Lakota Woman (23 page)

Before we could enter the courthouse to be with Leonard at his sentencing, we were thoroughly and electronically searched. They passed a beeper between Ina’s legs. She was eight years old at that time. They were afraid of us. They even stuck the beeper into Pedro’s diapers, looking for a gun. All they got was a beeper covered with baby shit.

At his three trials Leonard was sentenced to a total of twenty-three years. I watched the marshals dragging him off in handcuffs and leg irons. We just kept looking at each other until the iron bars snapped shut behind him and he disappeared from view. Leonard’s old Mother, Mary Gertrude, cried, “I’ll go on praying for him with the pipe. I’m Indian. I’ll keep praying with the pipe, making tobacco ties. And I’ll tell the spirit: ‘I want my son back here, where he belongs, where he was raised. I want him back in his house, in our old home where he was born. I’m old, but I won’t die until he comes back here.’ “

One marshal said, “Listen to that old, crazy squaw. Lady, I’m telling you, you’ll be dead a long time before your son comes back.”

It is hard for an outsider to understand what being in jail must have been like for Leonard, a traditional Sioux medicine man. Leonard is part of nature, a man who rides horses, who searches the hills and valleys for healing herbs, who herds cattle, who watches birds for signs, who talks to the clouds and the winds. I thought, “How will he be able to stand being cooped up in a tiny cell like a caged eagle in a zoo whose wings have been clipped?” But things were much worse than I could ever imagine, even in my nightmares. I knew little of what was going on in America’s maximum-security prisons. I soon found out.

After Leonard had been taken away he was whisked from one jail to another in a totally senseless pattern. I tried to follow him everywhere and keep in contact with him, but often neither I nor his lawyers had the slightest idea where he was being kept. The government seemed to be playing a game of hide-and-seek with us: Pennington County Jail in Rapid City; Pierre, South Dakota; legendary Deadwood in the Black Hills; Minnehaha County jail in Sioux Falls; Oxford and Cedar Rapids in Iowa; Terre Haute in Indiana; Leavenworth in Kansas; Chicago; Sioux City in Iowa; Lewisburg in Pennsylvania; Richmond in Virginia; and for a short time a holding tank in New York City. They dragged Leonard all over the country while I kept tracking him down.

From the first day Leonard spent in jail his friends rallied to free him. We turned especially to our white friends. They went all out, spent their rent money and funds that should have sent their kids to college to hire lawyers and fly them to different trials and jails, but they were as ignorant about the ways of American justice as far as Indians were concerned as we backwoods Sioux. But we all learned fast. It did not take us long to find out that money was all-important. If you have two hundred thousand dollars to spend on defense, you win your case; if you have no money, you lose. The so-called adversary system is simply a lottery. If you had money and connections to hire a brilliant lawyer and were faced with a mediocre prosecutor, you won. If you had no money and had to rely upon a court-appointed lawyer, you lost. If you could get a trial shifted to an Eastern city, you generally were acquitted. If you were tried in South or North Dakota, you went to jail. Guilt or innocence did not enter into it. We never got a jury of our peers. In all the trials I witnessed I never saw an Indian juror. They say that the law is getting ever more enlightened and liberal and color-blind. That is bullshit. In 1884 the first Crow Dog won his case before the Supreme Court which, under the 1868 treaty, ruled that the government had no jurisdiction on the Sioux reservations. Almost a hundred years later the courts ruled against us on the same question. The thing to keep in mind is that laws are framed by those who happen to be in power and for the purpose of keeping them in power. That goes for the U.S.A. as well as for Russia or any other country in the world.

After everybody involved had gone broke we learned how to raise money. In the end we had the support of the National Council of Churches, the World Council of Churches, the Quakers, Amnesty International, the Center for Constitutional Rights, and the Fellowship of Reconciliation. Of course we were lucky because just then Indians were “in.” A few years later the media and money would be concentrated on the environment, women’s lib, the Lesbian Nation, macrobiotics, or crystal-healing. Organizations supporting minorities have a tendency to put their main efforts into backing leaders with what is called “name recognition.” Thus main support was first concentrated on the cases of Russel Means and Dennis Banks. Leonard had to wait until support shifted to the secondary leaders. He had been sentenced to a total of twenty-three years. It took some two hundred thousand dollars to get him out of jail in slightly under two years. While I was happy to see him free, I had a bad conscience thinking of the many nameless kids who had stuck their necks out in all the AIM confrontations languishing in the slammer, unable to raise money for bail or defense.

