Levina Kussamwhy Wilkins

1936-2024

I still shake my head in disbelief that my Kala, Levina Kussamwhy Wilkins, from the Wenatchapam band of the Confederated Tribes and Bands of Yakama Nation, was laid to rest only one month ago after losing her life in a head-on collision in the Lower Yakima Valley over the Labor Day weekend of 2024.

In a painful synchronicity, she walked off into the mist exactly one year after my own mother, and I’ve felt her loss nearly as acutely.

I will continue to pray for this amazing spirit, who proudly proclaimed herself the great-great granddaughter of Wí’awick’t, “who ruled from the Canadian border to the Oregon plateau.” I will burn sage and give thanks for knowing this strong-minded great-granddaughter of Awatam Slusceum (Saluskin) – who spent nine months in the white people’s jail for practicing his Wa’ashat religion and for building the Wapato longhouse. I raise my hands to the Creator in gratitude for the teachings of this granddaughter of Chief Jim Noah Saluskin – “the last known chief that the people elected by unanimous vote as their leader” who, without pay, “was to take care of his people by his own ingenuity and strong back.”

Having known her, I can say I’ve known royalty in my lifetime, and even though our difference in age was never as great as that of our cultures, I feel blessed to have called her “Kala,” and to remember her calling me “Kala” too.

Kussamwhy was an energetic, constant educator, an engaged and compassionate school counselor, and an adopted grandmother to many, many others. I write my own recollections of her from outside her family yet from inside a larger circle that’s not so distant.

She was my close friend, and I knew her well.

Our friendship commenced instantly in 2002 and remained strong right up to her death. She was still telling me stories when we spoke on the phone this last August. She never tired of helping me to understand regional history, the way of life in which she’d been raised, quite different from my own, and her loving perspective on my own spiritual nature.

I was a kind of project for her, and I was aware she’d “taken me under her wing” as an elder and mentor. I’m sure she initially hoped to fortify my work as a professional psychologist charged with serving the wellbeing of her community’s tribal youth. But it wasn’t long before cultural distinctions between us diminished, and a mutuality and trust emerged.

Over the last decade, we often spoke about how hard life could be – and I knew of her pain, and she knew of mine. Kala knew a lot about “how” to be a friend, and she was always genuinely interested in who I was and how I felt. Our conversations were so often more like “collaborations.”

We first began working together when we co-created and facilitated talking circles with middle school and high school youth at Yakama Nation Tribal School in Toppenish and Mount Adams School District in White Swan, Washington in the heart of Yakama Nation land.

She was fluent in Ichishkíin Sinwit (“how we speak”) and would eventually become the long-term manager for Yakama Nation Language Program and teach language classes at Heritage University. But one day about a decade before then, she brought out papers she’d typed up of the Níix Ttáwaaxt (‘good growth’) Virtues she’d created and handed them to me.

I immediately recognized the beauty and significance of these words in orienting Native youth struggling with their cultural identity – and I also knew (as I’m sure she did) that a strong Native identity was the single biggest factor in promoting their wellbeing and resilience. She explained how she planned to expand the list she’d made from what was then nine to twelve Virtues to match the months of the year.

She then asked me if I might help her elaborate their English translations. I’d finished my doctoral thesis at University of Detroit years before in “paralinguistics” and culture. I felt both honored and able to help, and we began meeting regularly to discuss each Virtue. I immediately noticed how often it took a paragraph of English to capture two or three words.

I recognized these Ichishkíin Sinwit words as hers and her community’s, not mine. My sole task was to help English-only speakers grasp her explanations by summarizing them in a manner she endorsed. This was not always an easy process to accomplish. Many times when I’d share back my understanding of what she’d explained, Kala would respond with something like, “How I wish you could know how beautiful my language is, Doctor Walker. It’s so much prettier and much more descriptive than yours.”

When she finally felt satisfied, we began enhancing our talking circle work with the youth by introducing the Níix Ttáwaaxt Virtues as a centerpiece. Kala had already experimented with doing this on her own, but she appeared glad to add activities and ideas I suggested so as to further engage with what were often overwhelmed and traumatized kids.

I recall one very troubled Native young woman who’d suffered terribly in the foster care system learning about Níix Ttáwaaxt Virtues for the first time in one of our circles.

“Yáych’unakł!!” she exclaimed when she understood this particular Virtue’s relationship to the English word “courage.”

“Not afraid of anything! That’s me! I need a t-shirt with this word on it!”

How could I do such work with this wise Yakama elder over so many years and not take in such valuable teachings myself?

