by Win Blevins
We mounted the standards in the holes and staked and strung them with rope. We took care with the level work. Hey, a basketball court, kind of snazzy!
Over supper I talked some with Jamie and his brothers, Evin and Lee, and even felt some comradeship with them. They’d ignored me at school—I was a blanket Indian, and too far behind them in grades anyway—but now we were starting to be friends.
“When’ll it be set, Dad?” That was Jamie asking Gordon.
“We’ll put the backboard up tomorrow after dinner.”
“Come for dinner and we’ll play,” Jamie said to me. He had big buck teeth that made him look funny, but he was simple and sincere.
I couldn’t help myself. “Washtay!”
The wild part of it was, I could jump, I could really jump, and it was fun.
First Jamie wanted to play horse, and I lost every game. Except for a little fooling around alone on the schoolyard at Kyle, I’d never touched a basketball. I was poor at shooting and terrible at dribbling. Jamie, Evin, and Lee were terrific, natural athletes playing their sport.
So I wanted to try something different, anything different. I’d watched kids play defense on the schoolyard, and thought I’d do better at that. I said to Jamie, “You shoot, I’ll defend.”
His face lit up. “For money?”
I scowled and took position. “For the honor of the True Bull family,” I said, mock-growling.
Jamie bounced the ball lightly a few times, holding my eyes, deciding. Then he made a crossover step, went around me like I was a snubbing post, and flashed in for the lay-up.
Swat! He couldn’t have been more surprised when I whacked the ball against the backboard. I was shocked myself.
I’d got beat on the first couple of steps, but I came hard behind him, and when he laid it against the backboard, I leapt over him and knocked it away.
“Illegal!” snapped Jamie, glaring at me.
“Pretty damn neat, though,” said Evin. “Let me try you.”
He faked toward the basket, made a quick step back, and shot from the foul line.
I took the fake, got caught too far under, lunged back out, and blocked it clean.
“Hot diggety damn,” says Jamie. He liked that expression.
Lee tried me, Jamie tried again, they all tried. Short jumpers, driving lay-ups, hooks, finger-rolls, everything. I got a hand on about half the shots. Hey! Though I was bulky, then, now, and forever, I was tall and I could jump.
Couldn’t dribble. Couldn’t shoot. Couldn’t pass worth a damn. Couldn’t drive. But I had quick feet to stay in front of a ball handler, I could jump, and I had a natural timing for blocking shots.
I was loving it.
We played three against one, long shots forbidden. They had to come under the basket to shoot. Point for them if they scored, point for me if I blocked it.
They did some nifty passing. First game, they’d fake, get me in the air, pass it to another guy, and he’d score. I got whipped something like 20–3.
Lee showed me how to read the fake, wait for the jump. Next I got whipped 20–10.
Third game I actually won.
We played until suppertime, and I rode the dun home in the dark.
I went back every day the whole Christmas break. Jamie, Evin, and Lee gave me real tutelage at basketball, and I loved it. At the end of the two weeks I had three pretty good skills. I could block shots, I could rebound, and I could make lay-ups.
On the last day, when I was ready to ride home, the three of them kind of lined up and spoke their piece. “We want you to come out for the team.” That was Jamie.
“Yeah,” said Lee.
“You can do it,” chipped in Evin.
I shook my head. I shuffled my feet. I mumbled something.
“Forget it, Bud,” said Jamie, “we’re not taking no for an answer. You can do it, and you’re gonna do it.”
“Team can use a big defender,” added Evin.
I rode home slowly, my head in the clouds.
That night, packing my stuff, I found the bottle I’d bought from Plebus. Held it. Turned it around and around in my hands. Looked at my face distorted wide on its round surface.
I didn’t see the young man who’d wanted to do away with himself.
That young man seemed like another person.
I felt all jiminy-jeepers about that.
Hadn’t learned yet that the blackness is never another person—it’s you, in the shadow of the raven’s wing. You seldom get out from under, not for long, anyway, Not if you’re an Indian. But for the moment, I was out.
