Luckily, my hands shoot out to brace myself against the dashboard before my soft head smashes into the cold hard metal in a world where there are no neurosurgeons. Vernell, of course, thinks this is funny. When I give him my best evil stare, he only chuckles.
By the time I calm down enough to look out the window, the road has leveled off. I see that Yellow Bear Canyon completely engulfs us and it’s an entirely different world, a billowy world of evergreen trees and shrubs, stately lodgepole pines, naked trunks packed together like anxious runners at the beginning of a big-city marathon. But there’s very little room overhead for sky, which I find disquieting.
Vernell slows to a crawl. “People call this Yellow Bear Canyon, but its original name is Skokpa, Sh-coke-pah, which means ‘down in the valley,’ named for the Oglala people who first settled here. Yellow Bears came much later.”
Pointing with his left hand out the window, Vernell continues: “That creek along here is called No Flesh. No Flesh was chief of the Cut Off People. He went to Washington with Red Cloud in 1880-something when they tried to explain to us the Dawes Act, how the government was going to divide our lands into individual pieces.”
My heart no longer fiercely beating, my vision back to normal, I chime in sarcastically, “We generous white folk are going to give you poor Indians a few acres of the land you already own so you can learn how be farmers, not communists.”
Vernell laughs. “Worked out for my grandfather. He built up his land by trading horses for additional allotments—most people ended up with nothing.”
“I would say less than nothing.”
This time his hands are completely off the steering wheel. Pointing to both sides of the road (hopefully steering with his knees), Vernell says, “Notice how the utility guys mowed the left side but not the right.”
Sure enough, I can see that the foliage on the left from the edge of the road up to the barbed wire fence is short. But on the right it is long and wild; you can hardly see the barbed wire.
“I told them not to mow on the right side. The transmission hub for all this area is on my land. I paid for it, so I can shut it down whenever I want, and there is nothing they can do. They send me a royalty check every month for my electricity.”
“That would make you the John D. Rockefeller of Pine Ridge.”
Vernell either doesn’t understand or just ignores my bad joke. “Shortly after No Flesh went to Washington, a white man named Richards married Chief Yellow Bear’s two sisters, who then lived in this area. One night, Richards got terribly drunk and beat up his wives. The next day Yellow Bear went over to talk to him, but Richards murdered Yellow Bear with an ax. Most recently a retired white lady schoolteacher sold this land to the people living here now.
“Some developers from Rapid wanted to buy it for a bed-and-breakfast, but I said to them, ‘I cannot stop you from buying this land, but I can legally turn off your electricity.’”
When we reach the bottom of the canyon, Vernell veers right where wide tire tracks have forged a pathway through the thicket onto a clearing of muddy ground. There’s an old battered Dutchmen trailer parked in front of an immense prefab industrial steel building. Scattered about are the camping and construction tools you might expect to see: sleeping bags, a wheelbarrow, and, most conspicuously, a stone garden sculpture of Mother Mary.
“People living here don’t need my electricity,” Vernell says. “They live off the grid.”
It looks like no one is home: no parked vehicles, no barking dogs, doors and windows shut. Vernell puts the White Thunder pickup in neutral and pulls the emergency brake, leaving the motor running. He opens the driver’s door and jumps out. I hear the sharp crunches of his deliberate strides as KILI Radio still blares away; I hear a loud knocking at the door. As this cacophony of human sound goes on, I think I am warming up to this little spot of terra firma, thinking how lovely it might be to live disconnected from the haywire of modern life. You wouldn’t know who won the Super Bowl; hell, you wouldn’t even know what teams played in the Super Bowl! Rising sea levels might obliterate Manhattan, Bono might become president of the Republic of Ireland, and the Chinese stock market might crash—who cares? I’m easily lost in this fantasy when the front door opens. Vernell turns to look back at me and shouts, “Shut it down! Come inside!”
