But more than lives were lost. Black Elk: “When I look back from this high hill of my old age … I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud and was buried in the blizzard. A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream … the nation’s hoop is broken and scattered. There is no center any longer, and the sacred tree is dead.”
All of that seemed as distant as the Middle Ages in the wired America of the twenty-first century, but it wasn’t. It had happened a mere fifty years before I was born; I was in fourth grade when Black Elk died, at eighty-seven.
Carl’s account of the “battle” consumed twenty minutes, but it was only a prelude to a homily on today’s ills (like Cole Hunter’s, with some additional refinements: when liquor can’t be had, hair spray is boiled down to its alcohol base and drunk) and then a soliloquy on the Lakota’s illustrious yesterday.
“Everyone was strong and healthy,” he said in that somber voice. “We could walk or run or ride for miles because our bodies weren’t weakened by booze and drugs and diabetes and heart disease because of a bad diet. We could see for miles and miles. We didn’t need glasses…”
The oration went on for a while longer. I doubted the Lakota had been quite the supermen he described. Their past, compared with their dismal present, shone with a brilliance it may not have possessed.
“I don’t drink or smoke or do drugs myself,” Carl said by way of conclusion. “I’m a sun dancer. I follow the Lakota Way.”
He probably needed someone to talk to, get a few things off his chest, yet I couldn’t shake the impression that he expected something from me. Not payment for his tour-guide services, which I hadn’t asked for. What, then? Pity? Acknowledgment that the wrongs whites inflicted on his people were responsible for the wrongs they were inflicting on themselves? I wanted to say, “Okay, I get it. But the massacre was a hundred and twenty-one years ago. Your people have to get their act together. No one is forcing them to buy four million cans of beer a year.”
Whatever he wanted from me, if anything, that kind of speech wasn’t it, and I kept my mouth shut. Besides, what did I expect? Branded as intractable savages, subjected to wars of extermination, their languages and cultures suppressed, the original Americans had been made homeless in their own land, and in some sense still were. The nation’s hoop is broken … There is no center any longer. When a nation loses its center, each citizen in it loses his or hers, the moral compass is demagnetized.
At the Shell station in Pine Ridge, seat of tribal government, I was feeding Fred his twice-daily ration of gas while Leslie took the dogs for a walk. She came back, trailed by a middle-aged man.
“Phil, he wants…,” she started to say.
“I need a little cash for gas money, so my kids don’t have to walk home from school in the rain,” he said, slurring his words a little.
“Nope,” I said. “No way.”
Then, after I swung the truck into the parking lot, two women roared up an alley in a banged-up Chevy. The driver saw me and hit the brakes. “Hey, you. Wanna DVD player?” She reached into the backseat and shoved the player out the window, wires dangling from the jacks. “Twenty bucks.” I shook my head, fairly sure it was as hot as her eyes were bloodshot. “I’ll take ten,” she said, and when I refused again, she peeled off in search of another prospective customer.
The Red Cloud Indian School, beyond town off Route 18, is a Jesuit institution, kindergarten through high school. Having been trained by the Jesuits, I was drawn to it. And a donation card I’d picked up indicated that it offered hope in a place that, so far, struck me as hopeless. “More than 93% of graduates pursue higher education following graduation,” read one side of the card. “Five Red Cloud Upper Elementary students received awards at the 2005 South Dakota Media Fair … Red Cloud Lower Elementary students read over 2,500 books.” As if to guard against unwarranted optimism, the flip side delivered more bad news: “On the Pine Indian Reservation Today … Per Capita Income: $6,143 … Infant Mortality Rate: 2.6 times the national average … Suicide Rate: 72% higher than national average …
Why does anyone live here? I wondered.
In the Lakota Heritage Center, inside the original mission school building, I put that question to Tamarie Red Cloud, a tall, slender, striking young woman with glossy black hair, her sleeveless blouse baring arms liberally tattooed. She was ringing up sales in the gift shop with a coworker, Angel White Eyes. If anyone had roots in Pine Ridge, Tamarie did: she was a direct descendant of Chief Red Cloud, buried in a cemetery behind the school that bears his name. She’d lived all over the country, an army brat, but when her career-soldier father was killed in Iraq she moved back to the reservation with her mother and her young son.
