by Chris Hedges
•largest international arms sales;
•fourth-worst balance of payments, behind only New Zealand, Spain, and Portugal;
•third-lowest scores for student performance in math, behind only Portugal and Italy, and far from the top in both science and reading;
•second-highest high-school dropout rate, behind only Spain;
•highest homicide rate
•largest prison population per capita.1
1
DAYS OF THEFT
Pine Ridge, South Dakota
I did not know how much had ended. When I look back now from this high hill of my old age, I can still see the butchered women and children lying heaped and scattered all along the crooked gulch as plain as when I saw them with eyes still young. And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream . . . the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.
—BLACK ELK SPEAKS
But you have there the myth of the essential white America. All the other stuff, the love, the democracy, the flourishing into lust, is a sort of by-play. The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted.
—D. H. LAWRENCE, STUDIES IN CLASSIC AMERICAN LITERATURE
A GROUP OF FIVE MEN AND THREE WOMEN ARE SEATED CROSS-LEGGED in a small circle, in the shade of a flat-roofed brown building in Whiteclay, Nebraska. They are drinking 24-ounce cans of malt liquor. Three other men are passed out on the sidewalk, one alone and two lying next to each other. One of the pair is on his back. The other is on his side. We look at the soles of their shoes. More drinkers sit in pairs or sleep in the weeds and trash-filled lots. Abandoned cars lie junked behind the buildings. Garbage, empty beer cans, and plastic containers litter the ground.
Whiteclay, an unincorporated village that exists for only a block and a half before vanishing into the flatlands of the surrounding prairie, has only five or six permanent residents. It exists to sell beer and malt liquor. It has no town hall, no fire department, no police department, no garbage collection, no municipal water, no town sewer system, no parks, no benches, no public restrooms, no schools, no church, no ambulance service, no civic organizations, and no library. The main street, Nebraska Highway 87, is the only street in Whiteclay. A few of the buildings on the street, many of which once served as saloons, are boarded up and padlocked shut. Several are wooden, with high false fronts and sloping porches that extend over the dirt sidewalks.
The four boxy liquor stores—Jumping Eagle Inn, D&S Pioneer Service, State Line Liquor and Arrowhead Inn—are little more than oversized beer coolers. They have heavy steel doors, and clerks work inside metal cages. The Arrowhead Inn, a former filling station that is kept at a chilly forty degrees, has stacks of beer that are nine feet high. The liquor stores dispense the equivalent of 4.5 million 12-ounce cans of beer or malt liquor a year, or 13,500 cans a day.1
Whiteclay’s primary business venture brings in an estimated $3 million a year in revenue. Whiteclay’s clients, however, are some of the poorest people in the country. They are Native Americans from the Pine Ridge reservation that is less than 200 feet away, just over the state line in South Dakota. Most of those who live on the reservation earn between $2,600 and $3,500 a year. Dedicated drinkers must often beg, as many do outside the liquor stores, buy on credit, trade food stamps for alcohol, or offer sexual services to get money. Alcoholism on Pine Ridge, although the sale of liquor is banned on the reservation, is estimated to be as high as eighty percent.2
On the main street of Whiteclay, Nebraska.
Whiteclay is an extension of the long night of ethnic cleansing, degradation, and murder stretching back more than a century and a half, to the U.S. Cavalry charges on Indian encampments, where screaming women and children were shot down as they fled, and the systematic eradication of food sources by the white colonizers, who soon reduced bands of ragged Indians to destitution. Fights, brawls, and shootings eventually shut down the bars and saloons of Whiteclay. All sales are now carryout. But Whiteclay still provides the liquid fuel for the car wrecks, diabetes, heart attacks, domestic abuse, divorces, joblessness, violence, early deaths, and suicides: one in five Indian girls and one in eight boys attempts suicide by the end of high school. The average male life expectancy on Pine Ridge is forty-eight, the lowest in the Western Hemisphere outside of Haiti.3
The poison pouring out of these little shrines of death and profit, erected by tidy white capitalists, greases old, familiar cogs. The genocide that came close to obliterating Native Americans; the Indian boarding schools that ripped children away from their families, forbade them to speak their language, or practice their religious or cultural customs; the eighty percent unemployment on the reservation;4 the racism by the neighboring white ranchers and law enforcement; the frequent lack of running water and electricity in overcrowded trailer homes and sod huts, and the horrific violence are numbed or forgotten in drunkenness. The fury of self-destruction sweeps across Pine Ridge like the Black Plague. Whiteclay is the modern-day version of the old Indian agencies. It is where Indians surrender. It is where they hand over their self-esteem and autonomy and wait passively in line for a bag of flour, a piece of lard, a few blankets, and the firewater that blunts the pain of what many have become.
