Charlie Colombe Keynote Address

National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995

Transcription

Transcribed by Ross Fuqua, March 31, April 3-4, 2006.

Edited by Ross Fuqua, April 4, 2006.

Hal Cannon: I’m going to turn the microphone over to a gentleman that I’ve grown to
love and respect very much. He is a lone wolf. He came to the Cowboy Poetry
Gathering to recite poetry about five or six years ago, and he was the first voice of the
Indian Cowboy at the Gathering, and I think that took a lot of guts and I think that took a
lot of love. And this is a man who is full of guts and love; and I think he was really the
inspiration for going out and doing this research and starting on our quest to understand
Native American ranching and to celebrate Native American ranching. This is a man that
will introduce our keynote speaker. I’d like to introduce to you Henry Real Bird.

[audience applauds]

Henry Real Bird: I’m honored to stand here today. Last night I couldn’t sleep. It was
just like waiting to ride at the Calvary Stampede or the Cheyenne Frontier Days. Have
you ever wondered of the blood lines of the great chiefs like Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse,
Red Cloud, and Gall? When I was young, I saw this bronc rider at the Crow Fair and All
Indian Rodeo up in Montana. This bronc rider had the hair fly from a Montana bronc,
and when he returned to the bucking chutes, my brother Richard took me over and
pointed at this bronc rider’s spur rolls that had hair on there, and said, “When you have
hair on your spur rolls, you are a rider of wild horses.” That bronc rider that day is this
year’s keynote speaker for the 1995 Cowboy Poetry Gathering here in Elko, Nevada. I
present to you Mister Charlie Colombe of the Teton Sioux – Teton Band of the Sioux
from the Rosebud Indian Reservation, a bronc rider, cowboy and a rancher.

[audience applauds]

Charlie Colombe: It’s awful hard to live up to the things they say about you sometimes.
I guess it’s harder to live them down at other times. I’m greatly honored and I – to be
here, and I had no idea this was this large a deal. I honestly didn’t. I, I told Meg Glaser
when she contacted me that I was really busy, and I said, she said, “Well, we’ll pay you.”
And I said, “I don’t need the money.” But anyway, looking out through here, maybe I
only have to worry about one thing, and that’s I believe what us Indians generally worry
about. We want to make sure that what we do and say, when it goes back to the people
we live with, that it’s said about us that we might be a credit to our people. And with that,
I’m just going to visit with you a little about Indian cowboys, and we have a tradition in
Sioux country, we try not to talk a lot about ourselves. There, there’s just part of culture

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 1 of 1
that best leaves said those things by other people. We also have another thing that we
deal with many times, and it translates into, “The bird that flies gets shot.” And that
means if you rise very high, look out.

[audience laughs]

I think that will tell you more about me than you need to know.

[audience laughs]

I grew up on a reservation in South Dakota, and that’s back when they said the
nickel was big as a wagon wheel, but we didn’t have either, so I couldn’t measure that.
But we did have horses, and we had a strong tradition, and I knew about my great-
grandfather and his involvement with horses, and wealth was measured by how many
horses you had, and what kind of person you were was measured by how much you could
give away. Now that sounds a little strange.
In coming into this century, Indian cowboys have, have been measured many
times by that. We’re basically caught in a time when business and good business says
you save everything you can. And yet we’re pulled back by our people, and they say,
“Give it away.” That’s how you become the, the right kind of person. So it’s been a
struggle for us. And I may be talking too serious about some things, but I think knowing
that about me is important, and another thing I want to clarify: because this is, as I see it,
an honoring for we Indians, and it’s certainly a great honor that you would pick our
theme. But you’ve all had an accountant write on the bottom of his report, maybe on his
compilation, that this represents the views of what he saw, or you’ll a – it’s kind of a
disclaimer. I don’t what you to leave here today thinking that I’m speaking for all
Indians, because I’m not. I’ll just tell you a little about my experience with my friends
and neighbors, and there’s many, many tribes of Indians, and a lot of us have a different,
we have different languages, we have different backgrounds, we have different
involvements and experiences.
But in Sioux country, it’s always been real simple. You can be an Indian cowboy,
and that’s greater than being a jet pilot or going to West Point, so it’s easy for me to
speak about those people.
As I was saying, when I was a youngster, it was just automatic that I was going to
be a cowboy. My grandfather raised many horses, my grandmother’s brother was killed
on a, a saddle bronc at an Indian rodeo – or a rodeo – on the reservation, and I always
heard of that. And there was a, that was a single most important thing to me growing up.
And we Indians that grew up like that, we were the lucky ones. We didn’t have to worry
about anything else. We didn’t have to worry about getting rich, we didn’t have to worry
about owning any big ranches, we didn’t have to worry about going to school much. As
long as you learned how to ride them broncs, you were somebody. And I think the
Indians and the cowboys they, they joined hands many years ago, and the true western
people, you know, we crossed the lines many times between Indian and Cowboy. Lately,
we see a lot of the Indian motif clothing that people are wearing wherever we go. We see
a lot of the movies that are made, and some of them now are even – you know, the
wheels go the ride way on the stage coaches and the –

