People talk about the “Indian drinking problem,” but we say that it is a white problem. White men invented whiskey and brought it to America. They manufacture, advertise, and sell it to us. They make the profit on it and cause the conditions that make Indians drink in the first place.
CHAPTER 5
Aimlessness
I am roaming,
Roaming,
Restless,
Aimless.
In the snow I see
My ancestors’
Bloody footprints,
Moccasin prints.
My old boots are worn
And down at the heels.
On what road am I?
The white man’s road,
Or the Indians’?
There are no signposts.
The road is uphill,
And the wind in my face.
Still I go on.
—Yellow Bird
I was a loner, always. I was not interested in dresses, makeup, or perfume, the kinds of things some girls are keen on. I was scared of white people and uneasy in their company, so I did not socialize with them. I could not relate to half-bloods and was afraid that full-bloods would not accept me. I could not share the values my mother lived by. For friends I had only a few girls who were like me and shared my thoughts. I had no place to go, but a great restlessness came over me, an urge to get away, no matter where. Nowhere was better than the place I was in. So I did what many of my friends had already done—I ran away. Barbara, being older, had already set the precedent. A clash with my mother had sent Barb on her way. My mother was, at that time, hard to live with. From her point of view, I guess, we were not easy to get along with either. We didn’t have a generation gap, we had a generation Grand Canyon. Mother’s values were Puritan. She was uptight. I remember when Barbara was about to have her baby, mom cussed her out. Barb was still in high school and my mother was cursing her, calling her a no-good whore, which really shook my sister up. Barb said, “I’m going to have your grandchild, I thought you’d be happy,” but my mother was just terrible, telling Barb that she was not her daughter anymore. My sister lost her baby. She had a miscarriage working in a kitchen detail one morning. They gave her a big, heavy dishpan full of cereal to carry and that caused it right there. She lost the baby. She could not get over mother’s attitude.
My other sister, Sandra, when she was going to have her eldest boy, Jeff, my mother did the same thing to her, saying, “What the hell are you trying to do to me? I can’t hold up my head among my friends!” She was more concerned about her neighbors’ attitude than about us. Barb told her, “Mom, if you don’t want us around, if you are ashamed of your own grandchildren, then, okay, we’ll leave.”
I understood how mom was feeling. She was wrapped up in a different culture altogether. We spoke a different language. Words did not mean to her what they meant to us. I felt sorry for her, but we were hurting each other. After Barbara lost her baby she brooded. It seemed as if in her mind she blamed mother for it, as if mother had willed that baby to die. It was irrational, but it was there all the same. Once mother told us after a particularly emotional confrontation, “If you ever need any help, don’t come to me!” Of course she did not mean it. She will stick up for us, always, but looking over her shoulder in case her friends should disapprove. To be able to hold up your head among what is called “the right kind of people,” that is important to her. She has a home, she has a car. She has TV and curtains at the windows. That’s where her head is. She is a good, hardworking woman, but she won’t go and find out what is really happening. For instance, a girl who worked with mother told her she couldn’t reach Barbara at work by phone. Immediately mom jumped to the conclusion that Barb had quit her job. So when my sister got home, she got on her case right away: “I just don’t give a damn about you kids! Quitting your job!” continuing in that vein.
Barb just rang up her boss and handed the phone to mom, let her know from the horse’s mouth that she had not quit. Then she told mother: “Next time find out and make sure of the facts before you get on my case like that. And don’t be so concerned about jobs. There are more important things in life than punching a time clock.”
There was that wall of misunderstanding between my mother and us, and I have to admit I did not help in breaking it down. I had little inclination to join the hang-around-the-fort Indians, so one day I just up and left, without saying good-bye. Joining up with other kids in patched Levi’s jackets and chokers, our long hair trailing behind us. We traveled and did not give a damn where to.