Stopping for a moment at the doorway before I enter, I can see that this is not a well-lighted place. A small lattice window above the door is the only window on my end of the building; two double-hung windows at the other end are small. A single strand of LED lights runs along the walls near the ceiling like the cheap Christmas decorations you buy at your neighborhood Dollar Store. Vernell vanishes into the darkness. There is something eerie about this shadowy cavern, and I feel apprehensive as my eyes adjust to its dimness. But then a portly man with a fastidiously trimmed beard emerges; he wears a light brown short-sleeved dress shirt, dark brown khakis held up by suspenders. Spooky, but the slightness of his stooped frame makes him less threatening. A funny thought comes to mind: stick a briar pipe in his mouth, add a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and he could be a Berkeley professor, someone you might run into while strolling across Sproul Plaza—the Nobel Prize–winning chairperson of the math department. The space behind him slowly comes into focus: an expanse of unadorned concrete, a large wooden table, a few metal chairs, and what looks to be a newly installed kitchen sink and counter; tools and instruction booklets are piled high. In the gloom I spy three other human forms that I think could be teenagers and a child in a playpen. Apparently, we’re interrupting a busy day.
Vernell says to no one in particular, “I’d like you to meet David; he was my teacher. He’s the reason I can’t spell.”
The professor laughs a bit too loud for my taste. I’ll call him William and change the names of his family members too; he is accompanied by a shy young man looking down at the floor beside him who is six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter, his teenage son, James. The lovely young woman with a big Kate Hudson smile whom I like instantly is his daughter Eleanor. She is on her knees playing with a darling toddler who giggles and shrieks. William makes a point of telling me that Eleanor’s older sister, Helena, is the toddler’s mom; at the moment she is out running errands with her husband, Daniel. There’s one more member of this pioneering family, William’s wife, Deborah, who is in Minneapolis seeing relatives.
“Good day for you to visit. The first day we’ve had functional electric lights.”
William invites Vernell and me to sit with him at the table. I soon learn that he is a geologist from California. Just as we arrived, he finished hooking up the solar-powered generator that runs the LED lights. It will eventually power the refrigerator I saw sitting out in the yard, plus water pumps, power tools, heating, better lights, and, most essential to this enterprise, an Internet connection. If William is to maintain the consulting contracts he has with old-school brick-and-mortar companies on the West Coast, he will have to be online. James, who has been standing stoically at the kitchen counter, raises his head and sputters to life as if there is now enough energy in the room to trigger his programmable memory. “Our family mission is to become energy self-sufficient, raise or otherwise procure all our food, live off the land no matter how harsh the weather, demonstrate to the native people that they can do this too.” James’s eyes sparkle just like the LED lights, only brighter. “We already have a goat. Tomorrow we are going to buy one of Vernell’s horses.”
“When it gets warmer,” William adds, “we’ll get some chickens, a few ducks, and, hopefully, a milk cow. We’ll plant a garden. There are many wild strawberries all around here, and my Helena recently shot her first deer.”
I am shocked. “Really? She shot a deer?”
Eleanor says she’s made goat’s-milk yogurt and offers us some, at the same time profusely apologizing for not having any honey or jam to sweeten it. Vernell has zero interest in yogurt, but I happily try a bowl. It’s amazingly refreshing and delicious—g
oat’s-milk yogurt on the Pine Ridge!
“When I lived here,” I tell them, “I was lucky to get tripe soup at Sally’s Cafe.” At this point, William is cautiously circumspect and James has returned to his taciturn state, but Eleanor is obviously thrilled to have a little company, happy to tell us about their many adventures. “When we arrived last spring,” she says, “four of us slept in a tent; Helena, Daniel, and the baby stayed in the trailer, where there is heat. For water, we ferried buckets up from No Flesh Creek.
“An early blizzard last October nearly wiped us out. Dad, James, and I were still sleeping in the tent. During the first night, twenty inches of snow fell every hour. When the tent collapsed, Dad woke up to the sound of my screaming. I didn’t know what I was pushing and beating at; everything was mixed up in a bad dream.”
