Richard Rasmussen

What’s important in life is what you leave. You leave it better than what it was when you started.

Richard Rasmussen

Are you ready? That doesn’t mean I’m organized. This is my interpretation of my life and where I’ve been. My life started in a small community in Montana. I was born on December 22, 1948. I was a service brat, which means my Dad was in the Army. He went overseas to Korea. I then grew up in a town called Old Town, Oklahoma. It was a little like a suburb.

One thing they had was an Indian school. An Indian school was a process of assimilation.
Assimilation means you give up your ways. They tried to do this by taking students your age and taking them off the reservation and out of their homes and putting them in schools.

We had a section where the Indian School was called Riverside. We had this big long section of government houses because the Bureau of Indian Affairs had an office there. Of course this was the era of segregation. You have Indians in Old Town and then you have the blacks and then you have the whites and nobody ever mixed together.

When I was ten years old my dad was overseas in Korea and had a brain hemorrhage and died. My mom was working for the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and relocated in northern Minnesota. I grew up in Bemidji.

The happiest day of my life was when I spent time in Washington DC and they said, “Wouldn’t it be nice to put a museum up showing Native American culture to everybody in the United States?” If you go there you’ll see my name on the wall because I gave them money to share the knowledge on a continuing basis of education for native culture.

We celebrate holidays by gathering and having fun. Sharing expressions and sharing a drum to remind us that we are part of Mother Earth. We acknowledge the East for the sunrise. When I look South I know the warm air comes and gives spring. When I look North I realize the struggle the winter brings. When I look West, I realize that eagles are free.

I have eagle feathers. Eagle feathers are very important in our culture. Not everybody gets them. These two were given to me by my eldest son in recognition that I was a warrior and held up as an example to him and a lot of the people of the community. Eagles are strong. When I see an eagle it means that nature has recognized that I’m doing something right and shares the freedom of the sky and the freedom of the land.