“I made Kevin sign a nondisclosure,” she said. “He’s not allowed to tell anyone where it came from.”
If this wasn’t overwhelming enough, Helen also had a collection of Edward Curtis’s large, portfolio-sized original copper photogravure printing plates from his North American Indian project, the most extensive (and expensive) photographic project ever undertaken. Over a thirty-year period beginning in 1906, supported by a $35 million grant from J. P. Morgan, the renowned photographer attempted to preserve the culture of American Indians by creating a twenty-volume documentation of 125 tribes, each of which included 1,172 hand-pressed photogravures (from the copper plates) and four thousand pages of written text. Curtis spent more time painstakingly perfecting the imagery of each copper plate than on any of his other photographic processes, working the plate to get an image that would equal or better the original negative. Today these plates sell for about $20,000 each, and I’d gladly wager that if Helen’s collection were still intact, its value would be in the millions.
* * *
Sitting in my idling Villa VW with the air-conditioning running, as it is becoming a sizzling hot day, wondering anew about the origin of Helen’s 7th Cavalry paraphernalia, I remember an old story about the great leader Sitting Bull (Tatanka Iyotake) that might explain the mystery of some of these objects.
* * *
At the end of a grueling daylong Sun Dance in which he was the only participant, Sitting Bull envisioned the upcoming Battle of Little Bighorn—Custer’s Last Stand—known today by the Lakota as the Battle of the Greasy Grass. For hours and hours, Sitting Bull danced in circles, staring at the sun while singing holy songs, dragging a heavy buffalo skull tethered to two small bones pierced through the flesh on his back. As an additional sign of sacrifice, Sitting Bull had his brother Jumping Bull cut each of his arms fifty times—thus, blood flowed from his arms, from his back, and also from his feet as he was dancing on sharp gravel. Just before sunset, when Sitting Bull was totally exhausted and could move no more, he collapsed on the ground. Nearly unable to speak, Sitting Bull whispered to Jumping Bull, “Wakan Tanka told me to look just below the sun, where I saw many Long Knives falling into camp. These Long Knives looked like grasshoppers, they had no ears, and their feet were above their heads.” The Long Knives in Sitting Bull’s vision were the 7th Cavalry soldiers. Wakan Tanka warned Sitting Bull, however, that the people must not touch or steal any of the soldiers’ belongings.
On June 25, 1876, the day his vision was fulfilled, Sitting Bull was too old to take part in the actual fighting, but afterward, he toured the battleground. Seeing Custer and all his men dead on the hillside should have been a proud moment for him, but their bodies were stripped and mutilated, and Sitting Bull was deeply angry. The people had not obeyed Wakan Tanka about not touching the fallen soldiers or taking things from them, and thus their descendants would be made to suffer by the revengeful families of these Long Knives.
Somehow a great deal of the loot they took that day ended up in an old hotel in Rushville, Nebraska.
* * *
Now craving coffee like a tweaking crackhead, I haltingly drive down Main Street, my eyes darting from one side to the other as I scan each building. Optimistically, I stop at the grocery store with the Pepsi sign. There’s an old freezer chest out front, some discarded wooden boxes, hand-lettered signs, a few flyers and posters taped to the front window. As I walk in, I see a display of past-their-prime apples, moldy grapes, and surprisingly fresh-looking pears. I pick out a pear, walk up to the checkout stand. A teenage clerk who looks much too hip for a small-town Nebraska girl—pierced eyebrow, tasteful makeup, hair neatly tied back—looks into my eyes and cheerfully says, “Haven’t seen you here before. Where you from?” When I tell her, “Berkeley, California,” she says she is planning to go to college in Southern California, hopefully UCLA or USC, but this fall she will be a high school senior: “One more dreadful year.” She’s been working in the store since age ten. She lowers her voice and adds, “To be honest, I can’t wait to get the hell out of this pissant town, but don’t tell my dad.” She motions with a turn of her head to a middle-aged man on his knees, wearing a white butcher’s apron, carefully placing large pickle jars on a bottom shelf.
“He’s a great dad, but there’s nothing here for me, hope you don’t mind me saying.”
