* * *
To get to the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, I have to drive only a short distance past Billy Mills Hall, where funerals, powwows, and important community meetings are held. I once met Billy Mills, years ago when he came here for the dedication of this building. In 1964, when he pulled off one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history, I was a junior in high school, glued to my TV set. I already knew quite a bit about him because he twice led the Kansas University cross-country team to a national championship, and because he was from Pine Ridge. Mills was the Jim Thorpe of his day, but there was no way he was going to win the ten-thousand-meter run. World record holder Ron Clarke, who had the advantageous inside lane, was figured to win going away. Billy’s best time in the ten thousand was ten seconds slower than Clarke’s—if anyone was to give Clarke a race, it wouldn’t be Mills but Kōkichi Tsuburaya from Japan or Tunisia’s Mohammed Gammoudi.
Yet, in fourth place with three laps to go, Mills was within striking distance. Tsuburaya took the lead, and the home crowd went wild; Clarke was boxed in—Gammoudi in front, Mills to his right. When Clarke tried to elbow Billy out of the way, it looked for a moment like Billy would stumble, but just then Gammoudi charged between Clarke and Mills and into the lead. Tsuburaya began to fade. Clarke passed Gammoudi—things were just as they were supposed to be; Clarke would win for sure. But then came Mills. Swinging wide to the outside, he put on a burst of speed the likes of which had never been seen before in distance running. When he surged past Gammoudi and Clarke, I could not believe it, nor could the announcer, who famously yelled, “Look at Mills! Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” The whole country was transfixed, and at that moment, Mills became a genuine American hero.
When I heard Billy Mills speak, an inebriated heckler interrupted him, yelled out, “I’m going to burn this place down because it is named after you.”
“Please don’t burn it down,” Mills said. “Just change the name.”
* * *
A few feet past Billy Mills Hall, I pull into a parking lot in front of the biggest, ugliest building on the rez, a mass of cinder blocks painted vomit yellow. The sign
Sioux Nation
Shopping Center
Hardware Meat Produce
is matter-of-factly painted in garish fluorescent-orange letters on one end of the building next to an amateurish mural painting of an eagle, peace pipe in its claws, swooping down on a green valley where there are two or three tepees. Similar to many prisons, the Sioux Nation Shopping Center has no windows. You can’t see the entrance because it is around the corner of a false brick wall, making it awkward to get in and out of the place; a deterrent, I suppose, to shoplifting. I park on the far side of the lot, move my camera from the seat to the floor, get out, and saunter across the gravel surface. Several local people are around, but no one seems to take note of me, not even the stray dogs hoping for handouts.
Inside, the Sioux Nation Shopping Center looks like any urban grocery store: shopping carts, checkout stands, aisles of packaged food, and shoppers scurrying about. Everything is neat, tidy, clean, and well lighted, and I think, Why shouldn’t it be? Ahead is the drink aisle, more than half its length occupied by every brand of oversized soda you can imagine, but sadly no Perrier; they used to carry Perrier, and Vernell won’t settle for less. Perrier is sort of a running joke between us. At least they have Dinty Moore beef stew, so I stash a dozen cans in my cart and look for other things he might like. I’m so focused on reading labels, I nearly run my cart into an elderly Indian woman, a weathered grandmother, rock of the Lakota world, who has surely seen more than anyone’s share of hard times. Two small children, a boy and a girl, stand in her grocery cart eating Oreo cookies from a package. The children don’t object when she gently takes the package from the little girl’s hands and puts it back on the shelf—they’ve had their treat. No need for Grandmother to buy this, and I certainly don’t blame her; Lakota grandmothers are the primary caregivers of many children, a tradition in a culture where many teenage girls have babies, where many parents drink away their miseries and are too incapacitated to raise kids. They say over half the children on the rez live with their grandparents, and it is a good thing, or more would be snatched away to the do-gooder orphanages and foster care agencies, and in some cases adopted overseas.
