Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Barry leaned over the table covered in beer cans and ashtrays, his curly black hair
framing his kind face, and whispered, "I heard you got in some trouble?"
"Yeah," I squirmed uncomfortably, as he and Randy and a couple of the other boys
listened sympathetically.
"What was it, Man?"
"I was in jail."
"Jesus. That's what we heard."
"Yeah." Their looks of concern, and friendship, showed that they cared about me,
unlike the hierarchy of political "AIM" in denver and minneapolis, who were fighting
like cats and dogs between them for the scraps being thrown from the table. And
especially by the late 80s and early 90s I was becoming a player in the leadership
hierarchy, in spite of myself, because a big feature film of my little book 'The Powwow
Highway' was playing worldwide, thanks to George Harrison of The Beatles who had
produced it. I was becoming widely known and even trusted like a celebrity whose work
a lot of people love; even though a lot of them thought I must be rich because of it and
wanted only money (or something) from me. "It's amazing, Bro, how people think I'm
rich because I got a movie out."
"It's like horseracing," Randy observed wisely. "Hit or miss."
"You see how I gotta punch cows on your grandmother's ranch for wages."
"Nothing wrong with that," Randy frowned.
"Damn right," I nodded. "It's good work. I love seeing the Missouri River down the
cliffs from your place."
"Level's way down because of the drought," one of the other boys added. "The Army
Corps of Engineers is killing it, the richest bottomland around here, and wild game,
flooded out for dams and barge traffic for down-river big money states like Missouri."
"Yeah. Now it's getting droughted out, and for what?"
"So, we got branding and castrating next week?"
"Soon as this rain lets up."
"Maybe it'll help the drought ... "
"Shit, it could rain an inch and it would only raise the River an inch."
"I love that movie," another guy said as they came over when Randy rounded up
another round of Miller. He was a tall good-natured sioux everybody liked.
"Thanks," I replied lamely to the compliment.
"He wrote it," Barry proudly explained to the growing crowd who were waiting out
the rain, as proud of me as if I was his own brother.
"No shit?"
"Yeah."
"You know," I philosophized again briefly, when I saw their faces looking solemnly,
and even a little longingly, at me, in the noisy honky-tonk, "I read in Variety 20 million
people have seen it, all over the world."
"Jesus Christ!" It was just what they wanted to hear.
"Translated into 8 languages. A friend sent me a flyer in Japanese where it was
playing in Tokyo. And another guy came up to me at a film festival and said he saw a line
of people around the block waiting to see it in Kiev, in Russian."
"Holy goddamn shit!"
"Even my Dad likes it," one guy marveled, "and he doesn't like anything."
"It must be cool," a woman smiled. "Congratulations to you! A toast!"
We clanked aluminum cans and I thought about the nightmare it took to steal the
money to publish the book no one wanted, and how the cops took me away in handcuffs,
with my sons crying in their mother's arms. I had only stolen a total of $8,000 over the
years, mostly to pay my rent and feed my kids, while hollywood gave me a $600 option
on the book, whitewashing its comic allegory of the destruction of amerika as symbolized
in my old war pony Protector into a formula Buddy Picture.
"What are you working on now, anything?"
"Another book, 'Thunder Nation', going on 7 years of writing. I'm almost done with
it."
"What's it about?"
"An Indian film studio in the Black Hills, where a Native movie star is also building
his own Indian TV Channel for the whole hemisphere, 'Channel 4444', producing and
airing documentaries and features from grassroots peoples, using satellite uplinks and
downloadable computer Digital technology."
"Wow. Sounds great."
"I saw your documentary on cable access in Minneapolis," another woman said, "It
was great. 4 hours long! 'With Visible Breath, I Am Walking'. You got a Bush Artists
Fellowship for that, didn't you?"
"Yes, the only prize I ever won, for visual arts." And with $33,000, it was by far the
most money I ever got at once, thanks to my co-producers Bill McIntyre and David Ode
from the old Third Eye days. It also helped pay off my 'restitution' to the banks so I could
fulfill my 'probation' and get clean of crime and the cops. "We also did a great score, with
music videos to Buddy Red Bow's songs on his album 'Journey to The Spirit World'."
"Where he is now."
"Yes."
I sat in many sweat lodges up and down the hemisphere, and smoked many sacred
Pipes, dreaming of just such an Ixachitlatlan, "The red giants of Atlantis", like a Thunder
Nation in which the prehistoric Spirits were also reincarnated warriors and clan mothers
from the sunken continents under our worlds today, a Necropolis of gods.
The gang asked me to read a little from Thunder Nation, and, much to their
amazement, I had whole sections of it memorized, just like the old oral, traditional Bards: