Lakota Woman (7 page)

I was caught only twice. The second time I happened to be in Dubuque, Iowa. That was after the occupation of Alcatraz, when the Indian civil rights movement started to get under way, with confrontations taking place between Indians and whites in many places. I had attached myself to a caravan of young militant skins traveling in a number of cars and vans. While the caravan stopped in Dubuque to eat and wash up, I went to a shopping mall, saw a sweater I liked, and quickly stuffed it under my Levi’s jacket.

I got out of the store all right, and walked across the parking lot where the caravan was waiting. Before I could join it, two security guards nabbed me. One of them said, “I want that sweater.” I told him, “But I don’t have no sweater.” He just opened my jacket and took the sweater from under my arm. They took me back to the office, going through my ID, putting down my name, all that kind of thing. They had a radio in the office going full blast and I could hear the announcer describing the citizens’ concern over a huge caravan of renegade Indians heading their way. One of the guards suddenly looked up at me and asked, “Are you by any chance one of those people?”

“Yeah,” I told him. “They’re just half a mile behind me and they’ll be here soon, looking for me.”

He said, “You don’t have to sign your name here. Just go. You can take that damn sweater too. Just get out of here!”

The incident made me realize that ripping off was not worth the risks I took. It also occurred to me there were better, more mature ways to fight for my rights.

Barb was less lucky. During the riots at Custer, South Dakota, she spent two days in the Rapid City jail. She was pulled in for third-degree burglary. It was the usual liberating of some food for which they were arrested, Barb and an Indian boy, but when she went before the judge and he told her that she was facing fifteen years, it made her sit up. She too started to reflect that if you had to go to jail it shouldn’t be for a Saran-Wrapped chicken worth two bucks.

Most of the arrests occurred not for what we did, but for what we were and represented—for being skins. For Instance once, near Martin, South Dakota, we had a flat tire and pulled off the road to fix it. It was late at night, dark, and very cold. While the boys were attending to the car, we girls built a good-sized fire to warm our backsides and make some coffee, coffee—pejuta sapa—being what keeps a roaming skin going. A fire truck went by. We did not pay any attention to it. A little while later the truck came back followed by two police cars. The police stared at us but kept on going, but pretty soon they made a U-turn and came back.

Across the road stood a farmhouse. The owner had called the police saying that Indians were about to burn his house down. All we were doing was fixing the tire and making coffee. The farmer had us arrested on a charge of attempted arson, trespassing, disturbing the peace, and destroying private property—the latter because in building our fire we had used one of his rotten fence posts. We spent two days in jail and then were found not guilty.

Little by little, those days in jail began adding up. We took such things in stride because they happened all the time, but subconsciously, I think, they had an effect upon us. During the years I am describing, in some Western states, the mere fact of being Indian and dressing in a certain way provoked the attention of the police. It resulted in having one’s car stopped for no particular reason, in being pulled off the street on the flimsiest excuse, in being constantly shadowed and harassed. It works subtly on your mind until you start to think that if they keep on arresting you anyway you should at least give them a good reason for it.

I kept on moving, letting the stream carry me. It got to a point where I always looked forward to my next joint, my next bottle of gin. Even when the friends around me seemed to cool down I could not stop. Once I got hold of fifty white cross tablets—speed—and started taking them. The people I saw in the streets were doing it, why shouldn’t I do it also? It gave me a bad case of the shakes and made me conclude that roving was not that much fun anymore. But I knew of no other way to exist.

Sexually our roaming bands, even after we had been politically sensitized and joined AIM, were free, very free and wild. If some boy saw you and liked you, then right away that was it. “If you don’t come to bed with me, wincincala, I got somebody else who’s willing to.” The boys had that kind of attitude and it caused a lot of trouble for Barb and myself, because we were not that free. If we got involved we always took it seriously. Possibly our grandparents’ and mother’s staunch Christianity and their acceptance of the missionaries’ moral code had something to do with it. They certainly tried hard to implant it in us, and though we furiously rejected it, a little residue remained.