One or two kids acted like a magnet. We formed groups. I traveled with ten of those new or sometimes old acquaintances in one car all summer long. We had our bedrolls and cooking utensils, and if we ran out of something the pros among us would go and rip off the food. Rip off whatever we needed. We just drifted from place to place, meeting new people, having a good time. Looking back, a lot was based on drinking and drugs. If you had a lot of dope you were everybody’s friend, everybody wanted to know you. If you had a car and good grass, then you were about one of the best guys anybody ever knew.
It took me a while to see the emptiness underneath all this frenzied wandering. I liked pot. Barb was an acid freak. She told me she once dropped eight hits of LSD at a time. “It all depends on your mood, on your state of mind,” she told me. “If you have a stable mind, it’s going to be good. But if you are in a depressed mood, or your friend isn’t going to be able to handle it for you, then everything is distorted and you have a very hard time as that drug shakes you up.”
Once Barb took some acid in a girl friend’s bedroom. There was a huge flag on the wall upside down. The Stars and Stripes hanging upside down used to be an international signal of distress. It was also the American Indian’s sign of distress. The Ghost Dancers used to wrap themselves in upside-down flags, dancing that way, crying for a vision until they fell down in a trance. When they came to, they always said that they had been in another world, the world as it was before the white man came, the prairie covered with herds of buffalo and tipi circles full of people who had been killed long ago. The flags which the dancers wore like blankets did not prevent the soldiers from shooting them down. Barb was lying on the bed and the upside-down flag began to work on her mind. She was watching it and it was just rippling up the wall like waves; the stripes and the stars would fall from the flag onto the floor and would scatter into thousands of sprays of light, exploding all over the room. She told me she did not quite know whether it was an old-fashioned vision or just a caricature of one, but she liked it.
After a while of roaming and dropping acid she felt burned out, her brain empty. She said she got tired of it, just one trip after the other. She was waiting, waiting for something, for a sign, but she did not know what she was waiting for. And like her, all the other roaming Indian kids were waiting, just as the Ghost Dancers had waited for the drumbeat, the message the eagle was to bring. I was waiting, too. In the meantime I kept traveling.
I was not into LSD but smoked a lot of pot. People have the idea that reservations are isolated, that what happens elsewhere does not touch them, but it does. We might not share in all the things America has to offer some of its citizens, but some things got to us, all right. The urban Indians from L.A., Rapid City, St. Paul, and Denver brought them to us on their visits. For instance, around 1969 or 1970 many half-grown boys in Rosebud were suddenly sniffing glue. If the ghetto Indians brought the city with them to the reservation, so we runaways dragged the res and its problems around with us in our bedrolls. Wherever we went we formed tiny reservations.
“You are an interesting subculture,” an anthropologist in Chicago told me during that time. I didn’t know whether that was an insult or a compliment. We both spoke English but could not understand each other. To him I was an interesting zoological specimen to be filed away someplace; to me he was merely ridiculous. But anthropologists are a story in themselves.
It is hard being forever on the move
and not having any money. We supported ourselves by shoplifting, “liberating” a lot of stuff. Many of us became real experts at this game. I was very good at it. We did not think that what we were doing was wrong. On the contrary, ripping off gave us a great deal of satisfaction, moral satisfaction. We were meting out justice in reverse. We had always been stolen from by white shopkeepers and government agents. In the 1880s and ‘90s a white agent on the reservation had a salary of fifteen hundred dollars a year. From this salary he managed to save within five or six years some fifty thousand dollars to retire. He simply stole the government goods and rations he was supposed to distribute among the Indians. On some reservations people were starving to death waiting for rations which never arrived because they had been stolen. In Minnesota the Sioux died like flies. When they complained to their head agent, he told them to eat grass. This set off the so-called Great Sioux Uprising of the 1860s, during which the Indians killed that agent by stuffing earth and grass down his throat.
