Lakota Woman (12 page)

When we go down to the peyote gardens we usually travel in four or five cars or trucks. It takes a good number of people to do the harvesting. They have “distributors” on the border, peyote dealers. The last time we had to pay over a hundred dollars for a thousand buttons. Five years ago it was twenty-five dollars. That’s inflation for you. But on the last few trips we did not go to a dealer; we did the harvesting on our own. It is not only cheaper, but a lot more fitting to get the medicine in the right, sacred way, than just to buy it like aspirin or cough drops.

We found a place where we saw the desert sprinkled with peyote. It is a kind of cactus plant. We got up at sunrise and Leonard performed a prayer ceremony that he said would make us find plenty of medicine, that the prayer would help us go to the right spots. We all spread out and looked around. The whole area was covered with cactus, Joshua trees, chapparal, and creosote bushes. Some of the cactuses were gigantic, up to twenty feet high. The peyote was sitting there between all those thorns, prickles, and spikes. It was really hard to get at. I felt that it was good that we had to work for it and got scratched up. It gave the harvest a special meaning for me.

On one occasion Barbara found the chief peyote. It was large, divided into sixteen segments, four times the sacred number of the four directions. When you find a chief peyote you pray for him, to him, with him. We think that every person or family in the Native American Church should have a chief peyote in their home. So when somebody finds him, someone who doesn’t have one yet, we dig him out with the whole root and a lot of his natural soil and take him back with us. Barb did not have a chief peyote yet, so Leonard helped to dig it out and gave it to her, saying, “Just take this peyote and pray with him whenever you need help.” The plant thrived. Barb kept it watered and it grew. Every week she had a little flower on her chief peyote. Every time I saw it, it seemed to have grown. When Barb was not at home, grandmother watered it and made sure that it had enough sunlight. One day my mother visited her and said, “Why don’t you just throw that thing out?” But grandma told her, “Mary and Barb think a lot of this plant and I’m gonna take care of it when they are not here.” It showed that grandma was more Indian than mom, and it also showed the cultural and generation gap between our mother and us.

Some people take the whole peyote plant, but we decided to take only the tops and leave the roots so that the peyote could grow again. It took us a little more than two weeks to harvest about thirty-five thousand peyotes, enough for the whole tribe and for a whole year. While we were gathering our medicine, the rancher who owned the land came up and asked what we were doing on his property. When we explained, he smiled and said we were welcome any time. If we had been forced to pay for them all at the price the dealers were charging just then, it would have meant no shoes for the kids. We would have had to save on food and everything else for the rest of the year. Thirty-five thousand buttons! Maybe all that medicine on his land had influenced the man’s thinking, “sensitized” him, as the AIM guys would say. The first harvesting was a new experience for me. It made me want to go back and do a little better each time, do the gathering in an ever more sacred way, more knowingly.

Once we went harvesting in Old Mexico. As we drove back to the States we had little peyotes lying all over the car, all those little buttons on the dashboard. Somebody said, “Jesus! It’s illegal to bring it across the border. They’ll arrest us and take our medicine away.” I did not want to throw our medicine out the window. So I and another girl decided to eat it. It seemed more respectful. When we got back to our motel in Texas we were all peyoted up. My head was spinning. When you take medicine in a ceremonial context it does not affect you that way. There I was sitting on the carpet in our room and I sure was in the power. Later we found out that the customs inspectors had known all about us, had seen Crow Dog’s certificate, and had waved the other cars ahead of us through with a smile—buttons and all. And there I had struggled getting a record amount of our medicine down into my stomach in record time; for nothing. But later, in the motel, it felt so nice!

CHAPTER 8

Cankpe Opi Wakpala

I knew when I brought my body here,

it might become food for the

worms and magpies.

I threw my body away before

I came here.

—
Young man from Eagle Butte

I
do not consider myself a radical or revolutionary. It is white people who put such labels on us. All we ever wanted was to be left alone, to live our lives as we see fit. To govern ourselves in reality and not just on paper. To have our rights respected. If that is revolutionary, then I sure fit that description. Actually, I have a great yearning to lead a normal, peaceful life—normal in the Sioux sense. I could have accepted our flimsy shack, our smelly outhouse, and our poverty—but only on my terms. Yes, I would have accepted poverty, dignified, uninterfered-with poverty, but not the drunken, degrading, and humiliating poverty we had to endure. But normality was a long time in coming. Even now I don’t have the peace I crave.

When my husband was in a maximum-security prison in Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, I spent many months in New York with white friends in order to be near him. For the first time I lived a life which white Americans consider “normal.” I have to admit that I developed a certain taste for it. It was a new, comfortable, exciting life for a young Indian hobo girl like me. I became quite a New Yorker. I took my little boy Pedro down to the Village to Pancho’s, buying wonderful-tasting nachos for him and virgin coladas for myself. I liked to go window-shopping. Everything was so much cheaper than on the reservation where the trading posts have no competition and charge what they please. Everything is more expensive if you are poor. I went down to Greene’s; on 38th Street in the millinery district and bought beads at one-sixth the price Indian craftworkers are charged by the white dealer in Rosebud. They had many more beads to choose from, the kinds of beads I had not seen for years, indistinguishable from the old, nineteenth-century ones, like tiny, sweaty green and yellow beads, and cut-glass beads of the type Kiowas use in beading peyote staffs and gourds. I learned to like spicy Szechuan and Hunan food, learned to accept and talk with white friends, and lost some of my shyness to the extent of making public speeches on behalf of my imprisoned husband. I luxuriated in bathtubs with hot and cold running water and admitted that modern flush toilets were suiting me a lot better than our Leaning Tower of Pisa privies, even though they were products of white American technology which I usually condemned. Once, in a fit of total irresponsibility, I blew $99.99 on an imitation Persian rug on special sale at Macy’s. I took this thing home and spread it on the floor of our shack, feeling smugly middle-class. The rug didn’t last long, what with the dogs, the kids, and many people dropping in constantly with their problems. Once even a horse forced its way in through the unlocked door and relieved itself on this proud possession of mine. This rug was a symbol of the good little housewife I could have been. It is the government which made me into a militant. If you approach them hat in hand as a “responsible, respectable” apple, red outside, white inside, you get nowhere. If you approach them as a militant you get nowhere either, except giving them an excuse to waste you, but at least you don’t feel so shitty. Wounded Knee was not the brainchild of wild, foaming-at-the-mouth militants, but of patient and totally unpolitical, traditional Sioux, mostly old Sioux ladies.

The trouble started with Dicky Wilson, or rather it started long ago with the Indian Reorganization Act of 1934. At that time a government lawyer decided to do something for “Lo, the poor Indian,” and wrote a constitution for all the tribes. Indians were to have their own little governments patterned after that of the Great White Father in Washington. Every Indian nation was to have an elected tribal president and council. Poor benighted Mr. Lo was to have the blessings of democracy bestowed upon him by all-wise white benefactors. The people who thought it all up probably really meant to do well by us. Sometimes I think that the do-gooders do us more harm than the General Custer types. There were two things very wrong with this sudden gift of democracy. The most important was that the Reorganization Act destroyed the old, traditional form of Indian self-government. The Sioux always had their ancient council of chiefs; other tribes were guided by their clan mothers or, as among the Pueblos, by their caciques and kikmongwis, who were priests. All traditional Indian government was founded on religion. The Reorganization Act brought into being a class of half- and quarter-blood politicians whose allegiance was mainly to Washington. The full-blood traditionals never took to these puppet regimes, looking upon them as the work of white men, installed for white men’s advantage. They would have nothing to do with them and often refused to take part in tribal elections. As a result, in many tribes, the chairmen were voted into power by a small minority of half-breed Uncle Tomahawks who did not represent the grass-roots people but only the educated, well-off, landless part-Indians. A great number of tribes were split by the Reorganization Act into “cooperating friendlies” and “recalcitrant hostiles.” The first usually occupied a tribe’s administrative center, the latter the outlying backwoods settlements. This rift created in 1934 has lasted in many places to this day.