“What I like most is being close to family,” she said, then thought for a moment and added with a grin, “It’s also what I dislike the most.”
“It’s a big, supportive, loving family,” she elaborated, “but I have an uncle who gets up at six in the morning, walks two miles into White Clay, and sits there and drinks all day, comes home in the evening and goes to sleep. Just like a job … I used to drink myself, but when I got pregnant, I sobered up on my own. A lot of people have kids and keep doing what they’re doing. I had to break that cycle. My son is my life. I want him to grow up in a loving environment so he’ll know, be nice to your girlfriend, be nice to your wife. He’s a powwow dancer.”
She thought that the revival of ancient customs, like powwows, helps guide young Lakota onto a new path. “It’s not the Lakota Way to drink. There are a lot of people who have gotten sober, a lot of people who sit up and say, ‘I’m really proud to be an Indian, so why am I doing this?’ A lot of people are on the straight road.”
Leslie had a question: did Tamarie resent white people who copy Native American practices, like playing pipe music in fancy massage spas, conducting sweat-lodge ceremonies at fat farms?
Tamarie laughed. “A lot of Indians get upset about that, and the Chiefs and the Redskins and the Braves. It doesn’t bother me if you guys want to name teams after us. We’re still here, and we’re not going anywhere.”
* * *
The skies were stupendous as we drove back to Interior. The plural skies was appropriate because they were so vast and varied, tattered clouds racing from horizon to horizon, like ragged airships. The land beneath was a bright, eye-hurting green where the sun broke through, dark and muted elsewhere, and it looked as if it had been recently shorn and its hair had just started to grow back; the grass, topped with tawny tufts, appeared to be the same length all across the hills rolling on toward the Badlands. Beneath the fantastic rock formations, the flats and valleys, catching the late sun’s slanting rays, shone like lakes of light, and the pathologies afflicting Pine Ridge, awful as they were, seemed worse for the beauty of the setting, like a terrible crime committed in a splendid mansion.
22.
Indians and whites agree about one thing: the Dakota Badlands are bad lands. That is the meaning of the Lakota word mako sica. French fur trappers called them les mauvaises terres à traverser (bad lands to cross). A fair day was in the forecast; we were going into Badlands National Park on a buffalo hunt—with cameras rather than guns.
Wild bison roam the park’s prairies, sharing them with blackfooted ferrets and prairie dogs. Bighorn sheep range through the mountains. Our first stop was the Cowboy Corner gas station in Interior. There was no twelve-step program for Fred’s drinking habit. To avoid facing the truth—I’d bought too much truck—I did not look at the numbers flashing on the pump. A man walked out of the convenience store, wearing a silvery beard forked like a fish’s tail.
“Now that’s an unusual beard you’ve got there,” I called out.
He glanced my way. “Yup. It covers up a lot of ugly.”
Equipped with backpacks, water bottles, binoculars, camera, compass, GPS, and Tanka Bars (a version of Indian pemmican made from dried berries and buffalo jerky), we drove to park headquarters and picked up a map, the ba
ck side of which issued warnings: “Weather can change rapidly … seek shelter from the thunder showers, hailstorms, and occasional tornadoes that descend on the Badlands with sudden fury … Observing a bison up close in the wild … is extremely dangerous. This is not a zoo … they may attack. Never approach a bison closely. They can run faster than 30 miles per hour … Rattlesnakes, spiders, and stinging insects are found within the park.”
“Think we’ll live through this experience?” Leslie said, half jokingly, which is another way of saying half seriously.
The Badlands Loop Road wriggled across a wide, green plateau through what must be one of the weirdest landscapes on Earth—like a city designed by a mad architect. Buttes that resembled Mayan temples; chimneys, spires, minarets, cones, pinnacles, pyramids—every shape we could imagine and quite a few we couldn’t: gigantic rock mushrooms, enormous golf balls perched on stone tees tall as telephone poles. We stopped at the start of the Medicine Root Trail, shouldered our packs, and tramped off into a profound silence. (Prohibited from running in the park, Sage and Sky were confined to quarters in the truck.) After covering only half a mile, I discovered that my foot still had some healing to do and had to take a break. Sitting down, I munched a Tanka Bar for breakfast and glassed the prairie for bison, the mountains for bighorns, but saw none. The buff-colored mountains were banded in vivid reds—fossilized soils tracing the history of the Badlands from the present day (near the top) back to a layer of grayish black shale (at the bottom) that was a sea floor seventy-five million years ago.
