Ohitika Woman Read online

  Ohitika Woman

  ALSO BY RICHARD ERDOES

  Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

  The Sun Dance People

  The Rain Dance People

  The Pueblo Indians

  The Sound of Flutes

  Picture History of Ancient Rome

  Saloons of the Old West

  The Woman Who Dared

  American Indian Myths and Legends (with Alfonso Ortiz)

  A.D. 1000, Living on the Brink of Apocalypse

  Crying for a Dream

  Lakota Woman

  Tales from the American Frontier

  Gift of Power

  Ohitika Woman

  Mary Brave Bird

  with

  Richard Erdoes

  Copyright © 1993 by Mary Brave Bird and Richard Erdoes

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Scanning, uploading, and electronic distribution of this book or the facilitation of such without the permission of the publisher is prohibited. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated. Any member of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or anthology, should send inquiries to Grove Atlantic, 154 West 14th Street, New York, NY 10011 or [email protected].

  Published simultaneously in Canada

  Chapter 4, “Life in Paradise,” originally appeared in The Missouri Review.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Brave Bird, Mary.

  Ohitika Woman / Mary Brave Bird, with Richard Erdoes.

  p. cm.

  ISBN: 978-0-8021-4339-6 (pbk.)

  eISBN: 978-0-8021-9156-4

  1. Brave Bird, Mary. 2. Brule women—Biography. 3. Brule Indians—Politics and government. 4. American Indian Movement. I. Erdoes, Richard. II. Title.

  [E99.B8B733 1994]

  937’.04975—dc20

  [B] 94-18040

  Designed by Laura Hugh

  Cover design by Wendy Lai

  Cover photograph courtesy of Richard Erdoes

  Grove Press

  an imprint of Grove Atlantic

  154 West 14th Street

  New York, NY 10011

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  www.groveatlantic.com

  To the brave women of

  Wounded Knee

  Contents

  Instead of a Foreword

  1Like a Candle in a Storm

  2Ancestors

  3A Little Backtracking

  4Life in Paradise

  5Womb Power

  6Song of the Waterbird

  7Peyote Memories

  8Wrapped in a Hot, White Cloud

  9Ceremonies

  10The Granddaddy of Them All

  11Big Mountain

  12Under the Tempe Bridge

  13Living on Beer, Commodities, and Love

  14On a Tear

  15Bleeding Always Stops If You Press Down Hard Enough

  16Moon Power

  17The Land Is Our Blood

  18Selling the Medicine

  19A New Love

  20The Iron House

  21Skin Art

  22Here and Now

  Instead of a Foreword

  This book is the result of a collaboration between two oddly paired human beings—an old white man and a young Native American woman. Our backgrounds could not be more different. I, Richard Erdoes, have been raised in Vienna, as a member of a family of actors and opera singers. I came to America at the age of twenty-eight, and even though I have lived in the United States for a lifetime, I am culturally still more European than American.

  Mary Brave Bird, up to recently known as Mary Crow Dog, was born and raised in the tiny settlement of He Dog, on the Rosebud Sioux reservation, a member of the Brulé, or Sichangu, Tribe, one of seven tribes making up the larger Lakota Nation. While I was raised in the shadows of medieval cathedrals and ancient baroque buildings, Mary grew up on the prairie, where, as the old saying has it, “there is nothing between you and the North Pole but a barbed-wire fence.” In spite of our different backgrounds, Mary and I have two things in common: We both grew up fatherless. Four weeks before I was born, my own father died of double pneumonia after an exhausting series of performances at the Buda- pest opera. Mary’s father deserted his family while she was still a baby. And both of us had been youthful rebels fighting the powers that ruled over us. As a twenty-year-old art student I had been a member of the anti-Hitler movement in Austria and Germany, while as a teenager Mary had joined AIM, the American Indian Movement, fighting against racism and oppression. Mary and I finally met as the result of an accident.

