by Andy Conway
The snow turns red.
And the cannons roar, smashing down the tipis, ripping people apart.
Soldiers fall too, shot by their own. They do not care. They fire their guns and cannons into the screaming mass of Indians and kill their own along with them.
Women run across the open expanse of snow with their children.
The soldiers break ranks and go hunt them down, shooting them dead, shooting them in the back, staining the snow with their blood.
Eerily, a silence descends, as the screaming stops, which the whooping of the blueshirts and the bellowing of their officers cannot touch.
But the screaming does not stop in my heart.
The snow is red.
A blizzard sweeps in to weep over the slaughtered.
Chief Spotted Elk lies frozen as he fell, his legs twisted, his arms clutching an imaginary rifle across his chest, his eyes sleeping the longest sleep.
I am dying too, lying in the snow, blood and pain and life slipping from me.
This is what it must be to die.
This is the end of me.
This is the end of everything.
Peyote
I OPENED MY EYES TO a familiar face. The warm eyes of a handsome brave gazing down on me.
He lifted me from the cold snow.
Something familiar about this: I wake lying on the ground. I wake to an Indian face. The dream of my past life swiftly fading.
I thought it would be Little Star, welcoming me to the Spirit Land, and asking why I had not left his pony with him, for he had no horse to ride in the Spirit Land.
I readied my complaint that I had had to eat his horse, but I saw that it was not Little Star.
It was Red Shirt.
Was he too dead?
Perhaps he’d been killed after leaving me that morning? Had our Hunkpapa scouts protecting the rear of the column gone and killed him when he was out of sight? Just as Red Flea and her gang of winyanpi had killed me, out of sight of the camp, where no one might smell the stench of betrayal.
Red Shirt ran with my limp carcass in his strong arms, calling out instructions, and I saw a sea of concerned faces as he swept me into a wooden shack.
This was not the Spirit Land.
There was no panic in the Spirit Land.
I tried to speak, but my throat was as dry and cracked as dead tree bark.
He laid me on a bed and a violent spasm of pain shot through my body.
This was not the Spirit Land.
There was no pain in the Spirit Land.
Several women rushed to my side, an old grandmother wiping my face with a rag soaked in a bowl of ice water, shocking to the touch.
Warmth swept up through my back and I thought it must be my own blood. Convulsing now, like Crazy Horse as he lay in the dirt with his life pouring from the hole in his back.
This was not the Spirit Land.
There was no blood in the Spirit Land.
The old woman stroked my face and sang a healing song.
“Father help her, she wants to live... Father you have done this... Humbly have pity on her... Father help her, she wants to live...’
The warmth radiated through to my cold bones and I knew that it was from the buffalo blanket on the bed, not my blood.
The warmth took fire and blazed inside me and I thought I might be on my funeral platform, at last taking my journey to the Spirit Land.
But I was not burning on a pyre. It was a fever, from my wounds. I drifted in and out of sleep, in and out of dreams, and the faces and voices surrounding me changed.
I must have been in that fever for days, hovering like a hummingbird in the dream between life and death, until one morning I woke to the smell of frybread and bacon fat and such a cry of hunger rose in my belly that I knew I was alive and craving the sweet things of the earth.
Red Shirt smiled when I sat up. Death had retreated, beaten back by their prayers and medicine. He would have to wait for another day to take me.
Red Shirt stroked my face and I felt his fingertips ridge the crusted scar across my cheek. Red Flea had left her mark on me.
“You were hurt badly, sister, but it is good to see the blood in your cheeks. How did you get here?”
“I was near Canada,” I said, the words thick in my throat, as if my tongue had bloated. “We were on the border. Just a month after you left us at Lodgepole.”
He looked to the old woman who’d nursed me back to life. A look of incomprehension passed between them and she crossed herself in the Christian way, muttering a prayer, rocking from side to side.
“What is it? What’s wrong?”
“That is the last thing you remember?”
“It was no more than a month after you left. The winyanpi attacked me on the night of the moon when the wolves run together. They ran me out of the camp and beat me. I thought I was dead. But you found me.”
“This is not possible,” said Red Shirt. “You are at the Pine Ridge reservation. You have come a thousand miles.”
Perhaps I had run to him, in a fever of delirium. But I knew no one could travel that far in a dream. It would have taken me weeks, months without a horse, and still bleeding from my wounds?
“I have come so far in just a moment?”
Red Shirt shook his head. “It is no moment since that morning at Lodgepole when I last saw you,” he said. “You have come ten years.”
Indian heart
PINE RIDGE, JANUARY, 1887. It took a few days for it to sink in, but I had to accept it. By some miracle, I had skimmed across a decade like a stone across a river.
But by which hand had I been thrown?
For me it had been a few days since Red Flea and the other women had attacked me. I still felt the pain of their blows. The scar across my cheek still stung, the blood crusted. But the world had moved on a decade.
Had the same thing happened to me that first time, when I’d woken in the grass at the edge of the Hunkpapa camp and been found by Little Star?
It must have been so.
Only this time I remembered everything that had happened before, and my life before that first morning by the Tongue River was still a blank.
