OGLALA SIOUX
1840—WAR CHIEF CRAZY HORSE—1877
TASUNKA WITKO
Underneath was a lyrical summation of Crazy Horse’s remarkable life, how his mother delivered him by a stream near the holy mountain Mato Paha (Bear Butte) and wrapped him in a piece of soft deerskin; how he was different, with light skin and sandy-brown curly hair; how they called him Curly. When they were only eleven, Curly and his best friend, Hump, emulated the warriors of the village—went on horse-catching expeditions, snuck away to join war parties and buffalo hunts. Still in his teens, Curly famously took part in a battle with the Arapahos; he bravely charged straight into them, counted coup three times, and came back with a painful but not debilitating shoulder wound. Impressed by his son’s brave deed, his father gave him his own name, Tasunka Witko; took up the new name Waglula (Worm); and told his son to go on a vision quest. On this quest, Crazy Horse saw a magnificent war pony floating above the ground, mounted by an unpainted warrior who had a single feather in his long brown hair, a small brown stone tied behind his ear. This unpainted warrior spoke to Crazy Horse, instructed him before battle to streak his pony with dirt thrown up by a burrowing mole, and to touch the dirt to his hair, so that the mole’s blindness would make him and his horse harder to see. “Live for the people and never take anything for yourself,” the warrior said, “and you will have the power to ride straight through your enemies. You won’t be killed or wounded by their lead balls, flying arrows. You can only be hurt by your own people, who will someday betray you.”
Crazy Horse lived by these rules. He never bragged about his exploits. He gave his captured ponies to the needy boys of the camp, and he always honored the old ways, refused to live the life of an agency Indian, never touched the pen to a treaty. As foreseen in his vision, his own people spread rumors about him, said he was planning an uprising at Fort Robinson, when he only wanted to live in peace. They conspired with the soldiers to put Crazy Horse in jail, but their plans went horribly wrong. Crazy Horse struggled to get free, but one of his old warrior friends held him tightly. Just as Longinus killed Jesus at Golgotha, a soldier thrust his bayonet into Crazy Horse’s backside. Refusing a bed at the agency clinic, Crazy Horse lay bleeding on the floor throughout the night, and as the sun came up, he died. His parents took his body on a travois to be buried in a secret place some twenty miles southeast of here. Crazy Horse was never photographed. No one knows exactly what he looked like.
All these things were beautifully written by Vernell’s father, and beautifully inscribed on this remarkable sign. Poetry more powerful than any gigantic mountainside carving.
The Crazy Horse figure carved into Thunder Mountain near Custer Park in the Black Hills, when finished, will be by far the world’s largest sculpture, dwarfing the Mount Rushmore presidents. Already visited by millions every year, it makes a statement: Indians too had great leaders! (And they merit big monuments.)
Shortly after moving to the rez from Chicago in 1971, I made a trip to the Black Hills, and was fortunate to meet Korczak Ziolkowski, the Polish-American sculptor responsible for this great work. It is impossible for me to forget his carefully cultivated French fork beard and mustache, his battered cowboy hat, his eyes squinting as if he were facing the sun even when he wasn’t, and of course the Polish accent. Considering that Ziolkowski had a lot of work to do and I was just an idealistic young teacher from Chicago, he was extraordinarily generous with his time. What a thrill it was when he handed me the letter sent to him on November 9, 1939, by Henry Standing Bear, an Oglala chief, Crazy Horse’s maternal cousin. “This letter is what got me started,” Ziolkowski said.
The letter must have been written with black ink using a fountain pen as it was smudged in several places, but I could clearly read it, and I was struck by the directness and casualness of Standing Bear’s prose—and its correctness. “My fellow chiefs and I,” he wrote, “are interested in finding some sculptor who can carve a head of an Indian Chief who was killed many years ago.”
Standing Bear was one of the first Indian children educated at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Pennsylvania, a notoriously racist boarding school set up to transform Indian children into little white Christians. (The motto of its founder, Captain Richard Henry Pratt, was “kill the child to save the man.”) Standing Bear learned to speak and write English at Carlisle and used his skills to advocate for his people … his Indian culture apparently intact. He and Ziolkowski became great friends. Together they made the plans for the Crazy Horse Monument, selected the site, and got the project off the ground.