  During the first twenty years of my life in New York City I worked exclusively as an artist, particularly as a book and magazine illustrator. In 1964, two national magazines sent me west to do a painting portfolio and a photo essay on Indian reservations. This led to lasting friendships with several Native American families, many of them Sioux. One old medicine man, John Fire Lame Deer, insisted upon my “doing his book.” In spite of my protests that I was an artist, not a writer, and that English was my second language, he kept saying: “My medicine tells me that you’ll write my story.” This went on for years until I finally gave in, and to our surprise, the book, Lame Deer; Seeker of Visions, became a classic in Native American literature. Lame Deer changed me from an artist into a writer, though I still paint whenever I have a chance.

  The Indian civil rights movement started some ten years after the struggle for Black Power, but when it hit the Sioux reservations it did so with a vengeance. By 1970 many of the sons and daughters of my older Lakota friends had joined AIM. As a result my wife, Jean, and I became heavily involved ourselves. In November 1972, Jean, I, and our two sons took part in the Trail of Broken Treaties, which ended in the occupation of the Bureau of Indian Affairs Building in Washington, D.C. Mary was there too, sixteen and pregnant, but on that occasion we were not aware of each other.

  At that time I was especially close to the Crow Dog family—Old Henry, his wife, Mary Gertrude, and their son, Leonard, who was the medicine man of the American Indian Movement. After having given birth to her first child, Pedro, during the siege of Wounded Knee in April 1973, Mary married Leonard, Indian style, and moved in with him at “Crow Dog’s Paradise.” It was there that I first met her face to face. She was small, feisty, very pretty, and standoffish. I heard her say once, during those days of confrontation: “There might be a good white man someplace, but I never met one yet.” Observing the close bond existing between my family and the Crow Dogs, she tolerated my presence, ignoring me most of the time. I didn’t mind, having learned something of her terrible experiences at a white-run boarding school and with redneck racists. When she couldn’t avoid contact with us, she was politely cool.

  In the aftermath of Wounded Knee and the big shoot-out at Oglala in May 1975, which resulted in the death of two FBI agents and one Native American, my wife and I became heads of a defense committee for Leonard Crow Dog and a few other Lakota friends who were indicted for strictly political offenses. Crow Dog was tried at Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and Rapid City and Pierre, South Dakota, and was convicted in every case. While he was released on probation by the judge at Cedar Rapids, the one at Pierre ordered him to be at once taken to prison. In handcuffs, waist chain, and leg-irons, he was dragged away so quickly that I did not even have a chance to tell him good-bye. At the time South Dakota was considered
the most racist state in the Union as far as Native Americans were concerned; it was said that even Jesus Christ himself would have been found guilty of a heinous crime there had he been an activist Indian.

  Crow Dog was sent to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, to serve his time. The prison was some eighteen hundred miles distant from the Rosebud Reservation but could be reached by car from New York in a couple of hours. I therefore proposed to Mary that she move in with us, together with her baby, so that she could be near her husband. She stayed with us for almost a year and it was then, living together in the same apartment, that we finally became close friends. Even so it took her a long time before she hugged and kissed us as she did her Indian friends. She was as sassy, outspoken, and brutally honest as ever, but also bewildered, wide-eyed, and lost in what she called “the canyons” of the big city.

  We had not realized how isolated and limited Mary’s life had been before she came to live with us. After we introduced her to Lucy, an African American friend, she told us that this was the first black person she had ever met. She found out that many New Yorkers were unlike the racists who had made her life miserable in South Dakota and that there existed white people who would become her close friends. You could not pull the wool over her eyes, though. Coming home to us after a fund-raiser for minority causes held by some wealthy people in a luxury apartment, she told us: “Those people used me only as a prop, showing off ‘their Indian,’ trying to impress everybody with how liberal they were. They talked a lot about women’s rights but left a mountain of dirty dishes for their black maid to clean up. I went into the kitchen to help her and we compared notes. Well, I’m breaking through the buckskin curtain.”

  She once caught me looking at her and at once confronted me, saying: “I know you are sexually attracted to me.” I told her that, being an artist and photographer, I could not help studying people’s faces, whether they were men or women, young or old, pretty or ugly.

  She stared back at me for a moment, shrugged, and said: “Okay, I half believe you.” We laughed and I was never again suspected of harboring designs against her virtue, but the remark was typical of her blunt way of confronting situations.

  I also discovered that she had a beautiful voice, more like a child’s than like that of a grown woman, and we all liked to listen to her Lakota songs and peyote chants—touching, sweet, and indescribably sad.

  There were good days and bad, laughter and tears. I remember her bursting in on Jean and myself during breakfast, shouting: “Come quick, look, Pedro has a boner!” And indeed, two-year-old Pedro had a tiny erection, something to make a doting mother proud. But then there was the dark day when Mary and I were sitting in my studio, chatting. The phone rang. I handed her the receiver: “Mary, it’s for you.” I watched her listen, stiffening, her face distorted in grief. Somebody from the reservation was reporting that her best friend, Annie Mae Aquash, had been found brutally murdered in the snow, her eyes picked out by crows or magpies, her hands cut off and missing. And there were bad days whenever they were giving Crow Dog a hard time in the Lewisburg prison.

  One of my publishers approached me: “Your Lame Deer book is doing very well. What else would you like to do in that vein?” I told him that books and magazine and newspaper articles were being written about Native American men, particularly AIM leaders, but that the Indian women, whose strength kept the movement going, were being ignored. I said: “We have just now a Sioux friend living with us, a young woman who gave birth at Wounded Knee during the siege. I would like to help her write an autobiography.” We got a contract, and all during the time of Crow Dog’s imprisonment we worked on the taping and transcribing of her story. We got Crow Dog out of prison with the help of the National Council of Churches, which raised funds for his defense, and Mary and Leonard returned to the res. I put the manuscript together like a jigsaw puzzle out of a huge mountain of tapes and delivered it a year or so later. The editor phoned, asking me to come and see him. He told me: “This book is much too radical. The political climate has changed. This radical shit is out. Mysticism is in. Make her into a female Don Juan! Make her into a witch. Make her fly through the air!”

  I said: “Are you completely mad? Mary is not a spectral apparition but a flesh-and-blood Sioux woman. She’s for real, not something out of my fantasies. If I faked her story she would come after us with her skinning knife, and rightly so.” Whereupon he refused to accept the manuscript and, of course, we were not paid for a year’s hard work. The manuscript lay around for over ten years. I forgot about it. Mary forgot about it. But our literary agent, Peter Basch, remembered. In 1989 he mentioned it to Fred Jordan, at that time a senior editor at Grove Press. He loved the book. Lakota Woman became a best-seller. It is out in several foreign languages. We even got a movie contract for it. In a way, “our medicine was good.” Had the book been published back in 1979 it would not have been as successful. Women, especially Indian women, weren’t “in” at the time.

  Our first book described Mary’s life from her childhood until 1977. “What has happened to her since then?” the people at Grove asked. “Can you do a second book?” And so Mary, fifteen years later, moved in with us again, this time in Santa Fe, to do a second book, and here it is.

  Richard Erdoes

  Santa Fe, New Mexico

  August 1992

  Ohitika Woman

  CHAPTER ONE

  Like a Candle in a Storm

  I was like a candle in a storm, a little candle in a big storm, barely flickering, almost snuffed out. On March 28, 1991, there was a power outage on the Rosebud Reservation in South Dakota. As the light bulbs went out in my mother’s house she said: “I wonder if anything happened to Mary?” She still doesn’t know what made her say this. Then she heard it on her scanner, with which you can listen to the tribal police band. She heard a policeman say: “Mary Crow Dog has been in a terrible wreck. She’s dying. She’s gone.”

  I had been drinking heavily, like most everybody else on the res. To drown my sorrows. To forget. To wash away despair in a flood of Jack Daniel’s and “Buddy Wiser.” I had no place to stay. Part of the summer I had lived in a dilapidated one-room cabin with an earth floor, a kerosene lamp, and a toppling outhouse, a veritable Tower of Pisa. Before that, for months at a time, I had lived with my children in a tipi at Grass Mountain. The advance money from the book was long gone. Every week I had to borrow money from Richard, my wasichu coauthor.

