Ohitika Woman

by Mary Brave Bird

  About an hour later Jerry called, and he said: “Teddy Bear just got stabbed. He’s dead.” I couldn’t believe it. They had been coming out of the bar around midnight—it was just a little bar off Seventh Street with a dingy little alley and a back-street parking lot—and some other guys came after them wanting to fight. I don’t know how it started; I guess they were drunk, didn’t like Indians, and just wanted to have a go at them. Teddy Bear was driving the car, and he got out to warn his brother that one of those guys had a knife, and he got it right in the heart instead of his brother. They took Teddy Bear in the car, and there was a hospital about four blocks away, and they were in such a hurry to get him there that they crashed the car right into the door of the hospital. By that time it was too late. That night they took him to the morgue. No charges were ever brought against these gang members because they couldn’t find the knife. So the next night, Christmas night, we had a peyote meeting, and we just sat there not knowing what to do. Everybody was feeling so bad. We all wept. In the morning, as I was bringing in the water, the phone rang and it was Leonard Peltier calling from jail. Jerry told him the bad news about Teddy Bear. That was the last time I spoke to Peltier. Then we had a wake service at the mortuary for Teddy Bear, and we had the staff, the fan, and the drum go around, and we all sang for him and had a service like that. He was only seventeen, a handsome boy with his whole life ahead of him. Leonard buried him on the reservation next to Clear Water, who was killed at Wounded Knee. Jerry wanted it that way. After that night of tragedy I started to be more concerned about Pedro and my other kids. What made it worse was that Teddy Bear was clean, he didn’t drink and he was really into his schoolwork.

  I became more depressed than ever. When we first started living in Phoenix, I had told Leonard that I never wanted to go back to South Dakota. I was very adamant about it and he could not do anything about it. That’s why he stayed. After all, he too loved the children. He met different relatives in the Native American Church there. He’d go to sweats. He’d go on speaking tours and then come back only to travel again when some university would have him come and speak. I stayed behind, alone, with the kids. I started drinking heavily.

  There were two places Indians in Phoenix liked to go to get drunk. One was called Mr. Lucky’s. On the weekends they had bands upstairs, playing country music. Downstairs was a disco with rock ‘n’ roll. Thursday was ladies’ night. Sometimes, on certain nights, Mr. Lucky’s would have musclemen, male strippers, for the women to gawk at. At other times they had go-go girls for the men to make eyes at. The other favorite Indian watering hole was the Cancan on Fifteenth Street. It was a huge place that once served as a warehouse. Over the bar they had the Playboy poster of Sacheen Little Feather in the nude on a double spread. Very inspiring. Sacheen is a friend who once, years ago, made headlines when she received an Oscar for Marlon Brando. The Cancan was the place for country music. It had a huge dance floor and the place was always packed with Navajos from wall to wall. And, boy, could they dance! There are a lot of Diné in Phoenix. They come in winter to work. I met many friends from Big Mountain there. I preferred Mr. Lucky’s to the Cancan. Most bars in Phoenix closed at 1:00 A.M., but Lucky’s stayed open until 2:00 and steady customers would get a complimentary margarita after the last dance.

  There was still another bar with strippers. I went there with Bull Bear and another skin, an Apache. I was still parking my car when these two were already at the front table. They already had a load on. There were signs—DON’T TOUCH and HANDS OFF. It meant that they did not allow the customers to touch or fondle the go-go girls. One of the girls came over to our table. I told Bull Bear: “You’re supposed to tip her,” but he had no money left. I gave him five bucks and he tried to stuff it into her bikini. The Apache already had his hands between her legs. They had this big heavyweight bouncer who came running, yelling: “No touching! No touching!” The Apache was fighting Bull Bear over the girl, yelling: “I’m going to take her away from you!” She didn’t want to have anything to do with either of them. Luckily both passed out before things got really rowdy.

  One night I was at Mr. Lucky’s. I was downstairs, and I’d dance if someone asked me to. Then this guy came up to me and said: “Guess what tribe I’m from.” I said: “Apache.” “Right,” he said. I said: “Guess what tribe I’m from.” He said: “Sioux,” and I said: “Right on!” He said: “Let’s show ‘em how!” So we went and danced the last dance. He was with a Pima guy named Moran and two other guys. I was going to my car when they came over and said: “Do you want to party? Let’s go to the Tempe Bridge.” I agreed to go. We went down a back road and came upon a place where a lot of cars were parked. Everyone was just sitting around listening to their ghetto blasters under the bridge, drinking, cruising around, meeting people, checking it out. It’s near the university. Everyone just parks and parties up. If the police come everyone has to take off, because you’re not allowed to be there.

