We arrived Tuesday afternoon around 3pm and raced the setting sun to the Badlands National Park. Ez has never been to this part of the world and I was determined to give him a feel for the land, particularly the Badlands and the endless prairie that the Oglalas on Pine Ridge inhabit. The late afternoon light was perfect. We drove east on SD 44 through Scenic to Interior. Along the way we stopped the car twice. Once to shoot the shadows the badlands cast with their jillion folds. We were just west of the time zone boundary and so the suns set extra early. We stopped a second time to film a bald eagle perched in an old cottonwood tree that looked like the tree at the center of the universe, a twisted knot of forking wood standing alone in the vast flatness of the plains.
We made the park at sunset and filmed as much as we could. The air smelled of juniper, cedar, and sage-clean, dry, and vaguely green. We saw a Fed Ex truck, a UPS truck, and a park ranger truck. No one else was there. Snow fell over the weekend and the Badlands striated with their three shades of brown, white fingers of snow, and the long blue shadows of evening in winter.
After dark we drove south towards the Rez, making Kyle, SD, the town where I lived for two years at about 5:30pm. We stopped in at the Noisy Hawk residence there and visited for a while before heading to the new B&B, Lakota Prairie Inn, to have dinner and get a room. Vinnie Puckett, the owner, was the general manager of the kitchen at Little Wound H.S. when I taught there. This type of business never lasts on the Rez, but they have done a nice job attracting locals to the restaurant. I saw a number of people I had not seen in a long time.
It was very dark and I could tell Ez was disoriented, but he studied the people trying to glean some sense of Indian-ness. Most people have never seen a Native American and known it. When they come to the Rez, they are submerged in something so unfamiliar that their mind makes it familiar. Ez lives in Brooklyn, the nation's capital of brown people gathered from all over the world, and so maybe it just felt like Brooklyn, only weirder. Later he told me the place reminded him most of a rural wayside inn he had visited in Norway while covering a skiing event.
Ez is a filmmaker and he is searching for a worthy project. We had talked about filming the tournament five years ago and then let the idea go, but when I visited Brooklyn for
the Zebulon show , we sparked the idea back up and here we are.
I have spent much time deciding how to share my understanding of the Lakota, their place in history, society, and philosophy. My understanding is limited but deeper than what I encounter in most books and films. I just finished reading Jim Harrison's
Dalva and that is the best interpretation of the Lakota's interaction with the modern world I have read, even though the book isn't about that.
On the Rez, Ian Fraser's book, makes my scalp itch with its re-heated noble savage take. People want to make the Lakota predicament a simple plight. It is above all things neither simple nor a plight. Tragedy is the intersection of hope and failure.
The hard part in contending with the history of the American Indian in this country is that it is our original sin. America, the land of the free, was built on the bones of a genocide and the fact that this sentence sounds like hyperbole is a testament to how well we can re-write our own histories.
Later in the evening we visited the Brave Bird residence in the country east of Allen. Travis and his wife Clovia are old friends. Clovia is
John Around Him's daughter. She told us about his last months and made us handsome presents, a star quilt and a medicine pouch.
In the morning I went to the Noisy Hawks to speak with Lyle Sr. We discussed many subjects. He has a way of picking my brain for how best to keep "our Indian people from killing themselves," that flatters me. He likes my perspective. He is a descendant of Sitting Bull and remembers stories that his grandfather told him about Wounded Knee.
His grandfather told him that he was still up in Standing Rock when it happened and that all of them heard the singing voices, so loud that they left their tents to see what was going on, the day the massacre took place. Maybe the spirits were coming back to the camp. Maybe it was their ghost dance. We don't know.
The way the Lakota talk about spirits forces you to make decisions. It is so contrary for us to believe in the concrete presence of spirits and ghosts that we have to suspend disbelief or change our beliefs to maintain intelligent discussion.