Families, wracked by alcoholism, poverty, despair, and domestic violence, living lives in which tenderness and security are grabbed in desperate snatches, disintegrate swiftly under the onslaught on the reservation. The violence imposed on Indian culture has become internalized. Despair and pain of this magnitude lead to lives dedicated to self-immolation. The agony is expressed in self-defeating and self-destructive urges that shred what is left of dignity and hope.
Verlyn Long Wolf is sixty-two, with silver wire-frame glasses and salt-and-pepper hair pulled back into a ponytail. She works at a drop-in center for the homeless in Rapid City. Most of her life, including her childhood, has been colored by alcoholism, and the verbal, physical, and sexual abuse that drunkenness brings with it.
When she was a child, she and her brothers and sisters, terrified of the alcoholic rages of their parents, dug a small cave overlooking a creek near where they lived. The children would flee to the hiding spot when the parents, who were physically abusive to each other and the children, drank heavily. Her father’s alcoholism was exacerbated by the trauma of his time in World War II in Europe.
“He was in the Army five years, six months, twenty-nine days, ten hours,” Long Wolf says, laughing. “I could tell when he was getting high because he used to say that. ‘Been in the military, five years, six months, twenty-nine days, ten hours.’ He was in infantry.
“You couldn’t even, like, touch him, especially when he was sleeping,” she says. “If you touched his foot, boy, he’d be nipping you where’s you gonna end up . . . he’d jump up. He’d start swinging at you. There were times when he’d get up three or four in the morning. He’d wake us all up and have us march up the hill, come back down. If our beds, even in the tent, if we didn’t fold our quilts right, then he’d tear it apart and make us do it again.
“My brother and I, when we were ten and twelve years old, we picked fields of tomatoes and saved our monies,” Long Wolf says. “Forty-two dollars. That was what divorce costed back then on the reservation. So we save all that money and then we gave it to [our mom]. She went out and got drunk with my dad.”
The family, impoverished and in need of work, traveled to ranches and farms where her father could find seasonal employment. They camped out in tents or lived out of their car. Long Wolf did not have a permanent place to live until she was in eighth grade. As Indians in rural, white farm towns, the family endured racist taunts and abuse. When she was eight and her sister was four, they were each raped by a gas station owner in Hot Springs. Her father at the time was in prison for a forged check, although she says it was her mother who forged it and he
r father who claimed responsibility to serve the jail time. Her mother, destitute without her father’s meager income, moved to her brother’s house on the reservation. Here Long Wolf was repeatedly raped by four of her cousins. When she was eighteen an uncle raped her “down by the river.” Rape became a persistent problem, perpetrated by male relatives and casual acquaintances, many of whom were drunk.
“From that district where I grew up, I know that every family along that river, there was sexual abuse,” Long Wolf says.
“And most of these cases were among family members?” I ask.
“Yeah,” she says.
Long Wolf was sent away, like many of her generation, to an Indian boarding school. One of her classmates, when she was in fourth grade, was killed by four other students. The girl’s body was discovered in a nearby creek beneath a large tractor tire.
“They only stayed in prison until they were twenty-one and then they let ’em out,” Long Wolf says of the four girls. “They just beat her to death. When I was working at the treatment center . . . two of them walked in and I was like, ‘OK, God, help me!’ So, I asked them what they wanted. They were selling beadwork. I said, ‘No, I don’t have any money.’”
