Skip to main contentOn Margo Guajardo's right arm is the tattoo "N8ive Pride." It may be callous to ask what she has to be proud of. Callous, but not entirely inappropriate.
By traditional standards, Margo's own life story has not been one of triumph. Twenty years old, she has two kids, one of whom was fathered by Margo's uncle. She is unemployed, unmarried and largely unmoored. She does not know much about her biological mother, other than that she was once a prostitute. She has no relationship with her father. She has a history of drug and alcohol addiction.
And she has $103 in her bank account.
At times, it appears Margo's existence is as fragile as the plastic hairclips that hold open the burgundy curtains on the front window of her outer Southeast Portland home.
But Margo, a member of the Mnicoujou band of the Cheyenne River Sioux tribe (also known as the Lakota), does have reason to be proud.
As a Native American, Margo belongs to Portland's most disenfranchised minority, one whose members face challenges that dwarf the hurdles confronting Portland's other marginalized communities.
While media and political pressure is focused yet again this week on the rights of illegal immigrants, her story is a reminder of a different minority that receives far less attention.
It's a story that's 400 years old, not 40. And it's a story that is often hidden under a shroud of obscurity as dangerous and as seemingly benign as a warm blanket infected with small pox.
"The U.S. worries more about Mexican people being here illegally," says Margo, whose biological father was Mexican. "You hear more about that because it's OK to talk about."
By several measures, the Native American experience in Portland stinks.
According to the most recent figures from the city's Bureau of Housing and Community Development, Native Americans and Alaskan Natives comprise 10 percent of the homeless population.
Yet they comprise only about 1 percent of the city's overall population, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
A recent Portland Schools Foundation study revealed Native American students in 2004 had the lowest high-school graduation rate of any ethnic group.
More than 13 percent of all foster-care cases in the state in 2005 involved Native American youth, although Native American children made up only 1.3 percent of Oregon's under-18 population.
And while the numbers are not available locally, Native Americans have the highest rates of suicide, binge drinking and poverty of any minority group in the United States, according to various government sources. They also have the lowest median income, according to the Census in 2000.
The situation is no less bleak for Native Americans in the criminal justice system. "Native American youth are disproportionately showing up in the correctional system at a higher rate than any group but African Americans," says Barry Krisberg, president of the National Council on Crime and Delinquency, a California-based advocacy group.
Compared with the overall state population, the official number of Native Americans in Oregon is small indeed, less than 2 percent.
But while Portland is the 23rd-largest metropolitan area in the United States, the Portland area also has the ninth-largest Native American population in the U.S., about 38,000 people.
Still, the plight of Native Americans may be one of the untold secrets of the "minority beat" in modern-day journalism. Rarely does one read about members of the 300 tribes represented in Portland. Even rarer is a discussion of what is causing Native Americans to fall behind—or what is preventing them from advancing. What does remain in the news is talk of the nine Indian casinos in Oregon. And although profits at the nine casinos vary widely from tribe to tribe and not every tribal member in Oregon is entitled to money from those operations, many people continue to assume that the benefits of Indian gambling are spread among all Native Americans.
What follows is a photo essay about a young Portland woman whose life is both a confirmation of some startling statistics defining what it means to be Native American today and a rebuke of the forces that cast a shadow on her valued heritage.
It was Margo's arrest at the age of 14 that began her ascent from hell and led her to create the family she has today.
For most of her life, Margo bounced between foster-care families and relatives' houses in Texas, where she was born, and South Dakota, where her tribe is based.
But at the age of 9, Margo and her younger half-sister Roxanne Ashley moved to Sheridan, near McMinnville, to live with their uncle and his wife.
In 2001, when Margo was caught along with friends for stealing and crashing one friend's mother's car, she was arrested and placed in juvenile detention in McMinnville. As she was about to be released back into the custody of her uncle, she told an officer there was something she wanted to share. Her uncle, Margo said, had been molesting and raping her since she was 9. Weeks later, Margo would discover that she was five months pregnant with her uncle's child.