The second thing wrong with the whole scheme was that the tribal governments, such as they were, had very little real power. Power remained always in the hands of
the white superintendent and the white BIA bureaucrats. It was the superintendent who held the purse strings and gave out what few jobs there were. He had the support of Washington. In a conflict between the tribal president and the superintendent, it was always the white superintendent who came out on top. It was the same with the tribal courts, which were allowed to handle only minor offenses—wife-beating, speeding, drunk and disorderly, and such stuff. The so-called ten major crimes, which included everything but simple misdemeanors, were handled by federal courts outside the reservation before white juries. There were some good tribal chairmen, but many of them were corrupt. The typical bad tribal chairman practiced nepotism, filling up all available positions with his relatives. His brother became the chief of police, his nephews tribal policemen, his brothers-in-law tribal judges, his uncle head of the election board. You get the idea. Once such a guy had settled in, it was impossible to get rid of him.

Dicky Wilson at Pine Ridge was about the worst tribal president of this type. Pine Ridge is our neighbor reservation. Together with our own, Rosebud, it forms a very big chunk of land, some two, three million acres. Both are Sioux reservations. The people speak the same language, have the same rituals and customs, and intermarry all the time. Most Rosebud people have Pine Ridge relatives. Pine Ridge Sioux are Oglalas—Red Cloud’s and Crazy Horse’s people. In the early 1960s, Wilson and his wife had to leave the reservation after being accused of conflict-of-interest abuses while he was a plumber for the Pine Ridge housing authority. A few years later he came back and was accused, together with another man, of illegally converting tribal funds. When he became tribal president he abolished freedom of speech and assembly on the reservation. He distributed John Birch Society literature and was showing John Birch Society-made hate films. He misused tribal moneys. He took tribal ballot boxes into his basement and there “counted” the votes. Worst of all, he maintained his rule with the help of his private army, known and feared under the name of the goons. Opponents of his regime had their houses firebombed, their cars and windows riddled with bullets. People were beaten and shot. Pine Ridge experienced a rash of violent deaths, unexplained and uninvestigated. People were afraid to leave their homes. A small girl had her eye shot out. Most of the victims were people who had stood up against Wilson or had otherwise offended him. He had people stomped and beaten in his presence. Things got so out of hand that even the long-suffering back-country full-bloods, known for their capacity to endure in silence, began to grumble. The old treaty chiefs, medicine men, tribal interpreters, and traditionalists finally formed an organization known as OSCRO, Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization. Its head was Pedro Bissonette, a close friend who was later killed under mysterious circumstances by Wilson’s goons.

While a sort of undeclared civil war raged on the Pine Ridge Reservation, AIM had come in force to nearby Rapid City, which some Indians called the “most racist town in the United States.” The AIM people were demonstrating against prevailing housing conditions in Indian slums, against discrimination and police brutality. While fights between Indians and whites broke out in Rapid City streets and bars, a Sioux by the name of Wesley Bad Heart Bull was stabbed to death by a white man in front of a saloon in Buffalo Gap, a small hamlet not far from Rapid City. The case was tried in Custer, situated deep inside the Paha Sapa—our sacred Black Hills—and upon Custer converged the AIM people as well as many Sioux from Pine Ridge, Rosebud, and Cheyenne River, with the AIM and OSCRO people mingling together. Among the AIM leaders was Russel Means, himself a Pine Ridge Sioux, born and enrolled in the Oglala tribe. His family’s home was at Porcupine, some ten miles from Wounded Knee. Wilson had promised to “personally cut off Russel Means’s braids if he ever set foot on the reservation.” He forbade Means to speak at Pine Ridge. Russel went there anyway and Wilson had him beaten up. Russel wound up in the hospital with a hairline skull fracture, but was soon released. In that explosive situation, OSCRO asked AIM for help against the goons. Thus the stage was set.

