LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 2 - Colorado: "David, you're Sitting Bull"

Grampa Fools Crow looked me hard in the eye for a long time. It wasn't an unkind
stare and I don't think he was being rude, but I sure felt like an inadequate white kid of
only 24 next to this man who was already in his 80s (having been born around the time of
the first Wounded Knee massacre in 1890), and would last well into his 90s, and who had
the classic wrinkled face of the oldtime blanket-Skins of the wild west. He held out his
hand and we shook limply, politely, Indian-style with none of the firm grips of macho
competition amerikan men like to think proves them decisive and masculine or even
extra-friendly. No. It was 1971 and a lot of things were changing in the Country.
For me and the old Chief to shake hands a lot of blood had to flow under the bridge,
an introduction like a necessary prelude to the ongoing criminal investigations that tied
him and me to a lot of murders from the time of Columbus, and into the future tying
Anna Mae Aquash's mystery to Leonard Peltier's, unsolved assassinations and homicides
constituting FBI perjuries, and AIM perjuries too. Both of us would have to work hard as
detectives to bring the elders into the equation, as Leo Peltier would request years in the
future, to stench the bloody flow at its source. I'm not saying I'm any kind of Sherlock
Holmes or anything, but those old guys sure put the Whammy on me in which fateful
events put me in the right places at the wrong times over and over again. Fate, you see,
isn't death like most people think of it, because death itself isn't what most people think it
is, so I was cast in the role of the Chief not because I wanted it but precisely because I
didn't want it. I had no desire or thought at all to be Sitting Bull in a play. I barely knew
who I was, let alone who he was, let alone what powerful sorcerors he and Fools Crow
were.
But there they were, those immortals, forcing me to obey a kind of destiny that had
nothing to do with my own hopes and dreams of fame and fortune. I was like most
"Americans" then and now - I thought the "Indians" were getting a lot of attention, they
weren't being ignored to death, a lot of people cared deeply about them and were working
to make things better. So it was okay if I didn't do anything personally, or read any
books, or learn anything about it because I already had my well-educated conclusions and
I could go on with my own life and my own requirements for food, clothing, and shelter.
All that changed one night at the Third Eye Theatre in Denver. Joey Favre was the
great Director who was becoming one of my best teachers far, far outside of the normal
boundaries of education where a lot of pseudo-teachers had been parading as professors
of science all my life, but without art, imagination, their doctorates of philosophy had no
meaning to me. Joey laid it all on the line profanely, kindly, as I was a green kid in the
red world no matter if I was already a college graduate with one marriage and one
divorce under my belt. I knew nothing. He'd invited all of us in the acting company, in
which I was a minor spear-carrier in the chorus, to readings for his new production of
'INDIANS' by the Broadway star Arthur Kopit, upcoming for a ten week run that
summer. I knew nothing about the play and nothing about professional auditions as I was
a failed journalist at that point, a failed husband, and a novice in the theatre who was
working menial jobs in the city, rapidly working my way down a dead-end street at the
end of the road.
 But I was treated graciously at the Third Eye by all the actors and crew and I've
always responded enthusiastically to grace under fire {which was probably helped by my
school days as a sports star}. I found their company friendly and full of meaning, just as I
would enjoy the company of Indians over the years; and just as I have not enjoyed the
stilted pretensions of amerikans more and more, less and less, over the years. It's not
logical.
We read the strange scenes of Buffalo Bill and Geronimo cold, on folding chairs in a
half circle on the small stage, in the dingy second-floor walkup over a chinese restaurant.
I'd already begun to feel strong and confident the moment I'd stepped on a few stages
back in college, crude, untrained, wild again in my love of the lies you can tell in the dark
where truth cannot be tamed by logic and facts. It was the same honest darkness I felt
naturally with Indians, and maybe they sensed it in me too. I noticed the nicest and most
beloved man in the whole company, a plain Italian homosexual with curly black hair
named Dino, whispering to Joey and his no-nonsense wife Junie, who was a great talent
and a beautiful singer, and they looked at me.
"David," Joey said forcefully, decisively, "sit next to Budge and read Sitting Bull."
"Sitting Bull?" It was the second lead in the show, a star role.
"Yeah, what're ya deaf?" he joked in his characteristic abrasive way.
"No. You want me to sit over here?"
"No, I want you to sit on my face. Budgie, turn to the scene with the Bull, what's the
fuckin' page, Dino?"
We found the page in our scripts and I sat next to the best actor in the city, the star of
our group, a wild-eyed, skinny, genius with a comic wit as fast as Robin Williams and
more creative imagination than I've ever known before or since. Budge Threlkeld was
one of the heroes of my life. But the last time I saw him in the 80s in Los Angeles he was
a bitter junkie glad to get a beer commercial or a stand-up comedy gig in a Sunset Strip
club. We read the scene.
"Slower, David. Give me that deeper voice again, don't talk out of the top of yer nose.
And enunciate, fer chrissake."
Budge put his arm around my shoulder and whispered, "You're doing good, Brother."
Junie said, "Can we hear the scene about -- "
And a dozen of us continued under the hot white lights for another hour going into one
moving episode after another about Chief Joseph, Spotted Elk, Annie Oakley. When we
took a break I noticed Joey and June arguing in the back of the small black room with
about 120 rickety seats they'd salvaged from an old movie house that was being torn
down, under our few crummy leiko and fresnel lights with wires haphazardly hanging
down from a makeshift web of black pipes in the low ceiling, as everyone freely talked in
groups and smoked cigarettes and drank coffee. It was already like a second family to me
after less than a year of doing only 3 plays in minor parts, but they were of such high
quality both on stage and off, and I've never again experienced that camaraderie and
resonance in a dozen other very good theatre and film companies. Maybe it was because I
was still young without being young and enamoured with the first flush of destiny, about
to get the single greatest role of my lifetime; one that would be like the climax of a
shakespearean tragedy in which the equilibrium of the plot would be turned around on its
ear, the imbalance of drama, the scales of injustice, weighed, and thrown out of kilter.
But it was not about me, anymore than Leonard Peltier's evidentiary hearing in his
blazing sun-yellow ribbon shirt (or was it scarlet, and the lightning-bolt was yellow?) was
about me in the audience. No. I was learning that "The Powers" work around us and only
the wisest among us don't fight it.
Joey grabbed me and pulled me to the side of 'The House'. "We need real Indians to
play the Indians."
"I'm Indian."
"What?"
"My mother's Huron, from Canada."
"No shit? All right, Man. Junie, goddamnit, David's Huron."
"Oh yeah?"
"Budgie, get yer ass up there with David again and read Scene 8. Jesus."
I could understand why they didn't think I was Indian because I didn't look Indian,
except in a generic black-haired way like a billion Irishmen and Frenchmen who were
also in my ancestry. At that moment my identity changed or was stereotyped forever, and
I hadn't even paused for one moment to consider its ramifications. Blood was flowing
under the bridge. I read the great speech in the Bull's own words:

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