Dan Taylor asked for a continuance so that we could get our witnesses together. He explained that they had no phones and lived way out on the prairie. The judge said we had had enough time to subpoena them and get them to Rapid City. Dan pointed out that our witnesses had no mailboxes or mail service and were very hard to reach, especially in winter. Merhige denied the motion. He did not know the situation on the reservations. He lived in Richmond, Virginia.
Pfersick testified that I had hurt him with the chainsaw chain. He said that I had beaten him with a tomahawk. This was a serious accusation, but I had to laugh. There had not been any tomahawks on the reservation for more than a hundred years. The two women seemed embarrassed to testify. One of them said, “Crow Dog is a good man, a peaceful man. He didn’t start it.”
During the recess, Dan Taylor was happy. He assured me that not even an all-white jury in South Dakota could find me guilty on this cockamamie evidence. I told him, “Another five years.”
After the recess came Mary, my only Indian eyewitness. She told a simple story: “This man made a crude pass at me. He tried to touch my breasts. He grabbed the chainsaw chain from the wall and swung it at Leonard. It cut Leonard’s hand.”
Then it was Hurd’s turn. He showed the jury a color photograph of Pfersick, saying it was taken after I had beaten him up. Hurd showed that there was blood on Pfersick’s face. Taylor wet his finger with a little saliva and rubbed the “blood” off: “This is ketchup. It is not a part of the photograph.” Hurd did not know how ketchup could have gotten on it and called it an honest mistake. Hurd then made me out to be a dangerous and violent man. He told the jury, “Ladies and gentlemen, we have a good system here. The government is here to protect you! Would you believe, ladies and gentlemen, that the government, your government, would lie to you? What motive would the government have but the truth?” Finally, he let the jury in on a little secret: “Ladies and gentlemen, why was Pfersick beaten? Ladies and gentlemen, he was not beaten because he came uninvited, or because he brought drugs, or because he made a sexual pass at Mr. Crow Dog’s wife. No. He was beaten because they thought that Pfersick was an informer!”
After that Dan Taylor summed up for the defense. All through the trial the judge had tried to get things done in a hurry. And now, when Dan had his last chance to speak for me, he tried to rush him: “Mr. Taylor, you have exactly four minutes left. After that I’ll cut you off.” So ended the day. I was brought back to the jail. The Crow Dog party went back to their motel and had dinner. Dan assured everybody that the verdict would be not guilty.
The next morning the case went to the jury. The judge charged the panel fairly: “If Crow Dog acted in self-defense, you must find him innocent. The same holds true if he protected his home, his family, or even just his property. He cannot be found guilty if this was just a rambling, mutual fight which he did not start, if he has, in fact, not used a dangerous weapon. Then the jury can find him guilty only on a lesser charge—simple assault. Ladies and gentlemen, it is simply a credibility case. It is a matter of whom you believe.”
The all-white jury believed Hurd and Pfersick. In less than an hour they came in with a guilty verdict, and I was right—five more years. So now I had been sentenced to ten years on the two aggravated assault and battery cases and the eleven-year sentence for the postal inspectors case was no longer suspended because of my later convictions. So now I was in for twenty-one years altogether. It took a lot of long, hard work and devotion to get me out of the hole the government had dug for me.
twenty-five
IRON DOOR HOUSE
They have taken everything from me.
They have taken Crow Dog’s land.
They have taken my elements.
Most important of all, they have
taken my human body away
from my people. But they can never
take away my spirit: Let me be the earth,
let me be the wind for my people.
Leonard Crow Dog
I was dragged from one prison to another—Deadwood, Pennington county jail in Rapid City, the holding tank in Pierre, Minnehaha county jail in Sioux Falls, all in South Dakota; Oxford and Cedar Rapids, Iowa; Terre Haute, Indiana; Wichita and Leavenworth, Kansas; Chicago, federal correction institution; Lewisburg, Pennsylvania; Richmond, Virginia; Sandstone, Minnesota; and, for one night, a holding tank in New York City. The government was trying to hide me so that my wife, my family, and even my lawyer could not find me. In some joints I was kept for only a few days, or even hours. Only in Leavenworth, Lewisburg, and Terre Haute did I stay for any length of time.