  I was partying with Moran, and we took this Navajo fellow back to his apartment. Then we went to Moran’s apartment. It was already eight in the morning, and it was about a hundred degrees. I then realized that I had lost my car keys, probably at the Navajo’s place. He said: “My cousin has a truck,” and so he took us around. The problem was that I couldn’t remember where we’d dropped that guy off. We bought some more beer and jumped in another car and went back under the bridge to look for the keys. By then it was evening time and we couldn’t find the keys. I had to go to the bathroom, so I went behind some bushes and fell into the canal with my pants down. Oh, man, it was a drag. I was in the water, trying to get out, but I couldn’t because it was too steep. Pretty soon I started yelling and Moran and another guy came over. By this time I was all buzzed up from the alcohol and I said: “Come on in, the water’s fine!” They helped me out. I never did find the keys. I ended up calling a locksmith to come and make a new key. We had another twelve-pack. The whole thing turned into a long, forty-eight-hour drunk. We kept on drinking under the bridge, one beer after another. My head was swimming. I could no longer stand up. Moran took me to his apartment in the Wild Winds complex. He dropped me on a couch and threw a blanket over me. I was dead to the world. A disheveled woman clutching a beer bottle was hunkered down in a corner. No one knew how she had gotten there. I woke up when somebody was shaking me, yelling: “Who’s that?” It was Moran’s old lady, a young Arikara woman. She kept yelling: “Who’s that?” and “Are you fooling around with my man?” Moran was yelling from the other room: “It’s just a Sioux gal, sleeping it off. Nothing’s going on.” Then we all burst out laughing. After I got dressed and sobered up I found Moran sitting in the swimming pool they had there, in his shorts and boots. He grinned and said: “Jump in!” I did. Then the woman with the beer bottle suddenly emerged, crawled into the front seat of Moran’s car, and tried to take off He ran and stopped her by jumping on the hood. Later, they took me back to my place. I introduced Moran to my kids and to Brad, my sister’s husband, who was baby-sitting. Then I had a shower, cleaned myself up, and put on a new dress. After that I behaved for a while. For a week, to be exact.

  Next weekend we were going to go to San Carlos, the Apache reservation. That’s where Geronimo’s tribe is from. First a bunch of us went to shoot some pool and have a few. I was drinking Jack. Moran’s house was only two blocks down so we went down there, and we met another guy, who wanted a ride to the liquor store. So he hopped in. We were in the Camaro, and it was really packed—a whole carload of guys. That’s when I got stopped. Right away they gave me one of those sobriety tests. I failed miserably. They handcuffed me and threw me in a car. It was hot and I was sweating and crying—tears were streaming down my face. It took them eight hours to process me in a holding tank, where I almost got into a fight with a big old black hooker and a Mexican one. They were talking about how they could fight, and about their old men, yakking away. I had a hangover and told them: “Why don’t you just shut up? Is that all you talk about is how you fight?
I’m tired of listening to that shit.” They said: “Girl, you’re in the wrong place to get sassy. Who do you think you are?” I said: “I’m from the res. I’m not from your jungle. I wasn’t raised in a city. What are you going to do about it?” The hookers kept bragging about what big fighters they were, and how mean they could be, daring me to get it on, but there was a full-blood Indian girl with us in the cell and she backed me up. She was a warrior woman for sure, and after one look at her, the hookers cooled down. Then Moran came with a bail bondsman and got me out.

  I was arraigned, and that was a drag, because they fined me six hundred dollars. There was a city program so that you could work off your fine. In my case that meant working for twelve days. There was a whole crew—you’d meet early in the morning and there was a bus that would take you to a park, or wherever you were going to work that day. They put us in the dirtiest part of the city. There was shit all over the streets. But the men had to do that, shovel up the shit. I had to clean bathrooms in the parks and tidy up the whole area. The toilets had to be really clean because the inspector would watch us and check out our work. Later we cleaned the city streets. Everything from picking up trash, pulling up weeds, to landscaping in the parks. It was a pretty strict program. You couldn’t mouth back and had to behave. The crew was mostly wetbacks. Hardly anybody spoke English. I made a lot of friends there. We’d sit in the back of the bus and talk about things, those that could speak English. The others gossiped in Spanish. One black guy was especially nice to me, helping out when the work was too heavy for me. Every morning we got a break for about twenty minutes. We sat around in a park and these two guys went behind the hill to smoke a joint. They had to pee and went behind a bush and got promptly arrested for indecent exposure. They were kicked off the program. They didn’t even get a ride back—they had to walk.

  Mary in school. This is the only photograph taken of her as a child.

  Maiy’s great-grandfather Thomas Flood (Indian name Cheki Paw) at age twenty-seven. He was born in 1863 and died in 1906 at the age of forty-three. He was a tribal delegate to Washington and a tribal interpreter. He was murdered, shot to death. Nobody knows by whom.

  In 1971, at Crow Dog’s Paradise, a man undergoes the self-torture of the sun dance.

  At Rosebud and other Sioux reservations, many Native Americans still live in substandard houses, without modern facilities.

  A scene on the Pine Ridge Sioux reservation, part of Shannon County, S.D. According to a recent article in the New York Times, Shannon has the lowest per capita income of all the more than 3,000 counties in the U.S.A. The people of the Rosebud reservation are not much better off.

  Mary’s mother, Emily, with one of the grandchildren.

  Mary and her new husband, Rudi Olguin, at their wedding, in Santa Fe in 1992.

  A meeting of the Native American Church at Crow Dog’s place, Alex One Star doing the drumming.

