I recently received a testimony from a man whose mother and family were helped by Sun Bear. It is a truly touching, almost supernatural, tragic, and inspiring story. I’m sharing it with you as it was written to me by Black Cloud of the Chippewa Nation.

This December brings to a close a year of posts on Invocation Canada‘s Facebook and Instagram pages, whose themes throughout 2025 have been the Medicine Wheel of my mentor and teacher, the great medicine man of the Chippewa Nation, Sun Bear. So, this December, I will be offering several articles about this man who was my spiritual father.

The Story of White Hawk – by Black Cloud

White Hawk was my mother and the story I am telling is from information I was told by Sun Bear and many others who knew her. Since I was not born yet, I cannot personally attest to its accuracy but the people who contributed to it are a diverse cross section of my mother’s life and I feel that they were honest in their recounting of the events. I don’t have a complete time line as the details of her involvement with these people. Some of it was so hurtful that neither she or they would recount some of the things that happened but I will tell you what I believe to be true. I will use only the first names of the ones who held her as I will not speak their full names out of respect for my mother.

White Hawk was born on the White Horse Minnesota Reservation sometime in the late 1940’s. When she was around 4 or 5 she was stolen by a group of people from Kansas in order to be enslaved as a working hand on their farm. She only had one memory of her birth mother and she remembered that they lived by a river in a small shack, just her and her mother. When her mother got really sick, she started walking to a nearby community to get help and she was kidnapped on her way there.

I don’t know who did the kidnapping but she wound up with a family in Kansas. The matriarch of the family, Ruth, was a bitter and hatful woman who had little regard for human life; I knew her personally and will recount my memories of her in this story.

White Hawk was given the name Irene and was quickly put to work learning to cook meals, work in the garden, clean the house and feed the pigs among other duties. The long hard hours of work quickly erased her memories of her Mother and replaced them with avenues of survival.

Among the pigs on the farm there was a huge sow that was their breeder.  The sow hated humans with a passion but for some reason took a liking to White Hawk. So, when the sow would escape it was my mother who had to round her up and get her back into the pen. The sow would follow Mom like they were best friends and I think Mom found in the sow a kindred spirit in wanting to escape her bondage. She didn’t want Ruth to hurt the sow and, so, they taught each other how to survive. My mother taught the sow how to survive in captivity and the sow taught Mom how to be strong willed.

One day Mom burnt some biscuits she was making and Ruth started beating her so she ran to the pig pen and went in with the sow who had new piglets. Ruth couldn’t find her but she knew exactly where she would be, but when they tried to get Mom out, the sow attacked them and was protecting her like she was her own. So Ruth, in a fit of rage and meanness shot the sow and took mom to the basement and chained her to a bed. Mom was only 11 years old when that happened and Ruth kept her there, chained to that bed only letting her out to dump the chamber pot or do chores, until she was 18 years old. Can you even imagine that?

There had been talk of it in town and in the fall of Moms 18^th year a man named Mike Rhea, who was the head of the Masons there, went to the farm with the Sherriff and social service people and he cut the chains off of mom and took her out of that place. They sent her to a Convent in California where she stayed, recovering until she was 20. When they released her they got her a job doing landscaping and she was free, free from the Convent but not the trauma, it had faded but never really went away for the rest of her life. Mom was very beautiful even by today’s standards so men were always chasing her.  She married four different men and eventually had 8 children but she never stuck with a man for too long. She was too independent and would not submit and in those days that’s what a man expected from his wife. The first two husbands would not let her take the children with her. When she married Albert Murray who directly drank himself to death she had my older Brother, Walking Bear and they moved to Northern California to Redwood City and she met my Father, Leslie Paul Worel. He was Bohemian. He didn’t want any kids so Mom took him to court and was awarded child support when I was 6 weeks old but he never paid so she went back to Los Angeles and stayed there for a few years. Mom was always doing something to get into the papers, usually something spectacular. In one article she had said how she would like to live in a cabin in the mountains. Shortly after the article came out she got a letter from a man in Utah, a mister Moor, saying that she could live in his friend’s cabin in the Henry Mountains near Hanksville Utah. It belonged to a mister Hatt, so we picked up and moved there. As it turned out it was a log cabin without electricity or running water but there was a year round spring not far from the front door.

We lived there for a couple of winters. We ate mostly cactus and deer that mom shot, we didn’t have much but it felt more like home than any other place we had lived. Sure, we were hungry sometimes but we were happy. There was a place on the top of a butte that mom took me and my older brother, Walking Bear, that was completely flat. There the wind would blow around in circles and when it rained the wet sandy mud would roll into small balls that we called sand marbles. We would save them for winter when there was nothing to do and would play marble games that mom taught us. The sand would eventually break up and fall through the cracks in the floor. It was a fond memory I had of our time there.

Into the second year we were all losing weight pretty fast without proper food. In the early spring I went to the spring to take a bath in the half of an old water heater that served as a tub. I was at the spring taking a bath and a mountain lion was stalking me so my Mother shot it dead with her Winchester.  I was unaware that a mountain lion was stalking me, I didn’t see it until I heard the shot and when I looked up I could see mom standing by the lion . As luck would have it mister Moor showed up the next day to check on us and when mom showed him the lion he was completely shocked. He left and came back with the game warden and mister Hatt, they hung the lion from the eve of the cabin from the front paws ant the tail was  dragging the ground. It was a really big lion. The Game Warden couldn’t believe the size of the lion. It was the biggest lion ever seen in the Henry Mountain, 13 feet from the tip of the nose to the tip of the tail. Mom got a lot of news coverage from it and that’s how Sun Bear found out about a Chippewa woman and her two kids, living off the land in the mountains of Utah. They took pictures of it and put an article in the papers about how this Chippewa woman had shot this huge lion. Somehow Sun Bear saw the article about mom and called the sheriff and game warden and told them that mom was his sister and he needed to talk to her. Sun Bear had some pull so they listened to him. The warden came in on a helicopter and picked us up and took us to town to call Sun Bear. I don’t know what the conversation was like but a couple of days later Sun Bear had sent us money for bus tickets and food and we were off to Sun Valley NV where Sun Bear had a trailer park. It was a good thing he found us when he did because I believe we would have died up in those mountains if he hadn’t saved us. He took us in and made Mom the manager of his trailer park because she was good at fixing things.

We lived there for a couple of years in a trailer that Sun Bear bought us. Mom managed the trailer park and we lived behind the laundry house. Sun Bear was just starting Many Smokes and Mom was printing it out of the back of the laundry house on an old mimeograph machine. I used to help her sometimes and she would sure cuss that machine.

A year or so went by and Sun Bear was getting a divorce so he sold the trailer park but not before he got mom set up as a manager of a cabin complex in Oregon where he knew someone.

Mom kept in touch with Sun Bear through the years but we were kids so we were not included except to hear mom say that Sun Bear had said hi.

They kept in touch and Sun Bear performed her wedding ceremony when she married the father of my younger Brother, Grey Fox. After that, things got a little crazy like they do when you are a teenager but Sun Bear was always there for mom. He never left her side. They wrote letters to keep in touch. I wish I had thanked him but I didn’t know how special he was, I was too young to see it.