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 2 of 2
[audience laughs]

-- and they’re, they’re portraying some Indians, strangely enough, as we told them we
were.
But getting back to Indians, horses, cowboys, we, I guess the only cows we knew
about were buffalo cows and we, we dealt with those, and, and we treated them with
great respect, but from the – and this is in our part of the country which was, you know,
traditionally a buffalo society, if you will. And of course, again, different Indians live
different ways. I, I think Indian folks on the west coast probably had a different staple.
But anyway, growing up as I did, and watching my friends and relatives trade horses and
occasionally get the best of each other and talk about the, the broncs they rode, and
sometimes we even talked about the ones we were going to – but we usually had a few of
the spirits in us, when that was, when that was happening. But that’s not so much
different than all cowboys.
I think something that’s important for me for you to know is the values that we
live by in our, our part of Indian country, and maybe the most important one there is, is
courage. And it takes a lot of courage at times to pick yourself up off the ground and
walk back to the, the chutes amongst your friends – and sometimes you can barely walk,
you know, but it’s important to get up and do that. Anyway, it, it replaced for us some of
those things that we gave up when we gave up this great land. And we’re – but the fact
that it was for us, a test of courage made it a great thing for us. We didn’t have to go out
and drive cars fast or we didn’t have to make a lot of money, we didn’t have to get As in
school. In fact, we didn’t look at those things as being very important. Those were
things for our, we call them, white counterpart, or really they might just be our neighbor
down the road who would not share the same ideas as us, but still be a cowboy and a
friend and all those things, they were our white neighbors. And we, we still have a lot of
that that’s in us, those values. Those, I hope, we never give up.
And it brought other things out in us. And I’ve always kind of envied – for years
I did, I guess I’m fifty-seven years old now – and probably until I was fifty I envied the
non-Indian at times. And one of the things I envied him about was he could go to church
for an hour on Sunday and the rest of the time he got to do what he wanted to do.

[audience laughs]

And I thought, “That lucky rascal. Why did God give us a church, you know, that was
the whole outdoors? We can’t get away from it.” And you, you never heard anybody tell
a lie in church, and nobody ever really does a real shaky business deal in church, but here
we are – we’re stuck with this great outdoors that we think is our church. Son of a gun –
seven days a week, twenty-four hours a day – it just is crushing down on you. You can’t
go over here for an hour and kind of get rid of it, you got to just live it all the time.
So anyway, I, I stayed true to my, my values, and lo and behold, I’ve been so
lucky, just so terribly lucky. I’ve, sometimes I say I’ve got all the friends I can afford.

[audience laughs]

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 3 of 3
And I get a kick out of that, I suppose we all do. But I got a great family, and recently, I
got a grandson, and I could talk about him, but I told someone about my grandson – or I
asked someone the other day, we were visiting and we were both in a big hurry. And I
said, “By the way, did I tell you about my grandson?” And he said, “No, and thank you.”

