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Ohitika Woman

Page 18

by Mary Brave Bird


  If I had my way, people would be more self-sufficient, not dependent on Washington. They should have cheaper, better housing and more space to plant some trees and have kitchen gardens. Women should get together and talk about how to change things for the better. There are programs for women who are trying to get their families together, but there are not enough social workers getting out to the people. And many women cannot go to these meetings because they have no car or gas money. The Native American Church has a women’s auxiliary that does good work. They encourage us to do traditional crafts. Many people do beautiful bead- and quillwork but have to travel far to find an outlet. I myself make beaded and feathered earrings that I have no trouble selling in Phoenix or Santa Fe, but for which I have no outlets on the res.

  Things are not all bad. The land is beautiful. Life is laid-back and we do not have the all-Ameriean rat race. The days pass slowly, on Indian time. Uptown, young people are cruising or parking, talking to old friends, or meeting new ones. They have a beer or two. They joke. The boys make eyes at the girls. The girls giggle. They listen to rock ‘n’ roll or country music. They sing forty-niner songs. You go to the club and there is a line of white cowboys with their big hats on, having a Coors. They have their rodeos and watch their livestock, mostly keeping to themselves. They don’t mingle much, but there’s no friction. We have “sobriety dances.” You go dancing on the weekend. You sip soft drinks. There are nice snacks, but no alcohol at all. And you’ll ask someone: “How long since you quit drinking?” And they’ll answer: “Since yesterday.” And some guy will tease me: “Don’t do anything I wouldn’t do,” and I tell him: “I’ve already done everything.”

  I’m forever bouncing back and forth between the white and the Indian world. When I’m on my “white and middle-class” binge, I get up, turn on the radio real loud, put on my face, even paint my nails and tease or frizz my hair with a rouche on top. I can’t exist without constant music. Rock ‘n’ roll, hit songs, country music. I am addicted to modern Sioux songs by Jackie Bird. I put the same tape of hers on again and again. I eat junk food and get fat. I drink margaritas instead of Bud. The TV is on all day, even if nobody watches. And then, one day, I look at myself in the mirror and say. “Shit, what is going on here?” And let my hair hang loose, Indian style, put on a choker, go to a meeting, take medicine, go to the yuwipi, sing forty-niner songs, eat wasna and wojapi, happy at being Indian again. I guess my “white man” binges are due to having been exposed to middle-class comforts in New York.

  And then something very bad happens. Today, the fight for Native American rights is, above all, a fight for our land and environment. The land is a living part of ourselves. Once it is gone, we are gone. The fight is not merely preaching against Styrofoam, aerosol, and Pampers, which are all bad, though I do that too. Or fighting against trash being burned in open dumps. Or trying to stop trucks with uranium waste from the Edgemont area driving through the res. Now some entrepreneurs from Connecticut, and the East generally, want to turn our reservation into a garbage dump. The wasichu have already given us smallpox, measles, and whiskey, and now they want to bury us in their waste. The tribal government has sold us out, making deals without a referendum and against the will of the people. The waste disposal firm will send us the crap and filth from Minneapolis, Denver, and other big cities and will bless us with an Everest of garbage on five thousand acres of our most beautiful land situated near some of our most sacred places and not far from Wounded Knee. I have fought for a sovereign Sioux Nation, but in that battle we have been defeated. But when it comes to hazardous waste it is suddenly all right to be a “sovereign tribe,” which can be exempted from protective environmental laws and regulations. So now these firms come to us with their garbage. They do so not only to get around laws that protect white Americans, but because it is also so much cheaper. “Those benighted Indians,” these people reason, “are so desperate for money that they’ll accept any terms offered.”

  The contract our tribal leaders signed reads in part: “In no event shall any environmental regulations or standards of South Dakota be applicable to this project.” On top of that, these polluters shall have the sole right to decide what: kind of shit, poison, toxic or hazardous waste they will dump on us. If, at some later date, the tribe should adopt stricter standards for waste disposal, then we must compensate those bastards for the costs arising from the new rules. And, of course, we will have to live with whatever they dump on us forever. For allowing them to do this to us, they will pay to the tribe the magnificent sum of one dollar for every ton of waste. I do not know if and what our great iyeska leaders got paid under the table for selling us out, but if we find out that somebody has been bribed, there will be a sharpening of scalping knives. In the meantime, we’ll struggle against an incoming tide of the white man’s offal. Most of the tribal council people now agree with us.

