LAND OF THE RED GIANTS OF IZTLAN

Chapter 5 - South Dakota: "There is the sound of heavy gunfire"

We pulled into Wounded Knee at dawn after camping all night in a cold grove of
cottonwoods down a deserted gravel road, afraid to make a fire that might give away our
presence to the landowner or anyone else. It was a cold night in winter just a few days
before all hell broke loose and the road-blocks went up, and we crawled in the total pitch
blackness under zillions of stars like ice under a barbed wire fence to the cattle hollow in
the trees smelling of last summer's old cowpies. The bushes were almost dusty in the dry
spot with a lot of stickers and thorns that had somehow escaped the snow and wet,
swampy mildew of many of those uninvitng spots, but at least it was protected from sight
and the wind and we snatched a couple hours of fitful sleep in our colorado down-bags.
We'd dropped Buddy and Maria off at a bar in Oelrichs and went on east to the border of
the border - the sovereign Pine Ridge nation, where I'd go in the morning to visit Fools
Crow near the town of Kyle. I knew where his house was, as he'd taken me there after the
play closed back in '71, way out in the boondocks on an almost impassable dirt road, and
we had to pass through the village of Wounded Knee on the way. Chattering with cold
and trepidation, Karen and I had jumped back in the car before first light and turned it on
to get some blessed, modern heat.
We also turned on the AM radio to see if there was any of our species still left out
there. "Dennis Banks said at the Rapid City city council meeting last night that AIM was
demanding Indian representation on what he called 'an anti-discrimination Task Force to
end racism in South Dakota." We whooped at that news in our grubby half-sleep
grogginess and pulled out on the road. "Banks, and hundreds of supporters mostly from
out of state, has been everywhere this week, speaking at schools, churches, and even at an
all-day meeting yesterday with law enforcement authorities about the alleged problem.
Tensions have escalated in western South Dakota since the violent confrontation last
week at Custer in which the courthouse and chamber of commerce were severely
damaged by fire and looting, vandalism, and dozens of arrests were made for assaults on
police officers. The county hospital reported dozens of injured people were brought in.
There are reports a police car was also destroyed in the rampage. In other news, feeder
heifer calves at the Sioux Falls sale barn today -- " I turned it off and we smiled in
wonder at each other that we were right where the action was, passing the sleepy villages
of Oglala and Pine Ridge where there would be the major shootouts involving Leonard
Peltier and the FBI in another 2 years, but which were quiet that morning except for an
obviously heavy police presence, including what looked like a machine-gun nest on top
of the Tribal Council building, manned by several camouflaged men who were obviously
US Army. But mostly we saw the horrendous and shocking public ghetto housing areas
of indescribable poverty, trash, ruin, and desolation all along the potholed, unrepaired old
roads in the villages and back out in the depressing countryside, east about 10 or 15
miles, to Wounded Knee.
We stopped and got out of the car. We stood in the middle of the junction to watch a
glorious sunrise over the white church and graveyard where a hundred of the slaughtered
from the 1890 Massacre were buried in a mass pit. Several hundred others, mostly old
men and women and children, were eventually buried elsewhere by their families,
including many Hunkpapas of Sitting Bull's band, and Minneconjou Lakotas of Big
Foot's band. It was completely still and quiet with no movement or sound at all from the
few scattered hovels and outhouses off the rutted roads to other villages named
Manderson and Batesland; until a Wino spied us from somewhere and came walking over
with a friendly smile and a big "Hello" with his incredibly stinking breath and general
odor.
"Hau Kolas, where're ya from?"
"Hello. Colorado."
"Good morning."
"Colorado?"
"Denver."
"Oh yeah," he grinned genuinely, his big head and face very red and very pockmarked
from a short hard life of only about 30 years that looked in his rough, weather-beaten
slouch to be about 60. "I been there, Wasichu city, Custerville!" he laughed. We laughed.
"They gave a victory parade for Colonel Chivington and them 'Colorado Volunteers' who
slaughtered my Cheyenne relatives at Sand Creek, ennit? Governor Evans made them
heroes, and they named streets and schools and even a mountain after him!" It was just
what we wanted to hear, and he knew it. "Custer had it coming!"
"Yeah!"
He grabbed our hands and we all shook. "My people gave him an arrow shirt! We live
here now."
"Yeah. So you live here now, in Wounded Knee?"
"Yeah. Wounded Knee."
We looked around solemnly at the bleak spot that was also kind of pretty that
morning, in the quiet before the storm, as the sun was up and it was getting a little
warmer but not much.
"Say, Kolas, can you help me out? I gotta go call my daughter and we have to go to
Pine Ridge."
"Oh ... yeah." Guiltily we dug into our pockets and gave him a couple bucks. "Sure."
His focus changed immediately and the whole transaction became more real, somber,
meaningful as his face lit up even more and we felt the relief of desperation too, despite
the con game and wine, in his renewed handshakes. "Pilamaya Kolas, pilamaya. Thank
you."