For me, Wounded Knee started in Rapid City. This is John Wayne country. Everybody tries to look like the guy in the Marlboro ads. At that time I was not yet Crow Dog’s woman. I had been in love with a young boy who was not cut out to be a husband, much less a father. He had disappeared from my life, but he left me pregnant. I was in my eighth month and very big. My smallness only emphasized my enormous belly. It seemed as if the whole Sioux Nation, all the Seven Campfires, had come to Rapid City to demonstrate against the racism for which the city had become notorious. My brother was there, and Barb. So naturally I was there, too. We all stayed at the Mother Butler Seminary, a hangout for Indian activists. One night I was trying to sleep when a girl called Toony came in, all excited. She was a good friend of mine. She told me, “This whole goddam town is going to blow up any minute!” All business, she put down her bag, pulled out a knife, and stuck it in her boot. Her cowboy boots were tipped with metal. She was showing them off: “These are my special shitkickers. I’m putting on war paint.”

I asked, “What’s going on? Can I come?” “No,” she said, “not you. No way. Not in your condition.”

Outside, Russel and Dennis were drilling some guys in nonviolent tactics. They would blow a whistle and everybody would run into the street. Another whistle and they all would run back into Mother Butler’s. Most of the guys took it as a big joke. Indians are not very good at being drilled—even by their own leaders.

The bars in Rapid City were known to be tough on Indians. The unspoken rule was “Indians enter at their own risk.” Groups of skins were forming to sensitize the saloons. Nobody wanted me around, but I went along anyhow. We trooped from bar to bar, and wherever we went we caused a riot. One redneck told me, “We’re goin’ to make good Injuns out of you!” I kicked him in the shin and he hit me hard in the chest. I charged blindly and we both wound up on the floor. It was sure no way for a lady in my interesting condition to behave. A kind of insane rage seemed to possess, not only me, but everybody. Rapid City had been a bad scene for us ever since the town was founded on land stolen from us after Custer had found gold in the Black Hills. There was not one single Sioux from Rosebud, Pine Ridge, Standing Rock, Cheyenne River, or Oak Creek who did not bear the scars of humiliations, undeserved arrests, or beatings received in this town whose main sport has always been Indian-baiting. The resentment that had been smoldering for eighty years finally boiled over in one wild night. The police went berserk, going on a rampage with their night-sticks, busting the head of anybody who looked Indian. They arrested skins at random, stuffing them into a big, old Greyhound bus, carting about two hundred of us off to the small, cramped, and decrepit Pennington County Jail. Those of us who had not been arrested snake-danced around the jail, drumming and singing war songs.

It was then that Dennis Banks told us that Wesley Bad Heart Bull had been stabbed to death by a white man and that the trial was about to start at Custer, inside the Black Hills, forty-five miles from Rapid City. Custer! The name itself was a provocation. Custer, a town built on a spot which our legends told us was the home of the sacred thunderbirds, desecrated by tourist traps such as a phony Indian village with a big sign:
SEE HOW THEY LIVE!

A couple hundred of us formed up a thirty-car caravan to drive to Custer. It was early February 1973 and it was cold, below freezing. It was snowing heavily. When we arrived the first thing I saw was a huge sign:
WELCOME TO CUSTER—THE TOWN WITH THE GUNSMOKE FLAVOR
, and another billboard:
SEE THE PAGEANT, HOW THE WEST WAS WON!
Soon the smoke flavor would be stronger. We had come not to make a riot, but to see justice done. In South Dakota the killing of an Indian was usually treated as a mere misdemeanor and went unpunished, but if an Indian killed a white man he was condemned to death and was lucky to have it bargained down to a life sentence. We were fed up with this kind of judicial double standard.

We gathered before the courthouse. At first everything was dignified, even jolly. A delegation of four or five of our spokesmen (or should I say “spokespersons"? But they were all men; we were not in the spokesperson stage yet) entered the courthouse. A short while later the district attorney came out on the court steps with a smile in order to address us. As I remember, it went like this: “My Indian
ffrrrriends
.
I promise you, justice will be done. Depend on it. The man who killed Wesley Bad Heart Bull will be prosecuted to the full extent of the law—for
second-degree manslaughter
.”