An old woman, Stands at Crossroads, cared for me, and every night Red Shirt would tell me all of the things that had happened in the last ten years.
Sitting Bull and the Hunkpapa band had escaped to Canada a month after I disappeared. I wondered if Red Flea, and the women who had killed me, would think it was their murder of Bright Star Falling that had made their escape a success.
Sitting Bull had claimed that to the Lakota, the American and Canadian sides of the border were traditional hunting grounds and therefore, the Lakota were as much Canadian Indians as American.
When they camped at a place called Long Spear up above Fargo, they met an Englishman in a red coat, who welcomed them to Great Britain, the land of Victoria, Grandmother England.
On the same day, Crazy Horse and his Oglala band surrendered at the Red Cloud agency.
By now, a month after my mysterious disappearance, all Indian lands in America had been taken. All Indians had to live on reservations or die.
“So they took everything,” I said.
Red Shirt only smiled sadly and nodded.
“All we took from them was Long Hair, and they took everything from us.”
“By September that same year,” said Red Shirt, “in the moon of the brown leaves, news came that Crazy Horse had been killed. It was an accident, they said. He had fallen onto a soldier’s bayonet while fighting with his fellow Oglala braves.”
“It was no accident,” I said. “I saw it happen. He was invited to the fort to talk and they tried to trick him into the jail, and when he struggled, a soldier stabbed him in the back.”
Red Shirt wondered at how I could have seen this and I told him of the visions I had dreamed as I had skimmed over ten years.
“Crazy Horse is dead,” he said, “but Sitting Bull still lives, as does Spotted Elk.”
He took a stick and poked at the embers of the fire, perhaps wondering if I had seen things to come.
“It is true,” he said. “Crazy Horse’s friends turned against him. He was killed by them as much as by the blueshirts. The Men who are Talked About wanted to be chiefs of their reservations. But what man can be a chief when the greatest Oglala warrior in history lives next to you? He only made them look like The Men No One Talks About.”
I thought I should bury the white ghost — the lock of Little Star’s hair I wore in a medicine bundle around my neck — because it was the custom to bury it after twelve moons of mourning. I had worn it around my neck as we had travelled north to Canada, but knew now, ten years later, that I couldn’t give him up. It was the custom to bury the white ghost and hold a giveaway, presenting gifts to friends, relatives or the needy. But I had nothing to give away. I had no relatives, no friends, and there was no one in this reservation as needy as I was.
The poorest person in Pine Ridge could look on me with pity.
And besides. Twelve moons had not passed since he’d died. Not for me.
While I stayed there, I devoured their stories of what had happened to the Indian nations. Round the fires every night, they told their tales, reciting the history of betrayal and defeat — a nation still recovering from the shock of annihilation.
One night a squawman called Billy Roka told the story of Chief Joseph. Billy had married a pretty Indian girl who’d taken a white name. She dressed like a white woman and Billy Roka looked like any other white man, dressed in the rough jeans, shirt and waistcoat of a rancher, with a brown derby hat.
But for the colour of her skin, you wouldn’t know that this couple had ever been near a tipi.
Billy did a lot of trading with the whites and he read their newspapers so he’d followed the whole story.
“Chief Joseph and the Nez Perce,” he said, staring into the campfire flames. “I never saw a story capture the imagination of the American nation like that.”
We huddled in our blankets and leaned in closer.
“The government removed the Nez Perce from their ancestral homelands when they found gold and the whites invaded. Same story as the Black Hills. The army did nothing to protect the treaty. They just tore it up, like they did with all the promises they made to the Indians. They told the Nez Perce they had to move to a new reservation: some barren strip of dirt in Idaho.
“So over 750 Nez Perce and a small band of Paloose went on the run across America. The cavalry chased them, but they soon found out the Nez Perce were better warriors than they thought.
“For three months, all through that summer, the Nez Perce outfought two thousand blueshirts. The chase went all across Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana. Over a thousand miles they fought and chased, chased and fought. And the newspapers of the white men grew to admire them and praise them for their courage.
“In the end, with most of their war chiefs dead, starving and freezing to death with no blankets, just forty miles from the Canadian border, the longknives cornered them. They fought for three days in the snow. But then they had to surrender.”
Forty miles, I thought. So close. Caught just as they pushed at the door to freedom. Like me.
“Chief Joseph marched out to the blueshirt general and held out his rifle and said, “I will fight no more forever”. The white generals accepted his surrender and Chief Joseph was admired throughout the nation. If any Indian chief became a national hero to the whites, then Chief Joseph was it. But it didn’t make no difference. The president put the Nez Perce on a train, like cattle, and shunted them to swamp land.”
After four years, they pressured Sitting Bull to return to America. And with the buffalo dwindling so much, it was hunger that drove them back to accept their place on the reservations.
Sitting Bull rode south, handed over his rifle and made peace with the white men who’d taken the Black Hills. He lived on the Standing Rock reservation, over 300 miles from Pine Ridge.
“He is there now?” I asked.