William jumps back in. “I woke James up, and the two of us were able to rescue Eleanor. We moved into the crowded camper for the rest of the night, and next day we found refuge at Our Lady of Sorrows in Kyle. We lived in the sanctuary until we could move into this building.”
I glance over at Vernell, see the top of his water-stained cowboy hat as he is looking down, fidgeting, and crossing and uncrossing his legs. He doesn’t appear to be listening, but I know him; he is always listening. Always attuned to the moment … very little slips by Vernell White Thunder.
Irrespective of their idiosyncrasy, I am impressed with these survivalists—who wouldn’t be?—but there is a long history of white people with good intentions coming to the rez, hoping to save the Indians, show them a new way, lift them out of the morass. Volunteers come every summer—they plant organic gardens, build bunk beds for children, install protective skirting around mobile homes, spay and neuter pets, hold technology workshops. Mostly they do good things, but in terms of making a lasting difference … it’s dubious.
Vernell stands up, jokingly says, “We got to go milk the buffalo.” I shake William’s hand, wave good-bye to James and Eleanor; tell them I might be back this way one of these days, say perhaps I’ll drop in to see how they are doing. William walks us to the door, and we return to the White Thunder Ranch pickup. As soon as we are out of earshot, I ask Vernell what he thinks about white people thinking they can teach the Lakota how to be self-sufficient.
“He is skeptical and doesn’t approve of their self-imposed hardships. He worries for their safety.”
Turning the key, angrily revving up the engine, Vernell slips the clutch so that the wheels of his truck ominously kick up a vast splodge of dirt, much like a Lakota war pony might do before charging into an early morning camp of the hated Pawnee. “Let me show you where I grew up with my grandpa and grandma. You will understand how we Lakota were self-sufficient.”
As we spin out, I take one last look at this unlikely modern sod house, chuckle at the thought that these homesteaders settled here 150 years too late. The sun begins to dip behind the mysteriously steep hills; I begin to feel a chill, am thankful we don’t go far.
Vernell turns off KILI Radio, slows his truck to an idle, turns left off the ungroomed side of the road, drives across a shallow gully, a nearly hidden creek, over a thick bed of ferns to a broad clearing nestled in a cradle of hills, bare-branched cottonwoods, sweet grass, and sage. What a splendid womb of nature! Much larger than the barren survival camp, it is, I can see, protected from howling winds, blowing snow, the searing heat of summer.
Coasting to a stop, Vernell shuts down the motor. “Here is where my story begins. Let’s get out and take a look around.”
The one-room log house where Vernell spent the first eight years of his life is no longer standing, but he points out chunks of concrete that once made up its foundation. In back of the house, dug into a hillside, is what remains of the corral where Vernell’s grandfather kept the wagon team horses.
We walk down the other side of the hill to the bed of a small but fast-moving creek. “Right about here,” Vernell says, “we had a wooden box where you could keep butter, milk, whatever needed to stay cool. Grandma also dried a lot of meat, stored it in canvas bags—you never see that today.
“We had a huge garden—tomatoes, corn, and green beans, some of which my grandmother preserved in clay jars. We stored potatoes and turnips over there in our root cellar, and we had goats … there was always goat milk, but no goat cheese or goat yogurt; only wasicu eat these things.”
Walking along, Vernell kicks up pebbles with the scuffed toes of the Apache boots he’s been wearing for as long as I can remember, and with each kick, he uncovers old memories, memories as numerous as the pebbles.
“David, we were rich compared to others. When my grandfather butchered a cow, neighbors came for a feast; everyone went home with something. Grandfather used to say, ‘Grandson, there are spirits watching over our food, making sure it is good and plentiful. If you share, they stay. If you don’t, they get angry and leave.’”
