Lakota Woman

by Mary Crow Dog

  All this did not help Leonard get better treatment in jail. He was at times totally isolated from the outside world, not able to communicate, not knowing what was done on his behalf. When he was allowed to make his first telephone call from inside jail he said, “What will they do to me? Will they kill me like they killed Crazy Horse?”

  I asked him, “How are they treating you?”

  He said, “I have been handcuffed, fingerprinted, and humiliated by body searches. They won’t tell me where they are taking me next. They have taken everything from me. They have taken Crow Dog’s land. They have taken my elements, they have taken my human body away from my people. But they have not taken my mind. My mind is still free.” I tried not to let him hear me weep.

  The first thing they do in jail with a man like Crow Dog is try to break his will, to make him from a person into a number. One way to do this is the “holdover.” Leonard ignored all provocations. He was a model prisoner, never giving them an excuse for punishing him. But whenever he arrived at a new prison he was immediately put in isolation. At Lewisburg he was placed in a tiny cell, so small that he could neither fully stretch out nor stand upright. He asked, “Why are you punishing me? Why are you putting me in the hole?”

  They told him, “We are not punishing you, we just have to process you for some weeks before releasing you into the general prison population.”

  It was the same in Leavenworth, which Leonard calls the “big, bad granddaddy of penitentiaries.” They first took him through a maze of corridors and underground passages to a room which was just a cube of gray-green cement. Leonard had no idea in what part of the prison he was. The room had no windows, just artificial neon light which stayed on the whole two weeks he was there. Soon he no longer knew whether it was day or night, Monday or Friday, or whether the food he ate was breakfast or dinner. He had no clock or watch, and lost all sense of time. He saw only the hacks who brought him the food. To fight his disorientation, he sang old sacred Lakota and peyote songs. He said later that in this utter vacuum he taught himself an entirely new way of singing, and that is true. Since he came out of prison he sings peyote songs like nobody else, making it sound as if two or three men were singing. Also in some of these songs you can hear the voices of various birds, the cry of the roadrunner, the call of the water bird.

  It takes a particular type of human being to want to be a hack. Half of their waking hours they are prisoners themselves, inmates by their own free will. Uneducated and underpaid, the only thing they have going for them is feeling superior to the helpless prisoners. Here, at last, are men they can look down upon because they have them in their power. If they encounter a prisoner who makes them feel inferior or impotent they become enraged, because he threatens whatever feelings of self-esteem they have left. They try to bring such a man down to their own level by humiliating him. Leonard called it “mind torture.” So every day it was: “Spread your cheeks, chief, let’s see what you got up your asshole.”

  Almost from the first day he got anonymous hate letters, many of them saying that while he was incarcerated I was sleeping around with every Tom, Dick, and Harry. One letter read: “Crow Dog, you dumb Indian, your wife gets fucked by your best friends. We have cameras that can see in the dark. We photographed them while they were doing it. We bugged the motel room and have all their moans and groans on tape. Whenever you get bored doing time we can send you the pictures and tapes.” The guards bringing him these letters told him, “You know, mail is censored. So we can read your letters. Some wife you got. Maybe we’ll look her up some time.” Leonard only laughed in their faces. While he got these kind of letters promptly, some of my letters to him were never delivered.

  The hacks kept hassling Leonard all the time, saying, “If you are such a big-shot medicine man, why don’t you turn yourself into a bird and fly away?” They’d tell him, “Don’t you realize that you are in our custody, that we can do with you whatever we want, that we can put you in the hole whenever we feel like it, that we have absolute power over you?”

  Leonard would always answer, “You have no power at all. It is I who have the power. I have a legend. What legend do you have? What can you tell your children when you get home? What can you pass on to them?”

  They just would not leave him alone. Leonard wears his hair in the traditional style of two long braids. They always tried to cut his hair. Our lawyers had a running battle with various wardens proving that cutting his hair would be illegal. Finally, in May 1976, the warden at Lewisburg set a day and hour when Leonard’s hair would be cut, but his release on appeal was ordered just one day before the barbershop appointment.

