And now:Ish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
From: "Save Ward Valley" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: One more Elder gone to Spirit
Date: Mon, 29 Mar 1999 10:53:32 -0800
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-----Original Message-----
From: Jennifer Olaranna Viereck <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Date: Monday, March 29, 1999 12:23 AM
Subject: A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM ROSSE, SR
A TRIBUTE TO WILLIAM ROSSE, SR
Bill Rosse, a person dear to the hearts of many around the world, and
highly instrumental in bringing the Shoshone perspective on US nuclear
weapons testing into the public eye, passed over from this world on
March 27th. He was diagnosed with liver cancer two weeks before, and his
liver failed quickly. He was accompanied at the hospital by many family
members and Corbin Harney, a long time friend and Western Shoshone
Spiritual Leader. Services will be held at the First Baptist Church in
Fallon NV on Monday, March 29th at 1:00 pm, followed by graveside
service.
The following are excepts from an interview in the Citizen Alert
August 1996 newsletter. This is followed by comments in the same issue
by Carrie Dann. If you have stories to share about Bill, please forward
them to us, as we will be preparing a special tribute to him at the
�Honor Your Mother� Spring Gathering at the Test Site, May 7-10.
Bill was among many other things a board member of Citizen Alert,
Shundahai Network, the PooHaBah Healing Center, and a founding member of
the Healing Global Wounds Alliance.
____________________________________________________________________________
_____
I was never a reservation Indian, I was one of the landless Shoshones.
All my family, my mother, my dad, weren�t reservation Indians, they were
from the Hot Creek Valley, then they moved to the Smokey Valley. My dad
worked mines and things there- light enough to get away with it, passed
himself off as white or something, said that he was English. They
wouldn�t give Indians jobs. We got washed out, almost got drowned once.
It was an old forest service barn we was sleeping in, and this here
flash flood came down through, washed us out of there. there was this
little cave, we stayed in it for a week or so. I showed the family the
cave- it�s still there. It really wasn�t much of a cave, but it was a
place to stay. We were cave people. Hahaha.
I remember one time there was a pig pow wow down there, the Great
Smokey Valley. I remember I was having trouble breathing, I was down low
and they was stirring up all that dust, you know. And most things, I
don�t hardly remember. Just that and I remember this elevator in this
building in Tonapah, I walked up with my other.... And I remember being
in a funeral parlor there, being in my dad�s arms and seeing my mother
in her casket. I lost my mother when I was about four, five years old.
We were staying in Reno at that time, that was during Prohibition. they
hauled all the liquor up to the dump, my dad helped on that. So anyway,
we moved from there, moved to California, ended up in Bakersfield around
1931-32.
I�m just getting my roots back now, coming back and learning our ways.
I spent most of my life in California, working on farms, farmworker,
worked in the fields, grapes, cotton, the last 22 years of my working
life I worked for one man, 16 years I was his foreman. I spent most of
my life in Bakersfield. I went into the military in Bakersfield, came
out then went back into the Marine Corps. My brother got drafted, and a
month later I went down and reenlisted, wanted to see if I could be with
him, take care of him. It didn�t work out that way, I passed him up
going through boot camp. I went on overseas, sent on to Guam for jungle
training, and instead of that we went in as replacements at Okinawa.
Right after Iwo Jima. I spent 20 days there altogether, actually 28
days, because I went in there 28th of May 1945 and I got wounded the
18th of June, and the 26th of June I was off the island, when they
secured the island. Got a piece of shrapnel about that long- it was the
only souvenir I got. I think it was off of one of our naval ships.
Didn�t know how I would take it, getting wounded and all that stuff, but
I managed all right. It wasn�t that bad.
That was the last fighting they did before they dropped those bombs
over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I was in the hospital in Guam at the time
they dropped the bomb, and heard about it just as soon as they dropped
the first one, and then the second one. There was a lot of cheering
going on, a lot of celebrating, but it wasn�t much of a celebration,
there was so much rain going on. I�ve always felt that they didn�t need
to drop those bombs, that it was more of a test. They didn�t want the
Soviets to declare was on Japan, didn�t want Japan to surrender to them,
and so this is what that hurry-up was about.
