Lakota Woman (19 page)

When the firefight started on that day, I happened to be in the trading post to which I and the baby had been transferred. The bullets were going right through, coming through one wall and tumbling out through the other. Everybody was telling me to take my boy and get the hell out of there to a safer place. I was told to go with Roger Iron Cloud over to the housing area and hide in a basement. So I bundled up the baby and got his diapers together and we started running. We got into a crossfire and had to hit the dirt three times. I was scared, really scared, the only time during the siege—not so much for myself as for the baby. I was praying: “If somebody has to die, let it be me, grandfather, but save him!” I was concentrating upon survival, upon getting us out of this situation alive. I was lying on top of my child to shield him. Sometimes Iron Cloud interposed his body, putting it where he thought it would do myself and little Pedro the most good. That’s the type of Sioux macho I can appreciate. Well, we made it safely into the basement. I had experienced a moment of panic thinking that the voices I had heard, the vision I had received years ago, might mean that I and my baby would have to join the spirits up on the hill. Those bastards! Forcing me to run like a track star four days after giving birth! My knees kept shaking for quite a while. More from the running, I like to brag, than from anything else. Well, that was Pedro’s baptism of fire.

Leonard sneaked back into Wounded Knee a few days after Pedro was born and gave him an Indian name. He also held a peyote meeting for us. I took medicine and all the pain I still had went away. I also gave baby a little bit of peyote tea. Some people from California sent my child a sacred pipe and a beautifully beaded pipe bag, which made me happy and him well equipped on the road of life.

I left Wounded Knee the day Buddy Lamont got shot, roughly a week before the siege ended. I was resting with the baby in my room and some guy came in and said, “Somebody got killed.” I asked him if he was sure and who had been hit. He told me it was Buddy and I said, “Oh, no, that’s my uncle!” I went over to where Kamook, Dennis’s wife, was staying and found her crying, with Dennis holding her in his arms. I was so mad, I could not cry. I did not want to believe it. A friend took me over to our improvised hospital to see Buddy and I held his hand. It was still warm. His relations asked me to come out of Wounded Knee with them and help with the funeral. I went into Wounded Knee poor and I left it poor. All that my baby and I had was the clothes on my back and a bundle of diapers and a blanket for him. Of course, we had also the pipe, but it was not an auspicious start for setting up a mother-baby establishment.

I had been promised that I would not be arrested, but the moment I passed the roadblock I was hustled to the Pine Ridge jail. They did not book me, just took all my things away and were about to take my baby too. They told me I would have to wait, they could not put me in the tank before the Welfare came for my baby. Being poor, unwed, and a no-good rabble-rouser from the Knee made me an unfit mother. The child would have to be taken to a foster home. I was not going to give up my baby. I would never see him again. I was ready to fight to the death for my child, kick the shit out of the Welfare lady, scratch the guard’s eyes out if necessary. Luckily Cheyenne, Buddy’s sister, showed up just then and persuaded them to let her take care of the baby until I came out. I do not know what I would have done without her. Instead of helping her in her grief, she was helping me. Then one of the marshals came in in his pretty blue outfit and said, “Why are you so ornery? Why don’t you try to be nice to me?”

I told him that I did not talk to pigs, which turned him off sufficiently to leave me alone. Because I could not nurse, my breasts swelled up and became hard and painful. So I was not too happy in that jail which the goons jokingly called “Heartbreak Hotel.” They told me I was being held for questioning and debriefing, but I would not talk to them. I was not allowed to make any phone calls, send out messages, or talk to a lawyer. After twenty-four hours they finally let me go because the baby had to be nursed. Some of the government press officers said it was bad PR to hold a nursing mother. As I left the jail I found my mother waiting for me. I had not seen her in a long while. She was crying, telling me over and over again that I should not have come to Wounded Knee, or at least I should have come out early before things got tough and when I would not have been arrested. I told her there was nothing to cry for. She said, “Those militants you are hanging out with are no good. They’ll get you killed. Why on earth can’t you settle down, have a nice home, lead a peaceful life.” But then suddenly she stopped weeping and went on in a completely different vein: “Those goddam sons of bitches, doing that to my daughter and grandchild! They are not supposed to be doing that, jailing you just after delivery and taking your baby away. Why doesn’t somebody shoot a couple of them for a change?”

