Sexually our roaming bands, even after we had been politically sensitized and joined AIM, were free, very free and wild. If some boy saw you and liked you, then right away that was it. “If you don’t come to bed with me, wincincala, I got somebody else who’s willing to.” The boys had that kind of attitude and it caused a lot of trouble for Barb and myself, because we were not that free. If we got involved we always took it seriously. Possibly our grandparents’ and mother’s staunch Christianity and their acceptance of the missionaries’ moral code had something to do with it. They certainly tried hard to implant it in us, and though we furiously rejected it, a little residue remained.
There is a curious contradiction in Sioux society. The men pay great lip service to the status women hold in the tribe. Their rhetoric on the subject is beautiful. They speak of Grandmother Earth and how they honor her. Our greatest culture hero—or rather heroine—is the White Buffalo Woman, sent to us by the Buffalo nation, who brought us the sacred pipe and taught us how to use it. According to the legend, two young hunters were the first humans to meet her. One of them desired her physically and tried to make love to her, for which he was immediately punished by lightning reducing him to a heap of bones and ashes.
We had warrior women in our history. Formerly, when a young girl had her first period, it was announced to the whole village by the herald, and her family gave her a big feast in honor of the event, giving away valuable presents and horses to celebrate her having become a woman. Just as men competed for war honors, so women had quilling and beading contests. The woman who made the most beautiful fully beaded cradleboard won honors equivalent to a warrior’s coup. The men kept telling us, “See how we are honoring you ...” Honoring us for what? For being good beaders, quillers, tanners, moccasin makers, and child-bearers. That is fine, but... In the governor’s office at Pierre hangs a big poster put up by Indians. It reads:
WHEN THE WHITE MAN
DISCOVERED THIS COUNTRY
INDIANS WERE RUNNING IT—
NO TAXES OR TELEPHONES.
WOMEN DID ALL THE WORK—
THE WHITE MAN THOUGHT
HE COULD IMPROVE UPON
A SYSTEM LIKE THAT.
If you talk to a young Sioux about it he might explain: “Our tradition comes from being warriors. We always had to have our bow arms free so that we could protect you. That was our job. Every moment a Pawnee, or Crow, or white soldier could appear to attack you. Even on the daily hunt a man might be killed, ripped up by a bear or gored by a buffalo. We had to keep our hands free for that. That is our tradition.”
“So, go already,” I tell them. “Be traditional. Get me a buffalo!”
They are still traditional enough to want no menstruating women around. But the big honoring feast at a girl’s first period they dispense with. For that they are too modern. I did not know about menstruating until my first time. When it happened I ran to my grandmother crying, telling her, “Something is wrong. I’m bleeding!” She told me not to cry, nothing was wrong. And that was all the explanation I got. They did not comfort me, or give horses away in my honor, or throw the red ball, or carry me from the menstruation hut to the tipi on a blanket in a new white buckskin outfit. The whole subject was distasteful to them. The feast is gone, only the distaste has remained.
It is not that a woman during her “moontime” is considered unclean, but she is looked upon as being “too powerful.” According to our old traditions a woman during her period possesses a strange force which could render a healing ceremony ineffective. For this reason it is expected that we stay away from all rituals while menstruating. One old man once told me, “Woman on her moon is so strong that if she spits on a rattlesnake, that snake dies.” To tell the truth I never felt particularly powerful while being “on my moon.”
I was forcefully raped when I was fourteen or fifteen. A good-looking young man said, “Come over here, kid, let me buy you a soda"—and I fell for it. He was about twice my weight and a foot taller than I am. He just threw me on the ground and pinned me down. I do not want to remember the details. I kicked and scratched and bit but he came on like a steamroller. Ripped my clothes apart, ripped me apart. I was too embarrassed and ashamed to tell anyone what had happened to me. I think I worked off my rage by slashing a man’s tires.