  Every year some two hundred thousand motor bikers hold a huge powwow at Sturgis, South Dakota, at the edge of the Black Hills. With their shaggy beards and tattoos, they are often called rough, barbaric Archie Bunker types. But many of those bikers offered to help us fight the waste dumpers. They came down to Rosebud wearing T-shirts with slogans printed on them: REMEMBER WHEN SEX WAS SAFE AND BIKERS WERE DANGEROUS? This country must really be going to the dogs when even bikers turn environmentalists. We found them to be nice, jolly, concerned men and women. They wanted to hold an antidumping demonstration on the res, in Ghost Hawk Park, but the politicians forbade it. After reading this chapter, it won’t surprise you that I sank into a deep canyon of depression and tried once more to find consolation in a bottle.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  On a Tear

  I was drinking again, doing some very heavy boozing. I was on a big tear and it went on for a long time, from the summer of 1990 to the spring of 1991. This whole period of my life I spent in a haze, in a fog. I think that during all that time I was hardly ever sober. AIM and all the other Indian rights organizations recognize alcoholism as our number one problem and they try all kinds of approaches, but nothing seems to work. You can’t solve the drinking problem without getting rid of its causes but you can’t do this either, because it is the government and white society that are at the root of the problem, and both are beyond our power and influence. That goes not only for our Sioux reservations but for nearly all tribes in the United States. It is the whites who manufacture the booze, who transport and distribute it among us, who profit from it, and who make the laws governing the sale of liquor. It is the neglect of society at large that makes it impossible for us to rise from our abject poverty. So we drown our misery in cheap wine and whiskey.

  The possession or sale of alcohol used to be illegal on both Pine Ridge and Rosebud. The result was that many Sioux men became bootleggers in a small, you could say family, way. Last summer they opened up the Rosebud Reservation to liquor and now it’s everywhere. Anyone who has the money and the right connections can open a bar or a “club.” There is one outside Mission. It enforces strict rules because they’ve had too many fights in there. If you cause trouble more than once, you’re banned forever. We have a liquor store, the R & R, just outside Mission. Other places on the res have bars, too. The reasoning behind the new law was that if liquor was made legal, we’d have fewer accidents. Before, if you lived in Mission you had to go all the way down to Nebraska to get smashed—a ninety-mile round trip. If you lived someplace else on the res you might have to drive even farther to get your favorite poison. You got drunk in Valentine, forty miles south of the res in Nebraska, or Murdo, outside the res in the north, and then wrecked on the long way home. Allowing liquor on the res, close to where you lived, was supposed to prevent injuries and deaths caused by drunken driving. Personally, I have a hunch that as many people as before are DWI, driving while intoxicated, and that the number of accidents is more or less the same. On neighboring Pine Ridge, booze is still outlawed. You get arrested, jailed, and fined if the tribal police find just one single can of
beer in your car. But alcoholism on Pine Ridge is still about the same as on Rosebud. Right now, the people from the Ridge go to White Clay for their beer. It’s only two miles outside the res. They drink quarts, mostly Old Milwaukee or Busch, whichever is cheaper. If you want hard liquor, you have to go farther down the road, maybe all the way to Gordon, Nebraska. White Clay is notorious for fights. People are trying to hustle money for beer. You can bring in a diamond ring and they’ll give you a case for it. Whether a reservation allows liquor or not does not seem to make much difference.

