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  So they took me to the Pine Ridge jail. There were feds standing around in bright blue jumpsuits. They all had M-16s with sniper scopes, ready to get it on with the red savages. One of them, a fat pig, came up to me and said: “Is that your baby? How cute.” I told him: “I don’t talk to guys like you.” So he left me alone. They told me: “You can’t take your baby in here. Jail ain’t a nursery.” I was upset, but Buddy Lamont’s sister reassured me: “I’ll take your baby, sister, until you come out. I’ll treat him real nice.”

  They kept me in a cell, alone, for eight hours before they took me upstairs. There was an FBI agent there, sitting at a desk, shuffling papers. He looked at me with a nasty smile: “We got some heavy charges against you. You better cooperate if you know what’s good for you.” I answered: “What charges? It ain’t no crime to have a baby. That’s all I did, have a baby.” He kept on grinning: “You’re all guilty of rioting, armed uprising, criminal trespassing, and unlawful occupation, each and every one in that place. But if you behave, sign these papers, and give us some information, I’ll see to it that they’ll go easy on you.”

  I told him that we in the Indian movement had a policy of never giving information or signing anything, but he kept on badgering me: “Who’s in there? We want names. What are those AIM guys up to? How many of them are there? How many guns?” That went on for quite a while. I just sat there like a deaf-mute, staring at him. He finally gave up: “Well then, lady, you’re gonna spend some time in jail, until you decide to give us some info and sign some papers.” “That will be a long time,” I told him.

  They handcuffed me and took me to the Pennington County jail in Rapid City. They threw me into a cell with another Indian lady, who had been in there already for three weeks without having been allowed to make a phone call or see a lawyer. I wasn’t allowed to, either. They threw in a white girl with us. She was a sympathizer who had come to show her support. They let her make phone calls and get in touch with a lawyer right away, which showed us that, as far as the FBI was concerned, we were ranked even lower than a female left-wing radical hippie, the lowest on the totem pole. In the meantime my breasts swelled up and hurt because I didn’t have my baby to nurse. I felt like a poor cow with a full udder and no one to milk her. Again they were running the same kind of shit on me: “Who’s in there, at the Knee? We want names, we want to know about guns, we want you to sign papers waiving certain rights. It’s up to you. Cooperate, or rot in y our cell.” I told them: “Okay, so I’ll rot.” They couldn’t do anything with me. Somebody notified my mother and told her where I was. So Mom came out to see me. They told her that I couldn’t get out because I wouldn’t release any useful information to them. The feds almost locked Mom and Myrl up, too, saying: “You have come to protest and make trouble.” The goons pointed their guns at my mother. She had disapproved of my joining the movement, but she’s always there when I’m in trouble. They told her: “Lady, you’ve got five minutes to be with your daughter,” She cried when she saw me in chains, but I told her: “Mom, don’t let them see you cry. Don’t let them see you that way.” Mom told the feds: “My daughter is only seventeen. She’s done nothing bad. Let me stay a little longer.” They said: “It’s not what she’s done. The thing is, she’s become a symbol.” When Mom was forced to leave me, she reassured me: “Don’t worry about the baby. I’ll take him.”

  My mom went to Cheyenne, the sister of Buddy Lamont who had taken my baby. They had an all-night wake for Buddy at the morgue and my mother sat there all that time with my baby in her lap. Everybody was crying and singing the AIM song. Buddy’s grave is at Wounded Knee, right on the hill where all the victims of the 1890 massacre, three hundred Sioux men, women, and children, are buried in a common ditch. The FBI came to the morgue and wanted to question my mother right there. She told them: “Have a heart. My daughter is only seventeen years old, and we are in mourning here for an ex-marine and veteran whom you guys killed.”

  The man took my mother out into the parking lot and said he would help her, but he also told Mom: “There’s heavy charges against your daughter.” My mother told him: “How can you be so afraid of a seventeen-year-old girl, and so small a girl, too?” But at least she had my baby.