Then the peddlers arrived with their horse-drawn wagons full of pins and needles, beads and calico, always with a barrel of Injun whiskey under the seat. In no time the wagons became log-cabin stores, the stores shopping emporiums which, over the years, blossomed into combination supermarkets-cafeterias-tourist traps-Indian antiques shops-craft centers-filling stations. The trading post at Wounded Knee which started with almost nothing was, after one short generation, worth millions of dollars.
It did not take a genius to get rich in this business. There was always only one store in any given area. You got your stuff there or you did not get it at all. Even now, trading posts charge much higher prices than stores in the cities charge for the same articles. The trading posts have no competition. They sell beads to Indian craftworkers at six times the price of what they buy them for in New York and pay the Indian artists in cans of beans, also at a big markup. They give Indians credit against lease money coming in months later—at outrageous interest rates. I have seen traders take Indian jewelry and old beadwork in pawn for five dollars’ worth of food and then sell it for hundreds of dollars to a collector when the Indian owner could not redeem the article within a given time. For this reason we looked upon shoplifting as just getting a little of our own back, like counting coup in the old days by raiding the enemy’s camp for horses.
I was built just right for the job. I looked much younger than I really was, and being so small I could pretend that I was a kid looking for her mother. If my friends were hungry and wanted something to eat, they would often send me to steal it. Once, early in the game, I was caught with a package of ham, cheese, bread, and sausages under my sweater. Suddenly there was this white guard grabbing me by the arm: “Come this way, come this way!” He was big and I was scared, shaking like a leaf. He was walking down the aisle ordering me to follow him, looking over his shoulder every two or three seconds to make sure that I was still behind him. Whenever he was not looking at me I threw the stuff back into the bins as I was passing them. Just threw them to both sides. So when I finally got to the back they searched me and found nothing. I said: “You goddam redneck. Just because I’m an Indian you are doing this to me. I’m going to sue you people for slander, for making a false arrest.” They had to apologize, telling me it had been a case of mistaken identity. I was fifteen at the time.
There was a further reason for our shoplifting. The store owners provoked it. They expected us to steal. Being Indian, if you went into a store, the proprietor or salesperson would watch you like a hawk. They’d stand next to you, two feet away, with their arms crossed, watching, watching. They didn’t do that with white customers. If you took a little time choosing an item they’d be at your elbow at once, hovering over you, asking, “May I help you?” Helping you was the furthest from their mind.
I’d say, “No, I’m just looking.” Then if they kept standing there, breathing down my neck, I’d say, “Hey, do you want something from me?” And they answer, “No, just watching.”
“Watching what? You think I’m gonna steal something?”
“No. Just watching.”
“Well, don’t stare at me.” But still they were standing there, following every move you made. By then the white customers would be staring, too. I didn’t mind, because I and the store owners were in an open, undeclared war, a war at first sight. But they treated even elderly, white-haired, and very respectable Indians the same way. In such situations even the most honest, law-abiding person will experience a mighty urge to pocket some article or other right under their noses. I knew a young teacher, a college graduate, who showed me a carton of cigarettes and a package of Tampax with that incredulous look on her face, saying, “Imagine, I stole this! I can’t believe it myself, but they made it impossible for me not to steal it. It was a challenge. What do I do now? I don’t even smoke.” I took it as a challenge, too.
While I was roving, an Indian couple in Seattle took me in, giving me food and shelter, treating me nice as if they had been my parents. The woman’s name was Bonnie and we became close friends in no time. I managed to rip off the credit card of a very elegant-looking lady—the wife of an admiral. Ship ahoy! I at once took my friend to a fancy store and told her to take anything she wanted. I “bought” her about two hundred dollars’ worth of clothes, courtesy of the navy. Another time I pointed out a similarly well-dressed woman to a store manager, saying, “I work for that lady over there. I’m supposed to take these packages to the car. She’ll pay you.” While the manager argued with the lady, I took off with the packages down the road and into the bushes.
