Lakota Woman

After my sister Sandra was born the doctors there performed a hysterectomy on my mother, in fact sterilizing her without her permission, which was common at the time, and up to just a few years ago, so that it is hardly worth mentioning. In the opinion of some people, the fewer Indians there are, the better. As Colonel Chivington said to his soldiers: “Kill ‘em all, big and small, nits make lice!”

The Crow Dogs, the members of my husband’s family, have no such problems of identity. They don’t need the sun to tan them, they are full-bloods—the Sioux of the Sioux […] They have no shortage of legends. Every Crow Dog seems to be a legend in himself, including the women. They became outcasts in their stronghold at Grass Mountain rather than being whitemanized. They could not be tamed, made to wear a necktie or go to a Christian church. All during the long years when practicing Indian beliefs was forbidden and could be punished with jail, they went right on having their ceremonies, their sweat baths and sacred dances.

The whites destroyed the tiyospaye, not accidentally, but as a matter of policy. The close-knit clan, set in its old ways, was a stumbling block in the path of the missionary and government agent, its traditions and customs a barrier to what the white man called “progress” and “civilizations.” And so the government tore the tiyospaye apart and forced the Sioux into the kind of relationship now called the “nuclear family”—forced upon each couple their individually owned allotment of land […] So the great brainwashing began, those who did not like to have their brains washed being pushed farther and farther into the back country into isolation and starvation. The civilizers did a good job on us, especially among the half-bloods, using the stick-and-carrot method, until now there is neither the tiyospaye nor a white-style nuclear family left, just Indian kids without parents.

[Grandma Moore] thought she was helping me by not teaching me Indian ways. Her being a staunch Catholic also had something to do with it. The missionaries had always been repeating over and over again: “You must kill the Indian in order to save the man!” That was part of trying to escape the hard life. The missions, going to church, dressing and behaving like a wasičun—that for her was the key which would magically unlock the door leading to the good life, the white life with a white-painted cottage […] a shiny car in the garage, and an industrious, necktie-wearing husband who was not a wino. Examples abounded all around her that it was the wrong key to the wrong door, that it would not change the shape of my cheekbones, or the slant of my eyes, the color of my hair, or the feelings inside me.

One of the priests acted as the photographer, doing the enlarging and developing […] 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.

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.

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 […] 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.

In the beginning AIM was mainly confined to St. Paul and Minneapolis. The early AIM people were mostly ghetto Indians, often from tribes which had lost much of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. It was when they came to us on the Sioux reservations that they began to learn about the old ways. We had to learn from them, too. We Sioux had lived very isolated […] AIM opened a window for us through which the wind of the 1960s and early ‘70s could blow, and it was no gentle breeze but a hurricane that whirled us around. It was after the traditional reservation Indians and the ghetto kids had gotten together that AIM became a force nationwide. It was flint striking flint, lighting a spark which grew into a flame at which we could warm ourselves after a long, long winter.

In the end a compromise was reached. The government said they could not go on negotiating during Election Week, but they would appoint two high administration officials to seriously consider our twenty demands. Our expenses to get home would be paid. Nobody would be prosecuted. Of course, our twenty points were never gone into afterward. From the practical point of view, nothing had been achieved. As usual we had bickered among ourselves. But morally it had been a great victory. We had faced White America collectively, not as individual tribes. We had stood up to the government and gone through our baptism of fire.

The half-breeds, the iyeskas, I thought, never really cared for anybody but themselves, having learned that “wholesome selfishness” alone brought the blessings of civilization. The full-bloods have a heart […] They are willing to share whatever happiness they have. They sit on their land which has a sacred meaning for them, even if it brings them no income. The iyeskas have no land because they sold theirs long ago. Whenever some white businessmen come to the res trying to make a deal to dig for coal or uranium, the iyeskas always say, “Let’s do it. Let’s get that money. Buy a new car and a color TV.” The full-bloods say nothing. They just sit on their little patches of land and don’t budge. It is because of them that there are still some Indians left.

I have visited many tribes. They have different cultures and speak different languages. They may even have different rituals when partaking of this medicine. They may be jealous of each other […] But once they meet inside the peyote tipi, all differences are forgotten. Then they are no longer Navajos, or Poncas, Apaches, or Sioux, but just Indians. They learn each others’ songs and find out that they are really the same. Peyote is making many tribes into just one tribe. And it is the same with the Sun Dance which also serves to unite the different Indian nations.

It is the government which made me into a militant. If you approach them hat in hand as a “responsible, respectable” apple, red outside, white inside, you get nowhere. If you approach them as a militant you get nowhere either, except giving them an excuse to waste you, but at least you don’t feel so shitty.

At one time a white volunteer nurse berated us for doing the slave work while the men got all the glory. We were betraying the cause of womankind, was the way she put it. We told her that her kind of women’s lib was a white, middle-class thing, and that at this critical stage we had other priorities. Once our men had gotten their rights and their balls back, we might start arguing with them about who should do the dishes. But not before.