Time and time again, I witnessed her walk her talk. On so many occasions, I saw her counsel or teach these ways of living life while bringing out a snack from her purse or helping a grieving child “bring out” his or her own tears or offering a prayer or story from the language that had been taken from their ancestors. The language she spoke and preserved.

In this way, she taught me as a helper in ways that changed me immeasurably as a human being.

Together, we commenced a campaign in 2002 to create an actual “Níix Ttáwaaxt program,” a three-phase, culture-centered, community-oriented behavioral health project that would become a viable alternative to the oppressive “U.S. mental health system” still pushing stigmatizing labels and psychiatric drugs through the U.S. Indian Health Service. Our efforts soon involved over thirty community leaders and allies and culminated in the 2004 launch of Níix Ttáwaaxt Receiving Home to care for homeless or displaced Native youth.

This first phase took off with a unanimous resolution of support from Yakama Nation Tribal Council. I took part in this meeting by outlining our program to the council. After I finished, I witnessed Kala speak on its behalf before they voted on the resolution.

With some amusement, I listened as she cajoled, scolded, lectured, admonished, loved, and encouraged them to recognize the sacredness of children by supporting our efforts. She spoke only in Ichishkíin Sinwit, but I’d heard enough words by then to recognize her powerful advocacy as several heads lowered in respectful listening.

Those were glory days we shared together, but our program was too poorly funded to survive very long. It was excruciating for me to be the one to pull the plug, but I didn’t want any potential blame to fall on her or anyone else in the community. We simply didn’t have enough will from funding stakeholders back then to make our program sustainable.

Yet the Twelve Virtues of Níix Ttáwaaxt Kala created have survive in the hearts and spirits of many people to this day. And with her permission, they survive right here on my website for any and all to read and benefit from (please see my last blog post!).

She was always very glad to share these Virtues with anyone who’d contemplate them deeply and in the positive spiritual light she herself presented them. She told me she’d not intended the Virtues to be only for Native people. She felt all people could benefit from these Yakama teachings about living as a “real human being.”

It is both strange and beautiful for me to think of the Virtues now as part of her legacy. They are a gift she’s left for us.

Please don’t just read through them – but instead consider them as suggestions for living your life right now, today.

It’s a powerful realization for me to consider that without Kala, none of what we did with the Níix Ttáwaaxt program would have ever happened. As far as I know, no one had ever imagined such a radically Indigenous effort might be focused upon what “behavioral health” really means by using a Yakama epistemology, or way of “knowing,” at its center.

I believe this vision must survive. But who else will take up her vision of Níix Ttáwaaxt?

I’m getting older and perhaps a little out of touch. I’m not sure who remains who believes in what she and I were trying to make happen for so many years.

She was my ally, and I was hers. I would never have been able to leave behind the total dysfunction of the Yakama Indian Health Service Clinic without having the Níix Ttáwaaxt program to go to as program manager. My own career path and my family’s economic survival came about through her vision, and it in turn was a vision she’d carried forward on behalf of her own ancestors. I knew this then from her, and I proclaim it still.

From the start of our friendship, Kala fully understood I’d been raised and socialized a white EuroAmerican man. Yet when I finally – shyly and awkwardly – shared with her stories my paternal grandmother had told me about our Cherokee ancestors, she immediately called me “mixed blooded” and claimed she’d always known I was less “white” than I thought of myself. Instead of shaming me as some sort of “wannabe,” she challenged me to work hard to more fully embrace my own “bloodline,” including every ancestor encircling my life, Native and European.

On numerous occasions, she held out to me my own life as “a sacred gift of the Creator.” She periodically talked this same way for many years, and about eighteen months before she died, I even noted down some of her remarks:

“I remember you when we were doing our work together over at the Tribal school. I listened to you talk with the kids we were working with and I said, ‘this man thinks like me.’ And I know you have your bloodline but I don’t recall what tribe, but I knew it was your bloodline helping you to speak. And you said other people were telling you that you weren’t Indian because you don’t look that ways. You don’t look like they think an Indian should look. And you asked me if you should cut your braid because of what the other people were saying. I asked you, ‘are you going to be doing what they want you to do just because of what they say?’ And you said, ‘no, I guess not.’ And that’s what I remember because I told you ‘it’s in your bloodline,’ and I don’t remember what tribe it was, but your bloodline was helping you to speak with those kids in that ways. That’s what it is. Yes, I remember that.”