  We are a socializing, gregarious people. We like to visit back and forth, to get together, chat, gossip, and joke. That’s the chief pastime. In fact, the only one. Bui: there’s hardly a get-together without drinking. The favorite activity is playing quarter pitch and spinners. To play quarter pitch, you try to bounce, or rather ricochet, a quarter into a glass of beer. The loser has to drink it. There are a lot of other rules, but that’s the basic thing. And, after a night of quarter pitch, forget it! Then you can play spinners, where you spin a quarter and pick heads or tails with other players. The loser then has to drink continuously while the quarter is spinning again. When playing either quarter pitch or spinners, you can go through a case of beer in twenty minutes. It’s fun and it’s deadly. It costs a lot of money to go out drinking at the clubs, so a lot of people will just buy their beer and go home to play quarter pitch. Everybody gets caught up in the fun and excitement, and everybody gets drunk. My resistance to alcohol is much lower than it used to be, because I hardly touch a drop now, and Rudi doesn’t want either of us to get soused. But when we got married our Indian friends in Santa Fe threw us a big party at a public campground, high up on the mountain, halfway to the ski basin. And, of course, they had some big coolers full of beer and started a game of quarter pitch. And they picked on Rudi, because he was new at the game. To please them, he drank like a good boy, but he wasn’t used to drinking, and he passed out on his bed. When I went in to kiss him I missed the bed altogether and wound up on the floor. Well, that was our only relapse since we got together.

  While I was on my gigantic binge I still had enough awareness left to know that I needed help, that I should get into treatment or counseling. Leonard got on my case about it. His answer was always: “We have the medicine, we have the peyote, we have the pipe, we have the sweat lodge. There are elders here you can talk to.” That’s good, but in retrospect, I am sorry I did not seek professional help at the time. It might not have worked, but it would have been worth the try. I brushed with death many times during that nine-month binge, totaling no less than five cars.

  One time, my sister Barb and I were partying, when things got rowdy and ended up in a drunken orgy. So Barb said: “Let’s go while the going is good,” but I was in no mood to quit. Barb gave up on me, saying: “I’ve had enough of this shit,” and took off. Finally, I decided to go look for my sister. I got into the car and went after Barb. I still had a full bottle of Canadian whiskey, and I was drinking it. I was barreling down the road, almost blind drunk, taking big swigs from the bottle with one hand, driving with the other. I couldn’t find Barb, so I went heading west toward Parmelee, and then everything started spinning around—my head, the car, the whole world. And that’s the last thing I remember. After that there was nothingness. I woke up the next morning in the passenger’s seat, wondering how I had managed to get there. I noticed the whiskey. There was still some left, so I drank it. I got into the driver’s seat and tried to start the car but couldn’t. It was probably out of gas, but in my state of confusion, I couldn’t be sure of that. I crawled out of the car to investigate and found I had stopped an inch from a steep ravine. One little inch more, and that would have been that. I stumbled to the road and tried to hitch a ride. I saw a big prairie fire going on nearby, the wind whipping up the flames. For a moment I wondered whether this was just my imagination, or whether the fire was real. It was, because there was a fire truck, which picked me up and dropped me at the junction. I walked home from there, slowly sobering up. I told my friends: “I almost killed myself,” but they just laughed it off.

  I was still on my binge when my first book came out and I had to go to New York and Washington on a publicity tour. In Manhattan I stayed part of the time with my coauthor and his wife, and part of the time with Marilyn, a white lady friend from the old civil rights days. I had been out with some friends partying and when I arrived at Richard’s place, he said: “Mary, you’re totally out of it. Jean has to put you to bed. You’ve got to sleep it off and stay sober. We’ll be interviewed tomorrow.” Jean bedded me down but as soon as she and Richard were asleep, I got up, dressed, and sneaked out of the apartment. It was on the West Side, on Eighty-ninth Street. I found a bar open and went in there, ordering some margaritas. The barkeep said: “You’re too drunk. I won’t serve you.” I got rowdy, and probably obscene. I got into a cab and asked the driver, who was a Puerto Rican guy, if he knew where to get some pej, some pot. “Sure,” he said. “Let’s go for a ride!” He turned the meter off and drove straight to Harlem. There he took me to the house of a dealer, a black guy with whom I got into an argument about the price. The guy got ugly and threatened me with a knife. I said: “Go on, you’re just a pussy!” The cabdriver pulled me back into his taxi and took off at high speed, tires screeching. He almost had a heart attack. “Jesus, lady,” he said, “are all Indians that crazy? Do you want to get us killed?” He gave me a talking-to. He drove me around for two hours, showing me New York at nighttime. He didn’t even charge me. I’ll be eternally grateful to this man. He could have robbed me or raped me, instead of which he acted like a father. I don’t know how I could have remembered the way home, or Richard’s address, but somehow I made it back. I didn’t need a key to get in, because I’d never locked the apartment door. In the morning I was all innocence. Jean and Richard had not even noticed that I had been out and on a night ride. I later told them as much as I could remember. “You don’t know how lucky you are,” was all that Richard managed to say.

