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Remembering David Pego
Sometimes bad things happen. If one is lucky, marvelous things grow because of them. David Pego’s life was a study in the ability to turn challenges into opportunities. David, a full-blooded member of the Saginaw Chippewa tribe of Michigan and long-time journalist and contributor to IMDiversity, died late last week, after years of struggling with devastating complications from diabetes. But this is not a typical obituary. Rather it’s a compilation of pieces of bad things and the good that blossomed from them. David lived hard, worked hard, drank hard, played hard, loved hard, and desperately wanted to move mountains. He gave freely of his time, thoughts, money, words, ideas, and anything else he had to give. As a second-grader in a mostly white school, he was enamored of a red-haired, green-eyed girl who didn’t invite him to her birthday because he was a dark-skinned not-one-of-them Indian. He cried. Sometime after, he rejoiced in being Indian and became extremely involved in Indian education issues. Years later he founded a non-profit organization, Great Promise for Young American Indians, dedicated to creating educational and cultural opportunities for American Indian children and helping them understand prejudice. He’d remembered his pain and morphed it into creating strength within others. Growing up, he traveled the countryside with his Christian missionary parents. But each summer, the small family would return to the reservation where his grandmother lived. Neither his family nor people on the reservation had any money. But David remembered forever his granny’s cooking style, fashioned from ingenuity, “with the expectation that one, two or several individuals would drop by to share what a meal to get through to the next day.” David explained it by saying, “giving to others is a way of becoming an angel on earth, Granny said, and I came to believe it.” More, he came to be dedicated to it. As a national Newspapers in Education leader, he organized “Penny Power,” following the 9/11 disaster. Children across the country sent their pennies, amounting to more than a half million dollars, and the New York City Fire Department received a new fire truck. As a dialysis patient, he joked with others, moving their thoughts from the severity of their condition to laughter. As a person who hadn’t always cared for his diabetes, he wrote a column urging others to be smarter than him – explaining in painful personal detail why they might want to. As a Knight Foundation Visiting Journalist in Residence at the Department of Journalism and Mass Communication at South Dakota State University, he played student and mentor. He’d never completed his college education, and at the age of 49, thought maybe he’d try it again. He didn’t particularly like it and he didn’t particularly do very well. But he overlooked that and focused his energies on the younger people. He became a mentor to an intense young man, recovering from leukemia, who wanted to be a writer. Not only did the young man almost immediately begin publishing his articles, he later went on to become a full-time reporter for a major news organization. His mentoring also
extended to the other students he worked with. David, understanding that
lack of affiliation in some organizations had created obstacles for him,
organized the SDSU student chapter of the Native American Journalist
Association,
As a humanitarian, he connected with people. Several months ago, I gave a presentation in Washington, DC. David and I went together and while there attended the opening of the new Museum of the American Indian, “an incredible moment in all of our peoples' histories,” as David later told a friend. During our few days there, David wasn’t feeling the best, but he knew I had to work and so rather than tossing restlessly in bed and keeping me awake, he walked the streets of the nation’s capitol and found and sat with a homeless man who “told [him] secrets that scratched [his] soul.” The homeless man played the guitar and with David’s help, wrote a song that even days later caused passersby to listen and notice, and drop in a few dollars. Yet even with a scratched soul, he could joke around, hamming in front of a museum exhibit, pretending the white man was (still) killing off the Indian.
Several months ago David awoke one day and all the skin on one of his feet was literally falling off. From the local emergency room, he was transferred to the burn unit of a metropolitan hospital where he underwent excruciatingly painful treatments, while asking questions about his nurses’ and therapists’ lives and encouraging them when they were down. When his bed in the unit was needed by a young boy, David willingly moved from it, first tying a smiley face balloon to the boy’s bed. The boy’s burnt lips, barely noticeable amongst the heavy gauze bandages, moved – a semblance of a smile amidst anguish. During David’s hospitalization, I learned just how ill he was and just how ill he had been for years. He tried smiling. I tried crying. He slept. He hurt. He cried. He persevered. After a few months he came home staring at death. Depression won for a few days and then he remembered his granny and giving and like a madman began staying awake, answering emails, offering advice to people who asked but had never known him, and working on his novel about life on the reservation, the importance of compassion and music. David was not a saint. He was a human being with quirks and frailties like the rest of us. He was hard to live with. He cared so much about so many things that life was fragmented, unfocused, and often only partially dealt with. But, David was also a one-of-a-kind writer, an honest believer in the goodness of others, and clearly, as hundreds of condolence notes come in, a gentle, loving soul who indeed moved mountains in many people’s lives.
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By
Jennifer Hicks Pego
encouraging
the students to always be professionals and always proud of their
heritage. He bought each one of them a beautiful black and white
track-type club jacket, emblazoned with "American Indian Journalist"
across the back, which I saw them wear with pride and a sense of
belongingness.
As
a believer in the Creator, David adored nature’s landscape, the changing
light it offered, the mesmerizing mounds in the Badlands, the awesome
sight of lightning streaking from giant sky to giant plain, cutting the
sky in two. He prayed and he thanked.