  Christian prisoners are entitled to their priests and Bibles, Jews to their rabbis and Talmud. Leonard told the warden that the pipe was his bible, that he had a right to have it. It took months of petitions by our lawyers and the Indian Rights Association until we finally got a ruling which recognized the Native American Religion and gave Indian prisoners the right to have their sacred things and to pray with them. The warden at Terre Haute called Leonard into his office: “Crow Dog, I have an order to give you your pipe. Here it is.” Leonard asked, “Where are my pipe bag and tobacco?” The warden told him that the tobacco “was suspicious. It smells like some hippie drug. Sorry, chief. No can do.”

  Leonard tried to explain that, of course, this was a different kind of tobacco, chan-cha-sha, sacred red willow bark tobacco. The warden insisted that it was an illegal drug. Leonard told him that without the tobacco the pipe was no good to him, and gave the pipe back for the warden to keep until he was released.

  The hacks also harassed Crow Dog for speaking to his relatives on the phone in Lakota. They kept shouting at him, “Speak English so we can understand you. This is a white man’s country. You’re probably telling lies about us on the phone.”

  “You just have a bad conscience,” Leonard told them.

  They got back at him in other ways. One of the priests was gay and kept trying to fondle Leonard. He told the priest, “Father, maybe in your religion it’s all right to do this but in our religion medicine men don’t engage in this kind of activity.” At Leavenworth, almost every day, the punks and butt-winkles cleaning the tiers stood before Leonard’s “house” taunting him: “Come on, chief, put your dick through the bars so we can suck it. You might as well. You won’t have a woman for maybe ten years.”

  When Leonard ignored them they threw garbage into his cell. He told me that he was not bothered by these things, but they left their mark on him all the same. Then there were the shrinks. One psychiatrist asked Crow Dog whether he had any physical complaints. Crow Dog said he had an irritation. What kind of irritation? the shrink wanted to know. Crow Dog told him that the American government was irritating him. “Have you got a cure for breaking promises? Have you got a cure for lying?” The shrink said that Crow Dog had misunderstood him. What about physical sicknesses? Crow Dog pretended that it was the shrink who wanted to be cured. He offered to cedar him and get him some peyote tea. The man mumbled something and gave up. At Lewisburg a psychiatrist insisted that Leonard take Valium and Thorazine “to make him relaxed and happy while doing time.” Leonard told him that if they started that sort of psychological warfare they would lose, that with the help of Grandfather Peyote, he was a better psychiatrist than they were. “Don’t mess with my mind,” he told the Valium man, “or I’ll mess with yours.”

  “You Indians are all alike,” said the shrink, “hopeless!”

  One day after the Bicentennial, on July 5, 1976, the shrinks at Terre Haute tried again. One of them called Leonard into his office. As Leonard later described it to me, the man greeted him with a big smile, asking, “Crow Dog, how do you feel about the Bicentennial?” Crow Dog told him that for an Indian to celebrate that day was like a Jew celebrating Hitler, or a Japanese celebrating Hiroshima.

  “Very interesting,” said the psychiatrist. “I’m Jewish myself. What about the great men America is celebrating?”

  �
�Well,” Leonard told him, “Washington was a guy with short silk pants, a wig, and wooden teeth, who kept slaves. Then Columbus. He thought he had landed in India—only ten thousand miles off course. Then Custer—without us, you might have had him for a president. You ought to be grateful. You people elected a Nixon, an Agnew. I’m humble. I’m satisfied with Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse.”

  “Well, what do you think of me?”

  “I think you’re using me as a guinea pig.”

  “Well, you’re some guinea pig, Crow Dog, I’ll tell you. I give up. You don’t need me.”

  After that interview this shrink was always very nice to Leonard, wrote favorable reports about him, and helped us all he could.

