Unfettered and Alive

by Anne Summers

  I presented myself at the South Dakota State Penitentiary on a Saturday morning and was admitted, along with another WPI colleague who was going to photograph the event, with tape-recorders and cameras. Unlike when I had visited NSW prisons, we were not searched and we were taken to a private room where we enjoyed a three-hour face-to-face encounter with Means. He was a tall, good-looking man who wore his black hair in long braids; he told us his life story and gave us his political analysis of where AIM was heading. Means had been born on Pine Ridge but had been ‘relocated’ to Cleveland under President Eisenhower’s Indian Relocation Act of 1956, a law that ostensibly directed people to move to cities where employment opportunities would be greater. However, when seen in conjunction with the large number of ‘termination laws’ that were passed during the period from 1940 to the 1960s—which removed Indian sovereignty from lands that previously had been ceded to them—it removed federal government responsibility for American Indians, including health, welfare and education funding, and gave criminal jurisdiction over American Indians lands to the states. It was obvious what was happening. American Indians were to be ‘assimilated’, according to the official language of the day, but the word ‘termination’ that was used in many laws told the true story. This was nothing short of attempted genocide.

  Means told us that less than 10 per cent of land originally granted to Native Americans by the US government via treaties now remained in American Indian hands. These lands had been discovered to contain oil, uranium and other valuable resources and so a whole industry was now devoted to trying to undo these treaties. People like Means were getting in the way. I wondered how much longer he would survive, especially as he was due to be granted a special work release whereby he would work at Pine Ridge during the day and be held at the local jail each night. I saw it is as a device for the federal government to be able to wash its hands of responsibility for whatever happened to him. (As it turns out, Means lived until 2012, remaining a political activist until at least the late 1980s, and later becoming a screen actor; in 1992, he starred as Chief Chingachgook in The Last of the Mohicans with Daniel Day-Lewis.)

  Our amazing day was not yet over; after we had finished our visit with Means, Warden Solem asked if we’d like to talk to William Schilling, the man who had stabbed Means and who was now languishing in The Hole. Never in all my investigating of prisons in NSW for the National Times had I ever had access even to prisoner cells, let alone to punishment areas. We were escorted deep into the entrails of the penitentiary, through countless locked and electronic doors, until we reached an area that was remote from all human contact—a large concrete area which had ten ‘cages’ along one wall. Anyone who had seen how Hannibal Lecter was incarcerated in the film Silence of the Lambs will be familiar with the setup: the cells are each 12 × 6 feet (3.4 × 1.8 metres), with three concrete walls and bars on the front. There was just a bed and a toilet. The prisoners were allowed out once a week for a shower; they could have books but no newspapers or tobacco. I taped my hour-long conversation with Schilling, who was no doubt pleased to have a distraction from his solitary confinement. He was serving 90 days in The Hole for possession of an illegal weapon; a federal grand jury had dismissed the charge of stabbing Means—on the grounds of self-defence. Schilling told us that he had previously stabbed another Indian a few months earlier, and a black man in another prison. At no time did the guards intervene to stop him. In fact, one might see it all as a bit of a setup. Schilling was also notorious for having pulled off the biggest bank robbery in US history, more than $1 million from a bank in Reno, Nevada. He explained to us in great detail how he had done it. He was an escapee at the time but had managed to do a special locksmithing course, had located and analysed each of the 21 alarm systems for the bank and made keys for each of the doors. Although he got 25 years for this crime, his sentence was being served concurrently with his previous one so that only seven extra months was added to his sixteen years total sentence. He had four years left to serve, and as more than half the money had not been recovered, he was a pretty happy man. I asked him how much he was paid to stab Indians, but he refused to say.

  The next Sunday I was at the Edina Country Club in Minneapolis for brunch and feeling as if I had just walked into a John Updike novel. The cloakroom was wall-to-wall mink. Embarrassed, I tried to hide my unsightly puffer jacket behind a door before walking out into the bloody mary-wielding crowd of upscale Minnesotans. I was there as a guest of one of my three host families, this one my community host (as distinct from the academic and the farm families), a lawyer and his wife.