Rapes on the reservations are a big scandal. The victims are mostly full-blood girls, too shy and afraid to complain. A few years back the favorite sport of white state troopers and cops was to arrest young Indian girls on a drunk-and-disorderly, even if the girls were sober, take them to the drunk tanks in their jails, and there rape them. Sometimes they took the girls in their squad cars out into the prairie to “show you what a white man can do. I’m really doin’ you a favor, kid.” After they had done with them, they often kicked the girls out of their cars and drove off. Then the girl who had been raped had to walk five or ten miles home on top of everything else. Indian girls accusing white cops are seldom taken seriously in South Dakota. “You know how they are,” the courts are told, “they’re always asking for it.” Thus there were few complaints for rapes or, as a matter of fact, for forced sterilizations. Luckily this is changing as our women are less reluctant to bring these things into the open.
I like men as friends, like to socialize with them, to know them. But going to bed with one is a commitment. You take responsibility for each other. But responsibility in a relationship was not what our young men wanted, some ninety percent of them. They just wanted to hop in the sack with us. Then they’d be friends. If you didn’t cooperate then they were no longer interested in you as a person. With some of them, their whole courtship consists in pointing at you and then back at their tent, sleeping bag, or bedroll, saying, “Woman, come!” I won’t come that easily. So I was a lot by myself and happy that way.
Once I played a joke on one of our great macho warriors, a good-looking guy, a lady’s man. Women were always swarming over him, especially white groupies. One night, during a confrontation in California, I was lying in my sleeping bag when the great warrior (and he is a great warrior, I don’t call him that facetiously) suddenly came up: “I had a little fight with my old lady. Can I share your sleeping bag?”
He did not wait for an answer but at once wedged himself in. This happened before Wounded Knee when I was in my eighth month. He put his hand upon my breast. I did not say anything. Then his hand wandered farther down, coming to a sudden stop atop that big balloon of a belly. “What in hell is this?” I smiled at him very sweetly. “Oh, I’m just about to have my baby. I think I feel my birth pangs coming on right now!” He got out of the sleeping bag even faster than he had crept in.
One Sioux girl whose lover had left her for a Crow woman was making up forty-niner songs about him. Forty-niners are songs which are half English and half Indian, common to all tribes, often having to do with love and sometimes funny or biting. We were always singing them while we were on the move. So that girl made up this one:
Honey, you left me for to go,
Crow Fair and Indian Rodeo,
Hope you get the diarrhea,
Heya—heya—heya.
It became a great favorite with us, though I don’t remember all of it. One song was all Indian except for the refrain: “Sorry, no pizza today.” But to sum up: our men were magnificent and mean at the same time. You had to admire them. They had to fight their own men’s lib battles. They were incredibly brave in protecting us, they would literally die for us, and they always stood up for our rights—against outsiders!
Sexual harassment causes a lot of fights between Indians and whites. Our boys really try to protect us against this. At Pierre, South Dakota’s state capital, during a trial of AIM Indians, a lot of us came to lend our moral support, filling the motel, eight to ten people in a room. Barb was with a group occupying three rooms on the ground floor. On her way out to go to the car for some stuff, she passed three cowboy-type white boys leaning against a wall drinking beer and wine. Barb said she could smell the liquo
r on their breath from some ways off. They at once hemmed her in, making their usual remarks: “Look at the tits on that squaw. Watch her shaking her ass at us. I bet we could show that Injun squaw a good time,” speculating aloud how it would be having her. My sister tried to ignore them, but in the end just turned around and ran back into the motel. The only one she could find there was Tom Poor Bear, an Oglala boy from Pine Ridge. Barb told him that some honkies had been harassing her outside. Tom at once went out with her and these cowboys again started with the same kind of shit, the same sort of sexual harassment. When they noticed Poor Bear they slowly began walking off. Tom called to them, “Hey, you guys come back and apologize.”
The cowboy who had made the most offensive remarks turned around and fingered Poor Bear. He was grinning. “I don’t apologize to her kind ever. She’s nothing but a squaw.”