  Only twice during the one and a half years Leonard was in jail did he break down. The first time it happened in Lewisburg. He was standing in the yard near a group of inmates when it suddenly split up, revealing a prisoner whose throat had been slit from ear to ear with a shiv lying dead on the floor, almost decapitated. While Leonard was still shook up over this a man in a white coat, whom he took for a doctor, approached him, saying, “Crow Dog, your physical examination revealed brain damage. We have to lobotomize you. That’s what they did to that guy in the movie One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. That guy was like you. Wouldn’t cooperate. Chief, your troubles are over. You’ll be a happy, acculturated veggie. This week they’ll take you to New York to perform the operation.” This man knew that Crow Dog would be taken to New York on his way to another prison. It was his way of playing a joke on Leonard. When Leonard was in fact taken to New York a few days later, he believed that the man had spoken the truth. I was in New York at that time to be as close to Lewisburg as possible. I could have taken a cab and been with him in fifteen minutes, but they would not allow me to see him. They let him phone. He was weeping. “They’re going to lobotomize me,” he said. “They’re going to take my mind away, take from me my medicine knowledge, make me into nothing.” Then he really broke down.

  I talked to him the whole night through, trying to cheer him up. Richard and Jean Erdoes told him over the phone, “They can’t do this to you, they’d need special permission, including yours.” Leonard repeated over and over again, “You don’t know what it’s like to be in the penitentiary. They can do anything they like. They have that power. You just don’t know.” We were on the phone from eight o’clock in the evening until six in the morning. We were totally exhausted, physically and mentally. We had roused one lawyer from his bed in the middle of the night, and sometime the next day he found out that the whole lobotomy threat had been a hoax. The cruel joke backfired. When we made the story public there was a general outcry. Support for Leonard really began rolling as the National Council of Churches adopted his case, calling him a “persecuted and unjustly incarcerated religious leader.”

  The second-worst day for Leonard was November 19, 1976, when the old Crow Dog home was completely burned to the ground under mysterious, or rather highly suspicious, circumstances. All during the 1970s numbers of homes of Indian civil rights leaders were destroyed by fires or fire bombings. Of the wonderful old picturesque Crow Dog place absolutely nothing was left except black ashes covering the bare ground. All the invaluable relics, sacred things, ancient treaties, and buckskin costumes perished in the flames. Leonard’s parents barely escaped with their lives. Many ceremonies, peyote meetings, yuwipi rituals, and giveaways had been held in that old house. Now it was gone—a piece of Indian history and heritage was no more.

  Leonard took it very hard. He dictated a letter for us: “Is it right for me to be kept from my people, from my earth? The house of my mother and father has been burned down. This is where seven generations of Crow Dogs have lived. I am in the penitentiary and could not help my family save the house. I can only watch the iron bars. But even here, today, I can feel my grandfather’s heartbeat and hear the echo of the drum.”

  They made life hard for him in so many ways. Things that make life easier for the ordinary con—TV, reading, playing cards—meant nothing to him. He was thrown entirely upon his own inner resources. Then there were the sheer distances they put between him and his family and friends. First they put him into Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, half a continent away from his Dakota home. So I moved to New York together with little Pedro to stay with friends. If I started out by car early in the morning on visiting days, I could see Leonard and still be back in New York by nightfall. The prison system decided to make it more difficult for me to visit my husband and transferred Leonard to Terre Haute, Indiana, exactly halfway between New York and Rosebud. Now, no matter where I stayed, I had to travel nine hundred miles to see him. Each time it cost several hundred dollars.

  Though I felt lonely and lost without Leonard, weighed down by responsibilities I felt too weak and inexperienced to confront, I had a comparatively easy time. The nights were bad, but at least for an average of eighteen hours a day, I was kept too busy to brood. I traveled, I was in places I had never seen before, I composed leaflets, talked to lawyers, newspapermen, organization heads, made tapes, held speeches, and took care of my baby. It was now that I met and learned to like white people who were on our side. I made many friends: besides the Erdoes family, the Belafontes, the actor Rip Torn and his wife Geraldine Page, Dick Gregory, Brando, Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, the musicians David Amram and Charlie Morrow, the writer-editor Ed Sammis, the Puerto Rican author Piri Thomas, Ambassador Andy Young, Bishop Lou Walker, Ping and Carol Ferry who always supported Indian political prisoners, the Osage artist Jeffe Kimball, attorneys Bill Kunstler and Sandy Rosen, the filmmakers Mike Cuesta and David Baxter, who made a documentary about Leonard’s imprisonment. I learned a lot from these new friends, was exposed to new ideas and lifestyles. I enriched my vocabulary as my horizon expanded. I was stuffed with good food, strange and delicious, was given nice clothes, and was taken to shows and parties. There seemed to be a conspiracy to keep me so occupied that I had little time to feel sorry for myself. Most important, I had many shoulders to cry on. And always, wherever I was, I was visited by skins from many tribes who showed up in the most unlikely places.

