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Dakota Dream
James W. Bennett
This book is dedicated to the memory of
Nancy Jeane Hansen, whose love for hung-out kids
was as big as the sea.
PROLOGUE
For the time being, you can call me Floyd.
Someday I will have my name legally changed to Charly Black Crow. You can do that, but it’s a lot of hassle and it costs money, because you have to go to court and fill out lots of legal forms, and all that shit. Charly Black Crow is my chosen Sioux name and after it’s legally changed, that’s the only name I will answer to. Sometimes in school, especially in Mrs. Bluefish’s class, I sign my papers Charly Black Crow, AKA Floyd Rayfield. Whenever I do it, Mrs. Bluefish comes unglued. This is not too unusual for her, because she is a very excitable type, and besides, she has this mistaken notion that I am a troublemaker.
The thing you need to know first is that everything in this story is true. I’m not making anything up, I’m reporting everything exactly as it happened. I thought about giving everybody fictitious names, like they usually do in stories. To protect the innocent is the way it’s usually put, I think. But then I thought, Why bother? There’s already so much work that goes into writing a story, why put yourself through the extra hassle of thinking up a whole lot of fictitious names? Besides that, I never could quite figure out who were the innocent and who were the guilty. The real names just seemed a lot more on target than any names I could think up. If I ever get sued, it won’t matter, because I will be living with the Indians and whatever happens in the white man’s courts will not be any of my concern.
The second thing you need to understand is about my destiny to become an Indian. When I was a little kid, I didn’t understand what a destiny was, and if you want the truth, I didn’t understand much about Indians, either. All I knew was, I had a lot of admiration for Indians and I would always cheer for them to slaughter the cavalry whenever I watched a Western movie. What it came down to was, I wanted to be an Indian, the way other kids want to grow up to be a policeman or a fire fighter, or whatever.
Then one night last summer, I had this unbelievable experience where I saw a vision of myself as a Sioux warrior. The vision came to me in the usual way, in a dream. This is not the best time to go into the details, but to summarize the basics, the vision showed me that to become an Indian was not something for me to want or not want: It was my destiny.
In some ways, life gets easier once you understand your true destiny. Most of the time you know what to do, and you don’t waste a lot of time wondering and worrying about your future. I would recommend to anyone that they should get in touch with their destiny.
Because I hold the ways of the Indian in such high esteem, I dye my hair black about once a month to get the red out, so my appearance will be more in touch with my Indian identity. All you have to do is use this brown liquid when you shampoo your hair, so there isn’t much to it.
A couple of years ago, when I was still pretty much of a kid, I used to try to make my skin darker, too. It was pretty childish, but I don’t hold it against myself, because when you’re a little kid, you just naturally end up doing a few childish things. I never did find a satisfactory way to get my skin dark. I tried this tanning cream you can get at the drugstore, which is supposed to tan your skin even if you never go outside, but it made me look all blotchy like I had some kind of a disease. I tried mixing walnut husks in water and then rubbing the walnut water all over myself, which was a nice idea because it is an Indian ideal to use natural products at all times and live in true harmony with nature. But the result was, my skin got all streaked and I just looked dirty. Looking dirty is not for me.
I even tried laying out in the sun by the hour, but is that a boring pastime or what? I know girls who do it all the time, but you just lie there and nothing happens, except you get all sweaty, which means you attract all kinds of insects, so you just lie there with all this sweat and all these bugs. I gave that up after about one day.
Anyway, to get on with it, what this is is the story of how I ran away from home and became an Indian. Not just joined the Indians, you understand, but became an Indian. There’s a big difference, which I intend to make clear eventually.
The hardest thing of all is knowing where to start. It always is. Think of any story about yourself that you might want to tell somebody, and you could practically start at the beginning of your whole life if you felt like it, because in a way, everything that ever happened to you has got something to do with what happens later on.
Oh, Wakan Tanka! Great Spirit.
Like I said, the hardest thing of all is knowing where to start …
CHAPTER ONE
It was the early part of the afternoon when I got to the Pine Ridge Reservation, exhausted from walking the motorcycle more than two miles and not getting much sleep for the past forty-eight hours. But I didn’t pay much attention to the fatigue, because it was such a relief to finally be at my destination. I just went in through the main entrance.
Since it was the first part of June, there was lots of tourist activity. I was standing in the middle of a big, congested parking lot, surrounded by Delta 88s and Airstream campers and a whole lot of other barge-type vehicles favored by Mr. and Mrs. Tourist. I could see a lot of trailers and campers spread out like a settlement along the base of these very rugged foothills. There were a few Indians around, but more tourists.
This commercial part of the reservation was not likely to get me too excited. I happened to know from my research that the Pine Ridge Reservation covers many hundred square miles; this part was only the tip of the iceberg, and the tip was probably the least authentic part.
Besides that, it wasn’t smart for me to just hang out in the public eye. As soon as I had my bearings, I walked the Kawasaki down a gravel path that led to a semiprimitive campground along the river. There were tipis you could rent and brick grills for cooking, and even a shower house made of cinder block. I found a private, wooded spot by the river where I could stash the bike and my backpack.
