One String Guitar

by Mona de Vessel

  After the meeting, he pulled me aside and he said:

  “Why don’t you go with Jim Catches Crow to the trading post and see if you can get the people to let us take some supplies.” Felicia overheard him and said she’d come with us. And before we knew it, the three of us were on a mission of our own.

  When we got there the store was dark; they’d kept it closed out of fear. Jim walked around the building looking for a way in but everything was locked. I kept thinking about what Grey Stone had said to us about asking the owners for some supplies and I knew that asking instead of taking was not something we were going to do. Felicia was looking into the windows.

  “There’s everything we need in there. Food, canned goods, powdered milk. I even see some rifles in there, and blankets too,” Jim said as if we were kids all over again and we’d just found the biggest loot of our lives.

  I heard a loud bang and the sound of broken glass when Jim came around from the inside of the store. He opened the door for us.

  “I got us in. Let’s carry some stuff back to the church,” Jim said walking around the broken glass.

  I liked Grey’s idea of asking the owners for permission to use their supplies but deep down, I knew that asking for someone to give you a key to their safe was as naive as thinking that we were going to get our land back without a fight.

  Jim and I took three .30-30 rifles each, hunting rifles and a box of ammo. Felicia gathered some blankets and a large bag of rice. She could barely walk with all of the weight she was carrying. I offered for us to switch our loads but she refused. I found myself worrying about her all over again but I kept it under wraps.

  It was getting warmer by the time we got back to the church. Didn’t need to wear no gloves or nothing. People were milling about all over the place turning the land into a camp.

  We knew the Feds would show up sooner or later. It was only a matter of time. We gathered the handful of whites living in the few houses nearby and put them in the church. Father Johnson didn’t like us taking over his church but he stayed pretty calm when we told him he had nothing to worry about.

  One of the people we gathered was a guy who looked like a field mouse only he was a representative for the government. He was more of a rat than a mouse. His face was small, and his nose pointy like a trumpet. He wore glasses that kept on falling on his nose. Each time he looked at one of us, he kept pushing his glasses up as if he were trying to see us better.

  “Can you please let me go?” he asked Grey.

  “We’ll let you go as soon as we’re done making our demands. Sit tight.” Grey told him, and he did.

  The other people we had gathered were people who lived in the village. Grey Stone said that we needed to make sure that we keep these people safe.

  “Nothing will happen to them except maybe get shot by their own people when they show up.” Jane and Jeffrey, the owners of the trading post were there standing around with the others. They looked out of place, like we all did, I suppose. Jane was younger than Jeffrey. She was maybe in her late sixties with gray hair pulled back in a bun. The lines on her face told me that she had been a kind woman who’d suffered losses. Faces always carry the pain on the lines they carve out through time. I wanted to ask her how she could feel good about making money off people who were already poor. I wanted to ask her how a woman who looked kind and sad could exploit the suffering of others. But I asked none of those things. Instead, I found myself walking over to her standing there with her husband and apologizing for breaking into her store. I walked right up to her real slow and she looked at me. Jeffrey, her husband was too busy observing the people milling about the church busying themselves with the creation of a camp. But Jane looked straight at me and smiled. Maybe she’d seen the apology on my face before I even spoke ‘cause when I said the words, I’m sorry for your store, she just nodded and let out a real sad smile then looked away. I wanted to tell her that we were all prisoners in this place. That she was a prisoner too but we weren’t the captors. I wanted to tell her how everything was crazy now that we had started the machinery of reclaiming our country. I wanted to tell her about Felicia and the babies on the way and how scared I was to lose everything I had to regain when I couldn’t even remember having any of it in the first place. But I said none of those things. All I said was, I’m sorry. And then I was gone.

