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  When we arrived at Sioux Falls, Mom had a priest give me the last rites before they wheeled me in for surgery. The doctors gave me only one chance in ten to survive the next twenty-four hours. They performed open-heart surgery to put a graft around my ripped aorta. They told me later that for some twenty seconds I had been clinically dead with my arteries disconnected. I could not breathe by myself, and they had to perform a tracheotomy. I was also put on a respirator. They put a tube in my left side to drain the lung and a catheter in my urethra, and pumped antibiotics and God knows what else intravenously into both my arms. They did not bother with my lesser injuries. Even now, ten months later, there are “no strings attached” between my left shoulder blade and upper arm bones, where most ligaments were torn and never repaired. To this day, it hurts and the arm is weak.

  Before the accident I had been going through a lot, was depressed and did not want to go on with my life. That is why I got drunk and wrecked in the first place. So, during open-heart surgery, I had a vision. It was very real, like a down-to-earth experience. I went to see my grandma who had raised me. I was in a room with her in the house where I had spent my early childhood. I said: “Grandma, I came to stay with you.” She said: “No, you can’t.” I told her: “I don’t want to stay in the world anymore. I miss you.” But Grandma insisted: “No, you can’t. You have kids to take care of. Think of them. You have to go back. I’ll be here for you, someday, when you’re ready to come over. I’ll always be here for you.” So my grandmother was telling me to go back to the world and my responsibilities. After surgery I thought I was dying arid I wouldn’t let Mom let go of my hand. They took a CAT scan the next day, putting me into something like a giant tube to take X rays of my head. I thought I was dead and someone was putting me in the freezer.

  They performed a series of operations on me, but every time they thought they were through with me, they found new injuries to fix. They discovered that my womb was injured and took out one of my ovaries. Before they did this they made me sign a paper: “I understand that after this operation I will never be able to have a baby,” or something to that effect. At first I refused, saying: “Can’t you avoid it?” They asked me: “Do you have any children?” I told them: “Yes, three boys, one girl, and a granddaughter.” “Well, you’ve done enough,” one of the doctors said. “Herewith we retire you from that messy childbearing business!” Ten months later I was pregnant again. That shows you how much you can rely upon what those big-shot doctors tell you. Here I was thinking that I didn’t have to be careful anymore and then there was someone kicking again inside my belly. So it goes.

  I stayed a month in the hospital. They put staples in my back and in other spots where I had surgery. They hurt whenever I moved. At first I couldn’t move at all. I just lay there. If I wanted to change position I had to call the nurse. One night I got so tired of lying on my back that I somehow managed to turn over on my stomach. That was a mistake, because I got all tangled up in the sheets like a mummy. I couldn’t reach the button to call for the nurse. I yelled for help, but nobody heard me. I finally managed to push the button with my foot. The nurse came and laughed seeing me in my mummified state. I didn’t think it was all that funny. But the nurses were good to me. After a week or so they took out the catheter and the tube in my trachea. I could breathe again and go to the bathroom by myself They took the IVs off because I could now eat solid food. They took me to the rehab place for physical therapy. I was still in great pain but considered myself blessed having all my body parts in the right place and functioning again. There were a lot of other skins in that hospital for the same reason as myself. .. DWI! Some were missing hands or legs, and others were blinded or brain damaged. They were much worse off than I. A lot of people were sending me get-well cards. I didn’t realize how many people were praying for me. One guy, George, who partied a lot, even conducted a sweat for me. He later told me: “I thought of you every day. Even when I was drunk I prayed for you.”