Jamie took me to Coach Ragsdale the first day back. He took a look at what I could do, and what I couldn’t, and said quiet-like, “Be at practice this afternoon. Monty will check you out some gear.”
Hoka hey, Indian teams don’t operate like others.
What you gotta understand is, basketball is king on the rez. Anymore these days, young men have no other way to win honors. In the 1990s you gonna steal ponies or scalp enemies? The hunting is damn near zero. You can’t hardly get a decent job, can’t much provide for your family. The Pine Ridge rez, where I come from, is the poorest county in the U.S.A.—highest unemployment, lowest income per capita. How do you think that makes us men feel?
In the old days a man got his rep by striking coups, and then counting those coups in front of all the people. That’s how he got respect, got a woman, earned his place in the tribe.
Nowadays there aren’t any coups. So we go for the closest substitute—points, assists, rebounds, and blocks, and a big crowd to cheer us on.
We go for the closest thing to war, games against other high schools, Indian and white.
The women do their old-time trilling for a good play.
Instead of the scalps on a coup stick getting you laid, it’s that uniform.
So when Coach said, “Be at practice this afternoon,” that fired me up. I got stoked. I was somebody.
That first season I didn’t get to suit up for a game—Coach was waiting until I learned the ropes and saving my eligibility. But I started to do good in class. I wanted to speak English beyond “fast break” and “dunk.” Soon as I got interested, they put me up a couple of grades.
My second season, first game, Coach subbed me in to guard a big center. Blocked his first shot, and one more after that. Also got two rebounds, turned the ball over twice, and missed the rim twice from two feet, a line score of twos. After that Coach put me in the rotation, and I got some minutes.
The next three seasons at Kyle I started at center. By then I was my full height, six-six, I could jump like an antelope. I didn’t have much bulk, but I was quick and agile and such a good leaper I felt like I could defend any center in South Dakota. Most of all, I had a big wing span, bigger than a crow, more like a raven.
Pretty quick I learned enough English to flirt after the game with any white girl at any Dairy Queen in the state.
Coach Ragsdale taught me several things I have never forgotten, aside from basketball. He’d do a thing with his hips and shoulders and say, “You wanna be tough, you gotta swagger.” I am still pretty good at swagger. He’d lean into my face (actually up at my face) and glower and command, “You wanna play big defense, you can’t back down, not ever.” And he taught that the family (in that case the team) is more important than the individual. “Here’s where the individual really, truly gets his highest and best by throwing himself into the family, the team. Feel that energy moving you as one creature, feel where you need to be, what you need to do to be a perfect part of that. This is one of the meanings of mitakuye oyasin.”
Thanks, Coach.
I wish I had learned as much in my classes as I did from Coach Ragsdale, but the classroom still wasn’t my thing. I wasn’t a scholar at anything. I did graduate, though, and I did start playing guitar. The used guitar, of indifferent quality, was a gift from Emile one birthday. First music was folk, I think because the songs were little stories, not newspaper stories but somethi
ng more universal, little ways of telling how this romance felt, and that lost love, people expressing the goodness and the sadness of their lives. Anyway, what time I didn’t spend practicing or playing I spent picking that guitar, and I got pretty good.
Need I say that my music led to many adventures, plenty of wonders, and all sorts of trouble?
Juto the White World
My music and Coach Ragsdale opened a door that changed my life. You be the judge whether good or bad.
Coach got me a basketball scholarship to Mary College up in Devil’s Lake, North Dakota, and reading taught me the ropes enough to take it.
Mary was one of those places you never heard of, an NAIA school that took a fair number of Indian students and a few Indian ballplayers. At big schools, known schools, scholarships for Indian players were never-never. Just didn’t happen. Think about it. There’s a pipeline from the ghettos to college ball. How many Indian players you ever see on TV? In high school we’re the best players in the whole mountains and plains region. We’re shut out of college, except for the places you never heard of.