If it weren’t for the wind, the stillness would have been absolute. Looking at the bizarre formations in the eerie quiet, I felt as if we were astronauts on an alien planet. The earth shrugged its shoulders, and what had been sea bottom rose to become, many millennia later, a humid, subtropical forest; the climate grew cooler and drier, and the forest was transformed into an arid savanna; the earth shrugged its shoulders again, lifting mountains, and erosion patiently sculpted them over the ages. In the Badlands’ crumbling rock the fossil shells of enormous sea turtles had been found, the remains of giant marine lizards, the bones of prehistoric sheep and saber-toothed cats. I pictured, eons into the future, a paleontologist from our successor species scratching his own brain-bulging head at the discovery of a human skull, a homesteader’s plowshare, or maybe the preserved frame of a truck like Fred. Incomplete fossil records and fragmentary artifacts suggest that our primitive ancestor Homo sapiens inhabited this area in the anthropocene epoch …
We walked another mile, and the prediction of unpredictable weather proved accurate. A gray awning drew over the sky. It began to drizzle, then rain, then pour. The “waterproof” labels on our jackets were grounds for a false-claims lawsuit. Drenched, we slogged back to the trailhead and continued our hunt by road. We saw not one buffalo but did pass through prairie dog towns—cities, really—and watched the inhabitants pop out of their burrows, peer around, and scamper from hole to hole, emitting birdlike chirps. Leslie mused upon one of the great mysteries of nature: why are rats repulsive and prairie dogs cute? On the return leg, at a bend in the road hemmed on one side by sheer cliffs, we came upon a herd of bighorn sheep, all ewes and kids. A crowd of bipeds had gathered to observe and photograph them. They—the sheep, that is—were in the late stages of a wardrobe change from winter white to summer tan, shedding in huge patches that made them look disreputable. Camouflaged against the brownish heights, the animals perched atop rocky steeples or scampered down what appeared to be perfectly vertical bluffs. One kid, no bigger than a small dog, hadn’t yet got the hang of disobeying the laws of gravity and stranded himself at the edge of a dropoff. His piteous bleats drew his mother’s attention. She trotted to the base of the cliff and stood there, apparently to give him confidence. He found a way out of his predicament, and the two ambled across the road. They were quite tame, the kid coming right up to me, as if expecting to be fed, before he opted for the grass on a sloping meadow.
* * *
She would have stood out anywhere, twenty-one years old and not far under six feet, two thirds of it taken up by her bare legs, tapering down from the cuff of her shorts into a pair of iridescent purple Doc Martens. I was slouched beside a campfire, sipping an after-dinner scotch, when she sauntered over, draped in a mauve sweater over a pink tanktop, costume jewelry clattering from around her long neck.
“Hi! I’m Dani. That’s us, over there.” She pointed at a tent and a small red car, beside which stood a tall young man with long, sandy-brown hair. “My brother, Alex. Okay if I hug your dogs?”
Sage and Sky, leashed to a picnic table, were at their charming best, tails like furry metronomes. Dani missed her dog. She and her brother were driving from Baltimore to Portland, Oregon, and had decided to visit the Badlands. Dani was captivated by the geology—she’d graduated from Johns Hopkins a couple of weeks earlier with a degree in planetary science.
Alex joined us. Wearing wire-rim glasses, thin, and about six-four, he had the look of a slightly underfed scholar. He was in fact a graduate student in mechanical engineering at the University of Maryland and not sure he liked it.
“All I’m doing is crunching numbers. I’m taking a little time off to figure out what I really want to do.” He waited a beat. “Actually, I’m on the run from the law—I got a parking ticket.”
Leslie came out of the trailer, and Dylan’s voice trailed her through the open door. He was singing an anthem to the rambling life, “Let Me Die in My Footsteps.”
