The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  Yeah, I’ll see you there in twenty minutes. I’ll be there with ten of my cousins and we’re gonna knock the shit out of you.

  I paused, then said, Eleven Blackfeet against one Ojibwe sounds like even odds to me.

  He laughed. We’re gonna have a great time. And then he hung up.

  The Blackfeet aren’t really (or shouldn’t really be called) the Blackfeet. Rather, the Blackfeet are the southernmost band of a confederation of bands—the Northern Piikuni (known as simply “Piikuni” in Canada), Southern Piikuni (the only Piikuni band in the United States and usually referred to as Blackfeet), Kainna (Many Chiefs), and Siksika (Blackfoot). According to Sterling, “Blackfeet” is a misnomer that didn’t come into common usage until the Indian Reorganization Act. No one seems to know how this happened, but before that they knew themselves as “Piikuni” in their language and “Southern Piegan” to English speakers. Sterling also related that piikuni refers to a particular way of preparing and tanning buffalo hides. “Hard to translate in less than seven pages without three elders in attendance,” also according to Sterling. The Blackfeet historical homeland stretched from the North Saskatchewan River near present-day Edmonton to the Yellowstone River in the south, and from the timbered reaches of the northern Rocky Mountains east through the foothills and the short-grass northern prairies to the South Saskatchewan River and the Cypress Hills. Primarily bison hunters, the Blackfeet weren’t quite as nomadic as more Plains-centric tribes, but they cycled between different seasonal camps. They lived in small bands of eighty to two hundred people, hunting out on the Plains until winter, when they retreated to wooded river bottoms near the mountains, where there was shelter and wood and game. The Blackfeet held large ceremonial gatherings in the summer, after the chokecherries were ripe, and then they’d disperse again.

  Adopting the horse, around 1730, greatly increased their range. Nascent aspects of the tribal culture began to grow, in particular the ability and desire to make war. They fought tirelessly against the Cree to the north for control of the best trapping grounds and trade relations with the French and British. They made war on the tribes to the south in order to increase their land base and their horse herds. Their enemies included the Cree, Crow, Shoshone, Cheyenne, Kootenai, Flathead, Lakota, and Assiniboine, Kalispel, Nez Perce, Plains Cree, Stoney Cree, Plains Ojibwe, and Metis—basically, everyone. They won. And became known as the “Lords of the Plains.”

  Although the Blackfeet had been trading with Europeans for the better part of seventy-five years, it wasn’t until a small group of warriors leading a large herd of horses encountered Lewis and Clark’s expedition returning from the Pacific that they met their first Americans. The explorers said they wanted peace with all Indians, and the Blackfeet and the Americans camped together for the night. In the morning, the Americans woke to find the Blackfeet trying to steal their horses and guns. They stabbed one of the Blackfeet and shot another.

  Despite their capacity for making enemies and war, the Blackfeet largely stayed out of the conflicts that erupted across the Plains in the nineteenth century. They kept their peace in 1837, after the American Fur Company sent north a steamboat loaded with goods for trade with the Blackfeet, even though passengers showed signs of smallpox. The Blackfeet contracted the disease, and thousands died. Nor did they make war in 1870, after the Marias Massacre. A few hotheaded Blackfeet had attacked some settlers. The U.S. Army set forth to quell the “uprising.” Encountering an unrelated and peaceful band of Blackfeet on the Marias River, they attacked anyway, killing more than two hundred women, children, and elders. But America made war against them all the same, by hiring bison hunters to eradicate the herds as a means of subduing the Lakota and other Plains tribes. Without the bison, the Blackfeet could not maintain their way of life. Weakened by disease and warfare and starvation, they had little recourse when the government illegally modified and ratified new treaties with the southern bands of the tribe, stealing millions of acres. Three of the bands settled permanently across the border in Canada, leaving only the Southern Piegan (Blackfeet) in the United States. By 1900, there were fewer than two thousand Blackfeet left, according to the report of the commissioner of Indian affairs, though tribal members put the number at half that. They were clustered around the missions and churches nearby, having adopted at least the semblance of Christianity while their children were sent to Indian boarding schools out east. And yet the embers of this proud people burned on. Over time, their numbers grew back. What remained of their culture and language was reconstituted. What remained of their land base was consolidated and protected.