  Once I was able to get around I even enjoyed myself, up to a point. I had hot and cold running water, a bathtub and flush toilet, all the conveniences of a middle-class wasichu home. I could order any food I wanted and raid the fridge whenever I felt like it. But I got restless and tired of being cooped up in a hospital. I missed my kids and friends. So, over the protests of some doctors, I checked myself out and had Barb and Jim drive me the three hundred miles home. I stayed at my mother’s place, and she took good care of me. I still hurt, so the doctors gave me painkillers, Demerol and other highly addictive narcotics. The more you take, the more you want. I told them: “Take me off that stuff. I don’t want to end up as a junkie.” I drank to deaden the pain. When the pain stopped I quit drinking. Sometimes my heart muscle cramps, mostly when I am stressed out. So on certain days I still have trouble breathing. Singing with others at the drum during last summer’s sun dance, I got short-winded and had to sit down. But that’s my own fault, because I still smoke cigarettes. I smoke a little pej, too. I look upon it as a natural medicine that was put there for us. I never did drugs like crack, cocaine, or heroin. I never got into the hard stuff. It used to be that I couldn’t get out of bed and through the day without a joint, but I put it away because it was no longer doing anything for me. I pray to Wakan Tanka, the Creator, and I’m honest with him and with myself.

  Finally this episode in my life came to an end. I never was the same again after it. It changed my life-style for sure.

  Three things stand out in my memory regarding my car wreck. Two are funny and one is very strange. I got a bill for fifteen hundred dollars—to pay for a new telephone pole. That struck me as tragicomical. After the wreck, when I got a trailer house for myself and the kids, the utility company wouldn’t turn on the electricity until I signed an agreement to pay for the pole in monthly installments.

  The second incident isn’t quite as funny, come to think of it. Debbie, the person whose house I wrecked in front of, owns what calls itself a nightclub in Mission. Don’t imagine that it’s like a club in New York or Chicago. It’s just a small, humble drinking joint for skins. Debbie is an old friend. I grew up with her, and we are really close. After the wreck, while I was recovering, I stopped in and saw her at the club. She said: “I’m so glad you survived! We were rooting for you! Drinks are on the house!”

  The third thing that happened, the strange one, was this: As I was hallucinating on the operating table, I imagined that I phoned my children, telling them where I was and what had happened to me. At that time the children were staying with my sister Barb. When Barb came home from Sioux Falls, my son June Bug told her: “Mom called. She said that she was in a car wreck and is in surgery. She also said not to worry, that she’ll be all right.” The spirit works in strange ways.

  That is all I can say about this accident that almost killed me. White readers will probably look upon it as something out of the ordinary. On the res it caused no ripple. DWI wrecks like mine happen all the time, to be dismissed with a shrug.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Ancestors

  I am an iyeska, a half-breed, and there are some on the res who won’t let me forget it. The full-bloods, the ikche wichasha, the “wild, natural beings,” often look down upon the half-breeds as no longer living in the traditional Indian way, as being “apples,” red on the outside and white inside. The half-breeds, in turn, look upon the full-bloods as backward. All this doesn’t mean much. Ikche wichasha or iyeska, we are all no longer living like the old Indians—we all go to the same stores and supermarkets and have had to compromise, with one foot in the white and the other in the Indian world. Also, at Rosebud we are all related in some way, particularly as we recognize fourth, fifth, and sixth cousins as relatives. I am a half-breed. So what?

  We are all descended from Chief Iron Shell, Pankeska Maza, a son of a warrior called Bull Tail. Iron Shell was a legendary fighter. In 1843 he killed eleven Pawnees during a single battle. He counted many coups* and received many war honors. In 1849 a band of Lakotas
went on the warpath and fell into a trap. Over eighty of their party were killed, and the survivors and their families were from that time on known as the Wablenicha, or Orphan Band. Eventually Iron Shell became the chief of the Wablenicha. In 1855, after a heroic defense, Iron Shell and his band were defeated at the battle of the Blue Water River. In the retreat, one baby was lost but was found by an officer and later returned to his father, Iron Shell. The baby, whose name was Hollow Horn Bear, grew up to become a great chief.

  Iron Shell had seven sons—Bear Dog, the oldest, Hollow Horn Bear, Peter Iron Shell, Bird Necklace, He Frightens, Pretty Bird, and my great-grandfather, Stephen Brave Bird. At some time late in the nineteenth century, everybody got a permanent last name and a Christian first name. Brave Bird had only one son, and that is why there are so few Brave Birds left.

