you stayed there all summer.

They had commercial fishing back then. If you talk to some of your parents, they’ll say, “Oh, yeah. They used to use nets.” Well, using nets is a lot of work. It’s not like on TV where you see these guys throwing these things and pulling them out. It’s not like that. It’s a lot of work. I think each individual, like my mom had eight nets, my grandmother had eight nets, my uncle had eight so we’re setting twenty-four nets every night. We set four times a week. They had a big truck that would come along and deliver your ice in the morning. They had wooden fish boxes that, I don’t know, would hold a hundred pounds of fish anyway. We used to build houses out of them when they weren’t used to haul fish.

Back then when we used to leave our house in Red Lake, mother would put a note on the table that said, Clean up after yourself. Because somebody would be coming by and we weren’t home and they stop and eat, well she asked them to just clean up after themselves. You can’t do that anymore. I don’t care where you live. You gotta lock it up now. But we used to leave everything out in the open. And it’s kinda hard where you gotta lock everything up; it took me a while getting used to that. You go knock on the door now and people peek out the window and they say, “Hey whadda ya want?” You’ll ask if such-n-such is home and they’ll say, “No, he’s not” and shut the curtain. They don’t even invite you in anymore. I’ll be glad when that comes back for the simple reason you felt more secure when they invite you into their house and offer you something to eat, something to drink. That’s what I do at my house now, somebody stops by. It’s kinda hard to break those habits, but I think they’re good habits to have when your company comes over you offer them something to eat, something to drink. If they wanna rest for a while, you tell ‘em to go lie down back there.

I graduated from high school in 1965. When I graduated from high school, the Vietnam war was going on. They had ah, recruiters would come in and talk to you. Them guys from different colleges, they wouldn’t say what kind of college you want to go in, they’d say, “What branch of service you want to go into?” I didn’t want to go in any. I wanted to go to school and raise heck like everybody else.
I graduated when I was 17 years old. To get any kind of funding or any kind of help, you had to be eighteen years old so I had a couple months to kill before I could get any funding for school. I come to school down here, I went to school at the medical institute of Minnesota on 23rd and Nicollet. It was for a lab and X-ray tech. Because they’re two and a half quarters, but you’re getting sixty-five dollars every two weeks. That sounds like a lot of money to you, but it’s not. You gotta pay for your room, your laundry, your food. If you had any left, you could actually get some pop or something. I went to school there for two quarters. I had these bad habits, I like to eat and wear clothes so I had to go to work. I took a summer off and went to work in construction, highway construction for one summer. I was laughing at all them guys coming to work, “Oh, shucks, I got my draft notice.” Well, I figured I’d go back to school that fall. I didn’t know you had to put in for deferment and stuff. So. I think it was in, ah, either September or October, I got a notice. But see, when I graduated from high school, I graduated under the name of Joe Parkhurst.

I didn’t know my real name was Murphy N. Parkhurst, Jr. So when I got the letter down here, I called my mom and said, “Hey, Dad’s got a notice from the Army. Maybe they want him back in.” She was, “Well, what’s it say on there?” I said, “It says Murphy N. Parkhurst, Jr.” She said, “Well, that’s you.” “Oh.”

So that’s how I got introduced to the Army. I think I went in November, 1966. You see all the movies you wanna see, I think the closest movie I seen that comes to an actual Army thing would be ah, Full Metal Jacket. It was pretty close. It sure wasn’t what I thought it was gonna be, you know. You see these all these movies, they play all that cool music. I never heard any of that music. I was in, I don’t know where it was, but I took basic at Fork Poke, Louisiana. From there I went to advanced infantry training at Fort Gordon, Georgia. From there I went to jump school at Fort Benning. I went to jump school because I had two uncles that were paratroopers. My dad was a Navy guy, so. But I went there because they give you an extra $55 for jumping out of a plane. Back in the day when you’re nineteen years old and you think you can leap high buildings and not get hurt, but that was my attitude back then. I went to the 101st and 82nd. I went to Vietnam in 1969.

When you got to Vietnam, the, the climate was very hot, humid. It had a smell that you’ll never forget. But after you’ve been there a little while, you get to walk around in the country, up in the mountains. I don’t care where you go, you’ll never see land as pretty as that. The beaches will beat Hawaii’s beaches. They had some really beautiful beaches there. If people weren’t shooting at you, you could actually enjoy that. But they had some really beautiful beaches there.

