Lakota Woman (5 page)

On Saint Patrick’s Day, when everybody was at the big powwow, we distributed our newspapers. We put them on windshields and bulletin boards, in desks and pews, in dorms and toilets. But someone saw us and snitched on us. The shit hit the fan. The three of us were taken before a board meeting. Our parents, in my case my mother, had to come. They were told that ours was a most serious matter, the worst thing that had ever happened in the school’s long history. One of the nuns told my mother, “Your daughter really needs to be talked to.” “What’s wrong with my daughter?” my mother asked. She was given one of our
Red Panther
newspapers. The nun pointed out its name to her and then my piece, waiting for mom’s reaction. After a while she asked, “Well, what have you got to say to this? What do you think?”

My mother said, “Well, when I went to school here, some years back, I was treated a lot worse than these kids are. I really can’t see how they can have any complaints, because we was treated a lot stricter. We could not even wear skirts halfway up our knees. These girls have it made. But you should forgive them because they are young. And it’s supposed to be a free country, free speech and all that. I don’t believe what they done is wrong.” So all I got out of it was scrubbing six flights of stairs on my hands and knees, every day. And no boy-side privileges.

The boys and girls were still pretty much separated. The only time one could meet a member of the opposite sex was during free time, between four and five-thirty, in the study hall or on benches or the volleyball court outside, and that was strictly supervised. One day Charlene and I went over to the boys’ side. We were on the ball team and they had to let us practice. We played three extra minutes, only three minutes more than we were supposed to. Here was the nuns’ opportunity for revenge. We got twenty-five swats. I told Charlene, “We are getting too old to have our bare asses whipped that way. We are old enough to have babies. Enough of this shit. Next time we fight back.” Charlene only said, “Hoka-hay!”

We had to take showers every evening. One little girl did not want to take her panties off and one of the nuns told her, “You take those underpants off—or else!” But the child was ashamed to do it. The nun was getting her swat to threaten the girl. I went up to the sister, pushed her veil off, and knocked her down. I told her that if she wanted to hit a little girl she should pick on me, pick one her own size. She got herself transferred out of the dorm a week later.

In a school like this there is always a lot of favoritism. At St. Francis it was strongly tinged with racism. Girls who were near-white, who came from what the nuns called “nice families,” got preferential treatment. They waited on the faculty and got to eat ham or eggs and bacon in the morning. They got the easy jobs while the skins, who did not have the right kind of background—myself among them—always wound up in the laundry room sorting out ten bushel baskets of dirty boys’ socks every day. Or we wound up scrubbing the floors and doing all the dishes. The school therefore fostered fights and antagonism between whites and breeds, and between breeds and skins. At one time Charlene and I had to iron all the robes and vestments the priests wore when saying Mass. We had to fold them up and put them into a chest in the back of the church. In a corner, looking over our shoulders, was a statue of the crucified Savior, all bloody and beaten up. Charlene looked up and said, “Look at that poor Indian. The pigs sure worked him over.” That was the closest I ever came to seeing Jesus.

I was held up as a bad example and didn’t mind. I was old enough to have a boyfriend and promptly got one. At the school we had an hour and a half for ourselves. Between the boys’ and the girls’ wings were some benches where one could sit. My boyfriend and I used to go there just to hold hands and talk. The nuns were very uptight about any boy-girl stuff. They had an exaggerated fear of anything having even the faintest connection with sex. One day in religion class, an all-girl class, Sister Bernard singled me out for some remarks, pointing me out as a bad example, an example that should be shown. She said that I was too free with my body. That I was holding hands which meant that I was not a good example to follow. She also said that I wore unchaste dresses, skirts which were too short, too suggestive, shorter than regulations permitted, and for that I would be punished. She dressed me down before the whole class, carrying on and on about my unchastity.