“I don’t mind. Just tell me where a fellow can get a cup of coffee.”
“Home Cafe, halfway down the block, ’cross the street.”
As I walk out, I think that I would have liked to have met a girl just like her when I was a student at Alliance High School. None of the girls I knew would dare say “pissant” to a stranger.
The Home Cafe is an honest café, the kind of place you’d like to eat in every morning if you had to live in a small town. The molecular scent of brewing coffee, sizzling bacon, and fresh-baked bread hits the back of my nostrils as I walk in. I notice the scuffed but once-beautiful wooden floors, the spaciousness of the place. There are tables in the front, booths along the side, and a long counter in back, behind which is a retro kitchen. Local folks eating breakfast look up at me curiously. One man wears a grease-stained John Deere cap; an older woman is in a pretty flower-print dress that she must have gotten back in the ’40s. No children. If these people have children, the children moved away a long time ago. The convivial hum of the place stops, but only for a moment as the customers quickly decide I am no threat or just not that interesting. A stout young man calls out to me from behind a large mechanical brass cash register that, if it were polished up, might be worth a few bucks on eBay.
The young man says, “Welcome to the Home Cafe. Are you having breakfast with us?” and before I answer that I just want some coffee to go, he tells me his name is Perry and he’s been in town only a few months after serving six years in the U.S. Navy, where he traveled all over the world, most recently to the Persian Gulf. To be polite, I look over the menu he hands me, wonder if the sirloin steak special with homemade biscuits and gravy and green beans is as good as it looks. Maybe I’ll stop in on my way back to Alliance later this evening.
Perry continues to tell me about his naval adventures. He’s been to Qatar, Egypt, Greece, Italy, Japan, and Singapore, as well as San Diego and San Francisco. He’s met all kinds of people and really likes people, although the best people live right here in good ol’ Rushville, “especially that young lady in the back,” he says, referring to the owner and cook he met by happenstance while she was visiting relatives in Reno, where he was spending his leave with some Navy buddies. “My good fortune it was early morning. We hadn’t started drinking or Melissa wouldn’t have given me the time of day,” he laughs. “God, I’m loving it in Rushville.”
I wonder whether one day he will break her heart and reenlist. I also wonder how long it will be before I can detach myself, get that coffee, get back on the road. So I lie. “Perry, I’ve got to meet some friends in Rapid City, need to get going.”
Snapping to attention, Perry turns and hollers, “Hey, Melissa, this here gentleman wants coffee to go.”
A middle-aged redhead with a pleasant demeanor and stereotypical green Irish eyes pops out from the kitchen, hands me a sixteen-ounce Styrofoam cup. “Help yourself,” she says. “Coffee is over there. We don’t have decaf; no one here drinks decaf.”
Turns out the hot black syrupy glop tastes like the peyote tea I once unsuccessfully tried to swallow during a Native American church ceremony in New Mexico … but, hey, after a couple of sips, I can feel my heart racing—Christ Almighty, I got my high-octane caffeine infusion!
WHITECLAY
TWELVE THOUSAND CANS OF BEER ON THE WALL
I’m on the road again, heading north on Highway 87, edging closer to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. The land is still flat—there are no other travelers in sight, just an abandoned schoolhouse not so dilapidated that it couldn’t be restored if there happened to be any children around, a crumbling but still occupied farmhouse, hay rolls,
cows, a few goats wandering dangerously near the blacktop … and nothing but static on Villa VW’s radio. As I round a forty-degree turn, the monotony ends; I see the beginning of the rugged, ponderosa-coated buttes and ridges that define most of the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, an evergreen paradise formed millions of years ago as the result of a fault line between the Niobrara and White Rivers, dueling tributaries of the Missouri.
A beer truck whizzes by—the driver must be going ninety. No worries for him here about the Nebraska State Patrol. The beer truck is headed for Whiteclay; I’ll be in Whiteclay soon enough. (I hate speeding beer trucks, and I especially hate Whiteclay.)
