By Kara Shire
Valley Times

July 3, 2001

LIVERMORE — The note looked like most passed from hand to hand in the hallways of any American high school. Just a note from a friend, Smoke Johnson thought when it tumbled from her locker.

But the message scrawled inside would jar her spirit, alter her path and thrust her to the head of the cultural class at Livermore High School.

"It said, 'I don't know what she's so proud of. She's just a dumb Indian,"" recalled Smoke, a 16-year-old Walker River Paiute and Canadian Mohawk Nation Indian. "And then it said, 'We should have killed them all while we had the chance.'"

Smoke, an outgoing girl with long, thick hair and penetrating brown eyes, was stunned and angry. She had become the target of racism, and she knew she couldn't let it go.

Six months later, Smoke is focused on a single goal: Leave a legacy of cultural acceptance at her school, which has battled racial insensitivity ever since an ethnic slur was scrawled on a campus bench last fall.

"We have a lot of diversity on campus, the problem is no one's meshing," said Smoke.

Though far from diverse, her school is one of the more culturally varied high schools in the area, with nearly 25 percent of the school's 1,936 students declaring themselves something other than white.

But there aren't many American Indians on campus, and Smoke was tired of people asking if she lived in a teepee. This fall, after not showing much interest in school, Smoke joined a campus diversity group and took the reins of the school's fledgling multicultural week.

Now called "Heritage Week," Smoke steered the event beyond the usual ethnic food samplings to actually teach kids about cultures surrounding them.

"I'm hoping this will be the thing Livermore High is known for _ that I'll come back in 10 years and it'll still be going," Smoke said.

Called "Smokey" by her friends, Smoke Johnson was born in San Francisco on a crisp spring day in 1985. She had almond-butter skin and big black eyes. Sick and suffering from withdrawals, Smoke wouldn't leave the hospital for two months.

Her mom and dad, in and out of jail and strung out on booze and drugs, were never allowed to take her home. At two months old, Smoke was put into foster care.

Nearly two years later _ on her second birthday _ Smoke's foster parents adopted her under the Indian Child Welfare Act. Passed by Congress in 1978, the act essentially gave American Indian people a say over their children. Under the act, Indian children must be placed within a American Indian home _ a major departure from the days when middle-class white homes were considered far superior for Indian adoptees.

"I consider myself one of the lucky ones," Smoke said. "I was adopted early on."

Smoke is, by all accounts, thriving. She's a resilient, rambunctious, Ricky Martin-loving teen with a deep love of her Indian heritage and her cool new cell phone. She loves the color orange so much she painted the walls in her room in the bright hue, then plastered one wall with a collection of milk mustache ads.

Since she was 10 years old, Smoke has been a regular speaker at Indian Child Welfare conferences across the country. She's given talks on cultural awareness and drug and alcohol abuse issues, and has been a tutor at the Livermore American Indian Center.

Her adopted parents, Henry and Anaca, adore their only daughter so much, they're a bit embarrassed by their overwhelming pride.

"There's just something magical about Smoke," said Anaca.

Smoke would never meet her biological mother _ she died when Smoke was 5 years old _ but four years ago she did meet her biological father. He was in a convalescent home in San Francisco, beat up after an accident and years of hard living.

That meeting, arranged by Henry, would be the only time she heard her biological father's voice or held his weathered hand. He died a few years later, abused and beaten to death by one of Smoke's many half-sisters and her husband.

Smoke talks of a sense of regret about her father _ that she never bothered to visit him after that initial meeting _ but she also acknowledges learning from his life mistakes.

"I'm drug free and alcohol free and he's one of the reasons why I won't start that," she said. "I'm scared to start because I'm susceptible to (addiction). My adopted parents have given me so much, and I don't want to give that up."

The Johnson family lives in a small, paper-bag brown house in central Livermore. Most weekends, the family of three piles into its Toyota Camry and heads to a powwow.

Smoke's danced at powwows since she was old enough to walk. In the hectic world of a teen-ager, the powwow is one of the few places Smoke feels she can breath.

"I kind of feel like I have two lives," she said. "I go to school. I go to the mall. I go to the movies. And I'm Native American, and I'm very involved in my culture.

"(Powwow) keeps me balanced. School can kind of drive people crazy, and at the powwow I can kind of just kick back and relax."

Smoke's adopted father, who's attended powwows all over the country since he was a boy, knows the intrinsic value of the familiar celebration.

"Powwow is one of the few ways we have left where we can go and be ourselves, be who we are and practice our ways," he said. "So it's a different world. For us, it's a better world."

Smoke's job now is to focus on the future. Smoke's been through years of anger over the abuse her American Indian ancestors suffered. Now she's looking ahead, and she wants to teach people about the Indians of today.

"I don't want to teach about the past," she said. "I want to teach about now. We are here now."