"I'm Dave."
"Karen."
"Oh yeah. Raymond Yellow Thunder."
"Hi."
"Have you been over to Gildersleeve's?" he pointed to a building behind us across the
road in some trees.
"No. What's that?"
"Gildersleeve's trading post. Rips off Indins with sky-high prices for beads, but
bargains for the tourists, lots of belt buckles and war clubs!" he laughed vigorously again,
showing a mouth missing a few teeth in front. Back in those days panhandling wasn't
begging, it was a protest against The System, an honorable form of beating The Man, and
we felt, as we walked with Raymond over to the trading post, to be a part of that purer
Other World that wasn't neatly tied up in economic philosophies or social compacts. We
were on the ground littered with trash and empty wine bottles where hotchkiss cannons
had mowed down hundreds of refugees, in the unmarked gulley next to the store, like
Raymond Yellow Thunder. He was probably thinking about finding the bootlegger as
soon as he could (since it was technically illegal to sell booze on the reservation), in a
hovel out behind an abandoned gas station on the other side of a desolate field, but we,
we, were just learning. We knew we were privileged city kids with a car and more dollars
in our pockets than him, even if we didn't have enough for a motel room or a nice
breakfast in a cafe like a lot of other travelers passing through out on the main highways,
out of the reservation. They were passing way out of the way here at a forgotten massacre
site of their history that would have made it unbearably uncomfortable for them to give a
drunken beggar a dollar out of their (comparatively) fat wallets like a true christian taking
pity on a true lost samaritan, in his prodigality. The inequity of the wealth of course was
the big dividing line between our romantic search of discovery and Raymond's despair,
and amerika's guilt.
"Is it open?" we asked, at the unimpressive and therefore impressive front door of the
long wooden building.
Ray smirked at us like we knew nothing and opened the door, and we followed him in.
It was deserted of customers and bare of merchandise compared to the rich stores in
denver like the Western Trading Post on Broadway, not far from the Third Eye and the
Mayan Theatre; but what was there was authentic, local, of lesser quality but also much
lower prices. It was a good place for bargains, in other words, in the words of seasoned
shoppers. "Good Deals," a sign said. Beaded belt buckles of geometric abstractions and
inferior designs and art work of horses and sad warriors with their lances drooping in
front of them in defeat, badly dyed feathers of unnatural greens and pinks, cheap looking
papoose dolls, curios, junk, were mixed in with an occasional knife scabbard of quality
craftsmanship, leather mocassins, porcupine quill earrings with silver beads under glass
counters in a long square around the center of the room where a bored, bald white man
sat reading a newspaper.
"Good morning," we said, in our best imitation of friendly browsers.
"Good morning," he replied, startled to see us. "How are you folks today?"
"Great. Beautiful morning."
"Yes it is."
"You have some beautiful things here."
"Well thank you."
Raymond beamed, proud to be the broker in what might be a profitable commission
for him, for all we knew (although the white proprietor didn't seem aware of Ray's
existence or presence at all); although he had no idea we were comparatively broke, nor
would he have believed it even if we told him so. But then no comparatively solvent folks
would have wandered relatively (relativistically, in terms of physics and science) into this
shack off the beaten path in the first place. So it was pointless even to him and Old Man
Gildersleeve to speculate why we showed up or how much we had to spend. These are
the commercial tensions that immediately interlope upon human relations whenever and
wherever metaphysical questions are interrupted, interfered with and by the buyer and
seller contract of our modern new experiment in Trade. We weren't there to trade
anything at all, not in the original definition that involved barter or exchange. The old
Trading Posts have now evolved into import-export quotas and gross domestic products
that involve entire World Trade Organizations. The 200 Years War is still raging between
capitalist industrialization and communist cooperatives, multinational extranational
corporations, and the ancient tribalism of hunters and gatherers who didn't even know
what paper was, let alone currency rates and commodities markets, clientele, stocks and
bonds, taxes, except to know that they didn't like it. We wondered why a white man had
the only business in this indigenous outpost, and why I felt both guilty buying a nice
beaded knife-sheath and elkbone-handled knife for $15 and embarrassed, crass, like I was
foolishly trying to participate in the vitality of the Sioux community but could only
manage a handout to a wino and a businessman for some materialistic pleasure, some
altruistic gratification, some cultural, racial confusion.
We bade them farewell and hurried to the safety of the car, feeling that we had our
souvenirs of the trip - she bought a porcupine quill necklace for $7 - and that these things
might help us to linger, at least in our memories, over our feelings like they were
photographs we could hold on to, because neither of us believed in photographs as
mementoes of experience and we didn't own a camera. The morning light was making us
feel the Site was even grimmer than our expectations and sorrow, in the squalid reality of
the garbage in the ditches and the big gunshot sign that described the '1890 Battle' on
a faded green plywood board. That's all there was. No postcards for sale. No one-hour
Kodak instamatic moment. We didn't feel it was appropriate for us to gawk at the
cemetery or the gulleys where Big Foot Si Tanka and his children were gunned down in
the bloody snow. We didn't even want to read John Neihardt's brilliant and agonizing
description of it in his 1931 masterpiece 'Black Elk Speaks'. The reality was too sordid
and nauseating right there on the ground. The sun made it all too ugly, too impersonal,
impossible for us to grasp the daily grind of Yellow Thunder and Gildersleeve, even as
they sat in the middle of an infamous place.