“We made Chicago in one day from Baltimore,” Alex was saying. “Got into South Bend and checked in at a motel, but the rooms were full of bedbugs and we checked out and drove on to Chicago. Got in at three a.m. but couldn’t check in till eleven, so we popped some uppers and walked around the city for eight hours.”
Glancing at their tent, I noticed several purple hula hoops, two plugged into a power outlet. Electrified hoops?
“I’m a hoop dancer,” Dani said. “Those two are lighted. I’m recharging the batteries.”
She promised to stage a performance after dark.
They were a delightful pair, students on a cross-country adventure, separated from me by a gap of nearly fifty years, but we had the road in common. The road collapses differences in age and any other difference you can think of.
Then Ansel Woodenknife showed up to tell me how he’d gone from the reservation to the Food Channel.
* * *
The skies had cleared, stars came out, undimmed by smog or city lights, and we sat at the picnic table and talked till midnight. Woodenknife has an agile mind that’s likely to go off in unexpected directions; the conversation hopped and skipped and made sudden turns, but it began with fry bread.
Thirty-four years ago, his mother-in-law wanted to start a restaurant, but, she told Woodenknife, she needed something different to attract customers.
“At the time, my mother was making Indian tacos on the Rosebud Reservation and selling them out of a cooler. So she came down and said I’ll teach you how to make Indian tacos. That was the draw on the café and what a draw it was.”
The secret ingredient that made her fry bread so tasty was ground-up timpula—wild prairie turnip. Word spread. Customers flocked in from all over South Dakota and Nebraska. The Wooden Knife café became a must-stop for tourists visiting the Badlands.
Then, six years ago, the café was discovered by the Food Channel, and after Woodenknife appeared on national TV the business fell victim to its own success.
“We got so busy we couldn’t keep up. We closed. We’d expected to reopen when things slowed down, but they never did.”
But that didn’t mean retirement. The restaurant’s demise gave birth to the Wooden Knife Company, which sells fry bread mix and native foods online, and to nationwide chains like Walmart, Safeway, Stop & Shop. Woodenknife has picked up badges of recognition—voted Minority Small Businessman of the Year in 1989, inducted into the South Dakota Small Business Hall of Fame in 2003, appointed by the gover
nor to the state tourist board. The fry bread taco has carried him a long way from the Rosebud Reservation, where he was born, yes, in a log cabin in 1954, and made it only through the ninth grade.
“So did your mother create the Indian taco?” I asked.
“No. Just about every tribe west of the Mississippi would like to claim to have started the Indian taco. What I think happened…”
He then presented his theory, and it taught me two things: if you ask Ansel Woodenknife a question, you will not go begging for an answer; and fry bread was as crucial to the survival of the plains Indians as the introduction of the horse. The theory went like this. After they were confined to reservations, the tribes could no longer migrate; the men were not allowed to hunt. They nearly starved on meager government rations until the women figured out that by mixing a little of this with a little of that and cooking it in lard, a substance they’d never heard of before, they could provide a meal.
“The mother could feed her family,” he said. “What a relief! Her kids weren’t starving anymore. And that’s why fry bread is such a pivotal food in American culture. It was a monumental step.”
“I’d never thought of fry bread as the salvation of the Indian people,” I said.
“In a lot of ways it is. People talk about obesity on the reservations, that fry bread is this terrible thing that’s causing death. Those same people were never subject to a hundred-and-fifty-year change in everything … Most species never survive that, having to completely readapt in a hundred and fifty years.”
From there, the conversation branched off like a vascular system into Lakota beliefs, and Woodenknife’s traditional upbringing, and his hopes to preserve those traditions for his children’s sake.
“I embrace other cultures. Because I was given so much of my culture as a youth, I’m not threatened by other people’s. It’s sad to me that other people don’t have as much of their culture as they should. It’s sad that that’s disappearing … Just a few weeks ago, a friend of mine that’s a photographer came out here. He leads retreats. There was a lady there from Italy, and we were talking about my culture. I asked: ‘What do you know about yours and your gods? Not the crusade God but your beautiful gods. You had river deities, forest deities … power points where you could reach out and be beyond who you are. Know your gods. Know what made you Italian … What a thing you can offer the world—a slight bit of color in a gray, gray world.’”
The Longest Road Page 17