Six aisles of canned food seems out of proportion to the tiny frozen food, produce, and fresh meat sections. You might get the impression that Indians just like eating stuff out of cans, but there is a more insidious reason; nearly a third of their homes don’t have electricity, and people have long forgotten the old ways of smoking meat, storing dairy food in cold streams, and burying root vegetables under the earth. Produce at Sioux Nation is limited—iceberg lettuce, a few wrinkled tomatoes, strawberries on the edge, moldy spinach, limp carrots, old corn—nearly all would have been tossed in the Dumpster where I shop back home, but here it stays on the shelf until it is so green no one even looks at it. I spot a FRESH MEAT sign above a refrigerated display case stocked with packaged steaks and hamburger in front of the in-store butcher shop. The meat seems fresh enough, but there is a disturbing bulletin posted nearby, alerting customers to something I didn’t know about; it explains why hamburger is sometimes grayish brown on the inside even if it is red on the outside. “Oxygen from the air,” it reads, “triggers a pigment in hamburger called ‘oxymyoglobin,’ which gives it its red color. Because the meat beneath the surface is not being exposed to oxygen, it is sometimes grayish brown. Only when ‘all the meat’ in a package is grayish brown do you have to worry that it ‘may be beginning to spoil.’”
I catch the attention of the presumed butcher, a young, approachable Indian man with happy eyes, a plump face, and a ponytail hanging to the middle of his back. I ask him about the sign. He smiles, says, “People around here really like their hamburger, but they don’t understand why the meat isn’t red all the way through. They try to bring it back, or worse, they complain to the tribal council. We only want to educate them.”
I can’t help but remark, “I don’t like it when my hamburger is brown.”
“We sell a lot of hamburger here; it is really, really fresh.”
“Where do you get your hamburger?”
A little less friendly now, Butcherman moves closer, puts his hands on top of the counter, stares at me. “It comes frozen from the meat-packer in Omaha. We thaw it out.”
I can’t help but press on. “Why don’t you buy it from local ranchers?”
“Too expensive. Where you from, anyway?”
I tell him I once taught school in Kyle, shopped here many times, but I don’t remember any problems about the hamburger.
“Well,” he adamantly replies, “you should know that this store is important to the people. So what if some of our hamburger isn’t as red as the hamburger you can get wherever the hell you live these days.”
“OK, sorry to bother you.”
“No hard feelings,” he calls after me as I walk away.
Butcherman is right, of course. Without the Sioux Nation Shopping Center, people would have to drive a hundred miles to Rapid City or Chadron to get their groceries—other than Big Bat’s and the junk food you can buy with your beer in Whiteclay, there aren’t many choices on the rez; no corner produce market run by a nice Korean family, no stand-alone butcher shops, no weekend farmers’ market; no Safeway or Dean & Deluca. A couple of years back, the tribe tried to shut down the Sioux Nation Shopping Center after it was cited for food safety violations. There was a virtual uprising. People signed petitions, phoned in to complain on KILI Radio, organized a protest horse ride, put on their war paint. They seemed to be saying, “It’s not a great shopping center, but this is our shopping center—it is here, it is convenient. Many don’t have cars and those who do can’t afford the gas.”
There’s just one little problem: it isn’t their shopping center. While the name “Sioux Nation” might indicate that the tribe owns the place, in actuality, it merely licenses the
rights to an outside group, collecting a fee roughly equivalent to rent. When the store opened in 1968, it was inconceivable that someone from the tribe would be competent enough to run a grocery store! To avoid mismanagement, malfeasance, embezzlement, you needed to find an outside professional grocery store management company. But today things are different, and some tribal members have suggested that the tribe should take back the license and open a new grocery store, rename it Oglala Nation Shopping Center. Hopefully, this will happen.
I stash my groceries in Villa VW’s trunk, grab my camera, and go for a stroll around the building, not caring if I might be mistaken for a nosy tourist. A large black shipping container sits behind the store on a patch of barren space, a dirt surface. In front of the container is a long table with a standing display rack of rugs and blankets, clearly not Indian made, cheap, the kind you might buy at the Oakland Coliseum flea market. I see no one nearby; it appears abandoned.