I learned a few other things from Lyle Sr. over coffee. "I guess there are four kinds of Indians," he said. "The urban Indians who don't have their culture. The ones who come back to visit and learn and go to the pow wows. And then us, the reservation Indians. The mix-bloods and the full-bloods."
Also, a Czech scholar has written a grammar of the Lakota language that is useful. He interviewed Lyle Sr. for an hour in Lakota and discovered one new word. We are both sad that the language is dying and know that the philosophy goes with it.
After breakfast I picked up Ez and we drove to Wounded Knee, a place Harrison calls the Native American Dachau. Ez's father is Jewish and his mother African-American. We discussed the problems with comparing the Holocaust, slavery, and the American Indian genocide. He was amazed at the small quiet place, its apparent insignificance. Most people have heard of Wounded Knee but do not know where it is or exactly why it is important. The phrase rings in the ears. As do many Lakota names.
We walked to the top of the snowy hill and through the small graveyard looking at the names. The place is full of spirits. It was good to have the hour drive through the countryside to let all the thoughts and feelings settle. We arrived in Rapid City, got stopped by the police for speeding, and then filmed the grand entry of the school pow wow. Ez raced around the auditorium with his camera, filming the young people in their beaded outfits and the drum groups with their backwards ball caps.
Afterwards we went to the St. Thomas More gym to watch
Louie Krogman's first round game. He is a white kid from White River, a ranch community on the border of the Rosebud Rez. He will break the state's all-time scoring record during this tournament. He scored 40 points. The basketball was good, different from city basketball in that the tallest player was only 6'2" tall. Lower Brule had a pair of brothers who are mixed Lakota and African American. Ez interviewed them later and it turns out they don't live together. Their mother is a drunk and their father gone. The youngest one said he wants to know more about his culture but he has never been around it much.
We watched two games and then headed back to the Civic Center to watch the Red Cloud girls. Travis is the assistant coach to Jerome Lebeau, another friend and a young spiritual leader of the Pourier clan. Jerome was a protégé of John Around Him. Their team won by 80 points, 98-18.
Ez spent some time on his own interviewing people, pushing for information. I took a nap. In the evening we went to see Little Wound play St. Francis, a battle between the rural sections of Pine Ridge and Rosebud. No contest. The Little Wound Mustangs led by an impressive Bryce Hornbeck won in a rout, their full-court press suffocating the St. Francis Warriors, whose best player is Richard Spotted Tail, descendant of the great treaty chief from that area.
One of the things we have been discussing is to what extent the basketball tournament would allow Ez to tell a larger story about the Rez. It's hard to say. He asked Travis if he could film the sundance. No. No chance at all? No. What if he asked the spiritual leader? Go ahead and ask...
The secrets out here hide what is most valued. The stories that lie out in the open are dry bones on the prairie. The real story is to make the ghosts speak.
Or it is just to talk about short people from a rare minority group playing basketball. Ez has gone to Mt. Rushmore, following some irrational American impulse to pay respects to a dynamite blasted mountain, our nation's thumbprint in the Black Hills, a tribute to immigrant perseverance. Rushmore stands in the shadow of Harney Peak, where Black Elk had his great vision of the universe and where many Lakota have gone to the other side.
Why are the Lakota so important to me? Why did I come out here in the first place? Why do I keep coming back?
I told Lyle Jr. about the eagle feather that Buddy Red Bow gifted to me as a child. Maybe, he mused, the feather represented freedom to me when I was young and I came looking for it when I was old enough.
On Pine Ridge unemployment, diabetes, alcoholism, and suicide are epidemics. Freedom? To see the Lakota sing, or dance, or play basketball is to witness the freedom I came looking for but also a reminder that this country has never and probably never will treat its Indians with respect. They are already gone. Ghosts.
Tonight we'll see if Louie Krogman can break his record against Pine Ridge and whether Little Wound can beat Todd County.
Last year about this time I wrote a blog called 