As the former assistant to the sculptor who created Mount Rushmore, Ziolkowski was eminently qualified to handle such a huge task. He obsessively worked on his Crazy Horse stone sculpture for thirty-four years, honoring Standing Bear’s request not to accept any government monies, to rely totally on donations. When he died from pancreatitis in 1982 at the age of seventy-four, his wife, children, and grandchildren continued the project.
It has been nearly seventy years since the first of thousands of dynamite blasts made a small dent in the side of the iron-ore-rich mountain. When I visited Ziolkowski, you could see that someone had blown the crap out of some rocks, the beginning of what could conceivably be a face. Today you can clearly see what is supposed to be Crazy Horse’s head, even though no one knows what Crazy Horse looked like. Though there is no target date for completion, millions of tourists visit the site every year, which includes a museum with one of the world’s largest collections of indigenous artifacts. The tourists buy admission tickets and souvenirs, eat in the cafeteria and help fund the project for the Ziolkowskis, who live on the site. There doesn’t seem to be any sense of urgency to finish the carving; blasting is frequently halted to focus on fund-raising.
Is this something Crazy Horse would have wanted? I must ask Vernell what he thinks; but more important, does he know who stole his father’s sign?
WOUNDED KNEE
THE BABY WAS STILL ALIVE
I send Vernell a text to let him know I’m traveling his direction: Headed your way!
He replies: I’ll put on the beans.
* * *
Only two or three more miles of rolling flatness beyond the virtual Crazy Horse sign, I am again metamorphosed by the rugged beauty of the Pine Ridge I love: the Jurassic formations, waves of evergreen, golden-brown underbrush, chalky cliffs, and, popping up to my right, a village I’ve never seen before; I have to pull over, investigate, take a few photos. A quiet little cluster of BIA houses nestled at the base of a forbidding pine-coated hill, no road sign to indicate the name of this place, no water tower, no gas stations, post office, or churches. The people living here must have recently moved in from the remote areas where they lived in one-room log houses or battered trailers, kept a horse and a few chickens outside, maybe a garden; it’s doubtful they had plumbing or electricity. If my mother were alive, she would say, “How can they live like this?” as if there were a choice. But I see no evidence of life. No kids playing outside, no barking dogs, no horses, no one walking on the roads—yet there are a few cars and pickup trucks parked about … and the air is deadly still. Is this village with no name a ghost village, a mirage, a hunting ground for hapless lost souls? It scares me; I drive on.
Around the next curve and up a steep incline, I’m suddenly looking down at Wounded Knee, so barren you could easily miss it; the saddest little hill in America positioned near the middle of an unremarkable valley carved out of the plains by “the creek of a wounded knee” (chankpe opi wakpala). You have to squint your eyes from here to see fencing on top of Wounded Knee, the odd-looking portal—two white, maroon-checkered columns made from cinder blocks and bricks, joined together by an iron lattice archway, topped off with a small cross; the entrance to a cemetery. The cemetery where they unceremoniously dumped the grotesquely deformed, frozen corpses of Chief Big Foot and his scraggly band of warriors, old men, women, children, some shredded beyond recognition by .45-70 cartridges fr
om the 9th Calvary’s Hotchkiss Gatling guns. Dumped in a long narrow trench on a blustery cold New Year’s Day, 1891. According to the army burial-brigade count, there are 146 souls here, yet only forty-three names are chiseled into the obelisk stone marker at the foot of the mass grave. Some say there are many more buried here, up to 300.
As I drive into the valley, I think about the pretty Sacred Heart Catholic church that once stood by the side of this cemetery, the crown of its stately bell-tower steeple pointing high into the prairie sky. Except for the bright red door, the whole church, even the roof, was painted white—such an idyllic sight, you would never know by looking at it that the Catholic missionaries were determined to destroy native culture, that they built a system of oppressive boarding schools on reservations across America where Indian children were denied the right to speak their native tongue, not allowed to go home, often beaten and sexually abused. Looking at it, you would think these missionaries really cared about their native flock, protecting people, providing love and sustenance.