There is a curious contradiction in Sioux society. The men pay great lip service to the status women hold in the tribe. Their rhetoric on the subject is beautiful. They speak of Grandmother Earth and how they honor her. Our greatest culture hero—or rather heroine—is the White Buffalo Woman, sent to us by the Buffalo nation, who brought us the sacred pipe and taught us how to use it. According to the legend, two young hunters were the first humans to meet her. One of them desired her physically and tried to make love to her, for which he was immediately punished by lightning reducing him to a heap of bones and ashes.

We had warrior women in our history. Formerly, when a young girl had her first period, it was announced to the whole village by the herald, and her family gave her a big feast in honor of the event, giving away valuable presents and horses to celebrate her having become a woman. Just as men competed for war honors, so women had quilling and beading contests. The woman who made the most beautiful fully beaded cradleboard won honors equivalent to a warrior’s coup. The men kept telling us, “See how we are honoring you ...” Honoring us for what? For being good beaders, quillers, tanners, moccasin makers, and child-bearers. That is fine, but... In the governor’s office at Pierre hangs a big poster put up by Indians. It reads:

WHEN THE WHITE MAN

DISCOVERED THIS COUNTRY

INDIANS WERE RUNNING IT—

NO TAXES OR TELEPHONES.

WOMEN DID ALL THE WORK—

THE WHITE MAN THOUGHT

HE COULD IMPROVE UPON

A SYSTEM LIKE THAT.

If you talk to a young Sioux about it he might explain: “Our tradition comes from being warriors. We always had to have our bow arms free so that we could protect you. That was our job. Every moment a Pawnee, or Crow, or white soldier could appear to attack you. Even on the daily hunt a man might be killed, ripped up by a bear or gored by a buffalo. We had to keep our hands free for that. That is our tradition.”

“So, go already,” I tell them. “Be traditional. Get me a buffalo!”

They are still traditional enough to want no menstruating women around. But the big honoring feast at a girl’s first period they dispense with. For that they are too modern. I did not know about menstruating until my first time. When it happened I ran to my grandmother crying, telling her, “Something is wrong. I’m bleeding!” She told me not to cry, nothing was wrong. And that was all the explanation I got. They did not comfort me, or give horses away in my honor, or throw the red ball, or carry me from the menstruation hut to the tipi on a blanket in a new white buckskin outfit. The whole subject was distasteful to them. The feast is gone, only the distaste has remained.

It is not that a woman during her “moontime” is considered unclean, but she is looked upon as being “too powerful.” According to our old traditions a woman during her period possesses a strange force which could render a healing ceremony ineffective. For this reason it is expected that we stay away from all rituals while menstruating. One old man once told me, “Woman on her moon is so strong that if she spits on a rattlesnake, that snake dies.” To tell the truth I never felt particularly powerful while being “on my moon.”

I was forcefully raped when I was fourteen or fifteen. A good-looking young man said, “Come over here, kid, let me buy you a soda"—and I fell for it. He was about twice my weight and a foot taller than I am. He just threw me on the ground and pinned me down. I do not want to remember the details. I kicked and scratched and bit but he came on like a steamroller. Ripped my clothes apart, ripped me apart. I was too embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone what had happened to me. I think I worked off my rage by slashing a man’s tires.

Rapes on the reservations are a big scandal. The victims are mostly full-blood girls, too shy and afraid to complain. A few years back the favorite sport of white state troopers and cops was to arrest young Indian girls on a drunk-and-disorderly, even if the girls were sober, take them to the drunk tanks in their jails, and there rape them. Sometimes they took the girls in their squad cars out into the prairie to “show you what a white man can do. I’m really doin’ you a favor, kid.” After they had done with them, they often kicked the girls out of their cars and drove off. Then the girl who had been raped had to walk five or ten miles home on top of everything else. Indian girls accusing white cops are seldom taken seriously in South Dakota. “You know how they are,” the courts are told, “they’re always asking for it.” Thus there were few complaints for rapes or, as a matter of fact, for forced sterilizations. Luckily this is changing as our women are less reluctant to bring these things into the open.