I felt so gritty from the trip I went up to the shower house and took a shower, even though I hadn’t paid a camping fee and was probably a trespasser according to the letter of the law. I put on my clean clothes, which consisted of my spare T-shirt and blue jeans.
After that, I went back to my private spot by the river and mellowed out against the trunk of this big cottonwood tree. I was real hungry, but I was even more tired. There was no room in my head for the seized-up bike, or Carl Hartenbower’s stolen car, or the cops, or Mrs. Bluefish, or Mr. Saberhagen, or Mrs. Grice, or anything that might be a problem. I didn’t pay attention to my aches and pains.
The sky was bluer than you could imagine. It was the big sky, as the Indians called it. The river was sparkling like a crystal, and the rocky buttes on the other shore were like a picture frame. I felt like I had roots growing out of my body right into the ground. I was on the reservation, among the Dakota, and I had a peaceful, easy feeling, as that old song by The Eagles puts it. I was in place.
And then I was sound asleep.
What woke me up was the noise made by this guy in a pickup truck. He was collecting trash from the campsites and replacing garbage can liners.
I sat up and rubbed my eyes and looked at the low sun. The pickup truck was an old green GMC junker with PRR painted on the door; the guy was clearly an Indian. Now that I was at the reservation I needed to make contact, so I went on over and introduced myself.
It turned out his name was Donny Thunderbird, age nineteen.
He wasn’t very tall, but he was wiry, which is the ideal Indian physique.
“Where are you staying?” he asked.
I took him over to my private spot in the woods to show him.
“You don’t have to stay here,” he said. “A lot of the tipis are empty.”
“What I’d like to find is a more or less permanent place to stay on the reservation. I don’t think I could afford one of the tipis because my money would run out. I only started out with forty bucks.”
“Are you on your own?”
“I’m on my own.”
He asked me how old I was. I told him, “Actually, I prefer to think of myself as sixteen.”
“You prefer?”
“Well, I haven’t had my sixteenth birthday yet, but one time about a year ago, I read this story of these young German soldiers in World War One, and at the end of the book, the main character gets killed in battle. The way the author put it was, ‘He fell, in the autumn of his twentieth year.’ The thing was, he was really only nineteen, but if you think about it, once you’ve had your nineteenth birthday, you’re living in your twentieth year, just like once you’ve had your first birthday, you’re living in your second year. From the time I read that book, I got in the habit of thinking of myself as a year older.”
Donny Thunderbird said, “You’re only fifteen but you’re on your own? What about your parents and your family?”
“I don’t have any parents or family. That’s a big part of the total picture.” I could tell Donny was a guy I could trust, so I told him about taking off from the group home and coming 800 miles until I finally got here. I told him how I held the Indians in high esteem, especially the Dakota.
“You said you want a permanent place on the reservation,” said Donny. “I don’t understand what you mean.”
“I’m hoping someone at the reservation will help me,” I answered. I decided I might as well just get down to it. “I want to be a Dakota,” I said. “As a matter of fact, it’s my destiny to become one.”
Donny looked at me for a few moments without saying anything. He didn’t look at me the way I’ve been looked at before, like I was an alien, he just looked at me the way you look at a person when you’re really concentrating. After this long silence, he asked me, “Is that your bike?”
Now it was my turn to hesitate. “You might say I’m borrowing it.” Even though I could tell Donny Thunderbird was a guy to trust, there were limits.
“The bike is down,” I added. “I had to push it all the way out here from town.”
“That’s more than a mile,” he said.
“Don’t I know it.”
He wanted to know what was the matter with it, so I told him. “It’s seized up. It was burning oil, but I was only driving at night so I couldn’t see. There I was in the middle of Iowa with a seized-up bike. I couldn’t drive it and I couldn’t just leave it behind. I didn’t know what I was going to do.”
“So what happened?”
“I ran into this guy named Carl Hartenbower at a truck stop. He was on his way to Dry Gulch, Wyoming, to start a new job as a professional cowboy. Dry Gulch is a tourist town, and Carl was hired to sit on a chair in front of the general store and trading post all day long, and look like a cowboy of the Old West. Can you believe it, just sit there and get paid for it? He was perfect for it, though, he was a real leathery-looking kind of a guy. Anyway, he said we could tie the bike down on top of his car. It was a big Pontiac Bonneville. So that’s what we did.”
“And he brought you the rest of the way.”
“As far as the edge of town. The rest was up to me. Carl was a weird guy. About a hundred miles back, he told me the car was stolen. That made me nervous, because being more or less on the run myself, I didn’t like the idea of being in a car the cops were looking for. And it was pretty conspicuous with the bike tied on top. Of course, since the car wasn’t his, he didn’t care if the roof got scratched or dented.”
“He does sound weird, but I’d say it was pretty lucky you ran into him.”
Then I smiled. “You could call it luck, I guess. But the thing is, once you get in touch with your destiny, you get out of the habit of thinking of things as lucky breaks. Not to get overly philosophical, but that’s what a destiny means: It’s supposed to happen. That’s how it’s altogether different from lucky breaks or something you wish for.”