* * *
About fifty feet beyond the rug display, a young boy stands next to the open door of an old white Mitsubishi Lancer wearing a Jalen Rose Chicago Bulls shirt. I notice a hand-lettered sign on his dashboard, which reads BURRITOS & POP, $5, and I wonder, is this the Lakota equivalent of a taco truck?
I shout out, “Hi, there. What kind of burritos do you have?”
He looks up at me and says, “We got both kinds. Beans, and beans with buffalo. Two kinds of pop too, orange and grape.”
Healthy looking, at that age when baby fat is just beginning to turn into muscle, the kid is urban in his appearance: in addition to the Jalen Rose jersey, he sports jet-black spiked hair, a stud earring, sagging pants, Air Jordans. Recalling my conversation with Butcherman, I ask him, “Where do you get your meat?”
The boy shrugs, turns to ask someone sitting in the car whom I hadn’t noticed before. Must be his mom; she’s a pretty young woman, no makeup, black hair, not-quite-perfect teeth. Her skeptical dark eyes give me the once-over, lock on mine.
“Why do you want to know?”
“Just curious.”
“My husband,” she continues with decided emphasis, “buys surplus buffalos from Custer State Park. We butcher them ourselves, usually in the winter when the coat is full because my cousin is a buffalo hide painter. We boil the meat for burritos, donate leftovers to the elders or for ceremonies and powwows.”
Surprised at the preciseness of her answer, I can only say, “That’s amazing.”
“Don’t you think us Indians can be entrepreneurs?” she asks. “You surprised I know that word?”
“No, I think that’s great.”
“I went to college,” she adds.
I hand the boy five bucks, ask for a burrito with buffalo meat and beans, tell him to keep the orange soda for himself, and wander back to the front of the shopping center thinking, Here’s one boy who doesn’t have to live with his grandmother. Delicious beans obviously made from scratch, juicy meat, salsa with a kick—this burrito rocks.
Damn, who would have thought you could buy something so grubbin’ on the rez?
* * *
Away from the main drag, Pine Ridge neighbors fill their yards with the flotsam of American advertising—used Pampers, dead cars, punctured tires, and empty beer cans—until buzzards swarm like flies and carry away their unwatched children, young boys riding banana bikes through mud puddles. Bored teenagers hang about—at least they have each other—along with elders holding hands. And then there’s a busy Taco John’s, a thriving Subway sandwich shop, and churches: lovely white Sacred Heart Catholic, sturdy log-building Lakota Baptist, corrugated-metal Episcopal Mission, modern pointy-roofed Presbyterian. All reservation churches that collect substantial donations from well-meaning people all over the world who have no idea that native people have their own spiritual beliefs, “don’t need no white-man Jesus.” The priests and pastors live in tidy houses with neatly kept lawns, hedges, and thriving gardens; why should they suffer?
Regardless of who you are, however, the pace in Pine Ridge is infectiously slooooow, cars and trucks crawl along, no hurry … there is no place to go. But I can’t let myself fall into this rhythm; it is already past ten a.m., there are fifty more miles to Kyle, and I simply must stop at Wounded Knee.
ACT TWO
All Indians must dance, everywhere, keep on dancing. Pretty soon in next spring Great Spirit come. He bring back game of every kind. The game be thick everywhere. All dead Indians come back and live again. They all be strong like young men, be young again. Old blind Indians see again and get young and have fine time. When Great Spirit comes this way, then all Indians go to mountains, high up away from whites. Whites can’t hurt Indians then. Then while Indians way up high, big flood comes like water and all white people die, get drowned. After that, water go way and then nobody but Indians everywhere and game all kinds thick. Then medicine man tell Indians to send word to all Indians to keep up dancing and the good time will come. Indians who don’t dance, who don’t believe in this word, will grow little. Just about a foot high, and stay that way. Some of them will be turned into wood and be burned in fire.