I was there for a year. I got out of there in February of ‘70. When I left Vietnam, it was 110 degrees. When I got to Minneapolis, I think it was 28 below. I had on what we call summer fatigues or summer greens. You couldn’t go around like they do now where you just put on your fatigues and travel all over. When I was in there you had to wear dress or Class As. You had to look like you were going somewheres instead of just carrying your duffel bag or whatever.

I got to play around in a few different parts of the world. I got to see Nashville, Tennessee. I don’t know how many of you are familiar with country music. They were having rides back in the 60s. They had ‘em in Detroit and Washington, D.C. I got to go to both of them, those rides. They even had ‘em in Minnesota, but you couldn’t come to your home state. You had to stay back. They wouldn’t let you go because they figured you wouldn’t go back in the Army.

When I got out in ’69, I didn’t want to work. I wanted to make up for a few things I thought I missed. I think I got two jobs when I left the service. One, I worked for UPS for six months. But there was a hassle when the supervisor just quit. Then this friend of mine told me, “Oh, go work for NSP, I think they’ll hire you over there.” Back then I think they were hiring vets just to get us off the streets so we wouldn’t be in everybody’s way.

So I started out at NSP in 1970 as a janitor. It was kinda nice, you know, because in the Army you learn how to run all these things from clean barracks, buffers and how to shine up the floors and clean the windows. The only thing they didn’t have at NSP was butt-cans, but they had these little sand ashtrays and you had to go out and clean them. I was a janitor for about a year, maybe longer. Once you got in the door and they had a union, you could sign up for any job that came along as long as you were qualified. I went into the underground. They’re the people that put in your underground services to your house and what have you.

From there I went into tree trimming. It was kinda funny ‘cause when I went to tree trimming, they had just started a tree trimming class after I’d made journeyman and you had to go back and take the tree trimming class that they offered. I was over at St. Paul Vo-Tech or St. Paul-Hennepin College or whatever that is. We all went over there on a Wednesday night and sat down and they brought out their projector and start showing movies trimming trees and they had these guys walking around. Looked like they were walking around in Florida ‘cause all you seen was palm trees. I was thinking, “Man…” So I asked the instructor, “Where are these trees located cuz we don’t have any of those trees here.” He says, “Oh, this is the only film we could get. Next week I think we’ll have some film of what we need.” I think we went through three months of class before we actually got film of what we were supposed to be trimming. I got to work for 36 years before I retired.

I retired as a trouble-man. My granddaughter and my grandson go to school there. My granddaughter’s name is Alice Parkhurst and the other one is Devin. He broke his collarbone in the last football game they had. It’s kinda interesting. I been over here working around this school for quite a while. I had one of my daughters that was going to school here for a while. And then they went to school at Roosevelt. And they had the inter-tribal thing going. I was still working, but I worked a rotating shift then. If they needed me at school, I could take a day off and go over there and help them.

My daughter decided they were going to have a fundraiser and they were going to make tacos. “Well, good for you.” “Yeah,” she said, “we need forty pieces of bread...” “And?” “And you’re making it.” So that’s how I got involved making fry bread for school. And I done that for quite a while. I come over here and help them out a couple times with the tacos that they had.

There was a dude by the name of Don Peewash. He worked over at South High. He worked with the kids over there. He got me interested in working with the kids and helping with the fundraisers and whatever they had to do. I taught a couple fry bread classes. It’s kinda neat working with youngsters like you. I’ll mix the dough and I’ll show you how to bring it out and I’ll tell ya you’re on your own. Some of the pieces of bread that came out of there were pretty neat. I never seen any fry bread that looks like that. It all works

When I was growing up, we also had horses. Everybody had horses. If you weren’t chasing horses, they were chasing you. They had a, they had this one big white…I don’t know what kind of horse he was, but he was a big white one…his name was Dobbin. He’d let you chase him for about five-ten minutes, but then he’d put his ears back, he’d turn around and you’d better have a tree close by because he’s gonna run you right in the ground. They’d go around to these different houses, people used to hang their clothes out on the line. I don’t know if any of you guys are familiar with that. But the horses would go pull the clothes off the line. I don’t know why they did that, but they’d go pull the clothes off the line.