  Sterling showed up without his cousins in a Chrysler 300C (his father’s, evidently: Sterling’s Escalade gets bad mileage). Tall, thick, and affable, with short hair and an indecisive beard, he has a fondness for causing trouble and for loud, brightly patterned button-down shirts. We shook hands and he said, Follow me, and I pulled out behind him and we began climbing the road out of Browning into the mountains. It wasn’t long before we eased into the reservation border town of East Glacier and then into Sterling’s yard. The house he shares with a sister, her husband, and their kid is the one he grew up in. His mother lives across the yard in a newer house, and another sister lives across the street. The family was one of those confusing Indian families that required you to go back generations to understand just who was who and how they were related. They seemed raucous and vibrant and testy. There was always some kind of mischief brewing or opinion being contested. I am tempted to say Sterling is the black sheep of the family, but I have a suspicion that it would be easier to count the white ones.

  The tribe has a reputation for being both social and fierce, friendly and unpredictable, traditional and rezzy, proud and prideful. The Lords of the Plains have a reputation these days for being at times more like lords of chaos, the reservation less a political body than a metal band tour bus. I don’t know about that. Sterling settled me into his house. We ate dinner and then started talking. The talking didn’t stop that night, nor the next day, or the next: the whole week was spent shifting from one talker to another. The morning after that first night, I found myself in a back room behind the convenience store/gas station owned by Sterling’s father, Pat Schildt, on the outskirts of Browning. Seated across from me was a weathered old-timer, who was there to talk because Sterling and his father had asked him to.

  I was pretty excited to talk to Red Hall. I like talking to old people (though we call them Elders). I like the rhythms of those conversations, so unlike conversations with people my age or younger. Red had lived through three wars, and the forgotten years from 1930 to 1960, when Indian communities emerged from the dark days after the fall of tribal government into a period of constitutional, representative Indian government. For these reasons and more I thought Red was an important person to speak with, and I’m pretty sure he’d agree.

  “Red William Hall,” he began. “My right name is William. People then have Indian names. But first—I want to know what you want to know. What year? I’m pretty good back to ’thirty-six. I can answer from ’thirty-six up.” He spoke with a gruff sharpness. His voice was clear and crisp. He had the clipped tones of the High Plains along with a kind of “Don’t fuck with me” cadence that I always think of as “elderly Indian voice.” “What I’m getting at is the way I got the name Hall, that’s what you want to learn, too? This guy come in here named John Hall, came in here three times, from out of Texas. Around the time of the Civil War, Hall was helping to drive cattle up from Texas, where they were so plentiful. You couldn’t give a cow away. Up north you could get a better price. They brought about two thousand head to start. The grass was about like that. There was no fences here. They were getting rich that way. The train was coming in, and it could take cattle all the way from Seattle to Chicago. They started building feedlots. Every so far you had a depot and a big stockyard. We had three right here. We had Spotted Robe stockyards, Browning stockyards, we had stockyards
down here at Blackfoot, unloading yards down at Carlow.” Outside companies would come in and lease the reservation land to graze their stock—some sheep, but mostly cattle. To tend the cattle, “they needed good men, know what you was doing.” The Indians learned from the cowboys. “After a while, the Indian caught on. They didn’t know how to birth calves. How to pull them out. But they caught on.” In conversation, Red is a diver: he dives straight down into whatever pool occurs to him and then, just as quickly, jumps into a different one. It took a while for me to be able to follow him.

  “My grandmother was a war chief’s daughter. After driving all those cattle up from Texas, Hall stayed and married her, becoming a squaw man.” Interracial dating and marriage is a complicated subject, but Red has an explanation for why there was so much mixing in the old days: “Squaw men. That’s why you never got inbreds out of the Indians. You laugh, but I’m telling you some facts! See—there was a reason for that. Me and my dad talked about it. You had bands, tribal bands. And once a year we had a big Sun Dance. Like a big pilgrimage. And that was wife time. So you didn’t marry any of your relations, so when that tribe pulled out and pulled back you took your wife with you. That’s how we did it, see? We ruled way up north to the Saskatchewan and back down to the Yellowstone. We owned this area. We kept the Crows out. Kept the Crees east. We kept ’em all out until smallpox did us in.”