I said, “Yes, I’m a mother now and made you a grandmother.” Suddenly we got along very well and could understand each other. Her anger did not last and somehow things were better between us after this.

I was not free to go, though. I and the baby were taken to Rapid City to wind up in the old, buggy Pennington County Jail, but only for a few hours because they saw that nothing could be gotten out of me. That is how the state and the feds kept their promises that I would not be subject to arrest. It did not surprise me. They gave up on me and just let me go. After I got out I had to hitchhike about a hundred and fifty miles to get home to Grass Mountain. I got picked up by a goon called Big Crow and he tried to take me to his house and to bed with him. I held the baby tight and jumped out of his pickup truck, rolled over easy, and ran like hell into the sagebrush, hiding myself in a culvert. He was fat and winded, so I had gained on him. Also it was dark. He could not find me. I could hear him muttering and cursing until he drove off. I did not dare come out of hiding for two hours because I was afraid he was playing a trick upon me and would double back. It was dark, spooky, and very cold in the ditch and I had a hard time keeping the baby from crying so that he would not give us away. It was like in the old days when our women with their babies had to hide themselves from the cavalry, except for the culvert of course. In the end a nice old skin gave me a ride home and that was the end of Wounded Knee for me.

For Crow Dog, the end came about a week later when an agreement had finally been reached. Inside the Knee some warriors wept when the agreement was signed, saying, “Just another treaty to be broken. We made a commitment. This is a copout.” One man said, “Why don’t you just kill us and make our bodies plead guilty?” There were only some hundred and twenty people left to surrender: the others had all walked out, forty of them on the last night by way of a route that was not being watched because it was so open that it was almost suicide to take it. And even on that last evening there was still a firefight. The hundred twenty remaining could have walked out too but chose to stay to the end. Among the leaders who stayed to the last was Leonard. He was the last one out, I think. He was taken off in handcuffs by helicopter to the Rapid City jail. The feds were not satisfied with the twenty-odd old rifles that were surrendered, and the head of the government negotiating team proclaimed, “They just turned in a lot of old crap. I feel the White House need not fulfill its commitment to AIM because of this violation.”

Two years later, seven of us who had all been at the Knee went to see the movie
Billy Jack.
There was a superficial similarity to Wounded Knee—an Indian making a last stand inside a white clapboard church surrounded by a lot of state troopers—but afterward Crow Dog was joking, “That Billy Jack had it easy. He was besieged for only twenty-four hours and there were no heavy MGs or APCs. And he was taken out with just a pair of handcuffs on him while they trussed us up with manacles, leg irons, and waist chains like something out of a medieval torture movie. Yeah, Billy Jack had it easy.”

The little white church on the hill burned down in a fire which has never been explained, though I have heard that it has since been rebuilt. The trading post is flattened out like a stomped-on tin can. The museum is gone. Of the great Gildersleeve trading empire only a huge, rusty open safe remains in which wasps have made their nest. It is the only sign of the white man’s “civilization.” Everything is gone. No landmark is left. The feds bulldozed our bunkers as well as their own and only the spirits remain up on the hill, roaming in the night by their ditch. If you are lucky you might still find a .50-caliber shell or an empty trip-wire flare canister in the sagebrush. I believe that the government tried to extinguish all visible reminders that Indians once made their stand here. It will do them no good. They cannot extinguish the memory in our hearts, a memory we will pass on to generations still unborn. Today the perimeter looks very much as it did before the white man came, as it looked to Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse, and Big Foot. Maybe that is as it should be.

CHAPTER 12

Sioux and Elephants Never Forget

A beautiful tepee is like a good mother. She hugs her children to her and protects them from heat and cold, storm and rain.