Once I got a nice Indian turquoise ring, a bracelet, and a pin. I always admired the beautiful work of Indian artists, getting mad whenever I saw imitations made in Hong Kong or Taiwan. I learned to watch the storekeepers’ eyes. As long as their eyes are not on you, you are safe. As long as they are not watching your hands. You can also tell by the manner in which they talk to you. If they concentrate too much on your hands, then they won’t know what they are saying. It helps if you have a small baby with you, even a borrowed one. For some reason that relaxes their suspicions. I had no special technique except studying them, their gestures, their eyes, their lips, the signs that their bodies made.
I was caught only twice. The second time I happened to be in Dubuque, Iowa. That was after the occupation of Alcatraz, when the Indian civil rights movement started to get under way, with confrontations taking place between Indians and whites in many places. I had attached myself to a caravan of young militant skins traveling in a number of cars and vans. While the caravan stopped in Dubuque to eat and wash up, I went to a shopping mall, saw a sweater I liked, and quickly stuffed it under my Levi’s jacket.
I got out of the store all right, and walked across the parking lot where the caravan was waiting. Before I could join it, two security guards nabbed me. One of them said, “I want that sweater.” I told him, “But I don’t have no sweater.” He just opened my jacket and took the sweater from under my arm. They took me back to the office, going through my ID, putting down my name, all that kind of thing. They had a radio in the office going full blast and I could hear the announcer describing the citizens’ concern over a huge caravan of renegade Indians heading their way. One of the guards suddenly looked up at me and asked, “Are you by any chance one of those people?”
“Yeah,” I told him. “They’re just half a mile behind me and they’ll be here soon, looking for me.”
He said, “You don’t have to sign your name here. Just go. You can take that damn sweater too. Just get out of here!”
The incident made me realize that ripping off was not worth the risks I took. It also occurred to me there were better, more mature ways to fight for my rights.
Barb was less lucky. During the riots at Custer, South Dakota, she spent two days in the Rapid City jail. She was pulled in for third-degree burglary. It was the usual liberating of some food for which they were arrested, Barb and an Indian boy, but when she went before the judge and he told her that s
he was facing fifteen years, it made her sit up. She too started to reflect that if you had to go to jail it shouldn’t be for a Saran-Wrapped chicken worth two bucks.
Most of the arrests occurred not for what we did, but for what we were and represented—for being skins. For Instance once, near Martin, South Dakota, we had a flat tire and pulled off the road to fix it. It was late at night, dark, and very cold. While the boys were attending to the car, we girls built a good-sized fire to warm our backsides and make some coffee, coffee—pejuta sapa—being what keeps a roaming skin going. A fire truck went by. We did not pay any attention to it. A little while later the truck came back followed by two police cars. The police stared at us but kept on going, but pretty soon they made a U-turn and came back.
Across the road stood a farmhouse. The owner had called the police saying that Indians were about to burn his house down. All we were doing was fixing the tire and making coffee. The farmer had us arrested on a charge of attempted arson, trespassing, disturbing the peace, and destroying private property—the latter because in building our fire we had used one of his rotten fence posts. We spent two days in jail and then were found not guilty.
Little by little, those days in jail began adding up. We took such things in stride because they happened all the time, but subconsciously, I think, they had an effect upon us. During the years I am describing, in some Western states, the mere fact of being Indian and dressing in a certain way provoked the attention of the police. It resulted in having one’s car stopped for no particular reason, in being pulled off the street on the flimsiest excuse, in being constantly shadowed and harassed. It works subtly on your mind until you start to think that if they keep on arresting you anyway you should at least give them a good reason for it.
I kept on moving, letting the stream carry me. It got to a point where I always looked forward to my next joint, my next bottle of gin. Even when the friends around me seemed to cool down I could not stop. Once I got hold of fifty white cross tablets—speed—and started taking them. The people I saw in the streets were doing it, why shouldn’t I do it also? It gave me a bad case of the shakes and made me conclude that roving was not that much fun anymore. But I knew of no other way to exist.
Lakota Woman Page 6