Donny offered me a piece of gum, which I accepted. “You keep saying that, but I don’t know how to take it. No offense.”
“No problem. You’re hearing all of this with an open mind. I appreciate that. What it comes down to is, I had a vision; it came to me in a dream. I’m destined to be a Dakota. I think I was a Dakota a hundred years ago, so it might be just a matter of returning. Sometimes the way to your destiny is through your previous lives.”
Donny was quiet again, hearing it all. I liked the way I could tell him these things and not feel selfconscious. He finally said, “Are you hungry?”
“As a matter of fact I’m starved. The food in my backpack is all dried out.”
“Hop in the truck. We’ll go up to the snack bar.”
The snack bar where Donny took me was part of the tourist area near that parking lot where I came in earlier. In addition to ordinary stores like a grocery store and a Laundromat, there were lots of gift shops and souvenir shops and trading posts, loaded with tourists. You could buy almost any kind of Indian merchandise, all of it authentic. With the tourists, the most popular stuff seemed to be items from the Southwest tribes, such as Navajo blankets, turquoise jewelry, and so forth. The best stuff from the Plains tribes were ceremonial pipes and certain weapons, such as shields made from buffalo hide, and very quality bows made out of bone.
I could have looked at the Indian merchandise for the rest of the evening, but I was too hungry. I got two chili dogs with onion and a large Pepsi. Before I knew it, we were back in the truck and driving along some gravel road through the timber, far away from the beaten path. I was wolfing my food and trying to get my bearings, but it was too dark by this time.
We must have gone two miles at least. Our destination turned out to be some maintenance buildings where equipment was kept, such as a tractor, a couple of dump trucks, mowers, et cetera.
Donny was throwing trash in a big Dumpster while I finished my food. We sat in a mechanic’s shop where some old Indian men were playing cards, smoking cigarettes, and drinking whiskey. Even though it was just a maintenance shed, I felt privileged being in a place no tourists would ever see.
A very old Indian named Delbert Bear, who was one of Donny’s distant great-uncles, was doing most of the talking. He smoked his pipe and told numerous stories of the glorious past when the warrior Dakota were the feared enemy of the white man’s army. I asked Donny how old Delbert Bear actually was, and he said, “Nobody knows, including him.”
Anyway, Delbert told of all the famous battles in great detail, such as when Crazy Horse defeated General Crook in the Battle of the Rosebud, and the terrible Dakota defeat at the hands of the Seventh Cavalry at Wounded Knee. I know for a fact that the defeat at Wounded Knee happened in 1890, so I asked Donny if Delbert Bear could really remember it.
Donny smiled and said, “Nobody knows, including him.”
I had my journal with me, and I was making a point of writing down most of what came out of Delbert Bear’s mouth. Donny asked me if I did a lot of writing and I told him I did. “I like to write stories,” I said. “Sometimes I just write down notes and ideas for stories later on. I’ve been making notes on the Stone Boy legend for a long time.”
“You probably know more about the Stone Boy legend than I do,” he said.
I needed to be humble. I said, “There are different versions of the legend. I’ve sort of been working on a version which combines all the similar parts. You know, the essential stuff. There are gaps and missing pieces, stuff that’s gotten lost over time. What I’d really like to do is fill in the gaps and still be authentic to the basic mean
ing of the legend. It’s not easy.”
Donny took a look at me before he answered. “A writer can do a lot of good for Indians.”
I asked him how.
“I know a guy by the name of Chips,” said Donny. “He’s a Dakota on another reservation, but I’ve met him a couple of times. He publishes a newsletter twice a month on Indian civil rights and legal rights. People from all over the country subscribe to it, and I don’t mean just Indians.”
“Can you think of any more?”
“There’s a guy in Minnesota I’ve never met. He writes columns on Indian history and traditions. His column is published in newspapers all over. There are also publications on Indian education and agriculture. That’s what I’m interested in.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“I just got done with my freshman year in junior college. I’m going to finish college and major in ag economics.”
I said, “But aren’t you happy now, doing what you’re doing?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” I said, “you’ve got your home, and your people, and your family. You have a job. You have your place.”
Donny smiled. “A reservation is a place from the past. The Indian way of life is mostly history. It’s good that there are people like Delbert, and reservations, so we don’t forget the old ways. But Indians need help to live in the modern world.”
That was a letdown for me, hearing him talk like that. Being on the reservation had me so mellowed out that I couldn’t imagine finding anything wrong with it. As far as it being something out of the past, that was the best thing about it as far as I could see.
Donny Thunderbird went on. “I’ve got lots of other relatives up in the hills. They live the old ways. They still hoe the corn with elk antlers and they make arrows by rubbing sticks between two stones; the arrows get sold in the souvenir shops. But my people can’t improve themselves by living the old ways, because the rest of the world doesn’t live the old ways. One way that Indians need to become modern in is agriculture, and I’ve always been interested in crops and farming.”
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