  Then we all went to D.C. on the Metroliner. I was on my best behavior. We had good interviews. I was as sober as a judge. At the Larry King show, all went well. Then disaster struck again. At the fancy hotel our publisher had checked us into, Jean and Richard had one room, I the other. There was a sort of square nightstand with a lamp on it. I noticed at once that it was really an icebox full of bottles of beer and the most delicious hard stuff. I started to work on it. When Richard came to wake me up in the morning he found me totally wasted and the room in an unimaginable mess. He had a similar icebox in his room. You are supposed to take one of these little bottles for a nightcap and the hotel later charges you for it. Richard and Jean were too straight to take it for anything but a lampstand.

  How they got me into a cab to the railroad station I don’t know. The driver was a young man from Ethiopia. I climbed into the front seat with him and tried to steer his taxi and we had quite a tussle. On the train I got into an argument with a ticket collector, calling her all kinds of names. She almost had us put off the train at Wilmington. Richard pushed me into a corner and said: “Let’s sing peyote songs!” This distracted me enough so that I caused no further disturbance. The rest of the way to New York we just kept singing, to the wonderment of the other passengers. I was still pretty much buzzed during the next few interviews at our publisher’s. I don’t know what my emptying that lampstand icebox cost Grove. It must have been a nifty sum, because on subsequent stays to publicize the book in a number of cities, the publisher made sure that I was not led into temptation. As far as Richard and Jean are concerned, I can only say that they are very patient.

  Back at home after my tour, I went on as before. When you are drunk you do the craziest things. At the Rosebud Fair I met a kid who was half my age. We were drinking beer and tequila. It was hot, a real sizzler, which only heightened the effect of the alcohol. I was grounded, meaning I had no car. Or, rather, the last one I had wrecked was in the repair shop and I did n
ot have the money to get it out. I felt caged, a bird without wings, restless, impatient. The kid said: “I’m supposed to break horses on the Wind River Shoshone Reservation in Wyoming.” I said: “What are we waiting for? Let’s go. Hiyupo!” The kid didn’t have wheels either, so we hitched rides, guzzling beer all the way, from Kilgore to Valentine, to Pine Ridge, to Everett, to the Wild Rice Festival. We even stopped at the Long Horn Saloon in Scenic, a dark, gloomy place that still has five inches of sawdust on the floor. In the old days it had a sign saying NO INDIANS ALLOWED, but now it only had a cage for locking up rambunctious skins. Every now and then, as we drove along, I would sing out: “Stop, stop! A neon, a neon!” Meaning a package store with a neon sign reading “Bud,” “Coors,” or “Miller.” It was a mad ride from neon to neon. We fell in with Dan and Orville White Butterfly, who offered us a ride. It was not exactly where we wanted to go, but at least they were going north. What the hell! They dumped us in Lame Deer, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. The kid and I were so out of it that we forgot our stuff, which was in the White Butterfly’s trunk. We were standing there, freezing, when a typical derelict “Indian” car came wheezing up. Inside were two Cheyennes, two cases of beer, and two bottles of Jack Daniel’s—two of everything. They took us to their shack, way up in the mountains, and we stayed there the whole night through until “two of everything” was gone. Our new companions got us back to the highway, but while we were waiting to thumb a ride, someone reported us to the local police. We were arrested for public intoxication. The cops took us to the nearest jail, telling us: “We are doing you a favor. In the state you’re in, you’re a danger to yourself.” They threw us into the drunk tank and didn’t release us until six the next morning. I had nothing left. The only thing I had on me when we were arrested were my numchucks, which I carried for protection but the cops seized as a dangerous weapon.

 

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