After ten more miles of glorious rock formations, tall grasses, chokecherry bushes, towering pine trees, I find myself in the armpit of Nebraska, skid row of the plains, an unincorporated border town of fourteen people with a post office, a gas station, a house or two, abandoned buildings. Charred foundations. Smoldering trash pits. Dirt sidewalks. And four liquor stores that sell twelve thousand cans of beer a day to Indians who walk or drive from the nearby community of Pine Ridge, the most populous town on the reservation, where the sale and even the possession of alcohol is illegal. There are no cops in Whiteclay, no mayor, no officials of any kind. Small wonder that beer is sold to minors, to the obviously intoxicated; traded for sex, for leaning on some poor fool who hasn’t paid his tab.
I slow Villa VW to a sputter, wondering if Whiteclay is still as bad as I remember it. It doesn’t take long to see that it is the same, if not worse. Two disheveled Indian men sit drinking on the steps of an abandoned building next to a man and woman who are passed out, lovingly curled up together. I watch cars and pickup trucks coming and going from the four liquor stores: Jumping Eagle Inn, Arrowhead Foods, Mike’s Pioneer Service, and the unimaginatively named Stateline Liquor. In addition to alcohol, these stores sell cigarettes, soda, and junk food. I remember when they sold cheap wino wine and rotgut whiskey; today it’s only malt liquor, lots of bottom-shelf shitbrew, Steel Reserve (8.1% alcohol), Earthquake High Gravity (12%), and Joose (9%)—brands you’ll never see at your local Safeway. Drunks outside one of the liquor stores lean on each other, laughing, some of their brew spilling out of tall cans. An older woman, seemingly lost, staggers across the highway.
In Nebraska, it is illegal to drink in the vicinity of a liquor store—liquor store owners could lose their license—but these violations have been going on for many years. I know of at least one protest group that meticulously documented the sad fact of Whiteclay on-premises drinking. Volunteer students from nearby Chadron State College and the University of Nebraska–Lincoln spent a couple of weeks in Whiteclay taking hundreds of damning photos, which they forwarded to the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission. There was a hearing, but nothing was done—nothing will be done.
Sheridan County sheriff’s deputies and Nebraska patrol cars come to Whiteclay only when a fatal accident is reported or when the Indians mount a protest, such as the Lakota Women’s Day of Peace March in August 2013. Several hundred Indian women and supporters walked to Whiteclay from Pine Ridge in hundred-degree heat and stood in a circle in the middle of the highway blocking traffic. Chanting “As long as it takes,” five of the protesters locked their arms together with makeshift handcuffs and sat down across the highway, effectively shutting down the town and beer sales for the rest of the day and into the night. Notified ahead of time but not expecting such a large group, the few overwhelmed lawmen were afraid to get out of their cars, so they rolled down the windows, drove around the edges of the protest, and “indiscriminately pepper-sprayed the crowd.”
Three drunkards yelled at the protesters, calling the women “white bitches.” When one of the drunkards tried to hit a fourteen-year-old Lakota boy, a patrolman grabbed the kid, cuffed him, and shoved him in the backseat of a patrol car. Another young Lakota peeked into the car, demanded to know why the fourteen-year-old was being held. He too was pepper-sprayed. Tensions mounted. A riot was in the making when Pine Ridge tribal police, parked on the other side of the border, entered Whiteclay even though they were out of their jurisdiction. The tribal police chief demanded the highway patrolman release the boy and instead arrest the drunkards who had started it all. Looking relieved, the patrolman complied.
By sunset, most of the protesters had drifted off except for the five hard-core activists who remained locked down across the road. In spite of the danger of an unlit highway, they were determined to stay the night. After dark, a pickup truck pulling a horse trailer arrived in Whiteclay and backed up to within a few feet of where they were sitting. According to press accounts, police officers arrested the “White Clay Five,” removed their handcuffs with bolt cutters, and, picking them up one by one, tossed them into the back of the trailer. As it was impossible for the protesters to stand during the bumpy ride to Rushville’s Sheridan County Jail, they had no choice but to sit on the horse dung that littered the horse trailer floor.
