Betty Burns, an elder of the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony, walks into her yard in Fallon, Nevada Thursday, April 28, 2022.
Sunday, May 8, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Editor’s note: The Sun’s Jessica Hill and Wade Vandervort spent a week in the Reno area visiting with residents of Native American tribes to learn more about their history in Nevada. Today, meet Betty Burns, one of the elders of the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony in Churchill County.
FALLON — Betty Burns steps outside her one-story brown house adorned in ivy and shaded by a few small trees on the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony in Churchill County.
She walks around the side of the house, past piles of boxes and other miscellaneous items, and out to her backyard where a white goose struts about as planes from the nearby naval air station hum loudly overhead.
The goose — named Goose — has lived with her for 10 years, but he still hasn’t warmed up to her. If Goose gets snippy, Burns gets her stick and taps the ground in front of him to ward him off. Goose is one of the latest of many to live under Burns’ protection over the years.
Burns, an 81-year-old elder of the tribe who has gray, curly hair and wears light-colored glasses, has lived on the colony since she was born in 1941. Made up of a few dozen houses, the colony sits on top of an old landfill, and some of the houses provided by the Department of Housing and Urban Development have become uninhabitable after they began to sink into the ground, the frames tilted at an odd angle.
Near Burns’ house is Rattlesnake Hill, where thousands of years ago people of the Shoshone Nation would look out from the shore of a lake. The lake is long dried up, replaced by the alfalfa fields, cattle farms and an irrigation ditch, but ancient freshwater coral cemented in rock are remnants of the large body of water that was once there.
In her house, Burns raised five children and many foster children over the years, but she spends her days “mostly being lazy.” She points down the road, where as a little girl she lived in a shack with her brothers and sister. There had no electricity or running water.
She and her siblings were left to fend for themselves. Her mother had gone to prison, and Burns did not met her father until she was 30. When a dump truck would arrive at the landfill, she and her neighbors would chant, “Dump truck! Dump truck!” and go rummage through garbage for food.
Nowadays, she’ll watch TV and see depictions of poor people going through trash and think, “That’s what we used to do.”
At one time during Burns’ childhood, an aunt felt sorry for her and her siblings and brought them to live with her in Sparks. But they were too much for her to handle, Burns said, so she and her sister went to Stewart Indian School while her brothers served in the military.
Different take on boarding schools
The Stewart Indian School, established in 1890, and other Indian boarding schools across the country and in Canada were designed to Christianize and assimilate Native American children. The philosophy, originating from Army Capt. Richard H. Pratt, founder of the Carlisle School for Indian Students, was “kill the Indian, save the man.”
The boarding schools taught basic academics as well as patriotism, citizenship and manual labor skills, and they strictly forbade the students from speaking their native languages or practicing their culture. Children who went there have recalled abuse, such as being tied to a tree with a chain for trying to escape, and parents would hide their children so they wouldn’t be forced to go.
Agencies today are seeking to uncover the atrocities that happened at the schools. But for Burns, who was without parents, that wasn’t her experience at all.
“I loved it,” Burns said. “I just learned how to live, I guess.”
She started at the school when she was in sixth grade. Burns had regular schoolwork and played the clarinet in the band. People complained about the food, she said, but she was thankful. The teachers were nice and the staff kept close tabs on the students, checking on them every hour in the night, she said.
“I felt safe and taken care of,” Burns said. “There was no reason to be afraid anymore.”
She went to Stewart until 11th grade before transferring to the Phoenix Indian School. Her mother had gotten out of prison and was hanging around the school, drunk and making a big scene, Burns remembered. Her adviser said they were going to send her away because “you’re not gonna make it as long as you’re here” with her mother around, Burns said.
The Phoenix Indian School, which closed in 1990, was even better, she said. There, Burns said, she played clarinet in the marching band. The band performed at the Tournament of Roses Parade and at a premiere with television personality Dick Clark. As a senior, she was homecoming queen.
She joined every activity available to her and worked different jobs, like housekeeping, the school found for her on the weekends. If the students made $5, the school would keep $2.50 and put it in a savings account so the the students would have money to go home with, Burns said.
During the summers, she stayed with a family in Reno. The father was a doctor, and he had a wife and seven children. They would go to the family’s beach cottage in Corona del Mar, Calif., for vacation, Burns said. They were all close, and Burns took care of the mother before she died a few years ago.