  With the Blackfeet population so low in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and with old tribal animosities still in place, working cowboys like Red’s grandfather were a viable option for marriage. They brought their in-laws and children into the cattle business, which came to dominate the High Plains through the Dust Bowl era and past World War II. “My grandfather didn’t talk much. You ask him a question and he’d say my business is my business, your business is yours.” Raiding was part of the way of life. Red’s wife’s grandfather was a raider named White Grass. His great-grandfather took four hundred head of horses north across the border so the U.S. government wouldn’t kill them. “The line [the border between the United States and Canada] didn’t mean nothing to the tribe. . . . See, Indians didn’t steal. They called them thieving sons of bitches. But they didn’t steal. They raided. So get that straight. You raid that tribe and that tribe come raids you. Even-steven.”

  The Blackfeet’s animosity toward other tribes persisted through the early decades of the twentieth century. “They still held that. But, you see—we fought the Germans and we fought the Japs and that healed us. Now we are all right with other tribes. We are allies now. But we weren’t like that for a long time, probably up until the 1940s. That’s what got them together. That and them Indian schools—Flandreau, Haskell, and Chemawa, and other schools. They’ll marry a boyfriend from another tribe. And they start mixing.”

  Red was born in 1931, and the homeland he was born into was markedly different from the one enjoyed by his ancestors. Gone were the bison. Gone was the life built around bison and raiding. Gone was any lordship of the Plains. Instead it was as though the Blackfeet and other tribes served two lords: the United States government and the land itself. Both were uncompromising and at times inhospitable. Nonetheless, Red and his family survived on rations and cows. “I worked around stock my whole life. That’s why we got so many bronc riders. World champions.” Two of Red’s nephews are stunt riders in the movies. He goes back to an earlier time. “But you see—they starved us to death here. Gave us smallpox, we was hanging in all the trees.” The old stories don’t feel old at all coming from Red: he’s talking about seeing bodies “buried” in the trees according to the Blackfeet custom. As a young boy Red saw bodies in scaffolds in the trees that had been placed there during the winter of 1883–1884, when many of the tribe died of starvation, in a time known as “Starvation Winter.” “They brung us all into Fort Benton. They starved us in there. All except Sits in the Middle. He went out and fought them and instead of coming in he brought his horses up to our people in Canada.”

  Red talked in that way particular to Indians of a certain age, where the telling isn’t quite a linear narrative. Instead, what Red remembered ran and stilled and bottomed out in the lowlands of his memory, pooling there around horses and stock and fiddle playing and the railroad. These were the defining features of his landscape. He was not nostalgic in the slightest—for him, and for Indians in a lot of places, life got better as time went on, and it got a lot better with the New Deal.

  Red had eleven siblings. “Eight sons. Four daughters. Three brothers of us left. I had two brothers older than me. They gone. I worked around and worked for the railroad for a long time. My older brother was in World War Two. He was in the Air Corps in Mississippi. I was in the army too. I remember when they used to give out rations here. See—Roosevelt was the guy who really helped the people. Before that it was the Dust Bowl and all that went on. We was part of it. One of the old ration houses still stands—someone lives in it now. Back then there was a jail and a post office in the front of it, and rations were given around the back. I remember first time I ever seen a grapefruit. . . . They give ’em out. People didn’t know how to eat ’em. Or peel ’em. People didn’t like ’em, they were too bitter. I was about seven.”

  Red grew up on a ranch by the river, in a log house. “Everything was log. There’s one sitting up here. It was moved three times and it’s still all together. They got good at it.” The family weren’t all in the house at the same time, as some of the children were in boarding schools. Red went to Holy Family nearby. Circumstances had changed at such schools, for the better. “They weren’t mean to you.” Red went to about the eighth grade. “I learned to play basketball and soccer. They weren’t too mean to you there.” As a kid, he’d seen people putting up teepees each year. “I got two now. I saw ’em putting up teepees for the Sun Dance. Special occasions. More and more people are going back into their reality. College helps. That’s one of the best things that helped here. The college. Before, we made fun of our language. We had to sneak and talk in schools. They might learn a little bit at school, but they get home and there is no one to talk to. You lose the language, well, that’s losing your culture.”