  The Schmidt family were among the people who’d been summoned. They were the youngest in the group of whites, along with Father Marlin. The little Schmidt girl couldn’t have been more than 12 years old. A real smart girl who seemed scared, just like the rest of us. There was an old, frail man, so vulnerable he looked like he was going to keel over any second now. I began to worry about him too. Next to him were two old guys one of them real fragile-lookin’, with his white hair and his shaky hands that sometimes swept a loose strand of hair.

  “I think it’s best if you sit down,” I told him. Took him by the arm and showed him to the pews. He looked at me real calm and just went along with me. Didn’t look scared or nothing. When he sat down, he cleared his voice. “I need my medication otherwise I’m as good as dead,” he said. His voice was as shaky as his hands. For a second, I thought I could smell him. Old moth balls and some kind of shaving cream. A strange mix of clean and old.

  “What medication is that?” I asked him.

  “It’s for my heart. Keeps it nice and steady.” I memorized the name of the medication and its dosage and I returned to the others. Looking at him so vulnerable on the edge of the pew waiting for something to happen made my heart ache. He reminded me of my own grandfather. The way he’d be now, old and fragile.

  The camp got ready to gather for a meeting. I pulled Grey aside and told him about the old man and his medicine.

  “I’ll take care of it as soon as I can. I’ll make sure the old man gets what he needs,” Grey told me.

  Quickly, everyone around began transforming every inch of the land into a community. Grey, Jim, Jerome and I took over the back of the Wounded Knee museum, a sturdy log building attached to the trading post and transformed it into the security headquarters. Grey found a large, bright orange paper and pinned it up on the wall so we could draw a map of the whole camp. He drew a large X by places like the Cluster Housing Project, which we turned into a roadblock called The Last Stand. Right across there was the Hawk Eye bunker and across from that on the Big Foot Trail was the Little Big Horn bunker. In addition to these, there were four other bunkers and roadblocks on the other side of the trading post. The guys and I stood and pointed to the different posts calling out names of those who would man the roadblocks and dig trenches. We handed the guns to the men by the map. Felicia had gone with other women to hand out blankets to the elderly and families with children.

  It was funny how we had all naturally become leaders. There were no orders to be given or rules to be followed. We just went with the rule of brotherhood. Everyone did what they knew best. I became part of a roaming team with Jim and three other guys. We used citizens band radios to communicate with each other. Our job was to make sure no one tried to infiltrate from the outside.

  I had a .30-30 hunting rifle from the trading post store. Jim carried a .22 shotgun and along with the others. Billy Joe had an M16—the only automatic weapon of the whole siege —which later got us in trouble when a puny man with wired-rimmed glasses showed us his journalist card and came in the perimeter to talk to us. It was funny, ‘cause this boy looked like he couldn’t have been a day older than 16. He was not threatening nobody so Grey yelled to the roadblock crew: “Let ‘im in!” Little man came in with the excitement of a trapped mouse in a maze. He took pictures and took notes every time we spoke. When night fell, we fed him dinner, not much of a meal really—a warmed-up can of pork beans is what we had, and Billy Joe posed for a picture with his M16 cocked against his chest. We never expected that journalist to run the picture of Billy Joe with his M-16 and a headline that read:

  “Indians Armed with Automatic Weapons.” The
y just bled that story to death and made us all to be crazy Indian terrorists armed to the teeth, when in reality we didn’t have much of anything and we hadn’t come to hurt or kill nobody, only to reclaim our land.

  After roaming duty, I began digging the Denby Bunker, right next to Lil’ California, an area we’d named that way cause it was nice and easy to defend. Billy Joe and I dug for two hours and didn’t see time go by. By the time I started digging, my fingers were just about ready to fall off, but a little while later, my blood started flowing again and I’d never felt more alive than I did holding that shovel in my hand. With each dig, I was building my pride. Pride in my people, pride in my history. We were still here. Indians were still here. They couldn’t just get rid of us with a turn of a page in the history of this country. We were warriors, our people had been warriors and I was beginning to understand for the first time that power had nothing to do with how many people you killed but with how well you knew and loved yourself and your own people.

