In his final interview, filmed a few weeks before his death in October 2012, Means said, “Men go from diaper to diaper. You need a woman at the beginning of life to take care of you, and at the end of your life. If you are foolish enough not to recognize that throughout your life, you’ll never know love.”
It’s good to know that Russell Means knew love; his fifth marriage, to Pearl Means, lasted twelve years, and she was there at the end. He had seven children, three of them adopted. Crow Dog, the spiritual leader who passed the burning sage around Frank Clearwater’s body, presided at Means’s twelve-hour memorial service at the Little Wound School auditorium in Kyle.
“In four days,” Crow Dog said, “Russell’s soul will enter the Happy Hunting Grounds. He will see all the chiefs in his band, all the families, all the relations, all the stillborn that went to the Happy Hunting Grounds.”
Means’s family spread his ashes in the Black Hills, and as with only Crazy Horse’s relatives’ knowing where he is buried, only they know where.
* * *
I once visited the Porcupine Day School, a K-8 school. It was Columbus Day 1972, six weeks into my first and last year working as a BIA schoolteacher in Kyle at the newly opened Little Wound School. I was there for a district-wide teacher and administrator meeting in the school gym; nothing too remarkable—there was always a meeting of one kind or another. Naive and idealistic, I had quit my job teaching at an inner-city school in Chicago to teach Indian kids, perhaps thinking I could make a difference. Growing up in Alliance, I knew, of course, how impoverished Indians were, the discrimination they faced. More recently I had read Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, which had a great impact on me.
I was in a sour mood that day when Marvin Waldner, the principal at Little Wound School whose smile was not much more than a snarl, herded us out to the school bus. Feeling an urge to complain, I sat next to my two best teacher friends, Leonard Running and Lawden Heller. Fresh out of teacher’s college, Leonard was a long-haired music teacher who had lost three fingers on his left hand in a childhood accident yet was a wicked guitar player. Lawden was my father’s age, a history teacher who grew up in South Dakota; he had been a World War II pilot in the same squadron as Senator George McGovern. Still McGovern’s friend, he worked tirelessly on all his campaigns. Leonard and Lawden were excellent teachers, the two best I met during my years teaching, including in Chicago. Sincerely interested in and supportive of Lakota culture, they loved the kids, were the type of teachers I expected to find when I applied for a job on the Pine Ridge reservation. But some of the other teachers were decidedly not. A few were incompetent, too lamebrained to get more secure positions teaching in nearby white schools. Indifferent, blind, uncaring, hateful, these so-called teachers were going through the motions, doing their jobs, plodding along, hoping to land something better next year.
All three of us despised Waldner. For comic relief, we compared him to Colonel Wilhelm Klink, the buffoon commandant of the German POW camp on the then popular TV series Hogan’s Heroes. Like Colonel Klink, Waldner saw himself as being in absolute command, but the reality was quite the opposite. Little Wound School was chaotic, undisciplined, rudderless, poorly managed—you might say the inmates were in charge of the asylum. Earlier that day, Waldner had unexpectedly appeared in my classroom to berate William Bull Bear, a freshman, because he had long hair.
“This boy thinks he’s a girl,” Waldner said loud enough for the whole class to hear. “If he wants to play football, he needs to get a haircut.”
I was furious. Bull Bear kept his head down, said nothing. Waldner should have known or, if he did know, cared that cutting an Indian boy’s hair was an act of cultural transgression. Outraged but new at my job, I kept my anger below the surface.
When I told Lawden and Leonard this story, Lawden laughed. “Waldner is not going to kick Bull Bear off the goddamn football team; he is not going to make him get a haircut either. If he kicks Bull Bear off the team, there won’t be enough players to have a full roster, and if he cuts his hair, Bull Bear’s grandmother will pull her grandson out of school.”
Leonard added, “David, haven’t you figured out that football is by far the most important thing about this school?”
I must admit, it was painfully obvious. The boys on the football team got out of class at ten a.m. for early practice, returned in time for lunch, and then had a second practice after school. If one of the boys on the team didn’t show up in the morning, Waldner sent the bus drivers out to round him up. No one cared what kind of grades these boys got; just being on the team qualified them for advancement to the next grade and eventual graduation … not unlike too many other schools across our land.
