LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IXTLAN

Chapter 3, continued page 3

Buddy and I and some feminist friends went north to South Dakota several times,
before the war exploded in '73, in my '64 Buick Protector. Immediately the air out of the
city transformed me again, transmuting theories into practices and theatres into
meadowlarks standing on the backs of antelope in Wyoming.
"Inspiration changes your lungs," I breathed.
"Yeah, Denver sucks, Kola, my friend," Buddy replied. "Hey, I heard you talking to
Tall Bull about your relatives. Hurons are Algonquian speakers like Cheyennes?"
"Yeah, we're related through the Algonquian language family."
"I thought they spoke Iroquois?" he asked, giving it the French pronunciation.
"Who knows, the language was lost back in 1915 when the last fullblood Huron died,
and the tongue with him. Probably. But the prophet Deganawidah was Huron and
probably spoke Algonquian, because his wampum teachings, that's an Algonquian word."
"Oh yeah?"
"Ouendat autochtone. I have relatives in Loretteville Quebec, Stratford Ontario,
Detroit, and Flagstaff Arizona where my grandfather moved around that same time. He
worked at the Tuba City trading post on the Rezz."
"Here," one of the women said in the back seat, reading a book. "Mari Sandoz writes:

"All the horizon lay bleak and grey with late November, the
Indians gone, the scattering of antelope quiet on the empty prairie,
the white of their rumps barely showing. An eagle flew high over
the breaks, soaring, circling, while on the tableland the snowbirds
fluffed themselves out round and fed busily in their little circles.
But suddenly they lifted, tossing like dead leaves on the light
southeasterly wind. Then they were gone, perhaps to sleep in
some sheltered spot, perhaps hurried by the delicate perception
of a sound that seemed to germinate in the earth, a faint vibration
that grew in the air. The antelope were gone too, now, and the
deer from the buckbrush along the bottoms as the sound became
a far rumble that rose and spread. A wolf, whitened by approaching
winter, stood on a ridge a while, looking back, his tail an erect
plume against the clouded sky.
"Then the buffaloes appeared on the northwest tableland, singly
at first, then in twos and threes coming down the breaks, and in
little strings along the narrow trails. More and more of them came,
their running a deep rumble in the earth, their dew claws rattling,
the ponderous humped shoulders thrusting forward, great shaggy
heads down, grunting, their noses turned into the wind."
- 'The Buffalo Hunters', Mari Sandoz (14)

"Yeah!" Buddy whooped wildly, happily, hanging his head out the passenger window
and screaming for joy in the wind. "The Ptay Wakan!"
 I joined him in the wild whooping, but the women didn't know what to do, as if we
were foolish men. "Communism doesn't make much sense out here," I observed,
observing the endless horizons of the Great Plains in every direction as we roared along
on Interstate 25.
"Yeah, what are the 'means of production' out here - prairie dogs?"
"It's the same thing."
"What is?"
"The means of production."
"Oh. What?"
"Land reform," Karen said. "Isn't that what the Treaties are, Buddy?"
"Land reform? What?"
"Yeah."
The other woman, a Chicana named Maria, said, "The only enemies remaining in the
country are the Latifundistas and the reactionary bourgeoisie."
"Huh?" Buddy laughed. "Say what?"
"Landowners. Cowboys."
"Oh yeah, them."
"Haciendados."
"Haciendados. I like that. Haciendados. 'Hey, Gringo fucker, come here. Hey fucker,
come here'."
"That's what Sitting Bull said to Custer. 'Hey, Custer, come here. C'mere, you
STUPID Motherfucker!"
"Yeah!"
"God, I can't believe how beautiful it is out here," Karen sighed. The soft rolling
prairie was a wild pale green in spring and a soft rough brown in winter, not really flat
but moving subtly like it was alive, like the sea-bed it used to be, the sandy, grassy alkali
hills breathing up and down with a few isolated clumps of cottonwoods huddling by tiny
stream or some occasional lines of brave pines making a stand on a rare ridge beside
sagebrush, cactus, chokecherries, or a cattle fence. A few brown and white herefords or
black cows shit next to a gray tin water barrel once in a while, where ranchers toiled from
pickup trucks to drop off bales of hay, and a few horses stood next to a fence trying to
figure out what to do. The wind was usually soothing or maddening depending on how
long you had to be out there in it. If you were working you hated it, if you were too
young to appreciate the ranching-life and just wanted to get away from the mind-
numbing boredom and solitude to the city, and the bigger the better; and if you were
walking in it then you could learn to love it and marvel at it, at Crazy Horse for instance,
and how the real secrets and purposes were imbedded in the dry creek beds beside an old
cottonwood or box elder. "The smell," she said, "just smell it."
"Cow shit," Buddy smirked.
I pulled over and turned off the engine and we got out to take a leak. There wasn't
another car in either direction as far as we could see ten miles down the road. The silence
without the rubber tires whining on the asphalt almost hurt your ears. It was unsettling.
Meadowlarks sang at regular intervals but that's all there was, the songs making a sound
for the smell of the weeds and the plain, raw air burning your nostrils. "It's not really a
smell," she said, "grass, or something."
"Dirt."
 "Wind."
"Sex!"
We laughed. Animals were humping all the time of course, even if you couldn't see
them for miles at a time, out there, everywhere an integral part of the Movement. But in
Wyoming people weren't the proletarian means of production. It wasn't about people, out
there. It was the Buffalo Nations. As Tatanka Iyotake often said, "Everything I know, I
learned from the buffalo."

