Recently, with Candace, her blonde 18-year-old daughter, Cheryl, 45, completed a course through Ogden/Weber Technical College to become a certified nursing assistant.
Since her marriage to her high-school sweetheart, Brad Muir, Cheryl has been a homemaker and hairdresser. She is one-quarter Shoshone. Her business consultant/engineer husband is a non-Indian.
Cheryl never did believe it was unusual to have one set of grandparents that was full-blooded Shoshone, while the other pair was Anglo. And her children didn't find it odd, either.
"They called her 'Purple Grandma' because her skin was so dark," Cheryl says of her kids' reaction to Mae Timbimboo Parry, who died last year.
Cheryl's father, Bruce Parry is the chairman of the Northwestern Band. But she notes that her kids - who are one-eighth Shoshone - are like anyone else on the block in their Anglo neighborhood.
The members of the Northwestern band are so much a part of mainstream Utah that their Shoshone blood line is becoming weaker and weaker. And, says Cheryl, they are losing many of the tribe's customs.
"My grandma did beadwork and tanned deer hide and made moccasins. I regret that I didn't learn that stuff. It will be sad to lose that."
Cheryl, who does not look ethnic, has never felt the slicing edge of a racial slur and sees her Shoshone legacy as nothing but positive.
"We have that great heritage, in the back of our minds," she says. "There is no downside. And I've got skin that tans good."
csmart@sltrib.com