  Soon I was chatting with some fascinating members of the city’s elite. One of these was Otto Silha, the president and publisher of the Minneapolis Star and Tribune and I was eager to talk to him about where, in his view, journalism was heading. I remember him still, not so much for his ideas on newspapers, which, frankly, I do not recall, but for what I thought at the time were his wacky views on how to deal with climate. Silha was a self-styled visionary, a man who believed that nature was there to be tamed and that no force was immune from human intervention and control. The Midwest’s brutal winters could be dealt with, he told me, by erecting a huge dome over the entire area, creating a warm, even tropical, climate within.

  ‘No need for snow-birding then,’ he told me, referring to the practice of people moving to warmer states such as Arizona, New Mexico or Florida during the vicious winter months.

  I was both repelled and fascinated at this idea of circumventing nature. I was inclined to judge it as intrinsically evil, another example of capitalism gone mad, but a small part of me was in awe at the audacity of the idea. I was already prepped for it in a way by our visit a few weeks earlier to the headquarters of Deere and Company, the huge agricultural and other machine equipment manufacturing company, located in Moline, Illinois. We had flown there on a private jet that, we were told, was until recently owned by the Shah of Iran, and that was just the start of what was to be one of the most surreal days of my visit to the United States.

  Deere’s three administrative buildings were set in several hundred acres of picture postcard scenery. At the main entrance was ‘Hill Arches’, a massive Henry Moore sculpture, around which wound a large lake with white swans, ducks, geese and huge Japanese carp. The lake was kept heated throughout the winter, we were told, so that the swans would survive. The water from the lake was then circulated through the three buildings, which exemplified corporate largesse. There was a 400-seat concert auditorium in the atrium and luxurious open plan offices opened straight off a tropical garden. Deere boasted a huge art collection and an artist-in-residence: a concert pianist, Barbara Nissman, who was kept on retainer to play for the workers. We sat in the boardroom, hosted by a dozen top executives including William Hewitt, the chairman of the company, whose vision it had been to create these headquarters, commission the Finnish-American architect Eero Saarinen to design them and to fill them with art. We repaired to the corporate dining room, where an entire wall was covered with a specially-commissioned Aubusson tapestry and given a sumptuous lunch, including French wines. This was unusual since most WPI lunches were strictly coffee events. Later, when we were shown around the building, I found it chilling to walk through these corridors of corporate power. It wasn’t that they weren’t beautiful, but I baulked at the artifice. It was like walking through a museum, with paintings on every wall and glass cases displaying Roman and Mexican antiquities. The beautiful young girls seated every few hundred metres were like museum attendants, guarding the precious collection. Hewitt prided himself on his collection of primitive art. He made sure to collect something from every country he visited, he told us. I was especially offended to see two very large bark paintings from Arnhem Land. The beige carpets, beige desk dividers and white noise created what I considered to be a monochromatic prison. People strolled through the corridors in twos and threes, promenading, rather than rushing to meetings. There was no external view. No city skyline, no car pa
rk, nothing at all urban to intrude on the perfect tranquillity of the place. This was another instance of the kind of control that Otto Silha advocated, but this went even further in some ways because it was an attempt to control people’s entire lives. This was a company town, of course, with Deere providing almost all the employment. There were traffic jams of people wanting to apply whenever there were vacancies in their plants, Hewitt had boasted. The company provided health insurance, credit and any other welfare services needed by their staff. And, it turned out, they were needed.