Red Shirt shook his head. “I don’t think so. The Hunkpapa live on the reservation at Standing Rock, but four years ago Sitting Bull was given leave to tour in shows. I have heard he is now in New York, taking part in a great show with Buffalo Bill. He parades before crowds of white people who pay money to see him.”
But he was alive. His murder had not happened. Perhaps it was a vision given to me, so I could save one of the chiefs. Just one.
“I must go to him,” I said, “and warn him of what will happen.”
“Why?” asked Red Shirt.
“If I tell him what I saw, he might not answer that knock at the door. He might avoid being shot.”
“But it has happened. You saw it happen.”
“It hasn’t happened yet.”
“If you saw it, then perhaps it has already happened. Perhaps even those events of the future that have yet to happen have already happened.”
“What’s the point of seeing a vision of the future if you can’t learn from it and change it?”
Red Shirt smiled. “That I do not know.”
I left the warmth of the fire and wandered out into the darkness to see the stars, much like I had that night before the Battle of the Little Bighorn. Only this time I was not looking down on the greatest Indian camp the world had ever seen. I saw only a sad cluster of log cabins and half of the tribe wearing white men’s clothes. They drove wagons now and called themselves Christians.
The tales had cracked my heart open and spilled my guts into the campfire. I wondered at how our gods could have deserted us. Where was Tah-te when the Nez Perc needed a hurricane? Where was Sungmanito? The gods had failed us.
But wasn’t I myself a god? Sitting Bull had told me they all thought I was White Buffalo Calf Woman come back. I had felt the powers simmering inside me. I had killed the wolves on Wolf Mountain, I had seen visions and travelled through time. Perhaps I was the only god left to fight a last battle.
The beginnings of a plan formed in my mind. Go to New York to warn Sitting Bull. Lay waste the city and drive the whites back.
Red Shirt came out to me and stood, gazing at the stars for a while.
“Why are there no children here?” I asked. It had taken me a day or two to notice, and since then I had been afraid to ask, fearing a story that would make me puke up my heart.
“We built a school,” he said. “Almost ten years ago. At Carlisle in Pennsylvania. We send our children there to learn the ways of the white man.”
I was glad that they were alive, but a ball of anger lodged in my throat. “They will not know you. They will turn against you.”
He didn’t seem concerned, only nodded sadly. “It is our children’s only chance for a future. I do not want to see them fight and die. The white men are too many. We are too few.”
I thought of the murmurs I’d heard around the reservation over the last few days; that they were being moved once again, for a third time. Each time the Indians got settled, the white man found a patch of grass they thought was too green for Indians and wanted it, so the Indians had to move.
Pretty soon, they would be in a hole in the ground.
“If I stay here with you,” I said, “I will only bring you trouble.”
“There are many white men who stay with us,” he said. “They have wives here.”
“The whites call them squawmen,” I said. “They look down on them. How do you think they will look on me: a white squaw?”
“I think of them as a link between us and the whites. We need many links. You are a link too. You bond us to the whites.”
I shook my head. “I would bring shame upon you.”
“I would be honoured to have you among my people.”
Tears pricked my eyes and I swallowed them back, determined not to show weakness. “I have to go find Sitting Bull. Then find my home. Though I don’t know where that is.”
My notebook, still in my pouch, in which I scribbled the
dream words and images every morning before they slipped away, and pored over every night, trying to work out what the words might mean. What was Touchstone? Was Birmingham a city somewhere in America? Was Hudson the river in New York? What was Mitch, Rachel, Danny?
“It pains me that you will go,” said Red Shirt. “Ever since that first day I saw you, I knew our paths would cross again. I knew that our destinies were intertwined. But it is not to be.”
I felt it too, but I could not tell him. “I have another road to walk,” I said.
“And I too. Perhaps those roads will cross again, somewhere over the horizon.”
I wanted to cry, to yell at him for accepting it so easily. Why did he not hold me and force me to stay? Why did he let me go so easily?
“In the morning we will dress you as a white woman.”
“I don’t want to dress as a white woman.”
He smiled, and it was infuriating. “If you’re going to travel to New York, you cannot do it as Lakota. It is not safe out there for us.”
“I don’t care what they think of me,” I yelled. “I’ll kill them all!”
Fire roared in my heart and I felt I could summon up a tempest that would drive back every white man from the plains.
Red Shirt pressed his hand between my breasts and stilled my anger.
“You have a white woman’s skin, and you may put on a white woman’s dress. But you have an Indian heart. It will always beat to the rhythm of our drums.”
He stayed, with his palm to my beating heart, then turned and disappeared. A lone wolf howled in the blackness.
Running Water
RUNNING WATER, JANUARY, 1887. In the morning, Red Shirt got a cluster of elder women to dress me as a white woman. They first unbraided my hair. No white woman would wear her hair in braids like a native, falling on her breasts to indicate she was married or on her back to indicate she wasn’t. White women wore their hair tied up, mostly, sometimes down, often tucked up under bonnets, and whichever way they wore it there was no meaning to it.
Once my hair was free it fell copper red about my shoulders, twisted and gnarled like crooked roots.