  Well, the FBI couldn’t do better with me at Rapid City, where they moved me, than they had at Pine Ridge. They arraigned me, and took my fingerprints, but gave up on me in the end. They threw me out, saying: “We need your space for some real heavies.” And there I stood outside the “iron house,” which is what Indians call a jail, not knowing what to do, and with no place to go. I thumbed a ride to get back to the res, back to Rosebud, and with my bad luck was picked up by a goon. The goons were a private army organized by Dicky Wilson, the corrupt and murderous half-blood tribal chairman at Pine Ridge, who had declared an open season on all AIM members and everybody else who was opposed to his reign of terror. The goons were a bunch of thugs, some of whom were responsible for many, many murders that were never investigated. You can imagine how I felt when I discovered that I had been picked up by one of them. He wanted to take me to his home, “for a sandwich,” us he said. I knew a sandwich was not what was on his mind. I told him I wanted to go home to Rosebud. He tried to force me to go with him. I managed to jump out of his pickup, ran like hell, and hid in a culvert, my heart pounding. I was only a teenager and scared stiff.

  Leonard Crow Dog had been AIM’s medicine man at Wounded Knee. He had made a tremendous impression upon me. All during the siege he had been the rock of fortitude and courage. I stood in awe of him. He was thirty-one years old in 1973. Shortly after I got back to the res he gave me a ride in his old, busted-up car. Suddenly he had his arm around my shoulders and kissed me. I moved in with him on the old original Crow Dog allotment at Grass Mountain. Old Henry Crow Dog, Leonard’s father, had named this place Crow Dog’s Paradise, and by that name it was known to every Native American in this country.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Life in Paradise

  Sometime after Wounded Knee I and little Pedro moved in with Leonard Crow Dog on his father’s place. I married Leonard in the Indian way, with a blanket wrapped around us, holding on to the pipe, while being cedared and fanned off with an eagle feather.* This was not considered a legal marriage in a white priest’s sense but it was good enough for us. The Crow Dogs still lived on their old place, some eighteen miles from the tribal administrative center at Rosebud. The land is quite beautiful—a large flat area, including the sacred sun dance ground, surrounded by pine-studded hills. A stream runs through the property and the Little White River is only a few hundred yards away. A steep path leads up to the hilltop where the Crow Dogs have their vision pit when going on a hanbleceya, a vision quest. Here also Leonard and his father had a ghost dance in 1974. In summer the air is filled with the songs of many birds. Overhead you can see flights of eagles and waterbirds, sacred in our beliefs. The air is also fragrant with the sweet scent of plants we use in our ceremonies—sage, sweet grass, cedar, and washtemna—Indian perfume. Willows grow along the stream to serve as material to build sweat lodges. Here also grows mint for native tea, and chokecherries to make wojapi, a kind of berry pudding. Also, unfortunately, there’s a lot of poison ivy

  The place was very picturesque. The entrance was formed by two long crossed poles. Fastened at the top was a buffalo skull and an oil painting by Old Henry, depicting the peyote Christ, with the feather fan and gourd rattle in one hand and the tufted staff in the other. Visible from afar stood a huge monster-sized truck tire, almost as tall as a man. Painted white, it had written upon it in large letters: CROW DOG’S PARADISE. For me it was sometimes hell.

  When I first lived in this earthly Eden, there were still standing a number of different structures. First there was the main house, which Henry had built with his own hands around 1930. It was a funky but picturesque dwelling made of whatever Henry had been able to rustle up—parts of an old railroad car, car windows, ancient discarded lumber, and God knows what else. The whole
outside was painted bright blue with red window trim. Inside, upright tree trunks held up the ceiling. The walls were covered with stiff, heavy, brown crating paper. As you came in, you first entered the kitchen. It had an old-fashioned iron cooking range. Next to it was a rough bench with a pail of cold water from the brook and a good-sized dipper. This served for cooking, drinking, and washing as the house had neither running water nor indoor plumbing. Beyond the kitchen was the large main room, or living room, with a number of beds and a big wood-burning stove. Here was also Grandma Crow Dog’s out-of-date foot-pedal sewing machine. On the wall were old family photographs, a number of Henry’s paintings, a large poster advertising a movie, Stagecoach, in which Henry had had a bit part, and a large poster of a smiling Henry, which he had got for himself for two bucks in New York’s Greenwich Village during the mid-sixties. Hanging from the ceiling were bundles of dried medicine herbs, warbonnets, dance bustles, and other paraphernalia. In this room peyote and yuwipi meetings were held. There were two smaller side chambers, one of which served as sleeping quarters for Henry and his wife, Mary Gertrude.