I stood up and told her, “You shouldn’t say any of those things, miss. You people are a lot worse than us Indians. I know all about you, because my grandmother and my aunt told me about you. Maybe twelve, thirteen years ago you had a water stoppage here in St. Francis. No water could get through the pipes. There are water lines right under the mission, underground tunnels and passages where in my grandmother’s time only the nuns and priests could go, which were off-limits to everybody else. When the water backed up they had to go through all the water lines and clean them out. And in those huge pipes they found the bodies of newborn babies. And they were white babies. They weren’t Indian babies. At least when our girls have babies, they don’t do away with them that way, like flushing them down the toilet, almost.

“And that priest they sent here from Holy Rosary in Pine Ridge because he molested a little girl. You couldn’t think of anything better than dump him on us. All he does is watch young women and girls with that funny smile on his face. Why don’t you point him out for an example?”

Charlene and I worked on the school newspaper. After all we had some practice. Every day we went down to Publications. One of the priests acted as the photographer, doing the enlarging and developing. He smelled of chemicals which had stained his hands yellow. One day he invited Charlene into the darkroom. He was going to teach her developing. She was developed already. She was a big girl compared to him, taller too. Charlene was nicely built, not fat, just rounded. No sharp edges anywhere. All of a sudden she rushed out of the darkroom, yelling to me, “Let’s get out of here! He’s trying to feel me up. That priest is nasty.” So there was this too to contend with—sexual harassment. We complained to the student body. The nuns said we just had a dirty mind.

We got a new priest in English. During one of his first classes he asked one of the boys a certain question. The boy was shy. He spoke poor English, but he had the right answer. The priest told him, “You did not say it right. Correct yourself. Say it over again.” The boy got flustered and stammered. He could hardly get out a word. But the priest kept after him: “Didn’t you hear? I told you to do the whole thing over. Get it right this time.” He kept on and on.

I stood up and said, “Father, don’t be doing that. If you go into an Indian’s home and try to talk Indian, they might laugh at you and say, ‘Do it over correctly. Get it right this time!’”

He shouted at me, “Mary, you stay after class. Sit down right now!”

I stayed after class, until after the bell. He told me, “Get over here!” He grabbed me by the arm, pushing me against the blackboard, shouting, “Why are you always mocking us? You have no reason to do this.”

I said, “Sure I do. You were making fun of him. You embarrassed him. He needs strengthening, not weakening. You hurt him. I did not hurt you.”

He twisted my arm and pushed real hard. I turned around and hit him in the face, giving him a bloody nose. After that I ran out of the room, slamming the door behind me. He and I went to Sister Bernard’s office. I told her, “Today I quit school. I’m not taking any more of this, none of this shit anymore. None of this treatment. Better give me my diploma. I can’t waste any more time on you people.”

Sister Bernard looked at me for a long, long time. She said, “All right, Mary Ellen, go home today. Come back in a few days and get your diploma.” And that was that. Oddly enough, that priest turned out okay. He taught a class in grammar, orthography, composition, things like that. I think he wanted more respect in class. He was still young and unsure of himself. But I was in there too long. I didn’t feel like hearing it. Later he became a good friend of the Indians, a personal friend of myself and my husband. He stood up for us during Wounded Knee and after. He stood up to his superiors, stuck his neck way out, became a real people’s priest. He even learned our language. He died prematurely of cancer. It is not only the good Indians who die young, but the good whites, too. It is the timid ones who know how to take care of themselves who grow old. I am still grateful to that priest for what he did for us later and for the quarrel he picked with me—or did I pick it with him?—because it ended a situation which had become unendurable for me. The day of my fight with him was my last day in school.

CHAPTER 4

Drinking and Fighting

Got them real bad relocation blues,

Got them long-haired Injun big city woes.

One drunk Indian yells ‘cause he’s being mugged,

Some young Indian complains his phone is bugged,

But nobody is getting hugged.

Passerby says: “How, big chief,

What’s your beef?”

Ugh, ugh, big chief, how, how.

Hio, yana-yanay, hi-oh.

Got them sweet muscatel relocation blues,

Got them lemon-vodka big city woes.