I stop at a stone monument on the edge of Whiteclay that honors the memory of Wilson “Wally” Black Elk Jr. and Ronald Hard Heart, who were found shot to death here on June 8, 1999, some suspect by law enforcement officers. A march protesting these killings disintegrated into rock throwing and looting; one liquor store was set on fire, and nearly burned down. This time fifty Nebraska State Patrol officers wearing Plexiglas face shields and carrying tear gas met up with the protesters. There was much mayhem, many arrests that day; fortunately, no one was killed. The words on the polished stone monument in all caps reads:
IN MEMORY OF
WILSON WALLY BLACK ELK JR
& RON HARD HEART
TWO LAKOTA BROTHERS WHO GAVE
THE ULTIMATE SACRIFICE FOR THEIR PEOPLE
SO THE PEOPLE WILL ALWAYS SEEK JUSTICE
FOR THE FUTURE GENERATIONS
* * *
Four drunks sit on the ground across the highway from the stone monument, looking at me with bemused expressions, their backs resting against the metal door of what looks to be a beer-storage warehouse. All wear coats even though it is getting to be a hot day. One shouts out, “Come over here and talk to us.” Another staggers to his feet and hobbles my way, his bulbous nose so misshapen (it must have been busted on more than one occasion), so huge, I nearly fail to see his moon-cratered cheeks, bloodshot eyes, faded blue bandana. He walks right up to me, so close I can smell the stale beer, urine, and sweat of his sad life, and says, “Can I have a loan?”
“What you need a loan for?” I ask him.
“Need to buy beer.”
“I don’t think I should give you money to buy beer.”
He grumbles, “You white people come here all the time and say, ‘Oh, we are going to help you, we are going to fix up your house.’ What the fuck is that going to do? I was a Marine in Vietnam, but I don’t consider myself a goddamn Marine no more.”
Sheepishly, I reach into my pocket and hand him a five-dollar bill. His Indian friends across the road laugh. He says, “Thank you, bro. When you goin’ back to New York?” He walks away before I can answer.
When I lived on the reservation in the turbulent 1970s, there were bars in Whiteclay, not just liquor stores. One was Toad’s Lounge, owned by Toad Frohman, a solid Irish Catholic citizen from Alliance who also owned a bar in Alliance with the same name and a Schlitz beer wholesale distributorship. In 2011, when he died at age eighty-three, people remembered him for his kindness. They said Toad was always lending strangers a helping hand. In the winter, he plowed the snow for the entire neighborhood, he was very active in the Chamber of Commerce, and he could be counted on every summer to help out with the annual Little Britches Rodeo. People were not aware or didn’t care that Toad’s success was based on selling liquor to vulnerable Native Americans. His little bar in Whiteclay, now long closed, was his first business; it provided the cash flow for his beer distributorship and his bar in Alliance.
Out of curiosity, I once went into Toad’s Whiteclay tavern; I was surprised at how ordinary it was—the
re was a barrel-chested white bartender who must have played defensive lineman on his high school football team standing behind a long wooden bar fully stocked with beer, cheap whiskey, cheap vodka, and Schlitz on tap. Decorations included old beer posters, license plates from neighboring states, the ubiquitous bikini girl calendar, and an up-to-date Nebraska football schedule. There was no indication that nearly all the customers in this establishment were Native American, except, of course, for their presence: two Indian men and an Indian woman sitting on barstools, smoking, drinking, loudly talking; three or four more at tables opposite the bar; and an intoxicated man, passed out, slumped down in an old-fashioned barber chair in the far back corner near the bathroom.
A few years earlier this very barber chair had allegedly been the site of a depraved episode where an Indian woman was hog-tied, a balled-up napkin stuck in her mouth, and gang-raped by several men, Indian and white. Finished, the men gleefully dumped her battered body outside in the subzero snow, where she would surely have frozen to death if a Lakota rancher driving there hadn’t stopped, put her in the back of his pickup, and driven her to the Indian hospital in Pine Ridge.
Some of the bar’s admirers, no surprise, told a different story. “Old squaw bitch was giving head for drinks until she got so plastered she plumb fell off the barber chair, banged her face on the edge of a table. Crawled out of here, said she was going home. It was all her own damn fault.”
Good Friday on the Rez Page 4