[audience laughs]

I really got a kick out of that guy. And it was about ten feet away before it hit me, you
know how that works. Anyway, getting back to the, the subject here about Indian
cowboys, if you understand how important our values are to us, then it’s real easy to
understand that being a cowboy – which is a name maybe for a bucking horse rider or a
horse rider, even though we, you know, we didn’t have cows, or didn’t pen them up much
or brand them and all the things that we now do – it gave us such an out to be around
those horses and for years I traveled and I might have been kidding a little bit about,
about having to worry about our church being out there. It’s always been real easy for
me. I thought I better clear that up.

[audience laughs]

Anyway, it did so much for us, having a horse. And it goes back to that, that
spiritual side of us which translates into really who we are. And growing up around
cowboys, the things that were important to me always seemed to be important to them for
the most part. Yes, some of them went on to become businessmen, one of them that I
knew since I was probably seventeen or eighteen was Sean Davis, he went on to teach
and head up a, a horse program at the College of Southern Idaho. And now he produces
the National Finals, and Sean is still the same, still the same values. And, so over here is
an Indian on this side who opened a brand new casino yesterday – that’s me on my
reservation, and over there is Sean Davis who’s still teaching. You know, we almost
crossed each other’s bridges. And I, I’ll call Sean up in a few days and tell him I was
here.
But anyway, the difference between what we as Indians have become as cowboys
is not a lot, a lot different than I think the cowboys that grow up on ranches and want to
go to rodeos and do those things. We have used riding bucking horses, roping,
bulldogging, etc, as a test of ourselves. I don’t think the money’s ever been important to
us. But it replaced something that we gave up when we used to go fight Hank’s people,
you know, for practice –

[audience laughs]

-- and see how good each of us were, and it, it really took the place of that. And now, out
of all the things we gave up traditionally and spiritually and culturally, the one thing
that’s, we’ve replaced it with is being a cowboy. The one thing that I really like that
we’ve replaced it with. And an old friend of mine the other day, an old man on the
reservation told me, he said, “Charlie, it’s not what we gave up that’s hurting us.” And
he was looking out across, you know, a pretty poverty-stricken, desolate, area. He said,
“It’s what we replaced it with.” And that old man, he taught me something.

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 4 of 4
 I hope, when you think about us Indians – again, I’m just one speaking, you know,
and don’t judge the others by how bad I can be or anything like that. And even for my
own tribe where there’s eighteen thousand of us who live together, again, I only speak as
one person. And that’s important, only to me from a cultural level.
Getting back to the, to the cowboy aspect of it – if you understand that it was a
test of manhood, if you will. And it became so important to ride those broncs, and I
remember when I was young, it was just automatic. I think it was probably because we
didn’t have money to go to the barber, my hair got about this long by the time I was – and
every once in a while we’d whack it off if our knife was sharp, and it was kind of funny.
My first trek off of the reservation, I was about seventeen years old and somebody said,
“That boy can ride.” And all we did was ride, you know, so I, I sure had better be able to
ride.

[audience laughs]

I mean, that’s how we got to school, that’s how we made five dollars for breaking a horse
to ride, that’s all we did. So, you know, it wasn’t any shock to me. It certainly wasn’t a
shock to my dad, and he didn’t think I could ride – he expected me to ride better.
But anyway, they took me to the Cheyenne Frontier Days and they had what they
called the amateur bronc riding, or novice bronc riding. And my hair, like I said was
about this long and I, I didn’t know the difference, you know. I didn’t know you should
have it kind of buzzed up and, and maybe dress a certain way, but other than that there
wasn’t much wrong with me.

[audience laughs]

And I won second in the first round. And I remember a friend of mine from North
Dakota, he was a top flight bronc rider. In fact, there was two brothers and a couple of
their neighbors, who were just knocking on the door all the time of the World’s
Champion, and that’s how I got there, they took me down there. And this friend of mine,
he said, “Charlie, if you get a haircut,” he said, “you can win this thing.”