"Those in the lead stopped to sniff at the frozen creeks and the
fall ponds along the river bottoms, shying from the thin ice and then
crowded out upon it, pushed by the dark herd behind until the ice
sagged and cracked. In the deeper holes they went clear down,
others driven upon them, striving for footing on the struggling mass,
perhaps to go under too. And still they kept coming, thicker and
thicker, crowding hard upon the leaders. This was the way two
thousand buffaloes had been left in the quicksands of the Platte
River when the great herd moved north in the spring migration,
and why they could be driven over any bank or cliff if the scattered
van could be turned, as the Indians sometimes turned them with
waving blankets or with fire, to plunge over the Chugwater bluffs
up in Wyoming, and in many other less likely places."
- Mari Sandoz (15)

I'd explored all over that State for many years, all my life, born and bred in the Rocky
Mountains and their river basins from the Pecos at Roswell New Mexico to the Colorado
and Rio Grande and Gunnison Rivers, and the Arkansas where my european grandfather
had homesteaded in 1888, on the Kansas-Colorado border, on the Arkansas River border
of the great 1851 Fort Laramie Treaty. He came west on the railroad when he was 16, and
Sitting Bull was still alive; and I shook hands with Grampa and a Fools Crow too, who
was born right around then. We stopped at Fort Laramie on the way to Wounded Knee.
"Fort Laramie," I sighed nostalgiacally.
"The original massacre," Buddy swore metaphorically.
It didn't look like much, out there on an empty prairie between an ominous, secret Air
Force and ANG Base a few miles back and a farm-implement town a few miles ahead, on
a side road, along a pretty little creek with some willows and apple trees. It wasn't a
hollywood fort or a medieval fortress with great sharp walls of spiked wood or granite
towers. It was only a few sod buildings and a flagpole, but it was the end and the
beginning of the West in the great, solemn Covenant with the Great Spirits signed there
by the headmen and clan mothers with their thumbprints of ten thousand oldtime Buffalo
Nations and a mountain man named Tom Fitzpatrick representing the USA. This original
Treaty was upheld in 1980 by the US Supreme Court as a legitimate, legal document of
title to most of 7 States. It was the Law, in more ways than one.
"Of course," I explained to Karen and Maria what Buddy meant, "The Supreme Court
said they couldn't obey the law and return the land."
"They offered about 4 cents an acre, at 1851 dollars," Buddy said quietly, tears in his
eyes."Our elders said no. They wanted the land. It was sacred to us, lela wakan. We were
born where our fathers lived, and where they died. This is all a cemetery of the holy
ones."
"It's not about money," Karen understood.
"The Black Hills are not for sale."
"So the Supreme Court put the money in the bank where it's collecting a lot of interest,
making the Treaty elders and councils fight with the sell-outs, dangling dollars in front of
the people to divide and conquer."
"As always, everywhere," Maria cried too, '"in Mexico."
"Hundreds of millions of dollars. And that's nothing, compared to the trillions all this
is worth to realtors, the Homestake gold mine, coal, cattle, corn. It's the whole economy
of the United State of America, really, the stolen land. All their wealth, everything they
are, is based on this dirt right here, heart and soul."
Tom Fitzpatick was one of the honest old beaver trappers who'd come to the ends of
the earth in the pristine 1820s with the great explorer Jedediah Smith, working for the fur
trading companies whom the great poet John Neihardt from Missouri chronicled in his
'Cycle of the West':

"One hundred strong they flocked to Ashley's call

That spring of eighteen hundred twenty-two;
For tales of wealth, out-legending Peru,
Came wind-blown from Missouri's distant springs,
And that old sireny of unknown things
Bewitched them, and they could not linger more.
They heard the song the sea winds sang the shore
When earth was flat, and black ships dared the steep
Where bloomed the purple perils of the deep
In dragon-haunted gardens. They were young.