Parked at Porcupine Day School, we filed off the bus and into the gym. Along the way, I noticed that the hallway walls were decorated with children’s Columbus Day drawings and poems. Several depicted the Pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria; others, Columbus meeting the natives, the natives feasting him, waving good-bye when he sailed back to Spain. Was I in some twilight zone? And it only got worse; once we sat down in the gym, a group of cute third and fourth graders marched onto the stage. Their teacher at the piano, they began to sing:
In fourteen ninety-two, Columbus sailed the ocean blue
He discovered a new land for me and you …
“What the hell,” I said at the meeting that followed. “Columbus didn’t discover land for these kids—their ancestors were already here!”
A murmur ran through the room, a few people nodded, a few of my fellow teachers looked surprised that I would bring up such an unpleasant subject.
“What are we doing to celebrate Lakota culture?” I asked.
District Superintendent Joe Mooney, a gangly, prematurely bald man who favored starched shirts with turquoise buttons and bolo ties, was in charge of the meeting. “Calm down, everyone,” he said. “Of course we want our children to be proud of being Lakota, but not all the children who attend our schools are Native American. Some are white; their parents are ranchers, storekeepers. We want all the children to experience everything other American children experience; we don’t want them to feel left out. They need to identify with being American, not just Indian.”
Exasperated, I looked around to see all but one or two of the teachers nodding; they knew next to nothing about the true history of Native Americans.
“Thank you, Mr. Mooney,” I said, as there wasn’t much to be gained by continuing my protest. Little did I know then what a useful catalyst Mooney would be in the coming Kyle community struggle to rid itself of Marvin Waldner.
KYLE
GARDEN LEFT UNATTENDED
There are no other vehicles on the road. A few miles past Porcupine, a magnificent ridge, a massive column of steel-gray granite, rises high into the sky; a smaller butte in front oddly reminds me of a London Beefeater guardhouse. Magnificent! The productive but unappealing flatland might be in the hands of white ranchers, I think, but the Lakota still own the most beautiful parts.
Sharp’s Corner is ahead. From the road, all you can see is a prefab aluminum building, a gas pump, a few pickups. The Common Cents Food Store is where I used to stop for a soda on sweltering summer days. The village itself lies down a hill behind the store; I would guess fifty people live here. Across the road from a dramatic cottonwood tree is a Baptist missionary church, a log structure resting on a foundation of cement blocks, with double white doors, no windows, a simple wooden cross, and a school bus parked in the back. I once met the preacher at a community powwow in Kyle, a hardwired white man with a comb-over, sharp features, a food-stained dress shirt, and an out-of-style necktie he must have gotten at the Goodwill. He had desperate, hollow eyes.
I said to him, “Reverend, what do you hope to accomplish on the reservation?”
Refreshingly honest, I guess, he replied, “I am only here to spread the word.”
“But don’t people here have their own beliefs? Wakan Tanka, vision quests, the sweat lodge, the Su
n Dance?”
“Regardless, they still need Jesus. Once they have Jesus, they can solve all their other problems. Jesus is the answer.”
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
I don’t think Reverend Harold liked me much; strangely enough, he avoided me after this.
Turning right at Sharp’s Corner onto BIA Highway 2, I am still on the Big Foot Trail; only nine more miles to Kyle. An arthritic old man mindlessly crosses the paved road in front of me; a snarly dog follows him. I brake for him, remember how one night another old man materialized in front of me on this very road. The sky was cloudy—it was so dark it was like driving into a black hole. I heard or imagined I heard a thud, was sure I had smashed head-on into him. I stopped, searched the area with a flashlight, the front of my car … there was no body, no blood, no dents. Could he have been a spirit, an old ghost dancer who stayed behind when Chief Big Foot headed off for Pine Ridge?
Was he this very same old man in front of me now?
And I remember the stolen calves. People used to steal calves from the Thompson pasture that runs along the side of this road. Deplorable but funny—a hungry person stops his car on a moonless night, sneaks through the barbed wire to snatch a calf, ties its feet together and clamps a hand over its mouth so it can’t bawl too loudly, somehow hauls the piteous creature over the fence, forces it into the backseat, and speeds off to some prearranged spot where it will be butchered. It happened so frequently, I sometimes spotted old man Thompson driving through the fields at night on his tractor, cigarette in his mouth glowing, moving an eerie spotlight back and forth, no doubt with a shotgun on his lap.