  Each of Iron Shell’s sons formed his own tiyospaye, the extended Lakota family that includes all people descended from a common father. Of all these sons of Iron Shell, Chief Hollow Horn Bear, Mato He Oglogeca, was the best known. He was a magnificent-looking man. His face appeared on an old fourteen-cent postage stamp and on a five-dollar bill. He was invited by President Teddy Roosevelt to come to his inauguration. As a young man he had been a great warrior. When only sixteen years old he counted his first coup on a Pawnee brave. As befitted a great chief he had a harem of seven wives. As a chief he had to be generous, feeding all visitors and giving away fine buffalo robes. One single wife could not have done all that cooking and hide tanning. One wife’s name was Good Bed. He had his camp at Cut Meat, a small settlement so named because it was where the government-issued cattle were butchered.

  In 1912, the chief had his first ride in a motorcar. Studying our ancestors’ history, I am always struck by the fact that my great-grandfathers and great-grandmothers made the jump from the Stone Age to the industrial age in one single lifetime. Iron Shell and Hollow Horn Bear grew up making their fires with flint and steel and had gone to war with bows and stone-tipped arrows. They lived off the buffalo. In their old age they rode in cars, made telephone calls, posed for photographs, and had dinner with journalists and politicians in fancy East Coast restaurants. Hollow Horn Bear died in Washington of pneumonia during the inauguration of President Wilson. His body w as shipped back to Rosebud, where he was buried in 1913.

  Another well-known member of our clan was Fool Bull, Tatanka Witko, who fought Custer at the Little Big Horn. An old photograph shows him with a huge bear-claw necklace, each claw representing a grizzly or black bear he had killed. His son, Uncle Dick Fool Bull, took me to my first peyote meeting. He was the last maker of traditional Sioux flutes, which all ended in a bird’s head, the sound coming out of the open beak. He himself could play the flute beautifully. These were instruments for courting, making the love music. Uncle Fool Bull died in 1975, almost one hundred years old. He still remembered the massacre of some three hundred Lakota men, women, and children at Wounded Knee, in the winter of 1890. Uncle Dick’s son, Leslie, is a roadman of the Native American Church, the peyote church. Other Iron Shell relatives are also leaders, as well as members, of that pan- Indian religion.

  My great-grandfather, Stephen Brave Bird, had five wives. One of them was named Zoe Gurue, also known as Zoe McKenzie, my great-grandmother. She was half French. Stephen was a cowboy. He went on long, epic cattle drives from Rosebud to Texas and to the Kansas hell towns . . . Dodge City, Ellsworth, and Newton. He became one of the early rodeo riders, bulldogging being his specialty. When he married Zoe he settled down on the reservation at a place called Hollow Horn Bear Flats. All the sons of old Iron Shell lived close together, each with his own tiyospaye. The Hollow Horn Bears at Cut Meat, the Iron Shells at Spring Creek, the Bear Dogs near St. Francis. They all lived up there on the flats, close together for mutual support. Stephen lived strictly on his own land, the original allotment. He had a little wagon, and he’d bring wood and groceries for my grandmother after her husband died in an accident. He was very affectionate and couldn’t do enough for his grandkids.

  My grandfather, Mom’s dad, was Robert Brave Bird. He was a farmer, hunter, and trapper. All winter long he trapped beavers, mink, coons, and muskrats. Throughout the season my mother lived down by the creek in a tent. In the spring he’d sell all the furs he had. Mom said that this was her Christmastime. With the money from his pelts he bought all his kids new clothes and lots of candy. He’d buy new corn seed for his little farm and work his fields all summer long. After the harvest he’d move back to the river with his family. For food they’d eat turtle, beaver, whatever. It must have been a hard life, but Mom remembers it as a happy time. They had no electricity or plumbing or running water. They had oil lamps for light, and a stove with plenty of wood for heat. During the South Dakota winters, with temperatures often dropping to forty below, you had to be hardy to survive. Mom thought nothing of it. Mom also told me of some old customs that, in her words, “weren’t very nice,” like having multiple wives and “drumming” an unwanted wife out of camp so that she could never come back. She told me that wife beating was a way of life and that having head lice was considered part of normal living. When Mom was a young girl she could only speak Lakota. She still understands it perfectly, but nowadays she is slow in getting her sentences out. As a schoolteacher she comes in contact mostly with English-speaking people and has little chance to practice her Sioux language.