  It was no coincidence that the first thing white folks did to control the Indians was to put ‘em in boarding schools away from the traditional ways and forbid ‘em from speaking their language. But we were reclaiming all that now. We were becoming who we really were.

  After I finished my bunker duty, I went to visit Felicia at the clinic, the only house nearby with running water and heat. Felicia decided to run the clinic with Jerome Bean and Lea Fights Wolf. They were tough broads. That’s how they liked to call themselves.

  The clinic was set up in the small two-bedroom house across from the trading post. It wasn’t far from the security building and whenever I could, I’d go visit her.

  I walked into the clinic and saw the slogan on the wall:

  “Bleeding always stops if you press on it hard enough.” It was written in Felicia’s oversized handwriting. I recognized it from the note she’d written me once to tell me she loved me. Felicia walked me around the clinic showing me around.

  “You’re going to save the world?” I asked her smiling.

  “I’m going to save some lives.” She was proud and I didn’t want to take the pride away from her, even if I was only kidding.

  “Cough syrup, a few band aids, aspirin. Not much of a hospital. But it’s better than nothing.” She’d found her calling and I mine. Overnight, we’d turned into warriors on the run. We were at the top of our game. In love and driven to save the world. But later I had to ask myself: How can you save the world when you can’t even save yourself?

  **

  Later in the day, we held a meeting in the trading post with a hundred of us, all crowded in there. It was log cabin-style place with cement floors. Some of the guys gathered some wooden Pepsi crates, stacked them upside down and sat down on them. Some people were standing all around the sides of the room. I remember feeling like we were coming home to family, to our brotherhood. There were all kinds of people here. Old and young, women and children, elders. Holy men and healers and young girls. We were all here, waiting to reclaim our land. A couple guys—not more than two, really—carried a rifle between their legs, the butt resting on the cold cement ground, barrel pointing straight up. Some of the guys wore all kinds of hats: a white cowboy hat, felt and leather hats. Most of the men wore their hair long with eagle feathers in them and those who didn’t would soon let it grow out. I looked around the room and saw men my age who’d suddenly been turned from drunks and misfits to warriors. We all had a reason to live now.

  Adam Delmario, a small man built like a tank walked right up to the front of the meeting hall and began addressing the audience.

  “As most of you know, I’m the communications guy for AIM—I’m the spokesperson for AIM and for our people with the outside world, namely the press. I contacted the press about our situation here. I figured if we get them involved, it’ll be harder for the government to kill us all without having to be held accountable.”

  Jim Catches Crow jumped in:

  “Having witnesses to crimes never stopped them in the past. Look at the Wounded Knee massacre. People knew about it, nobody cared.” A roar, like a brush fire rose from the audience. Adam pointed his chin forward like he was getting ready to talk. He’d shaved his beard into a tiny goatee giving him an air of wisdom.

  “Look there are no guarantees that we won’t all be killed once again. But it’s worth a try.” Two days later, Adam’s house was firebombed by Dicky’s goons and his wife badly hurt. We would all have to pay a high price for being there; we’d all need to give up the one thing we thought we couldn’t live without. And I was no different.

  People took turns talking. White Crow Dog raised his hand and then spoke:

  “It’s about time we reclaimed our land. Never was their land to begin with, and now we’ve got a chance to get it back. I say we go for it!” White Crow Dog looked just like a white man. In fact, if nobody told you he was an Indian, you wouldn’t know it. He wore a cowboy hat and kept a long black beard. Strange-looking Indian for sure. But just cause his blood had been diluted didn’t mean he wasn’t one of us. This was what brotherhood was all about: a band of brothers, no matter how much Indian blood we all had running through our veins we were all brothers. People clapped and cheered after he spoke.

  A man I’d never seen before—a boy, really—spoke out:

  “They’ve been building on our land for as long as our people can remember. Back in Michigan, they flooded our ancestral graves and built a parking lot right where we buried our elders. When is this going to stop?”