  After the formal visit to the plant, there was the cruise on the Mississippi, followed by a fine dinner in a converted mansion where the wines flowed and lips were loosened. I sat next to a woman whose husband was in public relations for the company and who was trying to start a women’s refuge. The perfection we had been shown, she told me, in reality masked a community that was rife with alcohol and drug addiction and domestic violence. Another of our group discovered that one-third of those working at the foundry were drug-addicted. We visited other corporate headquarters that were almost as lavish and where the company philosophy of taking total control of employees’ lives was similar. These companies were more important than government, I realised, in the impact they had on the lives of the people who worked for them. And in the influence they had around the world. We had asked Hewitt whether he would follow the example of other companies and pull out of South Africa. He took the question seriously. Last time he’d been there, he told us, he had asked the opinion of every black person he’d met and the unanimous view was that Deere should stay in South Africa and provide jobs. It was pointless to ask if he had ventured outside the Deere plant to secure these responses.

  I had initially wondered why this company was spending so much time and such an extraordinary amount of money on our group. We had each been given expensive gifts including Parker Pens (a lot more special then than they are today) yet we were, let’s face it, hardly the world’s top-drawer journalists. What could they possibly hope to get out of it? Then I realised: we were mostly from countries where Deere did some but seemingly not enough business. We would be useful contacts once we returned home and were reminded of the largesse we had enjoyed at Deere’s headquarters. Once, I thought grimly to myself, American companies like United Fruit needed the US Marines to help them open up new markets. Now it was all smooth talking, greased palms and public relations. And that was where the media came in.

  I attended a Macalester Women’s Club lunch as a guest of the wife in my academic host family. It was like time-travelling back to the 1950s. The women looked as if they had walked out of the pages of an old copy of Good Housekeeping: fringed pageboy haircuts, dresses with pinched-in waists and full skirts, and everyone was introduced by the jobs their husbands did. And these were the wives of academics! It was fifteen years since the publication of The Feminine Mystique, yet these women seemed to still live in a world that I assumed had been shaken up if not totally subverted by that book and the women’s movement it helped spawn. The young students weren’t much better. I chatted with a couple of the Resident Assistants, whose job it was to enforce the rules in the dormitory, and they told me that the students were more conservative than ten years ago: ‘Most of the women wouldn’t call themselves feminists,’ one of the young women told me. ‘They are more assertive, they know what they want. They intend to have careers, and they don’t let men push them around.’ I wondered if any of these young students had encountered the Macalester Women’s Club. On the other hand, my host had told me that she had changed her mind about voting Republican in the forthcoming mid-term congressional elections because the candidate had said he was opposed to an extension of time for ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment. The ERA was the proposed constitutional amendment that would guarantee equality of the sexes, which Congress had passed in 1972 and which needed to be ratified by 38 states within seven years in order to come into effect. That deadline was almost up, and because they were still three states short of the number needed for ratification, its supporters were seeking more time to get this crucial amendment passed. (Although they ultimately won a three-year extension, to 1982, the measure failed to secure the necessary 38 states’ ratification.)

  ‘I’m not usually a single-issue voter,’ she told me, ‘but there are times when you have to lay everything else aside, when there is something that important.’

  She voted Democrat.

  The students at Macalester were for the most part not interested in politics. One of the teachers had surveyed the class of 1982 and found that students were, in his view, over-influenced by the ‘anti-American neo-modernism of the 1960s’. They read Rolling Stone and watched Animal House. They were more attracted to political satire than actual politics. Most of the students left blank the answer to ‘the man or woman you most admire’. The only students who answered that question were what were then called minority students, who put down Muhammad Ali, Barbara Jordan or Anwar Sadat.

  The idea of the host families was so we foreigners could be exposed to typical American family life and awkward as it was at the time, it certainly did that—although perhaps not always in the way the WPI intended. My St Paul host family lived in a gated community. It was not exclusionary, they explained to me, it was more a security thing—although I noted that the gate was broken when we drove in the first time. They did not mind Jews, my host ‘mother’ explained, and they were not against blacks, but none would be able to afford to live in such an expensive area. My first Thanksgiving in America was with them. It was a subdued and painful meal; we were so excessively polite it created a lot of tension. I was very conscious that my newly acquired Native American friends were marking Thanksgiving with a hunger fast, so I could only pick at the vast quantities of turkey and other foods that are the hallmark of this American feast. There were other tensions, too. The wife seemed suspicious that I was flirting with her husband; in fact, I was just trying to make conversation to make the evening more relaxing. She yelled at me not to put tampons or pads down the toilet.