Vernell was only two months old when his parents brought him to this very spot, left him to be raised by his mother’s parents, George and Emma Poor Thunder. It was late August 1954, Moon When the Chokecherries Are Ripe. Vernell is not sure why his parents abandoned him, nor does he seem bitter about it. “Perhaps with three other children,” he says, “taking care of me was too much for them.” Already in his eighties, Vernell’s grandfather was a legendary horse breeder and traditional medicine man, and his grandmother was the granddaughter of the great chief American Horse.
* * *
Before moving to Yellow Bear Canyon, George Poor Thunder lived on the Rosebud reservation, where he was one of the last breeders of highly prized Appaloosas, the remarkable spotted-coat war ponies of the Nez Percé.
“Appaloosas would be forever extinct if my grandfather hadn’t understood Nez Percé breeding practices.”
“What were those?”
“I wish I knew them all, but gelding inferior male horses was part of it.”
“Wonderful.”
“Whenever a white man came to Grandfather and wanted to buy a saddle-broken Appaloosa,” Vernell said, “Grandfather would tell him the price was two hundred dollars a head. Most would angrily say it was too high and leave, only to come back in a day or two with cash in hand because there was nowhere else to buy horses like these. ‘That was yesterday’s price,’ Grandfather would tell them. ‘Now it will cost you two hundred and fifty.’”
After marrying Vernell’s grandmother Emma in 1908, Poor Thunder moved to Yellow Bear Canyon in a buckboard wagon with his wife and children, including Vernell’s mother, Mary. They were leading two hundred head of the most beautiful horses in the world.
Only twelve at the time, ninety-two-year-old Guy Dull Knife, interviewed by Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer Joe Starita, remembered the spectacle of Poor Thunder’s arrival, and more interestingly, his appearance: “Poor Thunder had long gray hair and wore a full-length overcoat, two pistols stuck in the waistband. His lower lip came up over his upper lip, making him the scariest-looking man I ever saw, but my father admired many of his good-looking horses. After Poor Thunder had settled, they became good friends.”
Already revered among traditional Lakota as an old-style medicine man, Poor Thunder began to take charge of the spiritual ceremonies held around Yellow Bear. In the summer of 1911 he presided over a large Sun Dance held in a secret location in the nearby hills, attended by many friends and relatives. People remember his long graying braids and the traditional way he draped his blue medicine blanket about his body, which presented a picture of power and dignity. The Sun Dance was illegal, but the local Lakota policeman who knew about it was not going to make any arrests. He rode up to the Sun Dance lodge just before the painted dancers marched in with their sacred buffalo skulls. Poor Thunder told him, “If we lose the Sun Dance, we will no longer be a people. We will be something else, but no longer Lakota.”
The policeman stayed to listen to the drummers and their songs, which recalled the thundering buffalo herds that once were so plentiful, but he had to leave
before Poor Thunder skewered the dancers’ chest muscles with the razor-sharp sticks known as chawakha. He dared not witness this torture nor watch as the dancers frantically flung themselves backwards for hours and hours until the chawakha ripped away, leaving ragged bits of flesh to be trimmed away with a ceremonial knife and then laid on a bed of sage as an offering to the sun. To see this would make the policeman complicit in what the agency considered a serious crime. He would lose the job that gave him prestige and many privileges.
* * *
Hands in his pockets, Vernell briskly strides up the hill behind the dugout where his grandparents once kept the team horses. Because he’s never told me such stories before, I don’t want to miss anything he says, so I struggle to stay abreast of him.
Grandfather was very powerful. People came to visit him because he was one of the last yuwipi men. He presided over this traditional ceremony where you ask for help from the spirits to cure a sickness. The missionaries called yuwipi “devil worship,” so we had to be very careful.
Before the yuwipi, they would put all the furniture outside, cover the doors and windows with heavy tarps nailed to the wall so no light could get in. One time my uncle Daniel left the plate of food for the spirits on the roof while he assisted my grandmother.
Good Friday on the Rez Page 16