[audience laughs]

And by the time I got paid for the second round, and I’d would have went and got one,
believe me. I won second in the second round. And that was, I remember, it was three
hundred and seventy-eight dollars. You can’t believe how much money that was. It just
a phenomenal amount of money, especially when you’re hitchhiking and doing your own
clothes and sleeping in the park, or maybe a stock contractor’s truck.
But from that I learned a lot. And some people say I don’t look like an Indian
very much. But I, I have little tiny eagle feathers here, and since that date, traveling
around to Indian rodeos and I went to some big pro rodeos and got to visit a lot of great
places, and rode in the Houston Astrodome, and met a ton of good people. And all of
that from an Indian boy who, when they – I remember the first time I ordered a
hamburger. These guys were hauling me and they, they were over there visiting with
some more cowboys and they didn’t bring the catsup, and I was sixteen or seventeen

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 5 of 5
years old, and I was too bashful to ask for the catsup. Can you imagine that? And here I
am.

[audience laughs]

Isn’t that crazy, huh?

But it, it’s really been fun. And I won’t tell you I was a great bronc rider. Heck, I
only remember the ones I couldn’t ride. You know, once in a while someone will jar my
memory and tell me about a good one I did ride, but I never cared about being measured
out there in that, what they call the Big Apple. I went to some big rodeos, but sometimes
I’d just go home. And over the years I’ve watched that. I mean, I might have – some
guys said, “Charlie, you can go to the NFR.” I knew it. You know, it wasn’t important.
The thing that was important was being able to beat those rascals at home. You know,
that was my world. Small as it may seem, and in Indian country, Indian cowboys yet
today, are like that. And people say why don’t they go travel? We, we at home know.
A few years ago there was a young bronc rider named Howard Hunter, who went
to the NFR, and he was just absolutely great. And we put on a school, and I got my
friend Sean Davis to come back and help me put this school on. In fact, it took me
twenty-some years to pay him. He came as a friend and two years ago I sent him two
race horse mares. Finally, I got Sean paid.

[audience laughs]

But here was this Howard Hunter, and he could just ride. I mean, you know, it’s, he rode
so well, it was kind of a shock. When he was eighteen he could just beat us all.
Anyway, people over the years, I think Howard went to the NFR maybe three or
four times, and they said, “Why doesn’t Howard really go get it?” They knew I had a lot
of influence on him, and I said, “He has a wife and he has some little kids, and I think I
might have influenced him too much.” You know, I, honestly, I didn’t Howard go beat
them all, I just said, you know, go to the rodeo a few times. And he used to rush home all
the time. And I as so proud of him. He raised those kids, he put a little ranch together,
and I’ll remember him more for that than if he’d a got a gold buckle, because he – you
know, how soon they forget on those gold buckles. But no one in our country has forgot
Howard. He also went on and he’s been the Indian World’s Champion bronc rider. And
it’s strange that he, he went after that real hard a few times. I mean that, he had to beat
his friends and neighbors and brothers, and those people who measured him on a daily
basis.
Anyway, Howard’s back there today and he’s forty-one years old I think, and last
year we put on a big match in Pierre, South Dakota. Fort Pierre, South Dakota. It’s kind
of a Casey Tibbs – a tribute to Casey Tibbs, and they call it the Casey Tibbs Match – and
Howard jumped out there and there was twenty of the top thirty in the world were there.
And then they, they asked some people – and Howard was Indian World’s Champion, so
they asked him – and lo and behold he won second. He had to ride in the, make it out of
the thirty, he had to make it back in the top twelve then, and he had to come back in the
high six. And one judge had him marked, I think, eighty, where he would have been
eighty-three points, the other judge had him at eighty-one. Or, you know, I suppose this

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 6 of 6
was forty, forty-some points on one side and a couple points less on the other side, but I
know how much that meant to Howard to win second there at that age. And I was
thinking how lucky can a guy be and still get on a bronc at that age? Yet he does, like a
lot of us, he rides every day. And from a, in his community, Howard’s about this high,
but he’s a, probably as the song says – what is it? – ten foot tall and bulletproof? He’s all
of that.
Anyway, back in our area, and all across Indian country, cowboys have been great
big guys on the block, and we hope, we hope to expand on that again in the part of the
country I come from. Some of the things we’ve, we gave up or we’ve replaced things
with that we gave up are not so good for us, but you just imagine how good it is if you get
to bounce your head on the ground a few times, or it just has a tremendous way of
smartening you up and –

[audience laughs]

-- as they say, you find yourself real quick and you find where you fit. I’ve watched that
over and over again. And just a little note about my grandson. I know you’re all on edge.