Poor Bear told him, “You motherfucker, I’ll show you who’s nothing!” Then the fight started, all three of them jumping Tom, stomping him, three wasičuns against one skin. So again Barb scrambled back into the motel and in the lobby ran into Bobby Leader Charge, a Rosebud boy who was only fifteen years old at the time. Young as he was, Bobby just came out of that lobby like a thunderbolt, according to Barb, and joined the fight. By that time the cowboys had been reinforced by three more friends and again we were badly outnumbered. They were beating up on Poor Bear and Leader Charge, really hurting them, kicking them in the groin, going after their eyes. So once again Barbara was trying to round up more help. Luckily, at that moment Russel with the Means brothers and Coke Millard appeared at the motel. The whole sling of them rushed out. The honkies tried to get away, but were not fast enough. Coke Millard knocked one of them right over the top of a parked car. One cowboy got knocked out, just lying there. Another tried crawling away on his hands and knees. The others had run for it. This finished the incident as far as our men were concerned, and all went back to the motel.
But it was not finished. In no time the whole motel was lit up with searchlights as about half a dozen squad cars pulled up in front of it with their red lights flashing and sirens howling. Out of each car stepped two troopers with riot guns, helmets, and plastic shields, positioning themselves at both sides of each car. Already the loudspeaker was blaring: “This is the sheriff speaking. You Indians in there, you are wanted for assault and battery. We know you’re in there. Come on out with your hands on your heads or we’ll come in shooting!” Barb and the others peeked out from behind their window shades. Seeing the muzzles of all those riot guns and sawed-off shotguns pointing at them, they had little desire to come out. South Dakota police are notoriously trigger-happy when dealing with Indians, especially AIM people. One of the Means brothers went to the telephone and called up a white friend of ours who was in an upstairs room with one of the lawyers, helping with the trials. He told him to get his ass down to their room double quick, to bring the lawyer, and please, not to ask any foolish questions, just to hurry up.
It was two o’clock in the morning and very cold. Somehow it is always exceedingly hot or very, very cold in South Dakota. So, looking down from my room on the second floor I saw the two of them shivering, none too happy walking between the motel wall and the row of squad cars and troopers pointing their guns. Then I saw two pairs of hands reaching for them out of Room 108 and yanking them inside. I did not know at the time what it was all about. Barbara told me later that the two of them started negotiating by phone with the sheriff saying, “Our Indian friends and clients have been assaulted by a bunch of vicious, white, drunken, would-be rapists, but they are willing to withdraw these charges if your cowboys withdraw theirs.”
While they were arguing back and forth on the phone, the others had a little problem with Coke, who had consumed a few beers and was singing his death song: “It’s a good day to die! Let me out of here! I want to die a warrior’s death. Let me count coup on them pigs! Hoka-hay!” They had to hold him back, literally sitting on him in order to keep him from going outside and getting himself killed. In the end both sides agreed to withdraw charges and call it quits to prevent a massacre. The squad cars drove off and all was quiet again, but it had been a near thing. There is always the danger for us that one little incident will set off a major confrontation.
Looking back upon my roving days, it is hard to say whether they were good or bad, or whether I accomplished or learned anything by being endlessly, restlessly on the move. If nothing else, my roaming gave me a larger outlook and made me more Indian, made me realize what being an Indian within a white world meant. My aimlessness ended when I encountered AIM.
CHAPTER 6
We AIM Not to Please
They call us the New Indians.
Hell, we are the Old Indians,
the landlords of this continent,
coming to collect the rent.
—Dennis Banks
The American Indian Movement hit our reservation like a tornado, like a new wind blowing out of nowhere, a drumbeat from far off getting louder and louder. It was almost like the Ghost Dance fever that had hit the tribes in 1890, old uncle Dick Fool Bull said, spreading like a prairie fire. It even was like the old Ghost Dance song Uncle Dick was humming:
Maka sitomniya teca ukiye
Oyate ukiye, oyate ukiye . . .
A new world is coming,
A nation is coming,
The eagle brought the message.