  Across from the old blue dwelling was Leonard’s house, into which little Pedro and I moved. This was a so-called transitional house, jerry-built, flimsy, and resting on cinder blocks without a basement. It looked nice from the outside, painted red with white trim, but it started falling apart even before it was finished. The government put up these transitionals all over the res. People referred to them as “poverty houses.” It had some modern conveniences. Henry’s blue and red palace had recently gotten electricity and we ran the juice from the old place to the transitional with a wire. The place had a gas range fed from a propane tank and, off and on, running water and a sink. It had a bathroom and a toilet, but somehow these never got connected. When I moved in I found a hippie sleeping in the tub. As for the toilet, Old Henry sometimes dragged it into the living room to use as an easy chair, with the water tank serving as his backrest. The kitchen was combined with the living room, whose walls were covered with Leonard’s sacred things—pipe bags, peyote gourds, beadwork of all kinds, some quillwork, photographs, and many other things.

  Leonard already had three children from his first wife, Francine—one son, Richard, and two girls, Ina and Bernadette. By and by, I added four more. The place became too small for all of us. There were always hangers-on at the Paradise, coming from nowhere and, sometimes, staying for a long time—months, or even years. One of these guests was Roque Duanes, who made himself useful by adding a wooden addition and second floor to the transitional. This part was painted white and decorated with Crow Dog’s wotawe, what you might call a totem or family crest—two round balls representing bullets, and two arrowheads. This crest was designed by Henry himself, symbolizing that his grandfather, the first Chief Crow Dog, had been a great warrior who had been hit by two bullets from white soldiers’ guns and by two Pawnee arrows. The stairs up to the second floor were not built for the timid. A huge oil drum on cinder blocks served as a wood stove. I gave birth to my third son, June Bug, in Roque Duanes’s add-on.

  Once we had a plague of wood ticks on the second floor and, downstairs, an invasion of bedbugs brought to us by one of our less desirable guests. We had a hell of a time getting rid of them. Further, there was the cookshack, to the right and back of the entrance; a brush shelter for summer outdoor cooking, the so-called “squaw cooler” a never-quite-finished Navajo-style hogan; the sweat lodge; and far back by the stream a few tipis; and three outhouses, badly in need of repair. For a while there was also the bare shell of a red VW camper left there by a New York friend when it broke down. Without wheels and totally cannibalized, it served as a temporary home for a family of four. There were several horses on the place. Leonard’s favorite, Big Red, sometimes came into our kitchen, through the back door, looking for handouts. The Paradise was swarming with dogs. The puppies regularly wound up in the cooking pot whenever we had a yuwipi ceremony, which is also a solemn ritual dog feast. Once a week I did all the washing, in a rub with the help of an old washboard.

  Today, nothing is left of all these quaint structures that for a while had formed a veritable little village. The first to go was Henry’s old homestead. I was there when it burned down. Leonard was at that time in jail, at Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, on trumped-up political charges stemming from Wounded Knee. He always was convinced that the goons, who hated the movement, had put the torch to the place. I think that the fire was caused by something else. Henry was also away when it happened, gone for a few days on some business or other. I was left alone with Grandma and the kids. I was staying over at the transitional house. I went over that morning and Grandma was doing patchwork pillow covers and she gave me a pillow. I went back to do housework, and I was reading a catalog when I heard a noise from the electric cord connecting our houses, like it had shorted out. I got up and ran to the other house, and I saw smoke coming out. Grandma was standing there all freaked out. The inside walls, which were made of paper, were in flames. She wanted to stay but I grabbed her and got her out of the house. There was that little side room, and she said: “My trunks!” So I busted that window and went in and got one trunk and heaved it out the window. I tried to get the other one, but by then the walls were ready to go up. Grandma started screaming and crying, telling me to come out, so I did. I jumped out the window, and then the house went down. It all happened really fast. By the time the fire department came it was too late. Leonard’s sister Berta was still alive then, and she came over, and everyone felt really bad. The kids came home to find that they didn’t have a home anymore, and they were in tears. Ina, who had just gotten a medal for basketball, just stood there and cried. I felt so bad for her. For all of them.