Across the road from the little hill was a trading post that also served as the post office, and a large log building, the Wounded Knee Museum, curated by a gregarious, wheelchair-bound old man, Wilbur Riegert, who could have easily been mistaken for a South Dakota farmer of Belgian origin, though he claimed to be part Chippewa. I liked him very much. Obviously intelligent and dedicated, he had been collecting Lakota artifacts for many years. In addition to the usual quillwork, moccasins, breastplates, flint scrapers—both flint and steel arrowheads—and other relics you might find at the Crazy Horse Memorial Museum or in Rushville’s Pfister Hotel, Riegert had a magnificent, priceless painting of the last known keeper of the Sacred Pipe, Martha Bad Warrior, and two rare buffalo hide paintings depicting the Lakota’s complete knowledge of the stars. There was also a haunting display of black-and-white photographs taken in the aftermath of the 1890 massacre: Chief Big Foot lying on the frozen ground, his fingers and legs twisted like pretzels; soldiers standing by their horses, smoking and looking around at the charred piles of blankets and buffalo robes; soldiers dutifully piling corpses in a trench; more frozen corpses; the remains of the burned-out wagon that carried Chief Big Foot on his final earthly journey.
Stooped over in his wheelchair, Riegert was clearly in decline, but his neck snapped to attention and he smiled warmly whenever someone came through the museum door. He loved to share his encyclopedic knowledge of Indian culture and history, would talk for hours and hours if you let him, had a story to tell about each object in his collection. Sadly, when radical Indians occupied Wounded Knee in 1973, they couldn’t see much value in maintaining Riegert’s lifework. Their view was that all these things were stolen property and since there was no way to determine the original owners, it was perfectly OK to repossess them. While being held hostage with his wife and twelve-year-old granddaughter, Riegert watched in silent horror as object after object was removed from the museum until there was nothing left, not even an arrowhead.
The unpaved road up the hill to the graveyard is dry, yet deep tire ruts make the going slow; this is not the type of terrain German engineers had in mind when they decided to manufacture my poor underpowered Villa VW in Mexico. As I near the top, I see a few people milling about; Indian schoolchildren with their teacher, a couple of tourists, a boy selling dream catchers. I park in front of the portal; it is only a few steps to the mass grave protected by a short chain-link fence, easy enough to hop over if you wanted to. Outlined by a narrow strip of concrete, the grave is a single trench less than six feet wide and about eight feet long, a rough surface of grass, dirt, and weeds. Someone has disrespectfully tossed a cigarette butt near where I am standing. I find it hard to imagine the mangled bones beneath this surface.
Alongside the middle of the tomb stands an eight-foot-tall obelisk grave marker topped with a four-sided Ming Dynasty roof and temple vase. This strange but appropriately somber granite monument was placed here by relatives of the deceased in 1903. Carved into the side facing the rising sun is an inscription followed by the names of forty-three people known to be buried here. It is barely legible; if someone doesn’t restore it, it will soon fade away, perhaps forever:
This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in memory of the Chief Big Foot massacre December 29, 1890. Col. Forsyth in command of U.S. troops. Big Foot was a great chief of the Sioux Indians. He often said “I will stand in peace till my last day comes.” He did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.
This is followed by a list of names, of which I can make out a few:
Chief Big Foot, Yellow Robe, Long Bull, Wounded Hand, Red Eagle, Pretty Hawk, He Crow, Spotted Thunder, Chase In Winter, He Eagle, No Ears, Shoots the Bear, Red Horn, Wolf Skin Necklace, Weasel Bear, Big Skirt, Pass Water In Horn, Kills Seneca, Yellow Bird, Picked Horses, Bird Shakes.
A large blue prayer ribbon is tied around the vase; multitudes of colored ribbons are tied to the fence and nearby tree branches; sage and wilted flowers are scattered about. Just as I turn to walk away, a millennial tourist couple solemnly approaches the monument, squats before it at a respectful distance, takes photos. Lost in thought, they stand, silently peruse the scene. Better dressed than most tourists—he wears khaki pants and a polo shirt buttoned at the top instead of the stereotypical tattered cargo shorts and Duck Dynasty Mount Rushmore T-shirts you see on so many tourists these days, and she has on a fashionable floral-print maxi dress suitable for a summer backyard party in the Hamptons—they could be Ralph Lauren models if they were only a bit thinner. They look stunned … it must be incomprehensible to many Anglo-Americans that their government of the people, for the people could commit such an atrocity; U.S. soldiers gunning down women and children on U.S. soil (never mind the My Lai or Al-Ishaqi massacres). It’s sad for anyone to see this, but I am happy they are here; everyone should come to Wounded Knee at least once.