—
Sioux proverb

A
fter Wounded Knee I became Crow Dog’s wife. I think he had had his eye on me for a long time, but I didn’t have my eye on him. I was not even eighteen years old and he was about a dozen years older. So he seemed to me to belong to another generation. Also I looked upon him with a certain kind of awe. He was a medicine man and the spiritual leader of the American Indian Movement. Also I called him uncle after the Indian fashion, and he called me niece. So I did not look upon him as I would have upon one of the wild young warriors I was used to going with.

Now, in many ways the Sioux are prudes. They have a horror of nudity. They are in a way bashful. Boys and girls feel inhibited about showing affection for each other. Their fear of incest and the taboos connected with it are so severe that in traditional families a son-in-law will never speak to his mother-in-law, while a father-in-law will not behave in a familiar, easygoing way with a daughter-in-law. On the other hand the approach of a man to a woman is very simple and direct, and sex is taken for granted, as something natural or even sacred. Also medicine men are not supposed to be holier than other people, or sanctimonious like white preachers. As old Lame Deer used to say, “They respect me not because I am such a good boy, but because I have the power.” When it comes to women, medicine men are supposed to behave like everybody else.

I met Leonard at the Rosebud Fair and Rodeo. He took me for a ride in his old red convertible. Suddenly he had his arm around me and was kissing me. We were going to a party. I did not want to stay long. I did not want to be with him. I wanted to leave. I had a date with a young man from Oklahoma. But Leonard grabbed me by the arm and somehow maneuvered me out of the house down to the pasture, lifting me across the fence. Nobody was there. So in the end I went home with him. But I had not made up my mind about him. I was not ready to be tied down. So the next day I told his mother that I was going away, to another state. She said that Leonard had told her that I would be his wife for sure. I told her that I was not right for him. And I did not stay with him then. That came later.

At Sun Dance time Leonard approached me. He said he needed my help and my family’s pickup truck to go into the hills for tipi poles. I went and borrowed a pickup from my brother-in-law. Leonard took me way up to the highest hill. It was pretty up there. I stood and looked around, admiring the beautiful view of the whole valley of the Little White River spread out before us. But there were neither tipi poles on that hill nor lodgepole pines. Leonard said, “Give your uncle a kiss.” I kissed him. We stayed up on that hill for a considerable time. Again he asked me to be his wife, and once more I told him, “No, I won’t.”

After Wounded Knee, on the day the AIM leader Clyde Bellecourt was shot, we all got him to the hospital in the town of Winner where he was operated upon. Leonard was there and old Lame Deer, to pray and smoke the pipe for him. Then we drove in a caravan back to Rosebud and the Crow Dog place where Leonard held a big ceremony for Clyde’s recovery. Everybody vowed to drink no more and! to quit the wild life. After the ceremony he asked me to stay. I said, “No, I am going to leave.” He cornered me and would not let me go. Again and again he said, “Be my wife.” My ride had left in the meantime and so I ended up staying—for good.

Years ago Old Man Henry, Leonard’s father, had some-how gotten hold of an enormous truck tire, as tall as a man. He had put this near the entrance gate and painted on it in big white letters:
CROW DOG’S PARADISE
. This paradise, Crow Dog’s allotment land, is beautiful. The Little White River flows right through it. It is surrounded by pine-covered hills. In the sky overhead one can see eagles circling. Sometimes water birds, sacred to the peyote people, fly over it with their long necks outstretched. There are horses to ride. Everywhere on this land one is close to nature.

The paradise is not just a one nuclear family place, but rather a settlement for the whole clan, the whole tiyospaye. In 1973, when I moved in with Crow Dog, it consisted of two main buildings. The biggest one was the house in which Leonard’s parents lived. Old Man Henry had built it himself out of whatever odds and ends he had been able to find—tree trunks, rocks, parts of an old railroad car, and tar paper. Some windows were car windows from wrecked vehicles. It was large with a big, old-fashioned iron stove, an old wood-burning kitchen range, and an ancient, foot-powered sewing machine. Herbs, sacred things, and feather bustles hung down from the beams of the ceiling which was held up by two tree trunks. Right at the entrance stood the bucket with cool fresh spring water with the dipper for everyone to use. Coffee was always brewing on the range. On the outside Henry had painted the whole structure sky-blue with red trimmings. Nothing was at a right angle. Everything was bulging or sagging somewhere. There was no other house like Henry’s. It stood for forty years and all Henry’s children and most of his grandchildren were raised in it. It burned down under suspicious circumstances in 1976 while Leonard was in prison. Nothing is left of it now but the memory.