  Turns out the man was a Chippewa from Michigan. He’d been visiting relatives in Pine Ridge when the whole thing started and now he was banding with us. All Indians were brothers and nothing could separate us. When I saw him again a couple of weeks later. He’d started growing his hair out and wearing a red bandana around his forehead. Red like the color of blood, red like the north, like winter, the buffalo, and the magpie. Red like renewal.

  Lea Fights Wolf joined in: “Our women have been getting raped in the back of police cars for years now. I’m tired of giving these pigs the rights to our lives”

  It was hard to tell how old Lea was. Everyone’s age had been washed out by suffering and the hardship of our lives on the res. Someone who might look 40 was probably only 30. Lea had a weathered face, like most the people in the church, except for us young ones who could still hide our pain in the smoothness of our youth.

  Sam James, a stout and short woman built like the toughest shrubs on the res— the kind that could withstand winters and storms, droughts and floods—joined in on the comments: “I don’t care if it means dying. Our people have died before us and they’re watching us now. Waiting for us to do what’s right. And if I need to die to give this land back to our children. I say bring it on!”

  Everyone knew that Sam James was a tough woman. She took no shit from nobody. She liked to argue for the sake of arguing. It wasn’t like she was trying to pick a fight; she just wanted people to think.

  “Think for yourself,” she’d say. “This is the best gift God ever gave us humans.” Sam James was only a few years older than me and Felicia but she seemed as old as the earth itself. She had round beady eyes and a broad nose to offset her face, so nobody could say she was pretty.

  More people clapped and cheered. Inside me, the huge ball of fear from before began to loosen. I could feel myself filling the room, expanding into who I really was.

  Felicia stood on the other side of the room with some of the women. She didn’t look fragile; she was full of life smiling and clapping, standing there with her legs parted like the roots of an old tree pushing into the ground.

  Later when Felicia joined me from across the room, she pointed out six older men who were there at the meeting.

  “See those men,” she whispered to me brushing her lips against my ear.

  “They’re the medicine men,” she added, pointing to the men I later came to know as John Fools Crow, Jim Red Cloud, Martin Wounded, Evan Catches, Jason Wounds Enemy
and Seymour Little Dog.

  In the meeting, Felicia told me about the men and how they’d gathered before the meeting to strengthen spirit powers to prepare for the fight ahead. “They’ve smoked the peace pipe together and their visions are clear,” Felicia whispered.

  After we’d taken turns listening to everyone’s comments, Juan Baronnette helped out in the writing of the demands. Some people wrote down what they wanted, others just spoke, like Grandma “Any Kind of Dance” Wacilowan. She couldn’t see no more and it wasn’t clear if she could write. It took a while for us all to get down what we had to say and it took even more time to have us cut down everyone’s demands and comments into a one-page document we could hand the authorities. After a long meeting our demands came down to one main point: The United States of America will have to wipe out old people, women, children, and men by shooting and attacking us or they negotiate our demands.

  We were tired of being ruled by a corrupt leader like Washington. We were tired of having our treaties violated. We were tired of our land being soiled with the blood of our people. We’d chosen to take over Wounded Knee because a hundred years earlier our people had been brutally murdered on this land. 300 women and children shot down without a fair chance for battle. We wanted our land back. We wanted to be able to elect our own leaders to rule, and not a stand-in puppet like Washington. And most of all, we wanted to be respected and seen for the first time in American history.

  Juan—who was in the Oglala Sioux Civil Rights Organization—and the others signed the document. We sent mouse guy, still huddled in the corner, out of the camp so he could hand our demands to the authorities.

  After the meeting, everyone quickly took their position wherever they were posted: on the roadblocks, in the clinic, in the security building or in the church. Some of the men started digging trenches and making bunkers. Others made trips back and forth between the trading post to see if they could find anything else they needed. Truth is, by nightfall, the store was pretty much cleaned out of anything worthwhile, except for food.