  So then they all stayed in the house I was in, Leonard’s house. Grandma Crow Dog was a chain-smoker. The greatest gift one could give her was a carton of Pall Malls. She used to flick the used matches away from her with a snap of her fingers, and sometimes there were still-smoking cigarette butts on the floor. Maybe that had something to do with the fire. Eventually Henry and Grandma had to move into the primitive cookshack, which was really a step down for them.

  The next item to go was Leonard’s red transitional house. Leonard, I, and the kids had been away for a couple of weeks gathering sacred medicine at the Mexican border in what Leonard calls the “peyote gardens.” When we came home, the transitional was gone. Someone had stolen it. White people might wonder: “How can a house be stolen?” They wouldn’t ask this question if they ever had seen, or been inside, one of our transitionals. The way they are built you can just pick them up and walk away with them. The VW camper also disappeared mysteriously. The hogan disintegrated by itself. In the end only two tipis and the sweat lodge remained.

  When I first came to the Paradise I had a hard time. I was an outsider, I was a hall-breed, I spoke only a little Sioux, and I arrived with a baby that wasn’t Leonard’s. My greatest crime in the view of some members of the Crow Dog tiyospaye was that I had replaced Francine, Leonard’s first wife, a Lakota-speaking full-blood. Certain relatives of Leonard’s were really mean to me. They accused me, again and again, of having broken up Leonard’s family. They called me a homewrecker. This was ridiculous, because Leonard and Francine had split up long before I appeared on the scene. Leonard’s parents also looked upon me as an intruder. Old Henry was the more tolerant of the two. As a traditional man he still lived in conformity to the old tribal customs, like never talking to one’s daughter-in-law. There’s this taboo that a father-in-law never speaks to his daughter-in-law, and a mother-in-law never speaks to her son-in-law. There is a tremendous fear of incest, that a father-in-law might be attracted to his son’s wife, or a son-in-law to his wife’s mother, no matter how unlikely it is for such a scenario to become reality. There was a way around this. The old man might mutter to himself: “I’d sure like it if someone would fry me up some spuds and bacon.” And I’d be daydreaming aloud: “It sure would be nice if somebody would chop some wood fo
r me.” Henry made some concessions to modern times. He would speak to me briefly when it was absolutely necessary and when I was in despair he would grudgingly say a few kind words to me. But most of the time he was a deaf-mute as far as I was concerned. After I left Crow Dog, my new husband, Rudi, introduced me to his father, saying: “This is my woman.” It was really quiet. I didn’t talk at all. Then Rudi told me: “This is my family and my reservation. You can talk.”

  I have to admit that I liked Henry. He had a fantastic full-blood face, and a lean young body though he was almost eighty. He was still riding his horse dragging a load of firewood behind it. He was always busy with his hands, making a dance bustle, a horned headdress, or some other artifact. He was a fine dancer, even in old age. When he did the eagle dance you forgot that he was human. He became an eagle, flapping his wings, moving and turning his head like a bird. He had a wicked sense of humor and it was great fun to listen to him. He spoke English after his own fashion, a Henry-Crow-Dog-English of his own invention, full of quaint, strange, poetic half-Indian and half-white word creations. He was insanely proud of being all Indian and of his family history, often speaking of the “royal Crow Dog blood.” I was hurt that the two old people always called me takoja, grandchild, and never wiwoka, daughter-in-law.

  Henry’s wife, Mary Gertrude, was a kind, very brave, broad-faced woman. She was a fine header and moccasin maker, but so nearsighted that her nose almost touched the stuff she was working on. At first, she just wouldn’t accept me.