Albeit some might feel the winter flung

Upon their heads, 'twas less like autumn's drift
Than backward April's unregarded sift
On stout oaks thrilling with the sap again.
And some had scarce attained the height of men,
Their lips unroughed, and gleaming in their eyes
The light of immemorial surprise
That life still kept the spaciousness of old
And, like the hoarded tales their grandsires told,
Might still run bravely."
- John Neihardt (16)

We wandered around the almost deserted quartermaster's building and a livery stable,
some barracks whitewashed, and a little museum with muskets hanging on the dusty wall
in what the USA was trying to turn into a national memorial back then. Today it's a full-
blown National Park complete with an entrance fee and Smokey the Bear-hatted Rangers
conducting tours of the spic 'n span tourist attraction and gift shoppe. Back then, Sitting
Bull was a prominent young warrior of the northern Hunkpapas, while Crazy Horse was
still a boyish dreamer named Curly, of the southern Oglala band of the Teton
Lakotaki. 20,000 more Indians from 7 Nations camped outside on the creek, and over at
Horse Creek, in September 1851, agreeing to Old Tom's paper-making because they'd
known him for decades and trusted him. Merchants hadn't quite swarmed in on the Platte
River Country yet, on the way to the glorious killing fields of the California gold rush, on
the pretty Oregon Trail, and mountain men in their buckskins were the only French
voyageurs (with names like Robideau, Peltier, Amiotte, LeBeau still prominent among
the breed descendants on the reservations) who bothered to learn the Crow and Aatsina
and Zezestas and Lakota tongues of the Algonquians and Athabascans to negotiate real
estate deals in the name of the half-country that was eyeing these distant ranchlands from
the Atlantic seaboard. Washingtonians and Jeffersonians made the mistake of
underestimating the value of the property and spirit of its resident hunters and gatherers
and signed the formal government-to-government Treaty in 1851, authorizing Old Tom
as an official agent of the USA to give away what they didn't have in the first place to
give away: the entire Great Plains from the Musselshell and Yellowstone Rivers way up
north in Montana (and some say up to its tributaries the Milk and Bow Rivers of Calgary,
Alberta, owned by the Stoney Nakotas), along the entire Rockies south to the mouth of
the Arkansas in Colorado ski country, east to Kansas where my Grampa homesteaded
illegally, back around north to the North Platte in Nebraska, farther on north to the White
River where it empties into the Missouri at Chamberlain South Dakota on I-90, then it
followed the mile-wide meanders of the Missouri conveniently all the way back to the
Yellowstone. The Congress ratified it and the President signed it.
"It's an area greater than western Europe," the western European Karen marveled.
"Or all of Mexico," Maria added.
I wrote a poem as we had lunch next to a sacred Tree where holy men like today's
Pipe-keeper Arvol Looking Horse often conduct ceremonies, where their ancestors made
promises to the gods and goddesses, about all the Articles of the Consititution and its
Treaty provisions:

I sing of justice, of children

on the land. I am the white buffalo.

In the spring of 1850 the Arapahoes

and Cheyennes had a smoke at the fort
on the Arkansas River near the Santa Fe crossing.
The spirits were there, where the winds
turn west with the world. Fur trappers
also listened to meadowlarks in the winter
singing to the Pipe near the mountains
of snow and juicy chokecherries. Tom Fitzpatrick
was the Indian Agent; he rode with Jed Smith
against whiskey traders and railroads
who would ruin the peace of the timeless moons.

Broken Hand said, "The Indians are jealous

and selfish, and full of deception. Yet, strange to say,
there is nothing they hate more than to find
these things in a white man." Porcupine Bear
nodded, and so did Old Bark and Yellow Wolf.
They were in the Colorado wheatlands of Bent's Fort,
foothills of icy rivers where the Prophet was born -
Sweet Medicine, the first black chief of the night
when water-rocks burned in the sweat lodges;
and he is my son. My sister is his mother
Black Buffalo; she is, he is the Avenger.

The beaver men smoked the sacred music,

and Beckwourth and Jim Bridger agreed with Tom.
They would help the old men peacekeepers
and medicine women take tobacco to the nations.
They would seal a Scripture between men and God.
They'd keep the criminal opportunists away
from all my children and the wolf relatives
to make a Treaty forever, a Covenant
that no lie could ever un-promise, no animal
would ever really destroy with his hunger
or plow furrow the land with its iron.

They would write it carefully, Article by Article:

'ARTICLES of a Treaty made and concluded
at Fort Laramie, in the Indian Territory,
Commissioners specially appointed and authorized
by the President of the United States, of the first part,
and the Chiefs, Headmen, and Braves of the following
Indian Nations, residing south of the Missouri River,
east of the Rocky Mountains, and north of the lines
of Texas and New Mexico, viz., the Sioux
or Dahcotahs, Cheyennes, Arrapahoes, Crows,
Assinaboines, Gros Ventre Mandans, and
Arrickaras. Parties of the second part'"

- - - - - - - - [include MAP of the Treay Lands] - - - - - - - -