Among my favorite lawyers were Ken Tilsen of Minneapolis, Dan Taylor of Louisville, Bill Kunstler of New York, and Sandy Rosen of San Francisco who later won the Kent State case. Richard Erdoes and his wife Jean became our defense coordinators, providing a communications center and a place to eat and sleep. The phone bills alone ran to about two thousand dollars a month. Among our lawyers, Bill Kunstler was the most famous while Sandy Rosen was a “lawyer’s lawyer,” the best in his profession. Bill was great in preventing damage simply by winning a case at the first trial. In a courtroom he was brilliant and irresistible. I always thought of him as almost more of a first-class movie star than a lawyer. Sandy was a great repairman once an initial trial ended in conviction. He was a master at writing appeals, sniffing out pertinent points of law, following the tiniest lead—absolutely tops when it came to preparing a case. As for me, in spite of my original shyness I eventually became a good speaker, addressing rallies in auditoriums, churches, and parks.

All this did not help Leonard get better treatment in jail. He was at times totally isolated from the outside world, not able to communicate, not knowing what was done on his behalf. When he was allowed to make his first telephone call from inside jail he said, “What will they do to me? Will they kill me like they killed Crazy Horse?”

I asked him, “How are they treating you?”

He said, “I have been handcuffed, fingerprinted, and humiliated by body searches. They won’t tell me where they are taking me next. They have taken everything from me. They have taken Crow Dog’s land. They have taken my elements, they have taken my human body away from my people. But they have not taken my mind. My mind is still free.” I tried not to let him hear me weep.

The first thing they do in jail with a man like Crow Dog is try to break his will, to make him from a person into a number. One way to do this is the “holdover.” Leonard ignored all provocations. He was a model prisoner, never giving them an excuse for punishing him. But whenever he arrived at a new prison he was immediately put in isolation. At Lewisburg he was placed in a tiny cell, so small that he could neither fully stretch out nor stand upright. He asked, “Why are you punishing me? Why are you putting me in the hole?”

They told him, “We are not punishing you, we just have to process you for some weeks before releasing you into the general prison population.”

It was the same in Leavenworth, which Leonard calls the “big, bad granddaddy of penitentiaries.” They first took him through a maze of corridors and underground passages to a room which was just a cube of gray-green cement. Leonard had no idea in what part of the prison he was. The room had no windows, just artificial neon light which stayed on the whole two weeks he was there. Soon he no longer knew whether it was day or night, Monday or Friday, or whether the food he ate was breakfast or dinner. He had no clock or watch, and lost all sense of time. He saw only the hacks who brought him the food. To fight his disorientation, he sang old sacred Lakota and peyote songs. He said later that in this utter vacuum he taught himself an entirely new way of singing, and that is true. Since he came out of prison he sings peyote songs like nobody else, making it sound as if two or three men were singing. Also in some of these songs you can hear the voices of various birds, the cry of the roadrunner, the call of the water bird.

It takes a particular type of human being to want to be a hack. Half of their waking hours they are prisoners themselves, inmates by their own free will. Uneducated and underpaid, the only thing they have going for them is feeling superior to the helpless prisoners. Here, at last, are men they can look down upon because they have them in their power. If they encounter a prisoner who makes them feel inferior or impotent they become enraged, because he threatens whatever feelings of self-esteem they have left. They try to bring such a man down to their own level by humiliating him. Leonard called it “mind torture.” So every day it was: “Spread your cheeks, chief, let’s see what you got up your asshole.”

Almost from the first day he got anonymous hate letters, many of them saying that while he was incarcerated I was sleeping around with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. One letter read: “Crow Dog, you dumb Indian, your wife gets fucked by your best friends. We have cameras that can see in the dark. We photographed them while they were doing it. We bugged the motel room and have all their moans and groans on tape. Whenever you get bored doing time we can send you the pictures and tapes.” The guards bringing him these letters told him, “You know, mail is censored. So we can read your letters. Some wife you got. Maybe we’ll look her up some time.” Leonard only laughed in their faces. While he got these kind of letters promptly, some of my letters to him were never delivered.