So there was a lot of sneaking through the perimeter, a lot of coming and going. Indians from Denver, New Mexico, and L.A. trickled in, a dozen or half-dozen at a time. A group of Iroquois from New York joined us for a while […] Among the groups walking in were some Northwest Coast people, Pullayups and Nisquallies, led by Sid Mills who had fought so long for native fishing rights in Washington State. These were among our toughest fighters.

Life was so hard for our people—starving, fenced in, without horses or weapons. The message brought them hope. And so they began to dance and sing, to bring back the buffalo, to bring back the old world of the Indians which wasičun had destroyed, the world they had loved so much and for whose return they were praying.

Leonard always thought that the dancers of 1890 had misunderstood Wovoka and his message. They should not have expected to bring the dead back to life, but to bring back their ancient beliefs by practicing Indian religion. For Leonard, dancing in a circle holding hands was bringing back the sacred hoop—to feel, holding on to the hand of your brother and sister, the rebirth of Indian unity, feel it with your flesh, through your skin. He also thought that reviving the Ghost Dance would be making a link to our past, to the grandfathers and grandmothers of long ago.

I had been promised that I would not be arrested, but the moment I passed the roadblock I was hustled to the Pine Ridge jail. They did not book me, just took all my things away and were about to take my baby too. They told me I would have to wait, they could not put me in the tank before the Welfare came for my baby. Being poor, unwed, and a no-good rabble-rouser from the Knee made me an unfit mother. The child would have to be taken to a foster home.

Beside being tumbled headfirst into this kind of situation, still in my teens, with a brand-new baby and totally unprepared for the role I was to play, I still had another problem. I was a half-blood, not traditionally raised, trying to hold my own inside the full-blood Crow Dog clan which does not take kindly to outsiders. At first, I was not well received. It was pretty bad […] [Henry Crow Dog] told me that, as far as he was concerned, Leonard was still married to his former wife, a woman, as he pointed out again and again, who could talk Indian.

The first Crow Dog was an outcast but also something of a hero. The Crow Dogs wrapped themselves in their pride as in a blanket. […] The first Crow Dog had shown them the way. As a chief he had the right to wear a war bonnet, but he never did. Instead he found somewhere an old, discarded white man’s cloth cap with a visor and to the top of it he fastened an eagle feather […] He used to say: “This white man’s cap that I am wearing means that I must live in the wasičun’s world, under his government. The eagle feather means that I, Crow Dog, do not let the wasičun’s world get the better of me, that I remain an Indian until the day I die.” […] [T]hat old cap became in the people’s mind a thing more splendid than any war bonnet.

Annie Mae still traveled a lot. Wherever Indians fought for their rights, Annie Mae was there. She helped the Menominee warriors take over a monastery. She told me that she was packing a gun. She said, “If any of my brothers are in a position where they’re being shot at, or being killed, I go there to fight with them. I’d rather die than stand by and see them destroyed.”

But always, always I felt, and was enraptured by, [Leonard’s] tremendous power—raw power, spiritual Indian power coming from deep within him. It was raw because, never having been at school and being unable to read or write, there is no white-man intellectualism in him. At the same time, his thinking and ideas are often extremely sophisticated—unique, original, even frightening.

In May 1974, Old Henry and Leonard put on a Ghost Dance […] It was supposed to be a ritual for Sioux only, but somehow, through the “moccasin telegraph” which always spreads news among Indians in a mysterious way, everybody seemed to know about it, and many native people from as far away as Alaska, Canada, Mexico, and Arizona suddenly appeared in order to participate.

[Leonard Crow Dog] could not understand why the government was after him. He did not consider himself a radical […] He thought himself strictly a religious leader, a medicine man. But that was exactly why he was dangerous. The young city Indians talking about revolution and waving guns find no echo among the full-bloods in the back country. But they will listen to a medicine man, telling them in their own language: “Don’t sell your land, don’t sell Grandmother Earth to the strip-mining outfits and the uranium companies. Don’t sell your water.” This kind of advice is a threat to the system and gets you into the penitentiary.

With all that information pouring in upon Merhige, the judge began feeling twinges of conscience. He called us to his court in Richmond. A long trestle table in front of his bench was piled two feet high with petitions on behalf of Crow Dog. The judge pointed to this mass of papers, saying with a grin, “This is just the tip of the iceberg. We don’t have enough space in this courtroom to bring them all out. We have letters here from Nigeria, Java, Greece, Japan, Sweden, Peru, and Austria. I just wonder how folks so far away can know more about this case than we do.” Then he said in a low, matter-of-fact voice: “I resentence Crow Dog to time served. I order his instant release.”

I pierced too, together with many other women […] I did not feel any pain because I was in the power. I was looking into the clouds, into the sun. Brightness filled my mind […] In the almost unbearable brightness, in the clouds, I saw people. I could see those who had died. I could see Pedro Bissonette […] Buddy Lamont […] I saw the face of my friend Annie Mae Aquash, smiling at me. I could hear the spirits speaking to me through the eagle-bone whistles […] I felt nothing and, at the same time, everything. It was at that moment that I, a white-educated half-blood, became wholly Indian. I experienced a great rush of happiness.