NO MORE HIDING. Tommy Merino is through with hiding in the sagebrush to speak his Native language. Photo by Juan A. Avila Hernandez

Tommy Merino, 83, is a fighter.

As an Army infantryman in World War II, he fought and was wounded in the historic Battle of Bulge where over 19,000 U.S. soldiers were killed. As a shop steward for the sawmill workers’ union, he has been involved in long strikes. And, closest to his heart, he has struggled to help D-Q University (DQU), the tribally-controlled college near Davis, CA, gain title to its land.

On this cold, overcast Saturday morning in late January, Merino, a tall man with a friendly smile and short haircut reminiscent of hismilitary service, has just arrived at D-QU for the first board meeting of the year.

He has driven 150 miles from his home in the northern California Sierra foothills to attend this monthly meeting.  A member of the Mountain Maidu Tribe, he looks like a lumberman in his baseball cap and dark brown, thick denim overcoat.

“I’ve been involved [with D-QU] now 32 years or 33 years,” says Merino. American Indian and Chicano activists founded the college in 1970. Merino and other board members celebrated a big victory recently when they acquired the deed to the campus property, thus ending a long land dispute between the college and the federal government.

“I’m dedicated to the university,” he says intently during a brief break at the all-day meeting. “That’s the way I feel.  I’ve never drawn one cent of pay all the time I’ve been on the board.”

Paying your own way and joining with others for a common cause like education have been constant themes in Merino’s life.

While his resume may read like that of thousands of active American veterans and others of the “Greatest Generation” who survived World War II, Merino is a man of distinction. He is one of the most active Native American elders in the country. But his early years began with challenges.

When Merino was eight years old, his father was killed in a car accident. His mother survived but was unable to fully care for her children. Merino’s grandmother raised him and his two brothers and sister.

“She was a doctor and did all her doctoring in our part of the country,” Merino says. “But she could speak seven different Indian languages.”  Merino attributes his knowledge of the Mountain Maidu language to her.  Despite his age, he still periodically teaches a Mountain Maidu language course at D-QU.

Like many American Indians of his generation, Merino’s patriotism is tempered by his personal experiences with U.S. Indian policies, which bordered on cultural genocide. When he was about 12 years old, Indian agents arrived at his home and took him to the Stewart Indian Boarding School in Carson City, NV, where he lived for over two years.

“They just came around and took you there. That’s what they done with all the people,” Merino recalls. “There was really no instruction. They started us off like soldiers all right, but mainly they wanted labor; that’s what they wanted us there for. [The school] had big gardens and had all the kids working out on the garden. Maybe [they] got a little education but very little.”

Merino remembers that fellow students were quickly punished if they were caught speaking their Native languages. Such “violations” merited additional work.

“When they said no speaking your language, they punished you. There were no ifs or ands,” he recalls. Merino says that he survived those years by hiding in the sagebrush when he and his friends wanted to speak Maidu. “They couldn’t find out what we were talking about out in the sagebrush,” he says, laughing.

After he returned from Stewart Indian Boarding School, Merino participated in team sports and activities with other boys in his town. In 1935 he attended Greenville High School and became a “track man.” Most enjoyable, Merino says, was joining the school marching band. He became skilled on the bass drum and still plays in American Legion parades. He worked in the lumber mills to supplement the family income.

Merino is especially proud of his military service as an infantryman in General Patton’s Third Army in the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 – a distinction that he displays in bold lettering on the back window of his white four-door sedan.

“I got wounded in my right shoulder and my feet. A mine blew up,” Merino recalls. Merino’s unit patrolled the Belgian Ardennes forest at night and dug foxholes. “Every half hour you had to wake your buddy up. If you didn’t, you both froze… it was the coldest (winter) in history when the Bulge was happening,” he says.

Merino quickly became an active supporter of education rights in the late 1960s when he joined D-QU cofounder, Dave Risling (Hoopa), and his wife, Barbara, in their work to organize California Indian people around the need for Indian-controlled education programs.

They formed the California Indian Education Association (CIEA) and took their message on the road directly to Indian communities. From his home in Greenville, Merino persuaded local Indians to attend the first CIEA meeting in their area and organized to take education of their children into their own hands. When over 50 people attended the first CIEA meeting in Greenville, it shocked a Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) worker, who had no luck in his attempts at activating people through the government’s “war on poverty” program.

Merino soon became CIEA’s northern California vice president and the lead organizer in the area. “He was always someone you could depend on,” says Risling.

To gain the trust and participation of non-Indian teachers and students, Merino organized a yearly teacher workshop granting college credits on California Indian topics during the regional CIEA meetings at Butte College, says Barbara Risling.

Merino later served as a board member for the California Indian Legal Services and the California Rural Indian Health Board. In addition, he has fought for equal rights to services for members of non-federally-recognized tribes like his own Mountain Maidu Tribe.

For the last seven years he has directed Greenville’s Northern Sierra Indian Days. For over 30 years, he has sponsored a Bear Dance, a sacred ceremony for Maidu and other tribes in the region that unites many Indian people.

Most recently, Merino has become a gourd dancer at pow wows. Gourd dancers, who are usually veterans and members of the Native American Church, begin a pow wow with prayers and dancing before the Grand Entry.

“[It’s] taken me two years to get into the thing,” he says. “A lot of prayers involved in that. I didn’t realize that, but it’s all in the Indian way.”

Merino and his late wife, Ivy (who died five years ago), had 16 children during their marriage of 60 years. He makes certain to pay special attention to his grandchildren and hopes they will continue ceremonies that have been in his family for generations.