By Beverly Kehe-Rowland | Dec 16, 2019 | Reprinted from www.post-journal.com
Anna Miller was born into the Printup Family on Oct. 6, 1929, in Red House. The fourth child and the only girl of six children, she was delivered by her grandmother, who was a midwife. Her father had worked on the Pennsylvania Railroad, as did his father, but left that job around 1926 to work at Allegany State Park, which was closer to their home on Bay State Road. He built the house, barn and some out buildings on a property across the creek from his father’s home.
The 90-year-old has an excellent memory and vividly recalls her third birthday and the eyelet and muslin dress her mother made for her, a dress that was to be saved for Sundays. Sunday was regarded as a day to rest after a week of hard work. One Sunday her grandfather, a man of whom she had high regard, came to take her to church in her beautiful new dress. There had been enough rain to create a large puddle across which her father had place some boards for safe, dry crossing.
“I stepped off the back steps and couldn’t resist jumping into the puddle,” she said. “I love water and it was like that was what that puddle was there for.”
She remembers sitting in the dirty water and her grandfather taking her back into the house, but doesn’t remember being reprimanded.
“We never knew the hard hand of our mother or father or grandfather, but we knew the look,” she said.
She was one of about 16 students, all of which were native American, who attended Red House School No. 3. On the small child’s first day of school, as she was speaking to a friend in Seneca, the language she spoke in her home, she felt pain in her little hand. The pain was caused by a wooden rod wielded by her non-Indian teacher.
“He shook his finger at me and told me never to speak Seneca again,” she said. “My brothers didn’t tell me I wasn’t supposed to speak it at school. We were looked at as vile heathens. We’re still trying to get over that feeling. Our young people have become strong and don’t go looking for trouble, but won’t be pushed down.”
She has played piano from an early age and began lessons when she was five-and-a-half-years old.
“I was like a sponge,” she said. “I went to fourth and fifth grade at Tunesassa Friends School, a Quaker boarding school at the former Quaker Bridge, which went with our biggest heartache, the Kinzua Dam.”
She studied music under one of the professors at the school. From sixth grade, her education was completed in Salamanca, where she took typing, shorthand, bookkeeping, accounting, basic law, Spanish and French classes.
“In ’38 and ’39 there was grumblings of war. Many relatives went into the service because they had no work,” she said. “I’ll never forget Dec. 7, 1941, the attack on Pearl Harbor, as long as I live. My parents had gone to shop. I remember hearing on the radio that America had gone to war.”
After graduation in 1948, she went to Fredonia State College to study music, but left after one year because she found instead of learning music, she was being educated to teach school, something in which she had no interest. She returned home for the summer. The next 18 months found her living in a girl’s dorm while attending Jamestown Business College, where she took business courses including business law I, speed shorthand and typing.
“This is where I learned how to get along with people who weren’t native.”
She returned home, knowing she needed to support herself, as she had been brought up to understand. She had a job at Allegany State Park when she was 15, where she walked up to six miles each morning, but was able to catch a ride home with her father at the end of a long day. Her mother left the teenager with four dollars of her $15 pay. Today she understands why it was done and knows her mother was preparing her to make her way in life.
After finishing business school, she took a job in Olean with Max Andrews Outdoor Advertising and was able to ride to and from work each day with her father, who by this time had taken a job for a contractor in Allegany. One day after she and a coworker had finished lunch at a diner, they decided to stop by a nearby Navy recruiting office. The young women returned to work after their break as inductees of the United States Navy.
“We took the oath,” she said.
Two weeks later she boarded a train to Waukegan, Illinois for four weeks of basic training. As she was nearing the end of the training and about to return home for a fourteen-day leave, her mother called asking what she had done wrong. The FBI had visited the tiny community of Red House to ask about her. Unsuspecting family members and friends did not realize a background check was taking place.
She met Herman Miller, who was in the Air Force, the night before she left Waukegan and ran into him again on the train on her way home the next day. The Air Force Tech Sargeant took the seat next to Miller after her friend had gotten off in Jamestown. In the time it took to get to her stop in Olean, they had exchanged contact information and he had invited her to come to Waverly, just 150 miles from her parents’ home in Red House. Two days later she was once again on a train, this time headed for Waverly. The couple became Mr. and Mrs. Herman Miller a week later.
After the leave, the 21-year-old was on her way to Seattle, Wash., where she was to be employed with the Thirteenth Naval Intelligence District. Her husband had been transferred to Pensacola, Fla., to further his flight training, where she joined him after her discharge a year later.
Herman took his family with him to every assignment, both in the states and abroad. While living in England, his wife learned the Brits had heard negative stories about the American Indian and made it her main goal to prove she was as good as the others.
“I have no desire to travel, because I’ve been all over the world,” she said. “I lived in 22 states. My husband took his family wherever he went.”
On April 6, 1967, about three weeks before the pilot was due to retire and after 15 years of marriage, he was shot down over Vietnam. Miller was left to raise three children by herself. The 37-year-old mother moved her family to Salamanca, where she found more sadness.
“I watched my elders die, even though there was nothing wrong with them,” she said. “They were going to lose their homes to the dam.”
Her father and the president of the Seneca Nation had gone to the first Seneca relocation hearings in Washington, D.C. in 1927 and 40 years later, he was sitting on his porch on the day they came to burn his house. He stopped visiting with people after the dam flooded his property. His wife passed away at the age of 53 with a broken heart at the thought of losing her beautiful home and property.
“She grieved to death,” said Miller. “We were not even considered human.”
This was not Miller’s first experience with the effects of imminent domain. She saw it take land from farmers near McGuire AFB in New Jersey when the base’s runway needed expansion to accommodate the new C-148 planes.
“I’ve seen so much ugliness. I’m not bitter, I’m sad,” she said. “They came from Europe where they had troubles. They treated us like they were treated.”
Miller retired from United States Government Services when she was 41, after 20 years of service. Many of those years took place on the various bases near where her husband was stationed and she completed her service commuting to Buffalo after returning to New York. Finding herself bored one year after retirement, she went back to school to become a nurse. Her nursing career took her to jobs in Olean and Elmira and Erie,Pa., Edinboro, Pa., and Bradford, Pa.
Over the years she has taken several theological courses. She now keeps busy volunteering with her Seneca people and attending meetings, never sitting idle, because she was taught to never sit down with nothing in her hands. She always has a knitting or crocheting project in the works. Her family taught her trustworthiness, clean mind and spirit and faithfulness.
“We depend on that to get us where we want to go. We have high integrity,” she said. “My life is not just one thing or two things. I’ve been raised to believe we don’t show pride and be who you are under the Creator.”
“There has not been a day I had been able to play until complete retirement at age 76,” she added.