We drove off reluctantly, torn, worried, nervous, swinging north on a high wide slope
toward Porcupine Butte where, a little later, I would know the warriors who came over
those cold hard fields in the dead of night under police searchlights, past roadblocks of
Armored Personnel Carriers, shot at by FBI and BIA cops and redneck vigilantes with .50
calibre machineguns, M-16s from Vietnam Vets, deer rifles like 30-30s and 30.06s and
flares, tear gas, bullhorns and loudspeakers blaring unearthly profanities in the foreign
amerikan language. It didn't seem possible that peaceful morning that Porcupine Butte
wasn't a peaceful place at all, yet we sensed it. Something unearthly had just happened to
us but we wouldn't know it until a few hours later when we pulled up to Fools Crow's
house, and even then I didn't know it until years later. It was like I had been asleep the
whole time and wasn't even there, or I'd imagined the whole thing.
"There he is," I said. "Hey, it almost looks like he's expecting us."
"Yes."
"But it can't be. He doesn't have a phone. I couldn't call."
Buddy couldn't have told him we were coming; because he had hurried off
distractedly to go drinking when we'd dropped him and Maria (who very probably was
paying for everything) off, the day before a hundred miles back to the west at the little
junction of bars and a gas station and churches that made up the typical off-Rezz border
town of Oelrichs. I'd seen that alcoholic distraction come over my friend too many times
to mistake it for anything else; and he would become lost to the narrative until 5 or 10
years had passed when he'd show up again out of nowhere just as chipper and raring to go
on an important mission of music or the treaty as ever, as if nothing had ever happened
in-between; as if only a day or two had gone by.
Fools Crow had that same impossible air about him in which time didn't stand still, but
neither did it pass by, at least not in anything of any consequence. It was like the passing
of the landscape.
We finally pulled up as close as we could get to his shack on the wildly rutted and
gumbo-mudded dirt trail that passed for a driveway, in which I was afraid I'd break an
axle or at least a shock absorber or a tire rim in the mess. The old man waved at us from
his porch as a few dogs barked at us, some horses whinnyed in a small ramshackle corral,
and 3 or 4 big Lakota men glared suspiciously where they were leaning on the fence.
Kate was out behind the house chopping wood and completely ignored all of us.
"Hau!" Grampa waved. That almost made it okay that we were there. Almost.
I got out and tried to grin a big shiteating grin and shake hands all around, with
introductions all around, but we were way, way out of place. It was relaxed and it wasn't.
Big doings were going on and they needed a ride over to another guy's place. Of course I
said I'd be glad to help out and give them a lift as nobody had a car, at least not one that
was running anyway, which broke the ice a little bit as we cracked some smiles about the
vagaries of automobiles, (and considering what outlawry we were all about to commit I
have omitted using anybody's real name here, except as Sam or Leola, other than those
already employed) and also that I had just happened to show up at a very opportune
moment with a very big and tough old extra-large buick exactly suited to the
requirements of the rebellion and the gumbo. Laughing, and gathering up cigarettes,
women, children, and rifles, we piled into my car, and piled into it, and piled into it,
forever forsaking (in my mind) any further hope for the survival of my sorry axles.
Perhaps the car was already becoming a metaphor of myself, a comic allegory of
amerika. The iron beast sagged almost to the ground with the weight of the world on it
and several families and the grinning Grandfather Tunkasila who showed not the slightest
concern for the eventual success of our voyage in reaching its destination.
"You're in the AIM now!" the old boy joked toothlessly, with only a few wisps of
white hair left on his great red scalp, and everyone howled politely at the great good
wisdom of that sacred observation.
"Welcome to Lakota Country goddamnit!" someone else shouted.
Kate ignored us as we left. We scraped across the first small pebble we came across,
as the pony was only about an inch off the ground, and the ground was littered with dogs
yelping to get out of the way and high-centered with rusty pork 'n beans cans as I tried
not to groan as the haunches of Protector groaned and the oil pan dragged on the lumps of
horseshit. "This is my initiation, eh?"
"Hoka hey!"
Scraping and grinding, scheming and scamming, against every ungainly mound and
rock in the world, somehow we kept moving and made it back to the paved road, and
somehow the wheels rolled while almost rubbing against the outraged wheel-wells and
body. Almost.
"So you're back from the Longest Walk?" I asked, trying to salvage some meaningful
conversation before my car collapsed in ruin.
"Hau."
 "How did it go?"
"Pretty good."

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