Whoa! Sign of serious progress or just another mirage? On my right is the Lakota Prairie Ranch Resort Motel & Restaurant, a tidy collection of small red log cabins and one larger log central office with a blinking VACANCY sign, a for-real tourist spot I haven’t seen before. I wonder what it would be like to stay here. Café, yes! Swimming pool, no! Air-conditioning, maybe! Room service, no way! Lobby with roaring fireplace, dream on! No bar; that would be illegal. No matter; I am determined to book a room here one day. When I lived in Kyle, there were no motels or hotels, no B and Bs, no Airbnbs—it was unimaginable that there ever would be. Kyle is the most remote village or town in America, so remote that it is less than ten miles from the exact point of the North American pole of inaccessibility—the single most distant spot on the whole continent: 43.36°N 101.97°W, 1,650 kilometers to reach from both coastlines. Geographically speaking, Kyle is in the middle of nowhere.
At the time, there was a post office and three commercial establishments, Lawrence and Martha Whiting’s Trading Post, Richard Keiffe’s General Store, and Sally’s Homestyle Cafe. Sally’s was the only place to eat if you wanted to “eat out”—but calling it a “café” was a stretch. Sally ran it out of the front room of her trailer home, where she set up a couple of card tables and folding chairs. She specialized in taniga (tripe) soup, “indigenous tacos” (fry bread smothered in beans and salsa), and well-done double burgers between slices of white Rainbo bread, plus cowboy coffee she made by throwing coffee grounds into a pan of boiling water. And the funny thing was, I did eat there regularly; it had a warm conviviality you won’t find at the French Laundry, and I loved it.
I make a sharp left turn and gun Villa VW over a long hill; Kyle looms ahead. The usual BIA houses, government buildings, and churches reach out in a jagged pattern to the far horizon from both sides of the highway, making Kyle look much bigger than it really is. You might guess at a population of two or three thousand, but it is closer to five hundred. Like Pine Ridge, Kyle has a brand-new water tower, easily its tallest structure, shaped like a giant poppy pod with its large globe atop a stately column. Painted white, it is unadorned and unlabeled. If you were flying over Kyle in a small plane and looked down, you would see this water tower, but there is no way to identify it. No large KYLE painted around the top.
I wonder, does every town on the rez have a new water tower? Perhaps this is a line item in the recent Department of the Interior budget: Water towers for Indians.
* * *
As I get closer to the outskirts of Kyle, the traffic picks up; an assortment of the usual rez cars, UPS delivery van, muddy pickup pulling a horse trailer, at least three generations packed into a battered Dodge Caravan, the faces of small children pressed against the back window. They wave to me just as two boys dangerously zip across the intersection between us on a mini-motorcycle sans helmets, spewing a black cloud of toxic gas, their long hair flying behind them. Off to my right is the Kyle Health Center, a sprawling stone building, a huge step forward from the little one-room hovel that once gallantly tried to serve the same purpose with its staff of one medic and a part-time nurse. Nearly big enough to be a hospital, this new health center features an entrance framed by large wooden beams fashioned into the shape of four triangles—the Lakota symbol for the Sun-Earth connection. A strip of beautifully patterned mosaic tiles runs across the top of the entire building. It makes a statement: Lakota culture, once suppressed, is now celebrated; what was once a matter of shame is now a matter of pride. There are more new structures, large and small. One is the Kyle post office, another Oglala Lakota College, a small but serious campus of dorms and classrooms; there are also a modern convenience store and two gas stations. Past the new Kyle is a slice of the old Kyle I remember: a cluster of crumbling government housing; discarded trailer homes; old people and children walking about; an unoccupied car left running, the driver’s door open as someone goes inside the post office, a scene you would never see in San Francisco or Oakland. Vehicles coming and going here and there. Kyle is a busy place, but where are the horses?