The spring of the year, the fish start spawning. And you can go spearing fish. You head out to these little creeks that run into Red Lake. Right in town, they had one right down town in fact. You just go spearing fish in there. There’d be about five-six of us. Two guys with lights and the rest with spears. We were going along the bank of the creek like that and spearing the fish and throwing them up on the bank. We figured when we got done, we’d pick ‘em up as we go back. As we were walking down that bank throwing the fish up there, there was a bear behind us, but we didn’t know he was behind us. And he was eating the fish as fast as we were throwing them up there. When we got to the mouth of the river, we all turned around and started to go back, we musta walked about from here to the Exit sign and we run into the bear. What is neat about that is that back in those days, they were afraid of ya. They were just as much afraid of you as you were of them. He went that way and we when this way. We were about a mile and a half from my cousin’s house. We went running over to his house and he got a gun. We went back to look for the bear and the bear was gone. We were laughing. There were just six of us running. Ever try to run with a spear? It’s pretty hard, yeah. You always see these guys running really fast. I was trying not to trip on the rope. That was one of the experiences we had fishing.

A lot of times there would be walleyes, suckers, northerns. The suckers came in last. Whenever you start spearing suckers, you knew the spearing season was just about over. We used to go get about three tubs-full of northerns. Washtubs and stuff like that. We’d take them home and the next morning grandpa would say, “Well, here’s a list.” He’d give us a list of all the old people that couldn’t go out and fish and stuff and we’d have to go deliver the fish to them.

So we went hunting, I was brought up the same way when I was hunting. You got more than enough deer, people come over and got it from you or you took it over to them. You always assume that just because they had children and grandchildren that they don’t have to worry about getting anything like meat and fish. A lot of times, they don’t even check on them.

We went out, I don’t know if any you guys are familiar with shining, shining deer. We used to go shining back home. Why, I’d use my brother’s Blazer. He had a Blazer, we took the top off the Blazer and we were standing in the back of the Blazer. We got three deer, I think. I carried one of those portable BBQ grills. About 11:30 at night we’d stopped and grilled up some burgers and had some chips and some pop. Had a regular picnic way the hell out in the brush.

I had my, a couple of my nieces, a grandson and no, my son, and a couple nephews, we’re out there, my brother had to be to work at seven the next morning, so he said, “Well, when we get done, we’ll head in. We were out there and we ended up, ah, I told him, “You’re gonna have to shine as you go back kinda fast.” We were driving down this one little road like way out west on the western part of the Rez. We went toward Thief River and we come around the corner like that and they had these two big fields out to the side like that. I was a watching, keeping an eye on the light and they’d flash like that and I started slamming. He said, “What’s the matter?” I said, “I think there’s two big moose out there.” So I flashed it back out there and there they were. My brother jumped out there and “bam!” The deer were still standing there. “Get in,” I said, “there’s a road back there.” He jumped in, I started driving about from here to the wall away from the moose. There was a cow and about a year-old calf. The cow’s running back and forth like that. I tell my brother, “Shoot that before she comes tips us over here.” So he shot her and down she went. And we shot that calf and we went over there. It took us about three hours to get everything back on the truck. There’s something about a moose when they’re dead and you try to lift dead weight, it’s really hard. The head was even heavier than that, you know. We had two moose and three deer on the truck. We were driving down the road like that. If I went past 30 mph, the front end would come up. We had to slow down from about 45 miles out to our house. this is still on reservation, yah. We went driving over there, we got in about 4 o’clock in the morning. I dropped my brother off at his house. He said, “I gotta go to work. I’ll send my wife over to help you in the morning.”

So we got home and we’re sitting around talking and visiting with my mother and we had some coffee and I said, “Well, I’d better get to bed.” I think we got to bed about 5 o’clock. We were up at 7:30 the next morning cutting up the two moose and the deer. We didn’t get done ‘til 7:30 that night. Cutting it up, bagging it up. People were coming by, “Hey, you wanna sell some meat?” “Go in there and help yourself, but whatever you take, you gotta eat, ya know. Don’t waste any.” We give away about two deer and pretty close to half of that moose that day and one guy said, “Well, you shoulda sold it to the tribal council.” I said, “Nah, you gotta give that stuff away. It’s the first one we got so…” That’s what you had to do.

