Home of: Kenny “Warhoop' Camel

Kenny “Warhoop” Camel was born 12.2 ounces to a Pend D’Oreille mother and an African American father, and comes from a diverse family of academic and athletic interests. His life is one of continual growth, and intense circumstances and relationships.

His mother protected him, his father pushed him and his siblings were always there for him. Regardless of his family’s strong roots and desires for Camel’s success, it took years of being treated inferior by society for Camel to realize that the opinions and expectations of others mean little in the long-run of things.

Camel’s father Henry was born in North Carolina, and at the age of 16, shed his slave name of Campell and joined the Navy. Henry didn’t return home to Monroe for 50 years.

“My father was self-minded enough to say ‘I won’t take this,’” Kenny said.

His mother, Alice, always had a sense of spirit similar to his father’s, both surviving otherwise unbearable situations. Alice lost both her parents at an early age.

“The early years were traumatic for my mother,” Kenny said, going on to describe how the courageous woman journeyed by railroad from Dixon to Spokane to be close to her brothers at the age of 15. “You can only imagine the change that was occurring during those times.”

Alice met Henry at a service dance after the war. During the war, she built the famed “Mistery Ship” for the Navy. The two were connected by fate even before meeting it seems, working for a similar cause and supporting one another.

“No. We were not Rosie the Riveter,” said Ann Jurjevic Thomas in the book “Don’t Call Me Rosie” by Kathleen Thomas. “Rosie got all of the attention. No one even gave us a name.”

Kenny said his mother always longed for a family, and after meeting a similar “strong-minded individual” in Henry, the two married in Portland, and moved back to the Flathead Reservation where Alice’s family’s roots have always been.

There they owned 180 acres, and with the allotment act were placed between Dixon and Sloan’s Bridge — where Kenny’s grandfather died.

“We’ve always been nomadic people, and the allotment act said ‘Go there and stay there,’” Kenny said.

It was around this time when Kenny began resenting the wealthy and asking “Why?”

“How come he has so much,” Kenny asked himself. “My dad works hard, working 12-16 hours a day for a millionaire.”

Even though Kenny asked these questions, he said his father didn’t. His father showed Kenny that being resourceful, hardworker was always part of the game.

Soon his father began showing Arabian horses for H.O. Bell. Later he taught his children how to box after forming the Polson VFW boxing team. But Kenny wanted nothing to do with fighting, he was a creative boy who had a knack for art and football.

“I would say ‘I don’t want to fight, lets go play,’” Kenny said, adding that his mother protected him from the sport.

At a young age — in a conflict with a group of native teens from Polson who beat his sister the night before — Kenny felt the warrior spirit within him come alive, after which he chose the name Warhoop as his own.

Before the confrontation, he remembers being at a pow-wow where Nick Lassa “Longtime Sleep” was dancing. Kenny thought the audience was looking at him, and as he turned around Lassa put him in his place, and Kenny fell from his seat and landed on the saw dust floor — where everyone laughed at him.

“I loved the light,” Kenny said. “Nick’s job was to keep kids in line and now I aspire to be like him.”

Kenny said that fame can be a flame, and he eventually went on to get a little too close to that flame and got burned a few times.

He joined his brother Marvin, who would become a two-time World Cruiser Weight Boxing Champion, in the ring for a few years after going to the University of Montana on a Pell Grant scholarship.

“I got all Fs in college,” he said. “The only class I passed was billiards.”

He began to realize that he did not have the world around his fingers as he thought. In grade school, Kenny said his teachers passed him through all his classes and all he had to do was sit in the back of the class and draw, then go play for the high school football team.

“They just left me alone in the back because I was a Camel,” he said of his high school days when his Ronan High School football team only lost three games in four years, and took state championships in 1975.

He said that when he found himself at UM with red marked papers and teachers asking him “Where did you go to school?” he began to strongly resent his education.

“I started shutting down,” he said. “How could they let me go through the school system not learning? I remember telling my mom that I couldn’t wait to leave this place.”

After 19 years of trying to get off the reservation, then going on to fight and be compared to the great boxer Muhammad Ali, he wrestled with drinking and self-loathing and a lack of personal direction.

“I used to say that I’m going to stand at the top of the world and that I was never going back to Ronan,” he said. “But, in reality they deserve all the credit.”

Kenny went back to school at Salish and Kootenai College when he left the ring. The ring was a ring of comparison, where he was fighting the wrong kind of fight.

“Boxing taught me to be disciplined and focused,” Kenny said. “So when I went to SKC I started a long trek … I said ‘This is my second dance. I’m not going to blow this.’ I used to dance in the ring. I was fighting the wrong fight before.”

Kenny said the teachers and staff at SKC were never judgmental, and helped him become the insightful man he is today.

One day he turned in a 15-page paper that was required to be between 3-5 pages. His teacher read the paper and asked why he was so angry, to which Kenny replied that it was society’s fault.

“Ken, society didn’t make you angry,” his professor told him. “You allowed society to make you angry.”

Kenny said he lived with extreme racism all his life, from both natives and whites. He said he was always alone, with only his family understanding the depths of the societal struggle.

This built-up frustration finally broke Kenny down. He said he needed a spiritual connection in his life, and that’s when he traveled to the top of the Mission Mountains, found a spot surrounded by stones at Eagle pass, and laid in it asking the creator for direction.

He soon found that direction and purpose he sought that day at the Tribal Department of Human Resource Division where he monitored safety at the dam reservoirs. After seeing the progression of reckless behavior at the sites from his television monitor — which resulted in subsequent deaths of youths — he decided to retire from his job.

Kenny said he gave-up the “blame game” a long time ago. Being seen as merely an athlete, and not a whole person ate him up inside for years.

“The Camels never walked away from a fight,” Kenny said. “I’m a cultural warrior. Getting my bachelor’s degree will be my championship. You win it on your own or you lose it on your own.”

“I learned how to develop on my own resolve.” he said. “It’s not the face or a color of a person, but the person inside.”

He said that he learned to trust a “white man” for the first time when he took his first fire control jump as a smoke jumper near Snake River in Salmon, Idaho.

Camel has an associate degree from SKC. His education brought him back to the University of Montana where he became involved in the Black Student Union college group and began to learn more about himself.

“I was finally starting to find myself there,” he said, adding that he stayed on campus for the first full year, never leaving and walking to the top of the M every night.

When the university told him that his Pell Grant had run out of money — when he was a junior and that much closer to winning his ultimate scholastic battle — he said it was a heavy blow to take.

“It was like someone was following me around with a black hood,” Kenny said.

Being the persevere that he is, Kenny found that things were beginning to look up in his life. He found himself in the Silicone Valley where he excelled.

“You can get somewhere if you try,” he said. “Learn the system.”

At the age of 50 he confronted everything that had happen in his life: many spiritual, mental, physical and emotional failures and successes.

He decided to find his true life’s direction, went to the tribal council and told them “I give you my life.”

Kenny’s artwork is his mode of communication, his children are a source of great pride, his family and culture define him.

Kenny is now a referee and judge and gives several motivational talks to youth around the state, while working for the Tribal Credit Department.