Williams began by introducing himself and explaining why he was there. He said he’d been a Marine officer so he knew how things went, and after they rubbed globes and anchors together and a rapport had been established, he shifted smoothly into an interview mode that directed without leading Lonetree through a detailed, thorough personal narrative, from birth to the brig.
Clayton Lonetree told his life story in a flat, quiet, matter-of-fact voice. He said he was born on November 6, 1961, in Chicago, and that a brother, Craig Lonetree, was born two years later, and a half sister, Valerie, several years after that. He said his parents were from two different tribes and they had never married but he had been given his father’s name. He said his strongest memories from childhood were his parents’ arguments. “Sometimes it got pretty vicious,” he whispered softly.
When asked, Lonetree answered he was never really comfortable when he was young. Maybe it was because he was never in one place long enough to make friends. Or because he and his brother were continually passed back and forth between their parents. “My mom and dad didn’t get along,” he said in a way that underscored that it was an understatement. Whichever parent the children were with would try to turn them against the other parent. Clayton said he used to cry at school thinking about the terrible things his father said about his mother. During this time, he said, he lived in terror of his father because of his drinking. “It got so bad, just the smell of alcohol used to scare me.”
The intense loneliness of his childhood was poignantly rendered when Lonetree admitted that to get away he would ride his bike, climb trees, and draw pictures.
As he took all this down on a yellow lined legal pad, Tom Williams found himself thinking how sociological it sounded. Clayton’s mother would not have been the first young Indian woman to leave the reservation for the city and have a love affair with an urban Indian from another tribe, which led straight to an unplanned pregnancy, economic difficulties, and alcohol abuse, a separation and custody battles, with the kids caught in the middle and pulled in opposite directions. Often it ended in tragedy. In this case, according to Clayton, it ended in a kidnapping. Parenthood apparently not only highlighted the wrongness of the relationship, it turned the mother vindictive, along the lines of the woman who avenges herself upon a faithless husband by stealing his sons.
“In 1969 my mother stole us. We were living with my father and she came and got us and said she was taking us on a vacation to Canada. But it was a lie. She took us to an orphanage in Farmington, New Mexico.”
Farmington was a border town near the Navajo Reservation. The orphanage, Navajo Gospel Missions, was run by evangelical Baptists who believed that time spent in Christian homes would go a long way toward healing the emotional scars that grew out of broken families. It catered exclusively to illegitimate and abandoned Navajo children, who were boarded in cottages and raised by Christian houseparents drawn to this kind of service. According to Lonetree, his mother stayed with them for several months, working at the orphanage as a cook until she lost her job, and when that happened she left, virtually abandoning them.
Clayton said he was eight years old and a shy and easily frightened boy at the time; and when he realized his mom was gone, he was devastated. For months he stumbled around in a depression, sulking, refusing to talk to anybody. Making things even more difficult for him, once his mother was no longer around, the older kids at the orphanage began to pick on his brother because Craig had a cleft palate. Even though he’d had an operation and spent hours in speech therapy, when he spoke his voice sounded as if it were coming out his nose.
At night the Lonetree boys would cry together, wondering what they had done that no one wanted them. When his grief became almost unbearable, Clayton said, he came up with a plan to get even. In an act of self-defense performed as consciously and deliberately as ripping their pictures out of a magazine and tearing them into small pieces, he disowned his parents in his mind.
For most of the interview so far, Lonetree had spoken in laconic, toneless phrases that were clearly intended to deny or disguise his emotions. But at certain times his voice quavered and his eyes would glisten, conveying enormous pain. This was one of those times.
Clayton and his brother remained at the orphanage for five years, and if nothing else they were five years of relative stability. He attended public school, where he was an average student. He received extensive religious training, and if he wasn’t one of the “success stories” who would stand in front of an audience and deliver a life-transforming testimony about how God and Navajo Gospel Missions had rescued him and given direction to his life, he did come out of it believing in Christian principles. The exciting tales of missionary experiences in foreign lands had also created an intense desire in him to travel someday and see the world.
Other than that, Clayton portrayed himself as an ordinary boy who played Little League baseball in the summer, watched football on TV in the fall, and loved things military. He could play with toy soldiers all day. While still in elementary school he was talking about joining the service when he grew up.
When Clayton was thirteen, his life took another sharp turn with the return of his mother. So glad was he to have her back, he quickly forgot the business about disowning her. But his willingness to forgive was short-lived, for Sally had not come back to reunite their family; she was returning to the Southwest with a husband and two new children.
It was about this same time that his father, Spencer Lonetree, resurfaced. He said he had been searching for them for years and only recently learned where they were. And he invited Clayton and Craig to St. Paul for the Christmas holidays, sweetening the deal by promising to take them to a Minnesota Vikings football game. When they begged Sally to let them go, she was reluctant at first, but in a conciliatory gesture she gave in.
As it would turn out, the vacation package was just a ruse on Spencer’s part. He had no intention of letting them return. He knew that once he’d retrieved his boys, Sally would not have the wherewithal to come and get them.
Spencer was married at the time to a white woman Clayton said he actually took a liking to and who he thought liked him, until she issued his father an ultimatum: “The kids go or I do.” After she left, Spencer and his sons moved into a third-floor apartment in a building that overlooked a junkyard and rail lines on the East Side of St. Paul, a working-class community of whites, blacks, Hispanics, and “reservation migrants” of Lakota, Ojibway, and Winnebago descent. There, under a rekindled sense of parental responsibility, Spencer set about undoing the harm he believed had been inflicted on his sons by their mother and Navajo Gospel Missions.
Likening himself to the fictional and movie character The Great Santini, Spencer was a strict disciplinarian who converted his home into a virtual boot camp. Church was for sissies, he said, and he forbade them to read the Bible. Physical discipline and conditioning should be a part of the daily routine, and each morning, in the predawn darkness, without regard to the frigid Minnesota winters, he would lead them on a jog around Lake Phalen. He expected them to pitch in around the house with the cooking and cleaning, and he insisted on perfect attendance at school and good grades. All this was part of the necessary preparation for a triumphant entrance into American society, according to Spencer, because they were Indians.