It was kinda nice, you know, I was trying to save the hide to get the hide tanned. I rolled it all up and put it in two bags, put salt on it. Got it in the fridge and ha! forgot it. I don’t know what my brother come over the next day, er, two weeks later and took it out of there and threw it away. I said, “Damn, why didn’t you call me, I would have come up and got it.”

That was really exciting, you know, and then with my dad when my dad shot a moose. He shot a big bull moose that was charging after the car one day. He got about from here to where that lady in the red is sitting before it fell over. This friend of mine was standing by the door and my dad had the door open and was shooting out the door of the car and the friend of mine jumped in the back seat and hunkered down in the back seat, “Is he gonna get me?” It was kinda funny, you know, but then we had to stay there while he went and got a trailer so we could get the thing back into the house. But. That was mostly how we did, back when I was growing up and they had stores, but you had to go, to go to the grocery store like Cub, you had to go 37 miles to Bemidji. They had a little grocery store, like one of them little corner stores in Red Lake. You could go there and get everything you wanted, but if you wanted something other than what they had, well, you had to go out.

When we were fishing, there was a guy that used to come around by us every morning. He towed the back end of a pick up. He put some liners in there. You put all your sucker fish in there, you put it on ice. We use to go sell it to the mink farms. He’d just ask you what you wanted and he come back with some eggs and some butter. It was a lot of bartering, I guess, but everybody got along. You didn’t have the stuff that you have now going on.

If you were sitting at the house and you were eating and somebody came in with one of their friends, you had to get up and let them eat. They’d take their plate in the other room and they sat down and you didn’t really mind that much.

Back then they didn’t hardly have any TVs. My two uncles had TV, but we didn’t so we’d go over to his house and watched TV. We watched a lot of radio back when I was growing up. We had a radio station from Thief River Falls that told stories, the Lone Ranger and all these. If you watched TV and shut your eyes, that’s how we listened to the radio, you know, where you could hear all the sound effects, but you couldn’t see, you had to imagine the horse going across the plains or whatever.

It was, it was, well, I guess we didn’t realize we were poor because everybody had the same thing we had. There was nobody, I don’t know, we never considered or thought of being rich, I guess, the material things. I didn’t know there was a thing as being rich and being poor. I always thought everybody shared what they had, but... After I come out into the real world, I found out that it’s a heck of a lot different, you know. A lot of times, you say hello to somebody and they walk right by as if you’re not there. You know, Hey, cool. I used to get kinda angry when I was first…I was fighting a lot in the service because I was an Indian and after a while maybe I’ll have to quit or I’ll be fighting every day otherwise.

The thing that happened to my brother and his friend. You have to report to Fargo to get inducted. The guy that got drafted, he just graduated from Bemidji State. He figured, “Well, I’ll go to work and do this.” He had a deferment until he graduated. Two months after he graduated, he got drafted. He and my brother were down there sitting around in a bar, drinking beer and he was crying, he said, “I’m gonna go and kill myself.” My brother sitting there, “No, don’t do that.” “I’m gonna kill myself.” My brother said, “Well, wait then, let me get a six-pack of beer, I’m gonna watch you.”

They had this bridge over there. This guy went and stood on one of those pillars on this bridge. The edge of the river was over here and the pillar was right about here, I guess. They’re standing there drinking beer and the guy stood up, “Well, here I go, Rand.” My brother’s name was Randy. Jumped off the bridge. He watched him like that and “I tried to holler at him and tell him,” but it was too late, he’d already jumped. And he splattered in the mud and he couldn’t get out of the mud so my brother had to go down there and pull him out of the mud. They went back to the hotel room and they looked like they’d been in a mud fight all night. They got back to the hotel room at 6 o’clock, they had to report to induction so they didn’t even get a chance to take a shower. They walked in there all full of mud. He said, “I thought when they seen us they just tell us, ‘Hey, you guys get outta here, we don’t want you.’” He said, “Christ, they took us.” He goes right to the head of the line.