I came in on one of those hospital ships, it was one of those converted
Liberty ships, made of wood, and boy, coming across, you could hear that
thing creak and groan like it was coming apart. Anyway we made it there;
I celebrated my 19th birthday on the ship. I stayed in San Francisco
three days. We got out one night, walked downtown, man every time a car
backfired, I was hitting the ground. I didn�t recuperate too good, I
guess, because I wasn�t too good in the Veteran�s Day parade. Couldn�t
keep up with them. ...they had to give me a medical discharge, got
discharged December 13, 1945, my lucky day, 13.
I went back to Bakersfield, stayed there, trying to work the fields,
then I ran across her [his wife, who was sitting next to Bill as he
talked.] Her and her sister happened to be walking across the fields one
night, asked her if she wanted to go to the movies, she didn�t want to
go to the movies, kept on talking to her, I don�t know how I ever done
that. Met her in April of �46, just a little bit before her birthday,
her birthday�s April 6. then I went back and asked if I could see her
again, and her car broke down and so we had to leave it down there,
battery charging, and walked up there where she was supposed to live,
and we talked, had a soda, down at one of them drugstore fountains, and
by June 9th of �46 we were married. Didn�t waste a lot of time. so our
first child was born in �47, July 22 of 1947, that was Bill Jr. We had
four boys, two girls, and then three more boys. It was a nice sized
family to raise. At the time I was making maybe one thousand dollars a
month, which wasn�t a lot of money, but was pretty good to raise a
family, feed �em, clothe �em. Farm work never did pay very much. that�s
one of the reasons I left, if I was white I would probably be getting
two or three thousand dollars a month. I�m a good friend with him [his
boss on the ranch] anyway.
In 1973 I decided it was time to start for home, and moved here in
1974, gave my boss a year�s notice. Trained one of the young Mexican
guys to run the ranch. I was starting to learn my heritage again,
finding out I got a lot of kinfolk, all over the country, mostly in
Duckwater. Just about everyone over here is related to me in a way,
cousins and such. I didn�t realize I had so many kinfolks. Indian ways,
you got a lot of kinfolks. My kids all followed us, except my daughter
who still lives at the rancher�s place. They kind of come back to the
land and come back to the native ways a little bit. they�re still
learning, like me, how to be with the land and how to take care of
Mother Earth and everything, and they�re learning pretty good.
I was adopted to this tribe, because I was never from this reservation
or anything, I lived here for a year before I could get adopted to it,
that was 1975, and then in 1981 I became tribal chairman. That was when
I started in, I guess- fighting the MX missile deal, because one of my
first duties was to go over to Duckwater. They was having a meeting, and
one of them people was talking about the MX missile they was going to
put in there. Anyway I got involved in it like that. I got to thinking,
well it ain�t going to be bothering us down here, but they was getting
to putting it into Ione Valley and Smokey Valley, here, all these
valleys that they was going to put this MX in, so we started to fighting
it. We fought it until it came to a standstill.
It�s been a real struggle all the way through, and then the Soviets
finally give up. All this time the United States saying, no you can�t
believe them, and you can believe all those other people better than you
can believe the United States. They talk double talk all the time, they
say one thing but they mean something else. You can start believing them
when they start honoring all these treaties, maybe you can believe them
then. But until that time, no. We�ll fight them tooth and nail for
everything that�s there. Marine Corps taught me to pick the biggest
opponent and fight that one, if you win that one, nobody else want to
fight you. Who�s bigger than the US government?
Pauline [Esteves] and I went down to the Test Site in 1986. They [the
Western Shoshone] weren�t involved at all until I came back and said, we
talk about owning all this land here, but not a thing have we done about
the Test Site. They�re testing on our land, they�re bombing us. They
made me chairman of the environmental protection committee. We got
involved in that there testing and all, and people all over the world
know about us now..