The Indian boy selling cheap factory-made dream catchers rudely brings the contemplative couple back to reality. “Hey, where you from?” he asks aggressively.
The woman replies, “From Cincinnati. On our way to the ‘Faces.’ Heard about this place from my father-in-law. He loves everything about the West.”
The boy shows them the dream catcher, says he made it himself; many hours of fine craftsmanship. He smiles as they pay him twenty dollars.
Not sure I approve of what he is doing, I avoid eye contact, but this doesn’t stop him from approaching me. I give in … look up at his glowing, girlish baby face and see he is wearing an old Michael Jordan basketball jersey.
“Hey, where you from?” he asks.
I tell him I once lived near here but now I am from California and no thanks, I don’t want to buy a dream catcher; I have more dream catchers than I could ever need.
He laughs, quickly shifts gears as if he realizes that I realize what a fraud his dream catcher scam is, tells me his name (I’ll call him George), and asks me if I want to take his picture.
George stands underneath the Wounded Knee portal, raises his fist as a sign, he says, of “Indian pride,” gives me a big smile. He’s obviously a bright kid; he tells me he goes to the Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge, where his favorite class is computer science … So what, I now think, that he makes a few bucks selling dream catchers he buys in Rapid City for a dollar ninety-five? When he asks me to send him a copy of the photo, I enter his address into my phone, and when he asks for a donation, I give him five dollars.
George wanders off. I survey the rest of the cemetery; there are many other graves here, some sweet little ones just as poignant in their way as the mass grave—mound of dirt, simple wooden cross, name painted or carved into the crossbar: Mike Shot, Marvin M. Two Two, Zandra R. Shot, Ann T. Respects Nothing, and one that conjures up an especially sad story, Zintkala Zi (Yellow Bird).
The marker implies that she was a baby who died i
n 1976, but actually she was still a six-month-old fetus when a brutish cop, Clifford Valentine, viciously kicked her mom in the stomach outside a bar in Gordon, Nebraska. After being kicked, Jo Ann Yellow Bird fell against a parked car and slid to the ground. She experienced pain in her stomach and lower back, and later testified in a civil lawsuit, “I felt the baby kick once, real hard, and then I never felt it.” She begged, “Take me to a hospital,” but Valentine handcuffed her, threw her in the back of his squad car, and sped off toward the Sheridan County Jail, some twenty miles to the west.
As she sat thrashing about, kicking the front seat, she continued to scream, “Motherfucker, I need a doctor.” Valentine began swerving across the road, turned his head, and yelled; “Shut up, squaw bitch, or I’ll push you out of this goddamn car and shoot you.”
“Why don’t you?”
Valentine laughed. “I don’t want to waste any good bullets.”
Once in jail, Jo Ann continued her pleas to see a doctor. In her support, other inmates started yelling and banging on the cell bars, but the sheriff’s deputies ignored them. Next morning she was driven in handcuffs to Gordon Memorial Hospital, where doctors were unable to detect a fetal heartbeat. They called for an ambulance to the Pine Ridge hospital. It was too late. Jo Ann delivered a stillborn baby.
Zintkala Zi is a direct descendant of the Yellow Bird who is buried in the mass grave, one of the names still visible on the obelisk. Some say it was this Yellow Bird, a fanatical medicine man, who set off the series of missteps that provoked the soldiers to start shooting on the morning of December 29, 1889. When the soldiers went into the camp to search for weapons, Yellow Bird began dancing the Ghost Dance (Wacipi Wanagi), throwing dirt on himself, shouting to the other warriors, “Do not be afraid, because the soldier’s bullets cannot hurt you.” Most agree that Yellow Bird played a role in the start of the events—it may have been simply a cloud of dust thought to be gunfire; it may have been the firing of a hidden weapon. Regardless, a crack rang out through the camp of soldiers and American Indians. A tragedy ensued that continues to haunt American history.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 7