[audience laughs]

I’ll save that. I do have one, though, so look out. And he’s two years old. Like the guy
said, “There you go again.” Who was it said that?
Anyway, in our area, I know from my personal experience, and we shouldn’t talk
too much about that, but I will. I’ll share that with you. I traveled all over, and I tried
doing a lot of things. I mean, I owned a big bar, I had a construction company once that
three hundred people working for me. I had, oh, six, seven, eight, businesses sometimes
going on at the same time. But always, whatever I tried to do – and it’s just a challenge
of doing things, you know, that makes us all do it, I think. And sometimes they keep
score by how much money you make. I’d always give mine away because I had all these
friends.

[audience laughs]

But anyway, I watched all of that, and everywhere I went, it always seemed like I
just couldn’t quite get my spirit to go all the way with me. And I know life’s supposed to
begin at forty, but it didn’t really hit me until about fifty. I went home, and I started
putting together more horses. And just, right now, I got a couple hundred of them. And
the first year I was there, I, like all guys with a line of credit, I think I had about five
hundred that first year. And you know, somebody, people can tell you things, but you got
to really bump your own head before you learn about it. And I took all these horses and I
thought I’m going to have some fun with this deal, and I’m going to make sure every
little kid that’s having all these problems growing up is going to maybe get the same
opportunity that horses and rodeo gave me. I mean, it’s tremendous. Heck, I would have
been in jail when I was eighteen just for, for proving who I was or, or finding out who I
was without those horses.

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 7 of 7
 Anyway, I put together this big herd of colts and we started playing around on the
reservation and a lot of them had a little different ideas. You know, now there’s, there’s
three wheelers, there’s bicycles, there’s motorcycles, there’s all these things, and there’s
Nintendos and you name it. They got all these other thoughts, and all these other things
that they can do, I guess. Anyway, I put together a big bunch of these horses and we, we
started playing and letting some of these horses buck and I’d loan them to these kids to
ride, and they, they had a lot of fun. And anyway, in all my travels I found out what the
heck I was missing everywhere I went. You know, I made, sometimes I’d make a lot of
money, and sometimes I wouldn’t but I was always out there thinking I was enjoying that.
But I left my darn spirit back there behind me, I guess it was, or whatever’s inside of us.
It just always pulled me back. It pulled me back.
And I had this great big old house one time. In fact, it was the last big one I had
that was off the reservation, and I guess the best way to describe it, everyday at twelve-
oh-one AM, the taxes on the thing were thirty bucks.

[audience laughs]

And that’s kind of a tribute to South Dakota and the system we have, but believe me, it
was big and a little fancy. And that didn’t mean a thing to me, you know? It was just
another – it could have been the Holiday Inn or wherever.
But I was drawn back there five years ago, and I see now where I belong. And
what I’m going to work on doing, is we’ve, we let this bunch of cowboys that should be
there, and you know, there ought to be ten times more of them in our area, because it’s so
important to us from a value point of view. And they’re going to need, they’re going to
need those tests to grow up. I mean, it, otherwise I guess you have to go hit somebody
over the head or do something wrong, something that will affect other people. So I’m
going to work on that over these next few years, and in order to afford that, that kind of a
hobby and a habit, I also got to work pretty hard at something else, because this, I can see
this going to get expensive.
But I’m going to give back, if I can, some of the things that were gave to me.
And I, the first thing I did, there was a big old, blue eyed cowboy that lived north of us
when I was a kid that started me out, and I named my oldest boy after him, and recently
he moved back there, and he’ll help me. We’re going to probably get more of our kids
involved in rodeo and in being cowboys.
We, like I said earlier when I was telling you about going to this big rodeo and
they said you could win, you know, if you get a haircut. Only now, like I said, with these
two little, almost hidden eagle feathers, that’s the first thing I wore for years and years.
And like Hank said, there wasn’t any doubt I was an Indian. Where I came from, nobody
doubts who you are and those things. But I didn’t, I didn’t get the opportunity to do as
much at home while I was gone. And like you folks do, you give of yourself, and you
belong to an organization like this. I’m going to go home and I hope sometime I – I’ll
make sure of it – I’ll run into some of you again, and I’ll see if I can possibly do some
good and give back some of what was gave to me and basically, all it was was that
horse’s spirit that I couldn’t get away from. And I don’t really know if you really
understand that – maybe it’s not important – but our closeness with the Earth – of course,
you know, we had thousands and thousands of years of that, and all of our legends and