On November 30, 1975, when they took me away, I was thirty-three years old. They put handcuffs on me, along with waist chains and leg irons; I was like a walking hardware store. I was fingerprinted and given a number. Just before I was put into the holding cell inside the federal building at Pierre, I was allowed to make one short phone call to my wife, who was still at the Holiday Inn. She asked where I was going from there, but no one would tell me.
Twenty-five minutes after my sentencing I was taken by car to the Minnehaha county jail in Sioux Falls. I wished that I could go on a vision quest. Instead, I fasted for four days. During the eight days I was in Sioux Falls I met a number of inmates who had heard about me during Wounded Knee, in 1973. They said they never thought they’d meet a leader from the American Indian Movement. They said, “You are now one of our brothers.” I answered, “Yes, I am your brother.”
After Sioux Falls I spent a few days in a jail at Wichita, Kansas, and from there they transported me to Leavenworth, a maximum-security penitentiary. I was there for quite some time. They first took me through a maze of corridors and underground passages. Every few yards there was an electronically controlled grill. The guards had to push a button every time to open the grill to let us through. I felt like Jonah inside the whale. I wound up in a tiny room, really just a gray-green cement box. This was the hole, solitary. When I asked why I was being punished, the guards told me that this was a standard process before a prisoner was released into the general prison population.
The hole was like a grave. There was a narrow bunk, a washbasin, and the “toadstool.” That was all. There were no windows, no clock. There was artificial, neon light that was never turned off. The whole two weeks I spent in the hole was like being buried alive. I didn’t know whether it was day or night, or what day of the week it was, even what month. I didn’t know whether the stuff they fed me was breakfast or supper. I became disoriented.
This was all done according to plan. In Leavenworth, the first thing they do with a new inmate is try to break his spirit through what they call sensory deprivation. I was so down that the first day or two I could not even pray. I was too angry, too numb. Then I roused myself and said, “Tunkashila, Grandfather, you are here with me. They cannot penetrate me or my mind. They cannot disable me.” I started singing ancient ceremonial songs, peyote songs. Inside the hole I taught myself a new way of singing so that it sounded like two voices.
When they released me into the general prison population, the inmates already knew about me. They stuck their clenched fists through the bars and shouted, “Crow Dog, Crow Dog, Crow Dog!” In this way they welcomed me. They took one another by the hands through the bars, some whites, some Indians, some blacks. They chanted a prayer for me, a prayer for a Lakota medicine man.
The routine in the maximum-security prisons is always the same. You are in your cell, your “house.” You just lie there and get bored to death. It’s brain genocide. The whistle blows at five o’clock in the morning. That’s the wake-up call. The noise is terrific. There’s no sunlight, no fresh air.
There were close to five hundred seventy-five men in our “E” maximum-security unit. The inmates were considered dangerous because they were political, men who had been involved in movements. They made me a janitor. I cleaned up everything. I had an hour to do it. After that they locked me up again. They let me out for lunch, then they put me back
in my house.
I made friends—a white friend, a black friend, a Chicano, an Asian. They often asked my advice on different things. They told me, “Our thinking is very weak. We’ve been here for too many years now. We don’t know what’s happening outside the fence. We get a glimpse of cars driving by in the distance, but we do not know what is happening to us. We don’t know if our relatives still remember us. We do not know whether our friends outside are still struggling for the people.” My black friend’s name was Verge. He was a young man in his twenties. He was in the pen for forty-five years. He would be an old man when he would be released. He made up a song about me. He sang it to my wife over the phone while strumming on his guitar.
In all the prisons I was in, the hacks were always the same. It takes a special kind of man to want to be a hack. They are uneducated and badly paid. Half of the time they are prisoners themselves, cooped up with us inside. Outside nobody respects them. If somebody asks them, “What do you do for a living?” they say, “I work for the state,” or “I’m a peace officer.” They are ashamed to admit that they are prison guards. The hacks have no culture. They don’t have anything to tell their sons and daughters. They have nothing their kids could be proud of. Inside the joint they feel superior to the inmates because they have power over them. That’s the only thing that makes them feel they’re somebody. They get a kick out of humiliating the prisoners.