The other building is the one Leonard, I, and our children lived in. It was a flimsy thing, more in the nature of a bungalow than a house—a kitchen—living room and two tiny bedrooms. There was no cellar. The walls were thin and in winter it was hard to keep warm. It looks exactly like a few hundred other houses on the reservation built by the government under the OEO program. We call them “poverty houses.” It is painted bright red and looks nice if you don’t come too close.

There are always a few tipis around with people living in them, and somebody with no place to go who has made the outdoor cook shack his home. A white friend’s camper was totaled a few years ago, and now a couple is using the shell for a home.

I now had a place and a man to stay with, but it was not always paradise in spite of the legend on the huge truck tire. I was in no way prepared for my role as instant wife, mother, and housekeeper. Leonard had three kids from his previous marriage—two girls, Ina and Bernadette, and one son, Richard. The girls were old enough to know that I was not their real mother, old enough to judge my performance. They had it in their power to accept or to reject me. I did not know how to cook. I did not even know how to make coffee. I did not know the difference between weak coffee and strong coffee, the kind that the Sioux like which will float a silver dollar.

Sioux always drop in on each other and stay over—a day or a week, as the spirit moves them. People eat at all times, whenever they are hungry, not when the clock says that it: is eating time. So the women are continuously busy cooking and taking care of the guests. Indian women work usually without indoor plumbing, cook on old, wood-burning kitchen ranges, wash their laundry in tubs with the help of old-fashioned washboards. Instead of toilets we have out-houses. Water is fetched in buckets from the river.

Leonard is a medicine man as well as a civil rights leader. This means that we have ten times more guests than the usual Sioux household. The whole place is like a free hotel for anyone who cares to come through. The red OEO house in which I and Leonard live simply began to come apart from all the wear and tear. When I moved in, the place was a mess. Nobody tried to clean up or help out. They all came to eat, eat, eat, expecting a clean bed and maybe to have their shirts and socks washed. I spent a good many years feeding people and cleaning up after them. It is mostly men who stop by at the house, and only very few women, and you cannot tell men to do anything, especially Sioux men. I even sometimes moved my bed outside the house into the open to get some sleep, because the men stay up all night, talking politics, drinking coffee, and gossiping. Sioux men are the worst gossips in the world. I would wash dishes for the last time at midnight, go to bed, and in the morning all the dishes would be dirty again.

Most other medicine men do not go all out as Leonard does. They keep their homes tight, a little more to themselves. They do not fall into the trap of making their houses into dormitories and free hotels. Leonard pities people. Whenever we go to town we pick up somebody who is walking, and then usually we have him for dinner, and then breakfast. Some come and stay for days, weeks, or even months. Many Indians have no place to go, no one to feed them, so they come to Crow Dog’s Paradise. If we see somebody who is out of gas, Leonard stops and syphons some off into his tank, and then we ourselves get stuck five miles from home. If Leonard notices someone having car trouble, he stops, takes out his tools, and fixes the car—an automobile medicine man on top of everything else. Money I am supposed to use for food or household things he gives away to anybody who asks. Years ago he got almost four thousand dollars in residuals for a TV commercial he did. That money was to buy a pickup truck. So, of course, there was a big giveaway feast. The friends and relatives—sixth cousins, seventh cousins, people very distantly related, strangers claiming kinship, one hundred and fifty of them—came. They came in rattletrap cars, in buggies, on horseback and muleback, on foot, in trucks. One came on a motorbike. Sides of beef were being barbecued. Women were engaged in an orgy of cooking. People went up to Crow Dog: “Kanji, cousin, I need a headstone for my little boy who died.” “Uncle, I am crippled, I sit at home all day. I need a TV.” “Nephew, my children need shoes.” When the giveaway feast was over, Leonard had two dollars left to buy the pickup with.