By the 1960s the boarding schools began to shut down, and she and several of her siblings returned home. Her parents abandoned them. It would be two and a half years before her parents were located by the Department of Social Services in Denver. During this time as a young teenager, she ran the house, cooking, cleaning, and getting her younger brothers and sisters to school. Once her parents returned she left home. She began to drink heavily and ended up on the street, drifting from one city to the next, with prolonged stays in Denver, Dallas, and Albuquerque.
She was married and divorced seven times, gravitating to Vietnam veterans who replicated her father’s rigidity, alcoholism, and struggles with trauma. One of her husbands was white, the others Indians.
“They’re all dead,” Long Wolf says, “except for the one who wasn’t in the military. The longest one I had was four years.”
She quietly lists the ways her ex-husbands died.
“Car wreck. Fight. Suicide.”
She stops, coughs, and adds softly: “Two of them to suicide.”
Long Wolf adds that the husband in the car crash “didn’t die from the car wreck itself. He got stuck underneath the truck, so then the coyotes went and killed him.”
“How many of these relationships were physically abusive?” I ask.
“All of them,” she says, “Except for the one that I had two sons with.”
She began to have prolonged blackouts, often not remembering where she had been for days and even weeks. She frequented the liquor stores in Whiteclay. She panhandled for money and burglarized houses, selling the stolen items to buy alcohol.
“There’s places you can hide,” she says of the tracts of land around Whiteclay. “If you’re with a group of people, you kinda claim a territory. You all stay there, drink until the money runs out.”
“In one period of my life, there was nothing but females,” she says:
There was eight, ten of us females. When I reflect back then, we all had a hatred for . . . just being born, or something . . . the thing we had in common was the rapes, the sexual abuse. It didn’t matter. It’s like nothing matters. I mean, here we are, already dead anyway. I used to think that. And then on top of that, growing up in a Catholic school, the Ten Commandments. It’s like, you look at that list and then by the time you’re eighteen, nineteen, twenty, it’s like, you’ve already committed most of them. It’s like, “I’m going to hell anyways, might as well live it up.”
Verlyn Long Wolf.
She got sober, she says, on August 3, 1981, when she started attending Alcoholics Anonymous. She had by then lost custody of all her children, most of them living with their grandmothers. She had given up her oldest for adoption to a white Christian minister. Her brothers, trying to pull their own lives together, had found solace and meaning in the old Lakota rituals, including sweat lodges, healing ceremonies, and the traditional four-day Sun Dances, in which participants fast, dance, chant, and make small offerings of flesh. She attended a Sun Dance after she got sober and watched her brothers circle the ceremonial cottonwood tree festooned with colored ribbons. She broke down. It brought back “all the pain we grew up with.” It reconnected her with her vanquished culture and religion, she says, and saved her. Those who come out the other end of the hell that can be Pine Ridge almost always endure by turning away from white culture and reviving the traditions and religion the white invaders attempted to destroy. She has listened to old recordings of her great-grandfather Lone Wolf, who toured with Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show in Europe and died of pneumonia in England, speaking about the life her ancestors led on the open plains before the Indian Wars. For the first time, she says, she feels rooted.
She and a friend recently visited the abandoned buildings of her old boarding school. She walked alone around the empty dormitory where she had lived as a small girl. She said she could hear the cries and screams of children. And then she stops speaking to us. She buries her face in her hands and begins to sob.
“If that building is there, my ghost is not gonna be there no more,” she says through her tears. It’s not gonna be stuck there no more.”
We wait as she struggles to speak again.
“I’ll say about three-quarters of the people I’ve grown up with are dead,” Long Wolf says, her voice wavering. “Very few still alive. Alcohol. Drugs. Violence.”