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 8 of 8
our oral histories in our country, they all seem to have horses in them. And the horse’s,
his spirit is built right into us. And I’m really fortunate I think to have had that.
When I was growing up, you know, your horse was always your best friend, he
provided all these tests for you. Just imagine how important that would be in a culture
where it looked like most other things were gone. I mean they’d, I can remember my
grandparents talking to my dad and said – my grandparents spoke our language to us and
we spoke back to them and my dad, when we were little rascals, he said, he told my
grandmother – his mother, he said, “Mom, you shouldn’t do that. Those guys are going
to have a tough enough time with English.”
So we, we gave up some things along the way. But that thing we didn’t give up –
and I guess it’s up to people like me – is we didn’t give up that horse culture. We might
have put it on the back burner, and we might have neglected it for a while. And even in
our legends, we’re not real sure that when we crossed that Bering Strait, as they talk
about us having done – we don’t always believe that.

[audience laughs]

Why in the heck would we have walked over here? Huh?

[audience laughs and applauds]

I always get a kick out of that. You know? Good Lord, they know were we a, we were a
force to conquer. And they think they conquered us.

[audience laughs]

Anyway, common sense will tell you we would have rode our horses over here, and our
legends tell us that. You know, we, we think that Coronado, when we read the books,
that Coronado brought the horses here. Heck, we’ve got carvings in caves at home,
where us Sioux have been for thousands of years, and they show some of our ancestors
riding horses. I wonder where in the heck that Coronado was – maybe, maybe he just got
here earlier than the books tell us, huh? You suppose?

[audience laughs]

And those oral histories that we deal with, again, there’re stories of the horse. And that’s
kind of, kind of strange, but I get a kick out of it. It’s, horses become a, a part of who we
are, where we been, and all these things, and I joke about all these things.
You know, there’s a watch up here and it stopped.

[audience laughs]

I told Meg, I said I probably need a watch. I quit wearing one when I could afford to.

[audience laughs]

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 9 of 9
And I sit at home, we, we Indians when we get up to, to talk, I said sometimes we set a
cup of coffee there and when you can stick your finger in it and leave it there and it, you
know, it’s time to start wrapping that up. And finally when it’s cold, you’ve been there
too long. Anyway – what time is it? Does anybody know?

Hal Cannon: [off microphone] You got my watch.

CC: It’s not working. A lot of what the white people have gave us hasn’t worked, you
know?

[audience laughs and applauds]

Uh-oh.

HC: [off microphone] You’re right.

CC: Maybe we’re just lucky, huh? Anyway. This is genuinely an honor. I just can’t
imagine getting paid to, to talk to people. Heck, I guess they’re captives. They probably
lock the doors, huh?
What I think is something important that you folks can do, is exactly what you’re
doing: your, your message – and not just with the Indian theme – in all of the themes that
you pick, and you visit those, right? I mean it’s kind of like leaving town for the
weekend. That’s very important. That’s very important to me as an Indian person. It, it
really is, again, important that you understand – and I’m just one person, and again, we
come out of a horse, horse area, and a buffalo area. And our neighbors up north, they
were always, you know, real close to us, the Crows. And the gentleman that come out
here and spoke about the, the spiritual aspect of those things and the prayer.
Yesterday I was, I was honored by my people at home, and, and seldom do we
give anybody an eagle feather, and I shouldn’t even tell this. I almost wore it and I
thought I’m not real sure that I, that I didn’t have too good a press agent or something,
you know? But my tribe honored me with an eagle feather, and back there you only see
that a few times in your lifetime. And it was a, people from the land where I grew up,
you know. Five miles away, ten miles away, and I thought, Good Lord, I’m, I may have,
I may have told somebody something that wasn’t true, you know? How else would you
get that done?
And I thought about that all the way out here yesterday. But those things like that,
I hope it doesn’t make the newspapers too much. Again, that old saying, you know, the
bird that flies gets shot. Boom. That coming down is what hurts you.
Anyway, the cowboy poets and western folklore, to have us be a part of that,
that’s a tremendous honor for us as Indian people. Can you imagine how important that
is? You know, we’re still out there, it’s still the West, and sometimes we fight with the
United States government over this, that, and the other, and we, now they’ve turned us
loose, and we’re employing a few people in these casinos that seem to be cropping up in
Indian country. When it’s all done, you know what we’re going to do with our money? I
think we’re going buy more horses.

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 10 of 10
[audience laughs and applauds]

And maybe the government, maybe they ought to let us do things like that. We’ve been
basically placed in a little area, and those of you who’ve seen Grand Canyon know what
the Badlands of South Dakota look like. And my grandmother, in 1889, they passed what
they called the Allotment Act, and that’s where they divided the land up amongst us, and
they started picking specific tracts and they say, “We’re going to give you this land back
that we took from you, and we’re going to make a farmer out of each one of you.” And if
you’ve ever seen the Badlands….

[audience laughs]

…you know, I know what my grandma did, she just went east a little ways, and she threw
her plow away on the way, and strangely enough, she went on a horse when she did it.
What I see coming for us is maybe the, maybe the, the thing that I’m going to try to do at
home, I think what I’ll try to do is I’m going to try to make enough money to get every
kid there a horse – not so he’ll turn out like me, but so he can have the same, the same
wrecks I had. Wouldn’t that be fun, huh?

[audience laughs]

You know, I supposed to – this clock works and it says, “Shut up, Indian.”
Again, I’m, I want to thank you and tell you that I’m truly honored, not because
I’m here, or so much the theme, but the, the friendship that I can just feel here. You
know, amongst you folks, you look out there and I don’t need a bright light to feel this.
And I hope that more, more good feeling that you folks have amongst yourselves. And I
can see that it’s not the money that brings you here. That – what do we call that? I guess
maybe good feeling would do it. It’s hard sometimes to get things into one word. That
friendship that you, you seem to share – I hope you look at me that way. And if any of
you are ever back in the south central part of South Dakota, where us Siouxs have, you
know, we pulled the blanket up right there and said we’re not leaving. Any of you would
be welcome at my place. I, I truly –

[audience applauds]

I would truly show you that I mean that. And again, I came out here not knowing what
this is, but when I go home I’m going to tell them about you folks. Tremendous, warm
feeling, I’ll tell them. With that, you want to hear about my grandson?

[audience laughs]

I do have one and we’re going to give him a name this summer. He’s two years
old, and I think I’m going to, I’m going to call him Many Ponies. And then when he gets
a little older we’ll give him another name maybe. But the little rascal, I don’t know if I
influenced him. He’s, he must have, he’s got at least ten rocking horses.

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 11 of 11
[audience laughs]

So Grandpa could see the power of that horse, and he’s going to make sure that little
rascal learns to love the West right from the beginning. I don’t give a darn about cars and
three wheelers and all that. I, I think I’m going to make darn sure that he gets that
experience and that spirit that’s in all the animals and all things, but that comes out so
much in the horse. I want to make sure that that little rascal becomes part horse.
And with that, I’m going to hush up here, and I’m going to tell everybody that
again, the biggest thing that I could come out of here with – hopefully I’d be a credit to
my people. Thank you.

[audience applauds]

Charlie Colombe Keynote Address, National Cowboy Poetry Gathering 1995 Page 12 of 12