I like men as friends, like to socialize with them, to know them. But going to bed with one is a commitment. You take responsibility for each other. But responsibility in a relationship was not what our young men wanted, some ninety percent of them. They just wanted to hop in the sack with us. Then they’d be friends. If you didn’t cooperate then they were no longer interested in you as a person. With some of them, their whole courtship consists in pointing at you and then back at their tent, sleeping bag, or bedroll, saying, “Woman, come!” I won’t come that easily. So I was a lot by myself and happy that way.

Once I played a joke on one of our great macho warriors, a good-looking guy, a lady’s man. Women were always swarming over him, especially white groupies. One night, during a confrontation in California, I was lying in my sleeping bag when the great warrior (and he is a great warrior, I don’t call him that facetiously) suddenly came up: “I had a little fight with my old lady. Can I share your sleeping bag?”

He did not wait for an answer but at once wedged himself in. This happened before Wounded Knee when I was in my eighth month. He put his hand upon my breast. I did not say anything. Then his hand wandered farther down, coming to a sudden stop atop that big balloon of a belly. “What in hell is this?” I smiled at him very sweetly. “Oh, I’m just about to have my baby. I think I feel my birth pangs coming on right now!” He got out of the sleeping bag even faster than he had crept in.

One Sioux girl whose lover had left her for a Crow woman was making up forty-niner songs about him. Forty-niners are songs which are half English and half Indian, common to all tribes, often having to do with love and sometimes funny or biting. We were always singing them while we were on the move. So that girl made up this one:

Honey, you left me for to go,

Crow Fair and Indian Rodeo,

Hope you get the diarrhea,

Heya—heya—heya.

It became a great favorite with us, though I don’t remember all of it. One song was all Indian except for the refrain: “Sorry, no pizza today.” But to sum up: our men were magnificent and mean at the same time. You had to admire them. They had to fight their own men’s lib battles. They were incredibly brave in protecting us, they would literally die for us, and they always stood up for our rights—
against outsiders!

Sexual harassment causes a lot of fights between Indians and whites. Our boys really try to protect us against this. At Pierre, South Dakota’s state capital, during a trial of AIM Indians, a lot of us came to lend our moral support, filling the motel, eight to ten people in a room. Barb was with a group occupying three rooms on the ground floor. On her way out to go to the car for some stuff, she passed three cowboy-type white boys leaning against a wall drinking beer and wine. Barb said she could smell the liquor on their breath from some ways off. They at once hemmed her in, making their usual remarks: “Look at the tits on that squaw. Watch her shaking her ass at us. I bet we could show that Injun squaw a good time,” speculating aloud how it would be having her. My sister tried to ignore them, but in the end just turned around and ran back into the motel. The only one she could find there was Tom Poor Bear, an Oglala boy from Pine Ridge. Barb told him that some honkies had been harassing her outside. Tom at once went out with her and these cowboys again started with the same kind of shit, the same sort of sexual harassment. When they noticed Poor Bear they slowly began walking off. Tom called to them, “Hey, you guys come back and apologize.”

The cowboy who had made the most offensive remarks turned around and fingered Poor Bear. He was grinning. “I don’t apologize to her kind ever. She’s nothing but a squaw.”

Poor Bear told him, “You motherfucker, I’ll show you who’s nothing!” Then the fight started, all three of them jumping Tom, stomping him, three wasičuns against one skin. So again Barb scrambled back into the motel and in the lobby ran into Bobby Leader Charge, a Rosebud boy who was only fifteen years old at the time. Young as he was, Bobby just came out of that lobby like a thunderbolt, according to Barb, and joined the fight. By that time the cowboys had been reinforced by three more friends and again we were badly outnumbered. They were beating up on Poor Bear and Leader Charge, really hurting them, kicking them in the groin, going after their eyes. So once again Barbara was trying to round up more help. Luckily, at that moment Russel with the Means brothers and Coke Millard appeared at the motel. The whole sling of them rushed out. The honkies tried to get away, but were not fast enough. Coke Millard knocked one of them right over the top of a parked car. One cowboy got knocked out, just lying there. Another tried crawling away on his hands and knees. The others had run for it. This finished the incident as far as our men were concerned, and all went back to the motel.