Rape and indiscriminate violence are the legacies of the white conquest. Soldiers on the western frontier, who passed captive squaws from tent to tent, joked that “Indian women rape easy.”5 Ben Clark, General George Armstrong Custer’s chief of scouts, told the historian Walter M. Camp when speaking about Custer’s 1868 Washita raid: “ . . . many of the squaws captured at Washita were used by the officers . . . Romero was put in charge of them and on the march Romero would send squaws around to the officers’ tents every night. [Clark] says Custer picked out a fine-looking one and had her in his tent every night.”6 Major Scott Anthony witnessed the murder in the Washita raid of a terrified three-year-old child: “I saw one man get off his horse at a distance of about seventy-five yards and draw up his rifle and fire. He missed the child. Another man came up and said, ‘Let me try the son of a bitch. I can hit him.’ He got down off his horse, kneeled down, and fired at the little child, but he missed him. A third man came up, and made a similar remark, and fired, and the little fellow dropped.”7
Joe, my son Thomas, and I stand on a bleak, rainy day on the small hilltop in Montana where Custer, his two hundred and sixty-three soldiers, and other army personnel from the Seventh United States Cavalry were wiped out by Lakota, Arapaho, and Northern Cheyenne warriors on the afternoon of June 25, 1876. The decimation of Custer’s unit was quick, by most estimates no more than twenty or thirty minutes once they were surrounded.8 White stone markers behind a low iron fence are clustered on the hillside where the doomed troopers desperately fought and died, including Custer, whose stone is marked in black. Most of the small rectangular stones around him are marked “unknown.”
Acquiring the Black Hills, although they had been promised in perpetuity to the Lakota under the Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1868, became a government priority when an expedition in 1874, led by Custer, discovered gold. Miners flooded the Black Hills.9 The 1868 treaty stated that “no white person or persons shall be permitted” to “enter” the Black Hills, but the lust for profit led the administration of Ulysses S. Grant to pressure the Lakota to sell the Black Hills—the equivalent in the Lakota religion of Jerusalem or Mecca.10 The Indians refused. Washington, determined to seize the land anyway, launched a prolonged military campaign on behalf of mining companies and land speculators to decimate Indian bands that resisted and refused to resettle on Indian agencies.11
Custer, and the commercial interests he sought to protect and advance, set out to obliterat
e the Indians who stood in the way of the acquisition of buffalo herds, timber, coal, gold, and later minerals such as uranium, commodities they saw as sources of power and enrichment. Land was increasingly sliced up into parcels—usually by the railroad companies—and sold. Sitting Bull acidly suggested they get out scales and sell dirt by the pound. The basic elements that sustain life were reduced to a vulgar cash product. Nothing in the eyes of the white settlers had an intrinsic value. This dichotomy of belief between white man and Native American was so vast that those who held on to animism and mysticism, to ambiguity and mystery, to the centrality of the human imagination, to communal living and a concept of the sacred, had to be extinguished. The belief system encountered on the plains, and in the earlier indigenous communities in New England destroyed by the Puritans, was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, as well as to the concepts of technological progress and empire, and to the ethos of the industrial society. The honoring of the mystery of life, the embrace within native cultures of something very close to the Socratic dictum to know thyself, was pitted against the blind lust for empire, wealth, and power. The allegorical was pitted against the prosaic. The pre-modern view of the world as a living and sacred entity was violently vanquished, to be replaced by a culture that knelt before the power of the machine and a wage economy. This idolatry of efficiency, rationalism, capitalist expansion, and empire was later summed up by the sociologist Max Weber as the “disenchantment of the world”—a disturbing characteristic, Weber argued, of Western culture.12
Custer, whose tireless self-promotion, outsized vanity, lust for fame and power, and incapacity for empathy—most of his soldiers detested him—presaged the sickness of the modern celebrity culture, embodied the cult of the self. He was the quintessential American hustler. Contracts that presented impediments to material and national advancement, defined as progress, were nullified or ignored. Force rather than trust determined relationships. Nature was a commodity to make human beings wealthy. And there was no limit to the amount of human suffering and death, environmental contamination, and extinction of species one could inflict on the road to glory, wealth, and power.