  Grandpa Robert was a fine man, very kind, a good husband and father. He died during the early thirties. He had sold his corn and drove his wagon to the big general store to buy groceries. He had loaded his wagon with rations and was driving his team of horses when he had the accident. There was a storm. Lightning spooked the horses. They were dragging him along and he grabbed a fence to stop himself. The barbed wire cut his arm badly and he bled to death. A neighbor found the body the following morning. He found the horses, too, which I am told were exceptionally fine and beautiful animals. My great-grandmother killed them, shot them dead after the old custom. To make things worse, when Louise, his widow, had a giveaway in Robert Brave Bird’s honor, people came from everywhere, descending upon the house like a swarm of locusts, stripping the place clean, down to the pots and pans. After that my grandmother’s sister came and brought Louise’s kids back to Rosebud, where Mom spent the rest of her childhood. Later, Louise did cleaning and washing for people, mostly whites from the Bureau of Indian Affairs. I am told that I look very much Like this grandmother of mine. She was light-skinned but her features were totally Indian. She died only a few years ago at the age of eighty-five. Her maiden name was Flood.

  The Floods left County Mayo, Ireland, sometime during the Great Potato Famine and came to America. My great-grandfather, Tom Flood, was born in 1863. He went west early and opened a trading post in Wyoming, close to what is now the South Dakota state line. Here he married one of the Yellow Hair girls, from Pine Ridge, whose father was a Roubideaux. There are still lots of Roubideauxs in Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Some are AIM activists and Wounded Knee veterans, others are conservatives, and one is a lawyer. They are all descendants of Joseph and Antoine Roubideaux—French trappers, mountain men, traders, and trailblaiiers. They came from a family clan that had settled along the Mississippi and Missouri long ago, when that whole large area was still French. These Roubideaux men first appeared in Indian country between 1820 and 1830. They were friends of such famous men as Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, and Broken Hand Fitzpatrick. They trapped beaver and put up little log cabin “forts” where they traded with the local Indians for furs, paying them with “rattle-snake whiskey” . . . one gallon water, one cup raw whiskey, a dash of strychnine for taste, a pinch of gunpowder “to give her a kick,” and three rattlesnake heads for potency. The brothers bought whiskey at St. Louis for thirty cents a gallon and sold it for three dollars a pint to booze-crazed trappers in the Rockies. Antoine blazed an immigrant trail all the way from Missouri to California, and you can still see the deep ruts it made through our country. Both Antoine and Joseph marr
ied full-blooded Sioux women, because these were the only kind around. There’s also a tiny bit of Spanish blood in there someplace, but it’s hard to trace. The woman that Tom Flood married was a feisty lady, small of body but with a big heart. Legend has it that she once stabbed to death with her skinning knife a trader who had cheated her.

  Great-grandpa Flood opened a saloon and tended bar. He also herded cattle, acted as an interpreter, and worked as an allotment agent. One day in 1906, when he was in the saloon, some cowboys came in there wanting a drink. Some dispute started, and Tom Flood was shot in the back. His wife found his body and carried it six miles on her back to his camp. He was a tall, dark-haired, good-looking man. We still have a photograph of him, in full Indian regalia, with a very large eagle-feather warbonnet on his head.

  There was a man called Noble Moore, and he married my grandmother, Tom Flood’s daughter, Louise, after my grandfather Robert Brave Bird died. They were wonderful, kind people who raised me during my preschool days in the traditional Indian way, as I described in my first book. Noble’s son, Bill, married Mom. He was the no-good son of a fine father, but Mom didn’t have much of a crop to pick from. The reservation, at the time, was a hellhole, the men totally demoralized, with no money and no jobs, drinking themselves to death out of sheer boredom.