I wore the braid she mentioned until I encountered a grief big enough to shear it. I still have it because she taught me: “Your hair is a part of your sacred body and should be buried with you.” Since Kala (who some called “Mina”) has walked on, I’ve wondered how many other people might recall similar moments of care and regard?

She told me and many others her own family stories many times. Her grandmother, who’d suffered at Fort Simcoe Boarding School, knew first hand “what the white people were trying to do to us” in their brutally abusive coercion of children to abandon their Native language and their religious and cultural beliefs.

Her grandmother and each of her aunties vowed to raise one of their grandchildren in the traditional ways that still survived in the late 1930s. Kala said she began to wonder about her own place in her family when she was an older child and saw her siblings living with her parents. She asked her grandmother, who simply explained, “You are different.”

Kala’s very life was always about this mission sustained by her grandmother and aunties to keep Yakama tradition alive and thriving. for example, she was expected to help in the preserving and canning of food harvested from her grandfather’s several allotment farms. Most of this food would be given away to the community.

Here was an example of the Níix Ttáwaaxt Virtue of piná ɨwaat ku kw’ałáni – ‘he or she gives it all away’ – self-denial, gratitude and humility.

When she was a young girl, she’d sometimes complain to her grandmother – “Why do I have to work so hard on all this stuff if we’re just going to give it away??”

Her grandmother would correct her, suggesting if she’d paid better attention to her Creator in her morning prayers, she’d be more grateful to be in the position she was in the family of a leader.

She was reminded she was part of royalty, and this meant a duty to others that permeated Kala’s very being for the rest of her life.

She told me she spoke only Ichishkíin Sinwit until she was seven years old or so and was sent to public school. She described it as being “sent away” and “coming home” on breaks, but not as a boarding school, so I was never quite sure what she meant.

She was clear, however, about the ridicule she endured from her teacher and classmates as a “backwards Indian girl,” who didn’t know English. She’d grown up until then playing outside on the land, swimming and riding horses with her sisters, and she had little interest in the “dolls or toys” of the white girls she met.

How was she – royalty – ever supposed to fit in with the insults, shaming, and daily humiliation from these white children? Her grandmother only told her, “You must become the best among them by representing the best among us.”

Eventually, a tribal helper at the school assisted as translator, and she mastered English. Some years later, she earned a nursing license, and further on, a masters degree in education. Before retiring, she’d been honored as Educator of the Year by the Washington State Indian Education Association.

I knew her for twenty-two years and never saw her stray an inch from her traditional principles nor relinquish her passionate views about who her people could become, her optimism about their potential to rise up from the ongoing oppression of the “so-called dominant society,” despite knowing first-hand, better than many people, their suffering to the core of her being. In a long article about her family in the Yakama Nation Review in April, 2006, she challenged her own community:

“Our language was taken, our foods are being destroyed, our lands poisoned, water made unfit to drink, destruction of our natural forests, and no more salmon. This is what we were given by our Great White Father. This is our reward for becoming civilized. Civilization and assimilation were so great to the point that our children are acting like the dominant society with their learned behavior. Self destructive, and no respect for self or others. This was not our way of life.”

Other stories she shared with me depicted her hard travail. Wild young adult years she’d transcended. . . loss upon loss of treasured loved ones, including a beloved son and a missing sister. . . and always situated nearby Kala’s abidingly loving nature was her fierce protectiveness of children and youth, who she regarded as the living future of her own people.

In her early days, walking in on the physical abuse of a youngster. . .

“What did you do, Kala?”

“I went and got my pistol. Then, I shot out the back window of his truck while he raced off . . .” she chuckled, “Never came around there again.”

Carrying a baseball bat through a housing project community park to have a “conversation” with a youth gang . . .

“Not in my neighborhood.”

She didn’t mince words. After all, she was a language expert and specialist.

In my own life, there are very few hearts I’ve encountered as strong as hers. Her life is a role model for the Path of the Heart, and I will always cherish her friendship and her memory.

Not surprisingly, Kala was very supportive of my book, Coyote’s Swing: A Memoir & Critique of Mental Hygiene in Native America. I never could have asked her for an endorsement – she was far too much part of the fabric of it!

But we spoke of this book often, enthusiastically, and I do think she felt it was somehow her own project too. She often coached and encouraged me when I’d get bogged down during the seven years it took to complete.

And she never gave up on the project she’d begun well before I ever started writing Coyote’s Swing.

Me.

And so I stand and raise my right hand to the Creator on her behalf, and I touch my heart in her memory.

I have spoken of my cherished Kala and said my farewell.