I could feel this new thing, almost hear it, smell it, touch it. Meeting up with AIM for the first time loosened a sort of earthquake inside me. Old Black Elk in recounting his life often used the expression “As I look down from the high hill of my great old age...” Well, as I am looking from the hill of my old age—I am thirty-seven now but feel as if I have lived for a long time—I can see things in perspective, not subjectively, no, but in perspective. Old Black Elk had a good way of saying it. You really look back upon ten years gone past as from a hill—you have a sort of bird’s-eye view. I recognize now that movements get used up and the leaders get burned out quickly. Some of our men and women got themselves killed and thereby avoided reaching the dangerous age of thirty and becoming “elder statesmen.” Some leaders turned into college professors, founded alternative schools, or even took jobs as tribal officials. A few live on in the past, refusing to recognize that the dreams of the past must give way to the dreams of the future. I, that wild, rebellious teenager of ten years ago, am nursing a baby, changing diapers, and making breakfast for my somewhat extended family. And yet it was great while it lasted and I still feel that old excitement merely talking about it. Some people loved AIM, some hated it, but nobody ignored it.
I loved it. My first encounter with AIM was at a powwow held in 1971 at Crow Dog’s place after the Sun Dance. Pointing at Leonard Crow Dog, I asked a young woman, “Who is that man?”
“That’s Crow Dog,” she said. I was looking at his long, shining braids. Wearing one’s hair long at the time was still something of a novelty on the res. I asked, “Is that his real hair?”
“Yes, that’s his real hair.”
I noticed that almost all of the young men wore their hair long, some with eagle feathers tied to it. They all had on ribbon shirts. They had a new look about them, not that hangdog reservation look I was used to. They moved in a different way, too, confident and swaggering, the girls as well as the boys. Belonging to many tribes, they had come in a dilapidated truck covered with slogans and paintings. They had traveled to the Sun Dance all the way from California, where they had taken part in the occupation of Alcatraz Island.
One man, a Chippewa, stood up and made a speech. I had never heard anybody talk like that. He spoke about genocide and sovereignty, about tribal leaders selling out and kissing ass—white man’s ass. He talked about giving up the necktie for the choker, the briefcase for the bedroll, the missionary’s church for the sacred pipe. He talked about not celebrating Thanksgiving, because that would be celebrating one’s own destruction. He said that white people, after stealing our l
and and massacring us for three hundred years, could not come to us now saying, “Celebrate Thanksgiving with us, drop in for a slice of turkey.” He had himself wrapped up in an upside-down American flag, telling us that every star in this flag represented a state stolen from Indians.
Then Leonard Crow Dog spoke, saying that we had talked to the white man for generations with our lips, but that he had no ears to hear, no eyes to see, no heart to feel. Crow Dog said that now we must speak with our bodies and that he was not afraid to die for his people. It was a very emotional speech. Some people wept. An old man turned to me and said, “These are the words I always wanted to speak, but had kept shut up within me.”
I asked one of the young men, “What kind of Indians are you?” “We are AIM,” he told me, “American Indian Movement. We’re going to change things.”
AIM was born in 1968. Its fathers were mostly men doing time in Minnesota prisons, Ojibways. It got its start in the slums of St. Paul taking care of Indian ghetto problems. It was an Indian woman who gave it its name. She told me, “At first we called ourselves ‘Concerned Indian Americans’ until somebody discovered that the initials spelled CIA. That didn’t sound so good. Then I spoke up: ‘You guys all aim to do this, or you aim to do that. Why don’t you call yourselves AIM, American Indian Movement?’ And that was that.”
In the beginning AIM was mainly confined to St. Paul and Minneapolis. The early AIM people were mostly ghetto Indians, often from tribes which had lost much of their language, traditions, and ceremonies. It was when they came to us on the Sioux reservations that they began to learn about the old ways. We had to learn from them, too. We Sioux had lived very isolated behind what some people called the “Buckskin Curtain.” AIM opened a window for us through which the wind of the 1960s and early ‘70s could blow, and it was no gentle breeze but a hurricane that whirled us around. It was after the traditional reservation Indians and the ghetto kids had gotten together that AIM became a force nationwide. It was flint striking flint, lighting a spark which grew into a flame at which we could warm ourselves after a long, long winter.
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