  ‘Use newspaper,’ she said, but she did not tell me where I could find it.

  I assured her that I did not have my period so there was no need to worry. I knew I needed to be friends with her or this relationship was going to be disastrous so I asked her about the volunteer job I knew she had at the Science Museum. It was as if a light had been switched on; she was transformed. She brought out books and maps and explained to me all about Mayan culture. The ice broken, she then told me a lot more. That she had cancer; that her husband who ran six miles every day was a recovering alcoholic, who although he was a high-powered lawyer, did pottery in his spare time. I wondered whether to tell her about Jamie. In the end I did, and I was glad because it meant we were able to have an adult conversation about cancer. She and I became friends for the rest of my time in St Paul.

  I could not say quite the same of my farm host family, for whom I might as well have been from Mars. The wife had been a Minnesota Housewife of the Year and she turned out a second Thanksgiving meal for me, which was a splendid demonstration of her culinary expertise. We had every possible kind of American delicacy in enormous quantities that, my guilt about the American Indians set aside for now, I had no trouble scoffing down. The trouble came when I declined their invitation to accompany them to church the next morning. When I awoke, the house was empty but a radio had been left just outside my door; it was playing religious music. An open Bible lay beside my place-setting for breakfast. Later, while the erstwhile Housewife of the Year prepared lunch, her laconic husband attempted conversation with me:

  ‘Is Australia wet or dry?’ he asked.

  I started to explain to him about the various regions of the country, our deserts and our tropics and everything in-between, when he interrupted me:

  ‘Is it whiskey or is it beer you drink down there?’

  ‘Everything,’ I assured him.

  I’d noted sourly that the wine glasses on the dinner tabl
e the night before had been filled with apple juice. So that was why he had kept making frequent trips to the garage!

  Nor had I enjoyed the hayride, the entertainment organised for ‘the young people’ the night I’d arrived. We had had to protect ourselves against the freezing weather with snowmobile suits, ski jackets, hats, gloves and lots of beer with Schnapps chasers. This meant we needed frequent pit stops, boys to one side, girls to the other, while we struggled out of cumbersome clothing so we could pee in the cornfields. And that, of course, was the moment the wag left behind on the hay cart turned the spotlight on the girls, exposing their naked bottoms. Hilarious. I could not get back to the city fast enough.

  In addition to whatever entertainment our host families provided, the WPI arranged a busy program of group social outings. We went to a baseball game, an art show opening and countless parties. We met nothing but friendliness and warmth, although often the hospitality was strained and most of the time I felt patronised. One of our group, Sophia, was from Poland and she was the centre of attention, and not only because, for the first time, a Pole had just been elected Pope. Sophia was a very good-looking woman who attracted second looks wherever she went, but there were also a lot of Poles in Minnesota and so many people felt a strong connection with her. It was more difficult for those of the group who were from countries that Americans considered uninteresting. Manjula from Nepal, Carlos from Uruguay, Kyi from Burma and Fred from Zambia had the hardest time, being from places that our hosts had either never heard of or could find nothing they wanted to ask about them. Carlos from Portugal, David from Argentina, Elaine from South Africa, Patrick from Jamaica, and Roberto from Italy at least were from countries people knew about. But everyone had heard of Australia. Almost every single person I met while I was in the Midwest had just read The Thornbirds by Colleen McCullough which had been published the previous year (and, when it was made into a TV miniseries in 1983, would become the second most-watched show ever—after Roots) and it had instilled in them a desire to go to Australia, they enthusiastically told me. Or, and this from some of the older men I encountered, they’d been in Sydney in ’44 and asked if I knew some codger they’d met in a bar back then. A few people asked me where they could buy a cheap opal.