  As Red tells it, in his circular way, things got better in the forties and fifties. “Roosevelt made a big change here. We had it good once he was in charge. The New Deal was a big deal here. That’s when we got commodities and rations. When he come on he took the liquor back. Al Capone, you heard of him? He took it all. Roosevelt took the liquor back and that’s how he fed us. The taxes off the liquor! That’s when all them big-time bootleggers went under. We were still closed, though, till ’fifty-two here. No booze on the reservation. He turned the taxes on liquor and turned them into commodities. WPA, CCC, ECW—a dollar a day. Like the work I’m doing right now. I’m still working. Ten to one, not much. Make about three hundred every two weeks besides my pension, something for me to do. But anyway, that’s what it was.” You can still see on the reservation the work done by the Civilian Conservation Corps. “These ditches were built. Canals. They were built by Indians. They built them with horses and plows. Ditch bank days. They’d do it all summer. Go live out there in tents. Teams. Some of them guys went all the way to Yakima, they had a boxing team, basketball team, cooks. They lived good! Baseball teams! There were guys who’d kill to earn a dollar a day. Soup lines. People were starving on the streets.”

  No matter how Red tells it, things had changed for the better through the 1940s and 1950s. Life on the reservation changed, and improved. The Blackfeet tribal constitution, adopted in 1935, gave them a government—flawed and inadequate, but still a government—and a process by which they could control at least some of the leases for timber and cattle. New Deal jobs programs were a boon to Indians across the region, and their numbers increased. Indian lives didn’t change in spite of what was going on in the rest of America. Rather, Indian lives changed in step with the rest of the country.

  Migration

  When the s
un rose on America after World War II, it rose on a vastly different country. The United States alone had emerged from a worldwide festival of death intact and strong. Great Britain had squandered more than 25 percent of its national wealth on the war, and the debts it incurred to the United States through the lend-lease program would hang “like a millstone around the neck of the British economy” for decades to come. Britain’s “imperial century” had ended in 1914, and the empire itself, already in decline after the First World War, was finally killed off by the Second. With the country bankrupt, and the Eastern bloc growing, Britain could no longer hold on to its colonies: between 1945 and 1965 the number of people around the world who lived under British rule fell from seven hundred million to five million, with most of the remaining subjects living in Hong Kong. Continental Europe was a shell. Famine was widespread, infrastructure had been demolished. The Soviet Union, having lost upward of forty million people in the war—nine million in combat and the rest to disease, starvation, purges, forced labor, and programs of forced starvation implemented by the Nazis during their occupation of western Russia—rebuilt itself by force and made allies by coercion. It swept up satellite republics like Hungary, Poland, Estonia, Czechoslovakia, Romania, and Yugoslavia into its sphere of influence. The United States offered help under the Marshall Plan, but the Soviet Union refused that offer and instead extracted raw materials and machinery from the “annexed” countries, to their detriment. The Soviet Union made peace in the same manner it made war: with force and numbers. Under terms imposed by the Americans, Japan lost all of its colonies and possessions in China and Southeast Asia and wasn’t allowed to form an army or navy; it was intentionally returned to its standard of living circa 1930.

  The United States alone emerged stronger from the war. It sought to bind the struggling European republics to itself and its interests with golden handcuffs in the form of aid, loans, and protection. It invested in advantageous trade relationships, and its agricultural sector was strong. The population grew, and the standard of living rose. In 1945 a third of the country was without running water, two-fifths lacked flush toilets, and three-fifths had no central heating. More than half of those who lived on farms were without electricity. This would soon change. As more than $185.7 million in war bonds came of age, the uneducated classes were able to go to college under the GI Bill, and labor unions (despite inroads against them during the McCarthy era) ensured that working-class Americans would make high enough wages to admit them to the middle class. A new interstate highway system facilitated movement and trade across all regions of the country. A fascinating index of the system’s success is the spread of the turkey vulture, which had previously been confined to the southeastern states. The interstate highways functioned as a kind of moving buffet for them; as they followed the long lines of roadkill north and west over the next two decades, they came to inhabit every part of the country.