After she graduated in 1959, she went to Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kan., where she took secretarial classes and played in the marching band.
“It was just a lot of fun,” Burns said. “That’s why sometimes when I think about all the negative statements made about Indian schools, it wasn’t the way I got to know it. It was good for me.”
Working woman
Burns had three children after college with her boyfriend, but they separated and she raised them as a single parent.
She worked as a security guard at the prison in Carson City. She would work in the control room, which had all these different keys she had to learn, and she had to count inmates, keeping track of where they were.
Burns remembers escorting a couple of inmates, and although she was only 5-foot-2, she was never scared. One day, she escorted a big man from the prison yard where inmates exercise back to his cell. It started to rain and the inmate asked her if she wanted to wear his jacket.
“Everybody was nice,” Burns said.
In Reno as a single mother, times were hard, and she had to go on welfare. She remembers standing in line to apply and the staff asking her intrusive personal questions, such as who she was sleeping with. She was embarrassed. After that, she got together with a group of mothers, calling themselves the “welfare mothers” and worked to make the welfare application process more private. She also helped found the Urban Indians in Reno and helped Native people get funding.
In 1979 she moved back to Fallon, where she worked as a tribal police officer. It was mostly a quiet job filled with patrolling. She remembers driving down a road during a night shift and realizing she was at Stillwater cemetery, and she got scared. She remembers one case she had to handle in which a mother and father were being abused by their son.
Burns also spent time working in the health care industry, first as a nurse aide at a hospital, and then as a home health nurse, caring for the elderly.
Foster parenting
Although she was busy juggling her jobs and her children, Burns often thought about living alone with her siblingson the colony as a child. She wanted to help the kids who were like her, so she began fostering children in the 1970s.
“They had real serious family problems, so they had to be taken out of their home and placed in foster homes,” Burns said. “I talked to the social worker one time, and I said, ‘Why do you take these kids from their home and then you send them back to the same thing they left?’”
She said parents should take parenting classes and do something to improve their lives to earn those kids back.
Her foster children are all grown up now, but they still get together once in a while and talk and laugh about their experiences growing up.
One day a social worker called and asked if she wanted to foster a baby boy, who was going to be born while his mother was in jail. Burns was excited, and told everyone she was “gonna have a baby boy.” He lived with her off and on for years, and she adopted him when he was about 9 or 10.
A judge had ordered that he be allowed to be in touch with his birth mother, who was an alcoholic. Whenever he would stay with her, Burns said, he began drinking alcohol and doing “wild things.”
“He came back one time and he was a different boy,” Burns said. “He kind of went wild on me. I had to put him in a youth shelter here on the reservation.”
The boy graduated high school and went into the military, serving six years before returning home. While in the Army, he learned he wasn’t an only child.
Around Christmas one year, after drinking, he was driving to Reno when he crashed his car and badly injured a girl. He was sentenced to 10 to 20 years and was sent to the prison in Carson City where Burns used to work. Now in his late 20s, he is still there serving his sentence.
She wishes she could have afforded better legal help for him, and she worries the judge was prejudiced against him. She sends him letters frequently telling him how much she loves him.
“He needs to hear that he’s loved,” she said. “He knows he did a bad thing. He knows he’s supposed to be punished. And he’s dealing with it. …
I feel sorry for him because he came into the world, his mother was in jail, and he made it through high school, made it to the Army and then he ends up in prison.”
“It’ll be happy days when he comes home,” Burns said.
Native culture
Burns says she tends to have a more positive mindset than some other people in the tribe. The colony and the reservation have electricity and city water, and she is grateful for the homes that U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development provided.
It bothers her, however, that she never learned much in regard to her Native culture. Luckily her children have learned about their culture, doing beadwork, tanning and willow work.
“And they learned it all on their own because I was too busy working and taking care of things,” she said. “I never learned any of that. I was just on the go so much.”
She’s proud of her children for learning those traditions and passing them on to their children. One of her granddaughters is a dancer and recently danced at a powwow in Albuquerque, N.M., Burns said.
She recently went to the grand opening of the renovated grade school that she had attended from first to third gradez. It was so cute, she said, and there were little toilets for the children.
“I’m thankful my kids all grew up and they’re doing fairly well,” she said. “And I’m living here in my own home, in my own territory. It’s like I came home.”