Leonard’s great-grandfather had seven wives to do the cooking and tanning and beading for giveaway feasts, and the buffalo meat was free, but those days are gone. Naturally, Leonard is much admired for his old-style Sioux generosity. At the Sun Dance of 1977 they put the war bonnet on him and made him a chief. They call him a wicasha wakan—a holy man—but confidentially, it can be hell on a woman to be married to such a holy one.

Beside being tumbled headfirst into this kind of situation, still in my teens, with a brand-new baby and totally unprepared for the role I was to play, I still had another problem. I was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, trying to hold my own inside the full-blood Crow Dog clan which does not take kindly to outsiders. At first, I was not well received. It was pretty bad. I could not speak Sioux and I could tell that all the many Crow Dogs and their relations from the famous old Orphan Band were constantly talking about me, watching me, watching whether I would measure up to their standards which go way back to the old buffalo days. I could tell from the way they were looking at me, and I could see the criticism in their eyes. The old man told me that, as far as he was concerned, Leonard was still married to his former wife, a woman, as he pointed out again and again,
who could talk Indian.
Once, when I went over to the old folks’ house to borrow some eggs, Henry intercepted me and told me to leave, saying that I was not the right kind of wife for his son. Leonard heard about it and had a long argument with his father. After that there was no more talk of my leaving, but I was still treated as an intruder. I had to fight day by day to be accepted.

My own family was also against our marriage—for opposite reasons. Leonard was not the right kind of husband for me. I was going back to the blanket. Here my family had struggled so hard to be Christian, to make a proper red, white, and blue lady out of me, and I was turning myself back into a squaw. And Leonard was too old for me. I reminded them that grandpa had been twelve years older than grandma and that theirs had been a long and happy marriage. But that was really not the issue. The trouble was the cultural abyss between Leonard’s family and mine. But the more our parents opposed our marriage, the closer became the bond between Leonard and myself.

I came to understand why the Crow Dogs made it hard for me to become one of them. Even among the traditional full-bloods out in the back country, the Crow Dogs are a tribe apart. They have built a wall around themselves against the outside world. For three generations they have lived as voluntary outcasts. To understand them, one must know the Crow Dog legend and the Crow Dog history.

Kangi-Shunka, the founder of the clan, had six names before he called himself Crow Dog. He was a famous and fearless warrior, a great hunter, a chief, a medicine man, a Ghost Dance leader, a head of the Indian police, and the first Sioux—maybe the first Indian—to win a case before the Supreme Court. As Leonard describes him, “Old Kangi-Shunka, he was the lonely man of the prairie. He goes by the sun and moon, the stars and the winds. He harvests from the earth and the four-legged ones. He’s a buffalo man, a weed man, a pejuta wichasha. He sees an herb and he hears the herb telling him, ‘Take me for your medicine.’ He has the kind of spirit and words out of which you create a nation.”

For most people, what their ancestors did over a hundred years ago would be just ancient history, but for the Crow Dogs it is what happened only yesterday. What Kangi-Shunka did so long ago still colors the life-style and the actions of the Crow Dogs of today and of their relations, of the whole clan—the tiyospaye, which means “those who live together.” Sioux and elephants never forget.

Some of the Crow Dogs trace their origin back to a certain Jumping Badger, a chief famous in the 1830s for having killed a dozen buffalo with a single arrow, for having counted fourteen coups in war, and for distinguishing himself in fifteen horse-stealing raids. It is certain that the first Crow Dog belonged to a small camp of about thirty tipis, calling themselves the Wazhazha or Orphan Band, which followed a chief called Mato-Iwa, Scattering Bear, or Brave Bear. Kangi-Shunka was born in 1834 and died in 1911. He was raised in the bow-and-arrow days when the prairie was covered with millions of buffalo and when many Sioux had still to meet their first white man. He died owning a Winchester .44 repeating rifle with not a single buffalo left to use it on. He lived long enough to ride in a car and make a telephone call. At one time he was a chief of the Orphan Band. He played his part in the proud history of our tribe.