Her uncle, Art Ashley, would ultimately be sentenced to nearly 48 years at the Snake River Correctional Facility in eastern Oregon on 27 counts—including five counts of rape in the first degree, four counts of rape in the second degree and 18 counts of sexual abuse in the first degree, for incidents spanning a period of nearly three years. According to the U.S. Department of Justice's Bureau of Justice Statistics, the sexual-assault rate among Native Americans is double that for all other races.
Margo calls her daughter Lexi, who's now nearly 6, her "magic" baby.
Even given the circumstances, Margo considers the moment of Lexi's birth to be a moment of rebirth for her, too.
"I'll never be his friend," Margo says of her uncle. "I'll never like him. But I've come to let go of what he's done. [Lexi's birth] opened my eyes to adulthood and to adult responsibility. I had a lot to learn, and it took me a few years after I had her to understand what I had taken on."
Two years after Lexi was born in 2001, Margo entered drug and alcohol treatment, and for another two years she was under the thumb of caseworkers who monitored her schooling, her finances and her parenting. It was during this time period that she moved to Portland.
"I guess I have major authority issues because I've been in the system all my life," says Margo, whose sentences are frequently followed by nervous giggles. "Once I got to the age I could do something about it, I took charge and kicked them to the curb," she said—before laughing quietly.
Last year, Margo and her boyfriend, Tony Ream, who is an enrolled member of the Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde, decided to get married when Tony turned 21. He is now 17. Maellina is their 8-month-old daughter.
Margo met Tony, who has green eyes and black hair that he sometimes slicks back like John Travolta in Grease, in the summer of 2005 at a college-prep program sponsored by the Native American Youth and Family Center. "I talked to him first," Margo says. "I told him he looked like a porcupine," because he had dyed the tips of his hair blond. "No, a hedgehog," she said, correcting herself and insulting him at the same time.
Back then, Margo was still living at the Salvation Army's White Shield Center, an independent living program in Northwest Portland for pregnant and parenting teens. She had pink bangs, tattoos and piercings. "I liked that he was different and unique and that he wasn't afraid to say he liked soft music like Mariah Carey," Margo says. He was "hip-hop," she adds. She was punk. He was a virgin, and she already had a young child. He was 15. She was 18.
As an enrolled member of the Grand Ronde, Tony belongs to Oregon's wealthiest group of tribes. When he turns 21 he will be given at least enough money to afford a down payment on a comfortable house. Meanwhile, Margo is from one of the country's poorest tribes, which does not have a casino or the money to pay its members dividends. "[The other teenagers] thought I was an ex-druggie who was trying to get with a goodie two-shoes."
They do have one common bond: Tony's mother was also a prostitute. He has nine brothers and sisters who all have different fathers.
Margo and her two children get by on food stamps and welfare checks, and her life is filled with the endless errands that are required to maintain that public assistance. For instance, Margo must meet periodically with nutritionists and caseworkers who monitor the children's well-being. Since she was forced to drop out of Portland Community College this spring (after her scholarship fell through), she's had to meet regularly with another caseworker to discuss her efforts at finding a job.
And for the most part she relies on the buses that pass near her home to run those errands. Her life, she says, often feels like one long waiting game.
The No. 71 and 72 bus lines order her existence.
Margo relies on the money she collects from the agencies she's required to visit periodically. Her monthly rent is $700. She receives $400 in food stamps a month, plus an additional $400 in welfare. Tony, who works at New Seasons, helps to cover the rest.
Margo says she would rather not depend on state agencies for support. She finds caseworkers' guidance patronizing and cold at times.
Signs posted on the walls of one of Portland's welfare offices instruct visitors in all manner of things: cover your mouth, don't sit on the windowsill, do not adjust the curtains. No food or drink.
"It's a passive-aggressive way of telling parents, 'Watch your children,'" Margo says.
There's also a children's play area with a small table but no toys.
Margo is there on a recent Tuesday for the second time in two weeks to try to exchange the baby-formula vouchers she has for vouchers that will allow her to buy another brand, one that won't upset Maellina's stomach. In the intervening days she's been using her food stamps to cover the $14 cans of formula Maellina prefers, which last only three days.