  Because of some of the things I’d said in Lakota Woman, women on the res had liked my book. Some men had not and were giving me that “death look.” One had sneered at me: “You are nothing and your book is nothing.” Woman beating is part of everyday life on the reservation. The white man oppresses the half-blood, the half-blood oppresses the full-blood, and everybody takes out their anger, despair, and feeling of helplessness on the women. The men have a good and an evil side. Sober, they are angels. Drunk, their evil side comes out, and they are drunk a good part of the time.

  Men and women drink because there is nothing else to do. There are no jobs. The poverty is unbelievable. Everybody is on public assistance, which is not enough to hold body and soul together. There is nothing to occupy one’s time except partying and playing “quarter pitch.” Partying means visiting back and forth in groups while getting drunk. Getting drunk means getting mean, and partying often ends in violence. Men fight men, women fight women, friends fight friends, big guys beat up on little women. They seldom beat kids. I will give them that. Sometimes a fight ends in death or serious injury. Most fatalities on the reservation are caused by DWI, driving while intoxicated. More people die because of this than heart disease and cancer combined. Some kill themselves by drinking “Montana gin,” a deadly mixture of Lysol and water that is becoming popular on some reservations.

  I have many faults, but dishonesty is not among them. I tell it like it is. I don’t make myself better than I am. Being beaten up sometimes was my own fault. I don’t have to go partying. I don’t have to drink myself
into insensibility, though given conditions on the res, insensibility can be bliss. When I am in that state my anger comes out. I get rowdy and foulmouthed. I talk back to the men and get hurt. Many a night I wind up in the drunk tank. I wrecked several cars while being “lila itomni.”

  On that night, March 28, I had been partying with some of my friends. We had already downed a few and went to the “club,” where we had shots of Jack Daniel’s and margaritas on top of that. Then I went to a girlfriend’s house, where they were drinking beer. I joined in. Everything was covered with empty beer cans. When I got up to leave, everybody said: “Don’t go. You’re in no condition to drive.” But I went anyway. I wanted to pick up my cousin, Mike, who is part Navajo, and have some more Buddy Wisers with him. I never made it.

  Somehow I got on the road leading to the trailer of my sister Barb and her old man, Jim. It was about one o’clock. I was on a gravel road, real loose gravel. I took the wrong turn and must have been going real fast, because I lost control of the car, and when I saw that utility pole coming at me, I said: “Oh, shit!” And that’s all I remember.

  When I came to I couldn’t move. I yelled for help, but nobody heard me. Then I lost consciousness again. I had wrecked near a house. The man who lived there got up early in the morning and noticed my car from his window. He also saw the utility pole down and broken in half. Luckily he had a phone and called the police.

  High-voltage wire was wrapped all around the car, and to get me out they had to call the electric company to turn off the power. I was pinned inside the car, drifting in and out of consciousness. I did not know where I was or what had happened. They thought I was dead, but one man noticed a pulse beating. When they moved me there was a terrible surge of pain that shot up all the way from my feet into the roots of my hair. Cuts from the glass of the splintered windshield had left tiny drops of blood all over my face. My mother said it looked like freckles. One of my ears was nearly severed. Six of my ribs were broken. One had punctured and collapsed my left lung. Another had ripped open my aorta, but this they didn’t find out until later. At the tribal hospital they thought that my neck had been broken. They called my condition “code blue.” They knew that my injuries were too severe for them to handle and that they would have to fly me to the big hospital at Sioux Falls, our largest city. They phoned my mom, and she came down from He Dog to be with me. My oldest son, Pedro, also came, together with my sister Barb. They all flew with me. I fantasized that I phoned my kids to tell them where I was, but of course I was hallucinating. I was dehydrated and terribly thirsty, but they wouldn’t give me any water on account of my injuries. In spite of the state I was in I got rowdy and kicked the nurse. Barb took this as a good sign that at least I was not paralyzed. Pedro, on the sly, gave me some fluid to drink from an IV bottle.