—WOVOKA, PAIUTE MESSIAH, TEACHER OF THE GHOST DANCE
CRAZY HORSE SIGN
NO POETRY FOR TASUNKA WITKO
Once Villa VW chugs across the Pine Ridge “city limits,” I can drive faster, but not too fast; reservation roads are notoriously treacherous: slick when it rains, icy during winter, clogged with foot traffic, stray dogs and horses, inebriated drivers, blown tires, and potholes to China. In 1973, on my way to Rapid City, I nearly ran over two drunk men who lay passed out on the road near Scenic, South Dakota, then a liquor-soaked border town like Whiteclay.
It was mid-morning; the men lay perpendicular to the road, three-quarters of their bodies on the blacktop. I would have killed both if one hadn’t been wearing a bright red shirt, which from a distance I saw as a pool of blood. Fearing they were dead, I screeched to a stop … perhaps they had fallen or been thrown out the back of a truck. But the moment I got out of the car, it was apparent they were alive. There was an overwhelming stench of beer, cigarette smoke, urine; and then came the snoring, loud and sustained like the rumblings of a passing Chicago elevated train. Waking them was a lost cause. Neither stirred when I grabbed their ankles, pulled one and then the other off the road. It was nasty work. There was no way I could have gotten them into the backseat of my car, nor did I want to. This was before cell phones, so I couldn’t call the tribal cops, not that they would have given a damn. Shit happens—drunks stumbling down the dark highways, drunks driving blind without headlights, drunks falling asleep at the wheel, whole carloads of the oblivious rolling down embankments. Heads spinning in the starry night.
The land east of Pine Ridge is flat again—once lush buffalo grass as far as the eye can see now plowed under, pulverized, replanted, turned into dull-brown yellow wheat fields, dusty pastures, fallow land, a few farmhouses, fences, barns, domesticated animals, and domesticated people. I am still on the reservation, but most of what I see belongs to white farmers and ranchers, a consequence of the notorious 1887 Dawes Act, which divided tribal lands into individual parcels, 160 acres to each head of a family as long as they were registered members of the tribe, 80 acres to unmarried adults. Well-intentioned, the act’s stated goal was to encourage native people to adopt the ways of whites by giving them their very own farms. A transformative experience—Indians would learn the pride of ownership, the value of hard work; they would see the shortcomings of their primitive ways. Soon they would talk like, dress like, and act like proper white people. Indian men with short haircuts, Indians baking cherry pies, and parents happily packing their little ones off to boarding school. Everyone, of course, free to join the Christian church of his or her choice. But the reformers forgot one thing: in America, if you own a little piece of land, you have the right to sell it … right? And thus the Dawes Act became a cruel joke. White speculators moved in to buy up the best reservation land. When I taught at Little Wound School, one
of my first surprises was how many of my students were the privileged white children of parents who owned sizeable farms and ranches on the reservation.
The intersection to Wounded Knee and ultimately Kyle is straight ahead. As I slow down and turn left, I remember the makeshift memorial sign on this spot that honors the great warrior Crazy Horse. Just words, lots of words on a large metal plate suspended between two metal poles implanted into a cement base. Ah, the poetry on this sign, powerfully stated; the words written and the letters hand painted by Vernell’s revered father, Chief Guy White Thunder, now eighty-nine, one of the oldest living Lakota. I am excited to read it again, and to take photos, something I failed to do all the times I’ve been here before.
What the holy crap!
The sign is no more—I can see only the base, the metal poles pointing skyward like solitary sentinels with blank space between them. There is nothing to hold up or defend, no tribute, no poetry for Tasunka Witko, the Spartacus, Miyamoto Musashi, Hannibal Barca of the Lakota Oglala, great war chief who humiliated, then defeated, the U.S. Army. Who took down this sign, and why? Tribal dispute? Rowdy teenage boys just being teenage boys? Seething, I get out of the car to take photos anyway. The concrete base is defaced with graffiti; there are beer cans, bottles, and wrappers strewn about. I stopped here so many times in the past, never got tired of reading the sign, dedicated in 1964. Across the top in large letters was the heading, which I still remember:
Good Friday on the Rez Page 6