While waiting, Margo says she and Tony are hoping to move from outer Southeast Portland to Southwest Portland in the fall to be closer to Portland Community College's Sylvania campus, where Tony plans to enroll.
But Margo says she feels as if some neighborhoods have landlords who would not accept her rental applications because she is on welfare and doesn't have a job.
"It sucks knowing that there are homes you'll never live in," Margo says.
Nichole Maher, 28, is one of the most vocal advocates for Native Americans in the Portland area. An Alaskan Native from the Tlingit tribe, Maher has turned the Native American Youth and Family Center from a relatively shoestring operation with a budget of $280,000 in 2001 to a $4 million nonprofit agency in 2007.
She is outspoken in her criticism of practices and policies that do not support or respect Native Americans, especially children.
To some extent she also represents a new wave of Native American activism.
"We were always just taught to stand back and watch," says Darlene Foster, a 60-year-old member of the Warm Springs tribes, who is a case manager at the Native American Rehabilitation Association in Portland.
Tabitha Whitefoot, the 52-year-old coordinator for Portland State University's Native American Student and Community Center, who attended Lewis & Clark College in the 1970s, echoes Foster's sentiment. "When people like us went through school, we had to make a choice about whether we were going to be Native American or successful in the dominant culture," Whitefoot says. "They were very oppositional."
Today, Maher and others are fighting for recognition of Native American customs, which she considers a crucial element of the struggle to minimize the effects of poverty and harmful government policies on Native Americans in Portland.
"Systematic government interventions that took place up until 1978 created social conditions that broke down the family, broke down the culture and exposed a lot of our children to abuse and neglect," Maher says. "You can't do what the U.S. government has done to our community for a few hundred years and not expect there to be some consequences. The reality is our children are still paying a price for what happened. It's absolutely obvious that our children and probably our children's children—unless we do something very differently—will continue to pay a very steep price for being born into our community."
N8ive Pride is essential, she says.
"There are so many messages in this community that we're not welcome," Maher says, rattling off a litany of stereotypes about Indians found on cigarette packages, among sports franchises and in the media. "We're very unique in that we want to do everything that we can to hold on to our culture. We tried assimilation for 300 years. We're not interested in that. It hasn't done anything positive for us."
One date Margo remembers just as clearly as the birthdays of her two daughters is Oct. 8, 2005, the day she left White Shield in Northwest Portland. "I was waiting for that day to come," Margo says. "I was only supposed to be there for nine to 12 months."
Instead she was there for 20 months, during which time she earned her high-school diploma and attended classes at the Native American Rehabilitation Association and the Native American Youth and Family Center. During this time, she strengthened her ties to her Native American heritage.
Yet Margo and Tony are both acutely aware that much of Portland does not share their interest in Native American history and culture. At times, that indifference reaches offensiveness.
At a Lloyd Center event recently, Margo wore her colorful regalia and participated in a Native American dance. Passersby said, "It's a little early for costumes."
Margo's younger sister Roxanne was disappointed to learn she would not be permitted to wear an eagle feather in the tassel of her cap at her graduation from Portland's Marshall High School last month. But in a mildly subversive gesture she carried the eagle feather instead—and wore a satchel of dried sage for good luck under her robe.
"A lot of people think we were wiped out," Tony says. "No one really talks about our culture—in schools especially. They talk about so many other cultures but not Native culture."
"They just figure there aren't that many," Margo says.
At the same time, both Margo and Tony struggle to assert their Native American identity. Margo's last name, Guajardo, leads many people to believe she is fully Latina. And Tony's comparatively pale skin and green eyes throw other people off, too. Some people simply don't believe he's Native American.
"Even my own family kind of discriminated against me," Tony says. "I'm Native American, though. That's how I see it. I still want a little more tone to me, because I just like the way it looks."
Margo says, "I don't care how much you are of anything, you are who you identify as."
WWeek 2015