We’re not gonna talk reasons, least I get mad.
Coach Ragsdale finagled this athletic scholarship, and the tribe came up with a stipend. I was leery of it at first. Can’t tell you what it’s like to come off the rez and live among white people, and going to college was definitely doing that. To us they are pushy, impolite, indecorous, and generally out of line. We don’t understand them, they don’t understand us. You white folks who’ve gone to Mexico and been irritated by Mexican slowness will know what I mean.
And Coach came up with the one thing more I needed—like a roommate, only better, someone who would put me up, listen to me, help me out, steer me. No one needed one more, and my guide was named Bradley Dornan.
I was skeptical, living with some old teammate of Coach. Bradley was a grizzled, pipe-smoking black bachelor with degrees in communications, as the college called it. He ran the radio station. He broadcast the basketball games. He was a guy of wry humor and a skewed sense of life who never fit anywhere but was amused wherever he went. He let me have the basement apartment in his old Victorian. He fed me. He gave me advice about life and basketball. He listened to me when times were hard. He turned out to be my best friend.
Wouldn’t this piss parents off? You get the important part of your college education from three people, your roommate, the one professor you hit it off with, and one professor you can’t stand. My roommate was Bradley. He introduced me to the traditional college vices, getting loaded and getting high. He played guitar duets with me. And he showed me the way around the best of all your music, the blues. Bradley had an incredible collection of old-time blues musicians on 78s, the music that came up the rivers to Memphis, St. Louis, and Chicago—Blind Lemon Jefferson, Mississippi John Hurt, Henry Johnson, Huddie Ledbetter, Muddy Waters. Unfortunately, I also contracted from Bradley one of the intellectual diseases of our age. You call it agnosticism. I call it being a Great White Doubter.
Before I get to that, I’ll tell the other parts of my college career. The basketball went fine. Played all four years, did good, starter the last two years. Never considered trying to go pro—not big enough, neither high nor wide. I had a lot of fun. My teammates called me Wings (another one of my gajillion names, inspired by Crow)—it was for my long arms to block shots, and the fans picked up on it. It was fun.
I learned that white college girls think of athletes as, well, stallions standing at stud. I got irritated about that sometimes. Other times I took advantage of it.
I did okay in my studies. My freshman English teacher was the one prof I couldn’t stand, the blonde, fair Mrs. Standish, who looked like she’d just graduated from Young Republicans. She was always on my ass about one thing or another. Mainly, it was what she called my attitude. One day Mrs. Standish put it to me hard; she asked me, “Why are you all angry at white people? Isn’t that visiting the sins of the fathers upon the sons? Is that fair?”
I said I’d tell her in one of those papers we had to turn in every Friday. Here it is. I forgot about it, but Emile saved it all those years.
Your ancestors did the stomp dance on my ancestors, yes, and that’s a pisser.
You say, that was then, this is now. We’re not doing the stomp dance anymore. Not fair to visit the sins of the fathers on the sons.
Yeah, it’s not fair. So let’s talk about your own sins, right now.
It’s impossible for traditional Indians to live the way we want to today. We accept most of the compromises with good hearts. We start our cedar burning with cigarette lighters, and we drive to Sun Dance. But our old hunting life is gone. Our old religion is in tatters (your government consciously worked to destroy it). The ways that made us a people, that gave us a good life—they’re gone. You made the world we live in, we didn’t. In this world money and material things, that’s what counts. In our world nature counted for more, spiritual things counted for more. Your poet Housman wrote, “A stranger and afraid in a world I never made.” Though we’re past being afraid, we feel like strangers in your world.
We’re poor, very poor. Meanwhile, you’re prospering on the lands you took from us with smooth words and bullets. How about a good example that happened to my people? The Homestake is the richest gold mine in world history. It sits in the middle of the Black Hills, which you signed over to us for as long as the grass grows and water runs downhill. When you found out there was gold in the Hills, you land-grabbed them. Your own Supreme Court says that’s in violation of the treaty.
