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Friday, May 5, 1989 / University Daily Kansan
Indian bus driver overcomes prejudice
by Cynthia L. Smith Kansas staff writer
As a worker, student and American Indian rights activist, family man Ken Cadue learned how to play the white man's game and win.
Since fall 1985, Cadet has been the driver of the bus on KU's Meadowbrook route. He said the job was important but was still a part of that game.
"Throughout my life, I've done what I wanted to do," he said. "Prejudice things would bother me but never held me back.
"The first thing I let people know is that I am an Indian. People used to say I was cooky."
Cadue, 57, grew up on the Kickapoo Indian Reservation, six miles west of Horton.
He has worked as a barber, nursing assistant and a section hand on the railroad.
"When you grow up on a reservation, you have to learn about a lot of different jobs because there are no jobs that don't. You can't afford to specialize."
During his childhood, the reservation was like a ghetto, Cadue said. Leaving the reservation to attend a predominantly white high school in nearby Powhain was a difficult adjustment.
"There were always the snobly kind of people — even in their own kind." Cadue said. "They didn't care for the Indian kids there."
Because he was active in sports, Cadue was respected more than the other American Indian students.
The favoritism angered him. He resented his white friends' prejudices and his childhood friends had his relationships with whites.
"They used to call me a white man," he said. "It made the younger kids believe if you did well in school, you were less of an Indian."
He was the first American Indian to drive a school bus for his high school. Previously, none of the Kickapoo students were considered for driving jobs.
Cadue said he wanted to work, realizing that he would have to play
according to the rules of white society. The white man's rules sometimes conflicted with traditional American Indian values
Whites are more concerned with financial success, but American Indians concentrate on traditions and spiritual matters, he said.
"There were no jobs on the reservation, but people didn't really worry about it because they were Indian or concerned with culture," he said.
Cadue he realized during his high school years that he needed more education to succeed in the white man's world.
After graduation, Cadue enrolled at Haskell Indian Junior College in Lawrence to study business accounting.
"In '52 and '53 at Haskell, the paternalistic attitude was really there," he said. "They taught you to work for the white man. They'd encourage you to be the chief clerk but never the boss."
Don Ahshapanek, a 1953 Haskell graduate, was one of Cadue's classmates. Abshapanek said Cadue was popular at Haskell and interested in American Indian rights.
"But he was a little apprehensive about relationships until you got to know him," Abhapanek said.
He competed three semesters at Haskell and then joined the Navy during the Korean War. Because the war ended while he was in boot camp, he retired.
"I couldn't be a hero if there was no war," he said. "So I quit."
Cadue later finished his two-year certificate at Blackwood College in Oklahoma City.
In Oklahoma, he missed his home and returned in 1956, managing the reservation's baseball team. He soon moved to Oklahoma City, where he stands, Mona, a former schoolmate.
They married after dating a month. They have been married 33 years and have six children. Their daughter, Monita, and two of their granddaughters live with them in Lawrence.
"He's a good grandpa, a good dad and husband -- a provider." Mona
But American Indians are also a part of his family.
Cadue said. "His family comes first."
During the early 1970s, he directed the American Indian Center in Topeka and encouraged American Indians to vote when he was preincident chairman for the Democratic Party. Cadue said that because of his efforts, the number of American Indians who registered to vote in Topeka grew from less than one percent to about 60 percent.
"At first, they didn't want to play that game," Cadue said. "They didn't feel like a part of the system. So they didn’t register."
Cadue left Topeka in 1975 to work as a tribal executive at the Kickapoo reservation. He was responsible for government financing for the tribe
He often worked all night. With that kind of dedication, he helped secure financing to build 75 homes, provide a hot meal program for the elderly and establish a farm on the reservation.
His work also helped build a gas station, library and water plant.
The work was interrupted one rainy night in 1976 when his daughter, Roberta, was injured in a car crash that resulted to the reservation from Horton.
In the emergency room, the doctor asked Cadue to feel his daughter's head, but Cadue couldn't feel her skull at all. he said.
Cadue then rode with 18-year-old Roberta from Horton to a Topeka hospital.
"She was in shock; she could have died right there," he said "The only thing I could do was pray."
So he sat beside her, looked at the gash on her forehead and then shut his eyes to pray.
He felt heat pass through his body as he touched her arm and held on to the inside of the speeding ambulance, he said.
"It was so hot I thought I was on fire and then it was like someone pulled a zipper shut and there was no gas anyone." he said
Roberta Caduce was not as badly injured as she would have been without his prayers, her father said.
Ken Cadue said that between his daughter's recovery and his career success, he had been winning the white man's game.
Then President Reagan changed the rules, he said. Financing cuts shut down the recent developments and phased out Cadue's job.
"I thought that the worst thing that could happen would be for Reagan to
get elected." he said. "It was. It was the end of a dream. It's hard to live with failure."
Caude's problems increased after he suffered a heart attack in 1980 and a stroke in 1982.
"I just didn't have the vigor that I used to," he said. "I was tired all the time and I had to eat to keep myself going."
The stroke forced him to withdraw from work.
Participating in a ceremonial sweat bath helped him recover, he said.
"I wasn't doing anything and the "m" I thought about it, the worse it got," he said. "'84 was the worst year — the summer of '84 I could've laid down any time and that would have been the end of it."
A sweat bath ceremony takes place in a wigwam with a sapring framework covered by hides. The wigwam is airtight except at the door, which is covered and is heated by white hot rocks that are placed in a hole in the center. Participants are naked or wear towels, he said.
Cadue asked the other men to pray for him during the ceremony.
"When it was my turn to pray, I asked for health. The Cadae said. "I prayed to God and asked for a healing in the name of Jesus CHRIST."
When the medicine was poured over the heated rocks and the steam rose, he said, his pain ended.
Ken Cadue, KU on Wheels bus driver.
"I don't want to say he's a secretive individual, just more holding back until he gets a sense of where wind is blowing." Alshapnek said.
Ahshapanek said Cadue's personality had not changed much since they first met at Haskell in the 1950s.
Cadue decided to return to Haskell in 1985, and he completed 27 hours in one semester.
"Those workaholic habits came back then, and I got in that burnout mode again." Cadue said.
Cadue stopped attending Haskell after three semesters and now concentrates on his family and job.
Watching them play, he said he still cared about American Indian issues and his job, but he also was a coach. "You always play the white man's game."
At home, Cadue watched his two ponytailed, toddling grandaughters play in the family room. The room was quiet, with only a few chairs, a stuffed orange toy crab.
"I can go play that game when I drive the bus, but when I come home, I come home to my family," he said.
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