SAN DIEGO – An absent guest received accolades from the chairman of the National Indian Gaming Association and a huge round of applause from the audience during an awards ceremony at the association’s annual Indian Gaming Trade Show & Convention.

Marie Anastasio Hinton must have felt the love back home in Wisconsin when her grandson, NIGA Chairman Ernie Stevens Jr., a citizen of the Oneida Tribe of Wisconsin, told hundreds of association members that his grandmother is a “shining example” of the strength and resilience of Indian country.

“In about a month-and-a-half my grandmother Maria Anastasio Hinton will turn 100 years old. My grandmother is a very, very prominent part of our society and the status she holds in our community is something she doesn’t desire to have nor does she claim, but nonetheless on her 100th birthday, we will celebrate her victory.”

The praise came during the Chairman’s Leadership Awards Luncheon April 7 in the San Diego Convention Center. The awards program now in its eighth year grew out of Stevens’ commitment to recognize outstanding service by individual leaders in the areas of gaming and business development. More than 5,000 people attended the convention.

“We’ve seen many women that have been part of this leadership recognition process. We must never forget the women leaders in our lives.”

Stevens has been married for 31 years, and he and his wife have a son, three daughters, and six granddaughters, “so women are very prominent in my life,” he said.

Stevens said his grandmother’s victory has been one of survival and achievement.

“My grandmother has been speaking the Oneida language all her life from day one. English is her second language. But the struggle in that is that she is one of two living Oneida that have spoken the Oneida language all her life and the significance of that is she continues to teach, although she retired five years ago.”

Stevens explained that his grandmother is living on a fixed income in an elders’ apartment that was built from gaming dollars, and although she is no longer receiving a teaching salary, people continue to drop by and she continues to teach them for free.

“So the victory of my grandmother is not just that this woman continues to teach her language, but that this woman was taken from her home and put in a boarding school. She was bounced around a number of boarding schools. She’s been a victim of harassment and abuse, and yet she has survived and today she stands proud.”

The infamous Indian boarding school system began in the mid-1800s and continued in some places into the 1990s in both the U.S. and Canada. The system took Indian boys and girls and essentially incarcerated them in boarding schools far away from their families where their hair was cut and they were forbidden to speak their languages or wear traditional clothes. The idea was “kill the Indian, save the man,” that is, to assimilate American Indian children into the dominant society’s culture and values. Instead, generations of Indian children were brain washed, abused and traumatized.

In 2005, the Canadian government announced a $1.9 billion compensation package to benefit tens of thousands of survivors of abuse at Native residential schools as part of a reconciliation program. The U.S. government has no such program.

Stevens said his grandmother was victorious because she survived with her language and culture intact.

“This lady was a victim of government attempts to destroy our culture, government attempts to make us who we are not. And this lady, my grandmother Maria Hinton, is a shining example of why Indian country is successful in fending off government attempts to destroy who we are, destroy our culture and our language.”

Stevens said his grandmother would attend the convention “in a heartbeat” if they could drive from Wisconsin to San Diego.

“But grandma is at home and she’s busy with her chores, her travel on the grandparents’ bus, her activities at the Elders Center, and she continues to teach our language. So in her absence, could you please give my grandma a big round of applause?”

The audience responded with a long and enthusiastic round of applause.