The hacks kept hassling Leonard all the time, saying, “If you are such a big-shot medicine man, why don’t you turn yourself into a bird and fly away?” They’d tell him, “Don’t you realize that you are in our custody, that we can do with you whatever we want, that we can put you in the hole whenever we feel like it, that we have absolute power over you?”

Leonard would always answer, “You have no power at all. It is I who have the power. I have a legend. What legend do you have? What can you tell your children when you get home? What can you pass on to them?”

They just would not leave him alone. Leonard wears his hair in the traditional style of two long braids. They always tried to cut his hair. Our lawyers had a running battle with various wardens proving that cutting his hair would be illegal. Finally, in May 1976, the warden at Lewisburg set a day and hour when Leonard’s hair would be cut, but his release on appeal was ordered just one day before the barbershop appointment.

Christian prisoners are entitled to their priests and Bibles, Jews to their rabbis and Talmud. Leonard told the warden that the pipe was his bible, that he had a right to have it. It took months of petitions by our lawyers and the Indian Rights Association until we finally got a ruling which recognized the Native American Religion and gave Indian prisoners the right to have their sacred things and to pray with them. The warden at Terre Haute called Leonard into his office: “Crow Dog, I have an order to give you your pipe. Here it is.” Leonard asked, “Where are my pipe bag and tobacco?” The warden told him that the tobacco “was suspicious. It smells like some hippie drug. Sorry, chief. No can do.”

Leonard tried to explain that, of course, this was a different kind of tobacco, chan-cha-sha, sacred red willow bark tobacco. The warden insisted that it was an illegal drug. Leonard told him that without the tobacco the pipe was no good to him, and gave the pipe back for the warden to keep until he was released.

The hacks also harassed Crow Dog for speaking to his relatives on the phone in Lakota. They kept shouting at him, “Speak English so we can understand you. This is a white man’s country. You’re probably telling lies about us on the phone.”

“You just have a bad conscience,” Leonard told them.

They got back at him in other ways. One of the priests was gay and kept trying to fondle Leonard. He told the priest, “Father, maybe in your religion it’s all right to do this but in our religion medicine men don’t engage in this kind of activity.” At Leavenworth, almost every day, the punks and butt-winkles cleaning the tiers stood before Leonard’s “house” taunting him: “Come on, chief, put your dick through the bars so we can suck it. You might as well. You won’t have a woman for maybe ten years.”

When Leonard ignored them they threw garbage into his cell. He told me that he was not bothered by these things, but they left their mark on him all the same. Then there were the shrinks. One psychiatrist asked Crow Dog whether he had any physical complaints. Crow Dog said he had an irritation. What kind of irritation? the shrink wanted to know. Crow Dog told him that the American government was irritating him. “Have you got a cure for breaking promises? Have you got a cure for lying?” The shrink said that Crow Dog had misunderstood him. What about physical sicknesses? Crow Dog pretended that it was the shrink who wanted to be cured. He offered to cedar him and get him some peyote tea. The man mumbled something and gave up. At Lewisburg a psychiatrist insisted that Leonard take Valium and Thorazine “to make him relaxed and happy while doing time.” Leonard told him that if they started that sort of psychological warfare they would lose, that with the help of Grandfather Peyote, he was a better psychiatrist than they were. “Don’t mess with my mind,” he told the Valium man, “or I’ll mess with yours.”

“You Indians are all alike,” said the shrink, “hopeless!”

One day after the Bicentennial, on July 5, 1976, the shrinks at Terre Haute tried again. One of them called Leonard into his office. As Leonard later described it to me, the man greeted him with a big smile, asking, “Crow Dog, how do you feel about the Bicentennial?” Crow Dog told him that for an Indian to celebrate that day was like a Jew celebrating Hitler, or a Japanese celebrating Hiroshima.

“Very interesting,” said the psychiatrist. “I’m Jewish myself. What about the great men America is celebrating?”