Something rubs my leg. “Hi there, pussycat.”

Has a pink and naked tail, some big rat!

Home sweet home!

Hear the police whistle blow,

Someone pissing in the snow,

Tweet, tweet, ugh, ugh, clank, clank.

Hio, yana-yanay, hi-oh.

—
Forty-niner song

S
t. Francis, Parmelee, Mission, were the towns I hung out in after I quit school, reservation towns without hope. Towns that show how a people can be ground under the boot, ground into nothing. The houses are made of tar paper and almost anything that can be scrounged. Take a rusty house trailer, a small, old one which is falling apart. Build onto it a cube made of orange crates. That will be the kitchen. Tack on to that a crumbling auto body. That will be the bedroom. Add a rotting wall tent for a nursery. That will make a typical home, larger than average. Then the outhouse, about fifty feet away. With a blizzard going and the usual bowel troubles, a trip to the privy at night is high adventure. A big joke among drunks was to wait for somebody to be in the outhouse and then for a few guys to root it up, lift it clear off the ground, and turn it upside down with whoever was inside hollering like crazy. This was one of the amusements Parmelee had to offer.

Parmelee, St. Francis, and Mission were drunk towns full of hang-around-the-fort Indians. On weekends the lease money and ADC checks were drunk up with white lightning, muscatel-mustn’t tell, purple Jesus, lemon vodka, Jim Beam, car varnish, paint remover—anything that would go down and stay down for five minutes. And, of course, beer by the carload. Some people would do just about anything for a jug of wine, of mni-sha, and would not give a damn about the welfare of their families. They would fight constantly over whatever little money they had left, whether to buy food or alcohol. The alcohol usually won out. Because there was nobody else, the staggering shapes took out their misery on each other. There was hardly a weekend when somebody did not have an eye gouged out or a skull cracked. “Them’s eyeballs, not grapes you’re seeing on the floor,” was the standing joke.

When a good time was had by all and everybody got slaphappy and mellow—lila itomni, as they said—they all piled into their cars and started making the rounds, all over the three million acres of Rosebud and Pine Ridge, from Mission Town to Winner, to Upper Cut Meat, to White River, to He-Dog. To Porcupine, Valentine, Wanblee, Oglala, Murdo, Kadokah, Scenic, Ghost Hawk Park—you name it. From one saloon to the other—the Idle Hour, Arlo’s, the Crazy Horse Cafe, the Long Horn Saloon, the Sagebrush, the Dew-Drop Inn, singing forty-niner songs:

Heyah-heya, weyah-weya,

give me whiskey, honey,

Suta, mni wakan,

I do love you,

Heya, heyah.

Those cars! It was incredible how many people they could cram into one of their jalopies, five of them side by side and one or two on their laps, little kids and all. The brakes were all gone, usually, and one had to pump them like crazy about a mile before coming to a crossing. There were no windshields wipers. They were not needed because there were no windshields either. If one headlight was working, that was cool. Often doors were missing, too, or even a tire. That did not matter because one could drive on the rim. There were always two cases of beer in the back and a few gallons of the cheapest California wine. The babies got some of that too. So they took off amid a shower of beer cans, doing ninety miles with faulty brakes and forty cans of beer sloshing in their bellies. A great way to end it all.

At age twelve I could drink a quart of the hard stuff and not show it. I used to be a heavy drinker and I came close to being an out-and-out alcoholic—very close. But I got tired of drinking. I felt it was all right to drink, but every morning I woke up sick, feeling terrible, with a first-class hangover. I did not like the feeling at all but still kept hitting the bottle. Then I stopped. I haven’t touched a drop of liquor for years, ever since I felt there was a purpose to my life, learned to accept myself for what I was. I have to thank the Indian movement for that, and Grandfather Peyote, and the pipe. Having children played a big role too, though I stopped drinking even before I had my first baby.