In every prison I had a case worker, a counselor, and a shrink. The shrinks have a “behavior modification” lab. They use “control medications.” They love to have you on thorazine all the time. They tried to give me therapy—”logical therapy,” “living in reality,” “acculturation,” reports, interviews, group sessions. “How are you? What are you? Why do you think you are here? Let’s see, what did you say in your last interview? What’s in your records? What did you say yesterday? What are you going to tell me today and tomorrow? If you cooperate, no problem. I could get you out of here in no time. Not cooperating you’ve got a problem, a brain problem.”
One of them told me: “Let me research you. Let me analyze you. You’ve become a hobby of mine. You are my first Indian. I never met anyone like you. Let me crack your mystery.”
“No,” I said. “I am the native psychiatrist, I’ll analyze you, brain-shrink you. Be my guinea pig. Let me figure out what makes you tick. Tell me about your sex life. Through spiritual thoughts of my mind I could teach you, make you understand the red man, who we are and what we represent. But, maybe, you’re too retarded to be taught.” He didn’t like it. So we waged a kind of psychological warfare on each other.
I had a hard fight to practice my religion. When I was imprisoned they did not recognize the Indian religion or the Native American Church. A priest or a rabbi could visit the inmates, but not a medicine man. I asked to be given my sacred pipe under the Freedom of Religion Act, but at first, my request was refused. Later, my lawyers forced the warden to let me have my pipe. They brought me the bowl and the stem, but not the tobacco. I asked them, “Where is it?” They said, “You can’t have it. It could be some kind of drug.” I said, “How can I pray with the pipe, how can I smoke it without my sacred tobacco?” The warden told me: “We must first send it to a lab and have it analyzed.” After many weeks the lab report came back. It said that the Indian tobacco was a “suspicious vegetable matter.” Only at the very end of my incarceration was I allowed to use the pipe in the right way.
From Leavenworth I was taken to Lewisburg, Pennsylvania, a stone fortress on the banks of the Susquehanna River. It is one of six maximum-security prisons in the country, with cells for one thousand six hundred inmates. Again I was put on hold in an isolation cubby hole, so tiny that I could neither stretch out completely nor stand up without my head touching the ceiling. When they released me into the main prison population I found out that Lewisburg was the most dangerous of all the prisons I had been in. It was a killing place. The going price for murder was two cartons of cigarettes. I was told that if the place were thoroughly searched they’d find enough dope to feed the habits of all the junkies in New York for a month, and enough cash to found a bank. Every day, a young kid not strong enough to defend himself was gang-raped. Murders were done with a “shank,” a two-foot-long piece of sheet metal sliced off by a machine in the prison shop. A shank was a fearful weapon. I walked in the yard and saw a group of inmates huddled together. Suddenly the group split up, everybody running in a different direction, leaving a man lying on the ground with his throat cut from ear to ear so that his head was dangling by a thin strip of skin. That was my welcome to Lewisburg.
So I kept to myself. I did not speak to anyone if I could help it, except two or three Indian inmates I could trust, one of them a Pueblo from Taos, New Mexico. I obeyed all the rules, both the prison rules and the unwritten ones made up by the cons. Luckily, most inmates looked upon me as a sort of oddball and gave me some respect. So I survived.
The next night, on the way to Richmond, I was kept in a New York City holding tank. It was the worst night of my life. I called up Richard Erdoes and Mary. I told them: “They are going to take away my mind. They are going to cut part of my brain out.” Richard and Mary could have taken a cab and been with me in fifteen minutes, but the marshals would not allow them to see me. Richard said “They can’t do that to you without special permission.” I said “You don’t know. At Lewisburg they can do with you whatever they want.” We were on the phone from eight in the evening to six in the morning, until we were totally exhausted. I wept a lot during the night. The next day, Richard and Mary got in touch with my lawyer and we found out that, in fact, there was no plan to lobotomize me; strangely enough, the whole experience was a turning point for the better.