I feel like the Creator been keeping me here for a purpose. Probably
this is what that purpose is, what I�m doing now. Cause it seems like
he�s always seeing that I get to where I need to be. Then he puts the
words in my mouth, I don�t know what to say, the words are there, I
can�t write� em down because I can�t control �em.
It�s interesting how he works. Because there�s so many times I wasn�t
supposed to be here. In terms of my health, in terms of accidents and
other things that happened to me. One of the first things that ever
happened to me was that flash flood. I was about 4 years old and my
brother and I got caught in it, another time when I was about 7 or 8, we
played hooky from school and dug a hole in this sand hill bank. It
collapsed on me. All that was sticking out was my legs from the knee
down, and my brother finally dug me out of that. I was in a boating
accident, was the only one that survived that, Santa Maria we went in at
and San Luis Obispo I ended up at.
It was about 1957, about September the 28th, 1957, we went out to go
fishing. We went out there in the morning, out into Morro Bay. When we
seen it get rough I threw a couple of life jackets back for the other
guys and got one for myself, and we was hanging onto the keel, every
time a wave came it knocked us off, two or three hours. I floated into
shore. Good thing the tide was going in. There was a couple of times I
almost got shot. When I got wounded, it was an overhead burst, a naval
shell, bust overhead at treetop level, shrapnel rained down on me, I was
running bent over, how it hit me here and not in my head I�ll never
know.
It seemed like it was his work that I survived all that.
CARRIE DANN: I first met Bill at a Western Shoshone National Council
(WSNC) meeting in Duckwater in the early �80s. He said that he was
originally from Yomba, but had been gone for a long time and wanted to
know what was going on in Shoshone country. He soon became involved with
the WSNC as a representative of the Yomba people. Bill was appointed to
the WSNC as one of the environmental persons to watch over the nuclear
testing. To this appointment, he was most dedicated, traveling across
the country and the globe to bring nuclear testing to a stop. He served
on may different boards on behalf of the Western Shoshone people as
well. As he said, �We can�t destroy our mother, the Earth.�
Bill has always been an energetic person, he volunteered for the jobs
no one else wanted to do and somehow managed to accomplish these tasks.
After his heart bypass surgery, he told me that he had a lot to do yet,
and that it couldn�t wait. He said, �I�d be happy to die doing what I�m
doing. I believe with all my soul that what I�m doing is right.�
He spent many hours on the road traveling to the different meetings and
commitments he was involved with. He, of course, traveled at high speeds
at times, burning out some motors on vehicles that didn�t belong to him.
But his children kept Bill on the road, I�m sure many times putting bits
and pieces together of two vehicles or more.
Bill is an accomplished guitar player and also sings. Music is one of
his great loves and a great way to forget the stress of the day simply
by singing a song. I remember in the eighties, about seven of went
downtown in Austin after a late meeting. we went to some joint and Bill
played and sang for us. He told us about his past problem with alcohol,
and how he no longer drank. He acted just as nutty anyway and had as
much fun and remembered better than those who drank.
Bill was not paid for his work for the Western Shoshone people. He
returned home to dedicate his life to the traditional cause.
--
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Info about Spring Mother's Day Gathering, May 7-10, 1999 at
http://www.shundahai.org/HGW/
Healing Global Wounds: PO Box 420, Tecopa CA 92389-0420 USA
Phone 760-852-4175 Fax 760-852-4151 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Coordinator: Jennifer Olaranna Viereck
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HGW is a multi-cultural alliance of organizations and individuals
seeking restoration of respectful sustainable living with the Earth. We
coordinate a Spring and Fall Gathering at the Nevada Nuclear Test Site.
Events combine education on issues, community and skills building, daily
spiritual ceremony and taking personal nonviolent action to break every
link in the nuclear chain.
HGW is proud to be a member of the Abolition 2000 Global Network.
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Tsonkwadiyonrat (We are ONE Spirit)
Unenh onhwa' Awayaton
http://www.tdi.net/ishgooda/
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