OSEU One: April Fallis– “Crooked Gut”

She used to bring families home. It wouldn't be kids. It would be the whole family she would bring home, and she would help them and her, by teaching us how to make bread. And my brothers taught me how to skin the deer, even how to cut it. And I was like, oh my gosh, clean chickens the whole bit. We had to do all of that when we were younger. So having that teaching, also knowing, you know, the way that we survived when we were younger, what our parents did, there was always… We never did go hungry in our home because my dad hunted. And as the boys got older, my brothers and they went and did the hunting and we'd always have meat. The girls would have to stay home and pick the feathers or clean the chickens, gut them, actually gut them and scall them and oh my gosh. So we knew that. We knew how to do that. So when I was getting older, my brothers got married, brought their, brought their LAKOTA WORD back. That was so crazy sometimes. And my sister-in-law came and said you know “Ew! Ew!” because we were…one of our favorite foods is the LAKOTA WORD, the stomach of the cows. So we were cleaning it and my brother and my mom, we'd get the weird stuff outside and we'd bring it in and he was standing at the sink with her, standing at the sink with her. And they called it. There's different names we had for it’too. April Fallis: [00:01:39] One was the crooked gut, the straight gut, the Bible, the washcloth, all of that…the radiator. Aw shucks. We were standing by the sink and my brother had one of those crooked guts and he'd put it around his sink to flush it out. And I was holding it on this side. And here his wife came over. “Get over here. You got to learn how to do this too.” and she said, “Rock!” That’s her favorite word. She'd say “Rock!” whenever he'd say something and she'd say, like, you could just tell in her face she didn't want to touch it or she didn't want to get close. And so I was holding it here and he was on that side with the sink. So he takes it off, takes them... the water goes all over. All over. My mom was laughing, and he said, “Son, don't be doing that!” she was saying to him. That was crazy because, I mean, to me, it was like that was a good thing. Everything that they taught us how to do and the ones that didn't know how to do it, we showed them how, especially the ones that came to our home. She brought families home. We taught them how to make bread. My mom would be kneading the bread and she'd have them. But it was just like always teaching there, you know. And so, I had a lot of that and I didn't want to lose none of that.