Richard Erdoes went to the “god box”—that’s what they call the National Council of Churches boxlike building in New York—and persuaded them to take my case. They raised one hundred fifty thousand dollars for my defense. In addition to Dan Taylor they gave me two other lawyers: Bill Kunstler and Sandy Rosen. Later, they added Vine Deloria, Jr., so that a Native American attorney would be involved in my case. Vine is a Lakota from the Standing Rock reservation, a famous writer, and a professor at the University of Arizona. Kunstler was a great courtroom performer. Sandy Rosen was the lawyers’ lawyer, very patient and painstaking, going over every detail. He took my case all the way to the Supreme Court. At times my defense team was joined by Ken Tilsen, of Minneapolis, who had been on several AIM-related cases and was a supporter of Indian rights. We also got an expert who could figure out which jurors might be sympathetic to our cause and which were not.
Even during my worst days in prison there were things to console me. I felt that wakan Tanka, the Creator, was with me. Grandfather talked to me. He came to me in dreams and let his power work inside me. He sent birds to console me. Birds are sacred. They are the Great Spirit’s messengers. I saw them in my visions and in reality. I saw them outside my prison window. A crow spoke to me. I talked to a yellowhammer. I saw eagles in the sky. Several times during my imprisonment I thought I heard an eagle bone whistle. It came from the wind. It came from nowhere and it came from everywhere. The sound of the sun dance whistle gave me strength.
On March 10, 1976, I was released from Lewisburg, pending appeal. It came just in time. On the orders of the warden they would have taken me to the barbershop to cut my braids off the next day. Braids were not allowed in Lewisburg, not even on a Lakota medicine man.
Richard Erdoes, Mary, little Pedro, and some friends drove from New York to pick me up. They waited for me outside the fence. Laid out on a blanket were my sacred things—my pipe and pipe bag, my eagle wing and eagle bone whistle, my red and blue prayer shawl, my medicine bundle. We went to Richard’s apartment and had a feast. Then I fell down on the couch and slept for almost twenty-four hours.
I was not free for long. My appeal was denied. On June 22, 1976, I surrendered myself at Deadwood, South Dakota. I picked Deadwood because the first Crow Dog had given
himself up there in 1884, and I was following his legend. This time they took me to Terre Haute, Indiana, another maximum-security prison. The routine, the treatment, the boredom were the same as in Leavenworth and Lewisburg. Again I was a nameless number.
But I was not forgotten. My friends kept working for my freedom. In September 1976, my whole defense team went to Richmond to apply for a sentence reduction. When the defense team assembled in court they saw a long trestle table heaped with stacks of support letters and petitions. Judge Merhige said, “We have lots more, but we have no place to put them. There are letters here from Africa, from Austria, from Indonesia, and God knows from where else. I wonder how folks thousands of miles from here can know so much more about this case than I.” He smiled and then rendered his decision: “I can’t resist all this. I order Crow Dog to be immediately released and his sentence reduced to time served.” Even though Merhige had ordered my immediate release, Hurd protested and it took months before I was finally let go.
When I finally got home the whole tribe honored me with a feast and giveaway. Two spiritual men, Wallace Black Elk and Bill Eagle Feathers, ran the ceremony. All my relations were there, all my friends. The tribal chairman and vice-chairman had come, and Father Witthoeft, who had supported me through all my trials. Richard Erdoes had flown in from New York. Many people wore their traditional outfits. Bill Eagle Feathers and Dallas Chief Eagle had their war bonnets on, besides wearing their beaded and quilled rawhide outfits. Many others wore their old fringed buckskins, breechcloths, and even ancient bone breast plates of their grandfathers. I wore my ribbon shirt and an old peace medal on my breast. In my hair I wore an eagle tailfeather together with the plumes of three other birds. My pipe bag hung from my belt. The women wore their beautiful white deerhide dresses or many-colored fringed dance shawls. It was a great sight. Black Elk and Eagle Feathers fanned me off with their eagle wings and smoked me up with sage and sweet grass. My father helped them. We smoked the pipe and partook of the sacred food. Black Elk blew the eagle bone whistle toward the four directions. The drummers pounded out the AIM song. They chanted the chief-honoring song for me. I led the dance around the circle with Wallace Black Elk on my left side and Bill Eagle Feathers on my right. Behind us came my parents and my wife. My old mother uttered the wichaglata, the pulsating brave-heart cry, and all the other women joined in.
Crow Dog : Four Generations of Sioux Medicine Men (9780062200143) Page 23