And how is that today? The mine is still producing gold. Every day now, every year for a century, it has minted money that made you rich and us poor. When my nieces have to hitchhike, the thought of the Homestake makes me mad.
More. You’re doing the Great White Father crap. You control tribal governments through your Bureau of Indian Affairs. You give us the housing you think we need, the job training programs you think we need. You try to tell us how to use the minerals on our lands—our own sovereign lands—or not use them.
[I wrote this paper in 1974. Today I’d add that you want to tell us whether we can have gambling on our lands.]
I am warming to the subject. You assume we are lazy, dumb, shiftless, drunken, etc. (The black folks have told you about that.) Whether you want to help us because of it, or look down on us because of it, the assumption is in your faces—lazy, etc.
Which reminds me. You treat us like a conquered people. Some of you are proud of that, some ashamed of it. Either way, equally, you regard us as a conquered people. And you teach us to think of ourselves that way.
Think about that. What does it do to people, thinking of themselves as conquered, subjugated, defeated?
Last thing. Some of you believe we are noble savages, some believe we are dirty savages. Notice what those labels have in common—the word savage. Some of you idealize us, most of you despise us. Either way, we’re not people to you, regular folks to hang out with. You don’t see us. You see Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull way clearer than you see me and my relatives today. Five hundred years after you got here, we are ever more the invisible people. And that pisses me off.
What did Mrs. Standish say about my paper? Well, she made notes about spelling, comma splices, and vulgar language. She commended me for quoting Housman. About the content of the paper she said not one word. She gave me a B.
Afterward, I looked up comma splice. It means running sentences together without a period. Ever since, I have written all of those I want.
Generally, I made good grades. Thought I’d major in Indian Studies, which was hot in those days. My first teacher was a Chicago Jew named Ron Sternberg. He was the one professor I hit it off with, the person who changed my life. He was the sort of teacher common in the seventies who’s probably on the outs now, was a hippie, a child of the sixties, with a Jewish Afro, jean jackets, and Birkenstocks. He was wild about his subject, anthropology, and completely devoted to his students. He hung out in
the student union with us, drank beer with us (he wouldn’t smoke dope because it would get him fired), drank endless cups of coffee with us, and talked about books, movies, philosophy, anthropology, and life. To spend an evening with Bradley and Ron was to go roaming through the whole world of ideas and the life of the mind. (Remember, what the white man sees as the life of the mind is not the life of the spirit.) The first personal thing Ron ever said to me was that I should major in Anthro and not Indian Studies, which for me would be a free ride. That’s how I became an anthropology major in college.
It was Bradley and Ron who, without any particular intention, set me to thinking like a white man big-time. One night right before fall practice started we went to see Straw Dogs, a Sam Peckinpah movie that Bradley and I loved and Ron hated. We stayed up half the night drinking beer and talking about the movie, and the other half playing blues and talking about life. That night we added considerably to the decor—Bradley and I were ornamenting my apartment with the world’s largest collections of beer cans, stacked floor to ceiling in the living room, all Budweiser for looks. Eventually it got so I had just a corridor to the sofa, TV, and coffee table—the rest was red, white, and blue aluminum.
Peckinpah’s movie was said to be based on some books by Robert Ardrey, African Genesis and Territorial Imperative, which in turn were based on the work of anthropologist Raymond Dart. We went up and down and across, conversationally, about what they meant, these anthropologists’ discoveries about the origin of mankind—Dart’s evidence that human beings millions of years ago were meat eaters. The discoveries of the Leakeys at the Olduvai Gorge and Koobi Fora that proved humankind is much older than previously thought, and the implications of that for our notions of our human ancestry. We debated the Peckinpah-Ardrey notion of violence as a fundamental of human nature against the position that human beings were ancestrally vegetarians and cooperative, rather than competitive.