Barb and I have a lot of friends. Most of them are drinkers and I tell them I don’t booze anymore. When I go with them I drink 7UP. They keep asking me, “Are you too good for us, or what?” And I tell them, “I just don’t find that alcohol is doing you any good. And if you feel that I’m acting too good for you, then that’s up to you. You can have that feeling. If you want to drink, go ahead, don’t mind me.” I do not preach to them. In their drunken state they ask Barb or me what to do. Sometimes we feel like mother hens. They come and tell me their problems. So I try to talk to them in a way that peyote would want me to advise them. They listen to me and tell me that I am right and that they will stop, but they are not strong enough to do it. They say I am right, but the next day they just go out and get full again. I do not judge them. I am the last person in the world to have a right to do that, and I know where they are coming from. I tell them, “Enjoy your Budweiser, I’ll stay with my 7UP or Pepsi.”

I started drinking because it was the natural way of life. My father drank, my stepfather drank, my mother drank—not too much, but she used to get tipsy once in a while. My older sisters drank, Barbara starting four years before me, because she is that much older. I think I grew up with the idea that everybody was doing it. Which was nearly true, even with some of the old traditionals who always pour a few drops out of their bottles and glasses, sprinkle it on the floor or into corners for the spirits of their departed drinking companions, saying in Sioux, “Here, cousin, here is a little mni-sha for you, savor it!”

I started drinking when I was ten, when my mother married that man. He was always drinking, so I would sneak in and help myself to some of his stuff. Vodka mostly—that’s what he liked. In school I crept into the vestry and drank the church wine, Christ’s blood. He must have understood, hanging out with people like us. At any rate no lightning struck me. The first time I got drunk was when some grown-up relatives had a drinking party. One woman asked me, “Do you want some lemonade?” I said yes and she gave me a big, tall glass of lemonade and put some of that stuff in it. That was my first time. I was trying to walk across the room and could not, just kept falling down, while everybody laughed at me.

Liquor is forbidden on the reservation, which is something of a joke, and drinking it is illegal. But towns like Winner, St. Francis, and Mission have a population which is almost half white and the wasičuns want to have their legal booze. So they incorporated these towns, which are within the reservation, putting them under white man’s law. Which means that you have bars there and package stores. Also all around the reservation are the white cow towns with their saloons. Even if you are stuck in the back country, you can always find a bootlegger. My sister Barb was my best friend, the one who really loved me. She was the one who got me up in the morning and put clothes on me, watched over me. One day a boy took me to a John Wayne movie. Afterward we went “uptown” to hustle some hard stuff. The town hardly had four or five streets, two of them paved, and maybe two dozen shacks and mobile homes sprinkled around, but it had an “uptown,” and a “downtown.” So uptown we went to the cabin of a half-blood bootlegger, getting ourselves a pint of moonshine, the kind they call “liquid TNT, guaranteed to blow your head off,” and a small bottle of rum. As we were coming out of the door we collided with Barb, who had come to get her ration of wet goods. She made a face as if she couldn’t believe her eyes and said, “What in hell are you doing here?”

I answered, “What are
you
doing here? I didn’t know you patronized this place.”

She got really mad. “It’s all right for me. I am seventeen. But you are not supposed to be doing that. You are too young!” She took the bottles away from us, threatening to crack the head of the boy if he dared to interfere. In her excitement she smashed the bottles against the corner of the log cabin instead of saving them for herself and her friends.

Another time, after a school dance, I was sitting with a boy I liked, smoking a cigarette, and out of nowhere suddenly there was Barbara yanking the cigarette out of my mouth. She threw it on the floor and stomped on it right in front of everybody. I hit her, yelling, “But you do it.” And again she said, “Yeah, but I’m older.” We used to fight a lot, out of love and desperation.