I’m startled that I see no horses, no young boys streaking across the plains bareback on beautifully speckled Indian ponies. When I lived here, you could not look in any direction without seeing carefree horses grazing or clomping about—horses who some early mornings woke me up as they rummaged through the garbage cans behind my house. These were not wild horses. In Kyle, people let their ponies run about like cows in Calcutta, and like Hindu cows, these horses were sacred; no worry about their being stolen. But all’s not lost: as I approach the Allen turnoff, which will take me south to Vernell’s ranch, I see a young Indian boy riding in the drainage ditch on a magnificent brown overo American Paint, but he is using a saddle and bridle. I pull up next to him and stop, wave to him.
“Is that your horse?”
“Yes. His name is Cherry Bomb.”
“Why Cherry Bomb?”
“When he takes off, he explodes like a racehorse out of the starting gate. Are you a tourist?”
“Long time ago I taught school at Little Wound. Here to visit my friend, Vernell White Thunder. Do you know him?”
The boy smiles. “I go to Little Wound; Vernell is my uncle.”
He agrees to let me take his picture with my iPhone, but before I can ask him his name, he says, “See you later,” spurs Cherry Bomb up the far side of the ditch, and trots off away from the road. I make a mental note to show this photo to Vernell.
I’m so enthralled with this boy on horseback that I nearly pass right by Little Wound School, perhaps because like the rest of Kyle, it too has changed—once just a boring brick building, it has had a dramatic face-lift. There is a massive brick avant-garde entrance, which I guess suggests a buffalo, with red inward-curving walls and portholes about two feet in diameter positioned to represent nostrils and eyes; the dramatic curvature of its back seems to hold up the sky. Four tall cylindrical sculptures, at least forty feet high, define the front courtyard—I wonder if they are meant to suggest the Tree of Life in the center of a Sun Dance circle.
When they opened this school forty-three years ago, I was the first high school science teacher. I had no experience teaching science, had not majored or minored in science, chemistry, or physics—I had a minor in social science, which I guess is how they qualified me. It didn’t matter much, since most of
the kids couldn’t read the textbooks. There was no chance they could have understood or cared that the number of electrons in the last energy level of an atom is its valence number. So I stashed the syllabus and the science books in a cupboard and tried the best I could for a white dude to teach them something about their history and culture.
I bought all the books I could find on Lakota and American Indian history at the Native American–owned Black Hills State University bookstore in Rapid City and filled the walls of my classroom with posters of great Indian chiefs and bumper stickers such as This is Indian country. I even teamed up with one of the few native employees, Leroy Big Boy, who was the career counselor, to teach Lakota language, which too few of them spoke. Principal Waldner didn’t care. He was interested only in the sports teams; in his eyes, my main responsibility was to make sure the boys made it to football practice and, when basketball season came, basketball practice. His road to BIA recognition was a South Dakota football championship. When I asked around about the name Little Wound, no one seemed to know who Little Wound was or why the school was named after him. With Big Boy’s help, the story of Little Wound became my first lesson.
I taught my students that Little Wound School was named for George Little Wound, son of Chief Little Wound, leader of a Lakota clan known as the Bear People (Kiyuksa). As a young warrior, Chief Little Wound counted coup in the last major inter-tribal battle with the Pawnee, the so-called Massacre Canyon Battle of 1873. The great Pawnee chief Sky and his party of three hundred warriors were happily dressing buffalo near the bank of the Missouri after an unusually successful hunt when a thousand Lakota warriors unexpectedly attacked them. On a dead gallop, Little Wound charged right up to Sky, touched him with his coup stick, and then retreated. Two Strike followed Little Wound, except he killed Sky with his war club. The Lakota killed sixty-nine Pawnee that day while suffering no casualties. Because counting coup was considered a more courageous act than simply killing someone, Little Wound emerged as the hero of this battle, while Two Strike’s exploit was largely forgotten. As one of the main Oglala chiefs, Little Wound rode with Crazy Horse in the Battle of the Greasy Grass and fled to Canada with Chief Sitting Bull. When Sitting Bull returned to the Standing Rock Agency, Chief Little Wound moved to Pine Ridge, eventually settling in Potato Creek, only fifteen miles west of Kyle. He was a ghost dancer, but after the Wounded Knee massacre, he came to the realization that war against the whites was futile.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 11