  Leonard survived through his spiritual power. Even in his cement cell with the steel bars, the bucket, and the naked light bulb which was kept burning all the time, he went on a vision quest. When he got to Terre Haute, as the bus stopped at the prison gate he heard an eagle-bone whistle. With it came a voice saying: “You hear me, you feel me, you see me, you know me. Hold on to your ancient ways and learn to bear the unbearable.” Leonard told me that he communicated with birds outside his window or in the yard. They seemed to him to be spirit messengers and they cheered him up. Once a crow perched on his windowsill and that made him feel good. He thought it was a Crow Dog spirit come to visit him. Another time it was a yellowhammer which to him represented the Peyote Church. During a parole hearing he saw two eagles through the window circling in the clouds and he took this for a good sign. He always felt the presence of the spirits, even when he was in the hole. “Tunkashila is watching over me,” he told me one time. “I have a hot line to the Great Spirit. I got a built-in amplifier for talking to Tunkashila.”

  He enjoyed the respect and affection of his fellow prisoners. When he got into Leavenworth the whole tier of prisoners ran to the bars of their houses, banging against them, chanting rhythmically, "Crow Dog, Crow Dog, Crow Dog!” The whole tier was a wall of outstretched hands welcoming him. In Terre Haute a black fellow inmate made up a song about Leonard. He sang it to me over the phone, accompanying himself on his guitar. It was a typical black blues song. It was beautiful. Leonard got many letters. Indians often send him poems.

  He made friends with black, white, and chicano inmates. He felt especially close to the lifers. He simply could not understand how a human being could be put in a cage for a lifetime. He told me during one of my visits to the jail, “I know how these lifers feel with nobody to support them. Some haven’t had a visit for years. They been here for ten, fifteen years. They don’
t have any idea of what’s happening on the outside. Through their windows some of them can see the watchtowers with their sharpshooters, and maybe cars passing by on the distant highway, or a plane flying high in the sky. And that’s the limit of their world. They don’t even know whether their relatives still remember them, whether they’re even alive. Lifers are the living dead.”

  In the spring of 1976 Leonard got a break: he was released for three months pending appeal. Rip Torn and Richard Erdoes drove us to Lewisburg to get him out. He was supposed to be released in the morning, but the hacks had their usual fun and games, taking all day with one nitpicking thing after another to delay his release. It was as if they could not bear to let him go. They even played their miserable little power games with us, the visitors, shouting down from their watchtower over a loudspeaker, “Put your car over there. No, ten yards to the right. No, put it over there on the left. No, back up forty feet. No, come forward. Now turn the car around . . .” and so on and on for a full hour. Rip has a fierce temper and I was afraid he was going to explode, but he managed to control himself though trembling with rage. When they finally released Leonard late in the afternoon they stipulated that he could not walk out. He had to be driven by the owner of the car. Nobody else could be in the car. Nobody was allowed to wait for him at the gate. Everybody, except Leonard and the driver, had to walk one mile and wait outside the prison perimeter.

  So we waited, not letting all this pettiness bother us. Outside the prison grounds the hacks’ power ended. We found a nice spot by the road. There was a brook, grass, flowers, trees. I spread out Leonard’s sacred things—the pipe bag with Indian tobacco, the buffalo skull, the eagle wing. We had brought a fine young Lakota singer, Steve Emery, and when the car finally drove up and Leonard stepped out, Steve pounded the drum and sang an honoring song. Then he sang the AIM song as I draped my husband’s red-and-blue prayer shawl around his shoulder and put the red beret with the eagle feather on his head. Then we sat down in a circle and smoked the pipe. When we were ready to go, Erdoes asked, “Crow Dog, what do you want for dinner?”