  A Sioux sweat lodge. The participants are inside, taking their vapor bath in the dome-shaped lodge.

  After Crow Dog’s release from prison in 1977, a great honoring feast and dance was given for him and Mary.

  A buffalo skull serves as an altar during a religious rite.

  Sioux women participating in a sun dance at Pine Ridge, 1972.

  During 1976, Mary made many impassioned speeches in support of her husband at the time, Leonard Crow Dog, imprisoned for political “offenses” in the aftermath of Wounded Knee.

  At a ceremony held at Rosebud in 1977, Mary, as a special honor, was given the name Ohitika Win—Brave Woman.

  Mary in Paris in October 1992. She was invited to give a lecture at the Musée de l’Homme, on the occasion of the opening of the Discovery of America exhibition.

  We went out and celebrated the last few days. Had our first Bud in twelve days. Even the program director said: “Drink and drive. Get arrested and fined. Keep this program alive!” I had a Bud Light T-shirt on and this guy, Alberto, asked me more than once: “Hey, Bud Light, you want to have a drink after work?” I finally said sure. So I went to a bar with Alberto and we had a few beers. He tried to teach me the finer points of playing pool. Then we decided to cruise around. We stopped in at a park. You are not supposed to be in the park after hours and, of course, the police checked us out. Alberto had a warrant out from Mesa, for some old traffic tickets, so they took him to jail. He gave me his money, two hundred dollars, and said to hold it for him and take a cab home. I couldn’t find a cab and had to walk home. The park was on the other side of town, so that meant hoofing it for sixty blocks—through the worst part of Phoenix, downtown. It was dangerous, and I was scared. Some seedy characters came running after me, yelling: “Hey, girl, stop!” I kept walking. My heart was pounding. One of those men ran around and in front of me. He wanted me to give him a blowjob for ten dollars. I said: “Are you kidding? I don’t do that stuff.” The situation didn’t look good. I could see out of the corner of my eye that these creeps had a companion slowly following in a car. On a sudden inspiration I told the guy crowding me from the front: “I can’t do what you want, but I know where there are some hookers, close by where I live. You’ll drive me, I’ll show you.” That satisfied them. So I caught a ride home with them and I pointed out some hookers to the one who had crowded me. He was happy and I got a ride home. Crazy!

  Alberto had given me his sister’s phone number. I called her up and she got him out of jail. I went to their place. I told Alberto: “I still have your money,” and gave him his two hundred dollars back. He said: “Are you kidding? Anybody but you would have spent that money.” We became good friends after that. Alberto is from Nogales. He’d go to Mexico sometimes and always brought me back a little present, a trinket or a curio. Meanwhile, Bernadette, Leonard’s daughter, who was baby-sitting for me at the time, got tired of my partying and moved out.

  I still remained on my “liquid diet,” One of the people on that cleanup crew, an Indian woman, had told me about Mexican bars: “Go downtown. There’s some good bars with nice-looking men who have money to spend.” She told me about one place only one block from where I lived, with the best margaritas in town. It had a mellow atmosphere. Everybody was having a good time, jawing and dancing. It wasn’t rowdy. I’d sit at the bar, sip my margarita, and check out the scene. Then I discovered another bar across the street I went over there one day and, lo and behold, sitting in a booth was Albert Two Hawk, from Rosebud, son of Webster, a former tribal chairman. It’s amazing in what strange places you meet old acquaintances from home. I was shooting pool with him. I won a game, and when I jumped for joy my foot went out from under me and I broke it. I wasn’t even drinking. It was just clumsiness. I went around in a cast for a couple of weeks but still went dancing in the nightclubs. I was irrepressible, on a continuous tear.

  One day there was a knock at the door. It was Moran, my Apache friend from under the Tempe Bridge. He drove me to the top of South Mountain to see the sunset from Lookout Point. It was very romantic. The view was magnificent. Then he took me out to dinner and fed me real good. Moran is from Salt River. He is a roofer and gets up every morning at four to go to work—when he’s not under the bridge, that is. He gave me a good-bye kiss, saying: “If you ever need me, I’ll be there.” On that nice note I ended my stay in Phoenix. I had gotten tired of the scene there and of the life I was leading. I packed up the kids and went home to Rosebud.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Living on Beer, Commodities, and Love

  When I came back to the res after Phoenix, I had what the wasichu call culture shock. Things were even worse than before. Rosebud looked like an area ravaged by war. I had seen poverty before, in my youth, but now we seemed almost well off in the old days of twenty-five years ago. Most of the little businesses we had then, the timid attempts to make it in the white man’s way, were gone. Gone was the ancient movie house, crumbled years ago into a ruin. Gone was the little cafe with its pool hall, the little shop where Barb had made fancy western shirts, a space she shared with
an Indian jewelry maker, and even the great Abourezk’s trading emporium—everything gone, gone, gone. The whole res stank of poverty. You could see it in the listless way people were moving. If a tourist car stopped you usually saw a zombielike wino emerging from the shadows trying to panhandle. Everybody was on welfare—GA (general assisitance), ADC (Aid to Dependent Children), food stamps, commodities.