After I quit school the situation at home got worse and worse. I had nothing but endless arguments with my mother and fights with my stepfather. So I ran away. At first only for two weeks to a place that was not very far, just a few miles, then I stayed away for months, and in the end, altogether. I drank and smoked grass all the time. At age seventeen that was just about all I did. Whiskey, straight whiskey, and not Johnny Walker or Cutty Sark either. Then I changed over to gin because I liked the taste. How I survived the wild, drunken rides which are such an integral part of the reservation scene, I don’t know. One time we were coming back from Murdo at the usual eighty miles an hour. The car was bursting at the seams, it was so full of people. In the front seat were two couples kissing, one of the kissers being the driver. One tire blew out. The doors flew open and the two couples fell out arm in arm. The girls were screaming, especially the one at the bottom who was bleeding, but nobody was seriously hurt. I must have lost more than two dozen relatives and friends in such accidents. One of those winos was out in his car getting a load on. He had a woman with him. His old lady was in another car, also getting smashed. Somebody told her he was making it with that other woman. So she started chasing them all over Pine Ridge. In the end she caught up with them. I do not think they were lovers. He was at that stage where the bottle was his only mistress. His wife shook her fists at them, screaming, “I smash you up! I total you!” All the other drivers on the road who watched those cars drunkenly lurching about scrambled to get out of the way, running their cars off the highway into the sage-brush. Well, the wife succeeded in bringing about a head-on collision at full speed and all three of them were killed.

Supposedly you drink to forget. The trouble is you don’t forget, you remember—all the old insults and hatreds, real and imagined. As a result there are always fights. One of the nicest, gentlest men I knew killed his wife in a drunken rage. One uncle had both his eyes put out while he was lying senseless. My sister-in-law Delphine’s husband lost one eye. She herself was beaten to death by a drunken tribal policeman. Such things are not even considered worth an investigation.

I fight too. During my barhopping days I went into a Rapid City saloon for a beer. Among Sioux people, Rapid City has a reputation for being the most racist town in the whole country as far as Indians are concerned. In the old days many South Dakota saloons had a sign over the door reading
NO INDIANS AND DOGS ALLOWED!
I sat down next to an old honky lady. Actually she looked about thirty, but when you are seventeen that seems old. She gave me a dirty look, moving to another stool away from me, saying, “Goddam, dirty Injun. You get out into the streets and the gutter where you belong.”

I came back, “What did you say?”

“You heard me. This place ain’t for Indians. Dammit, isn’t there a place left where a white man (I remember, she actually said “man") can drink in peace without having to put up with you people?”

I felt the blood pounding in my head. In front of me where I was sitting was a glass ashtray. I broke it on the counter and cut her face with the jagged edge. In my insane drunken rage I felt good doing it. Possibly I would have felt good even had I been sober.

One time I was in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, visiting a girl friend among the Sac and Fox Indians. She is poor but always cleans out her whole icebox to feed me. Her tribe happened to be having a powwow with a lot of young people participating, over sixty of them young men. The full-bloods were all standing or sitting around a drum, drinking beer. A lot were dancing with roaches or war bonnets on their heads, feather bustles on their butts, and bells on their ankles. The songs were militant. Some of the white boys and breeds were catching on to that and started hassling the skins. I should make clear that being a full-blood or breed is not a matter of bloodline, or how Indian you look, or how black your hair is. The general rule is that whoever thinks, sings, acts, and speaks Indian is a skin, a full-blood, and whoever acts and thinks like a white man is a half-blood or breed, no matter how Indian he looks. So the full-bloods told the others, “If you are ready to get it on with us, so get it on!” The half-bloods and white boys had white or cowboy shirts on while the skins wore ribbon shirts and chokers. They wore their hair long, often in braids. The others wore it short. It was easy to tell friend from foe. They got it on. It was one of the biggest drunken free-for-alls I was ever involved in. It lasted about half an hour, but already after five minutes the breeds had three casualties. One man got his face knocked in, the others had concussions. In the end there were about nine of these white shirts lying on the ground under a big tree, bloody and knocked out. One had a broken arm. It’s something you can’t stop once it starts. If somebody in that fighting mood yells at you, “Go, get ‘em!” you can’t tell that person, who has been fucked over for so many years, that he is wrong, that he should be a pacifist.