Ohitika Woman

by Mary Brave Bird

  A third strong Sioux woman was LOU BEAN. At the head of some three hundred demonstrators at Pine Ridge she faced seventy-five heavily armed marshals. One of the marshals told Lou: “The seventy-five of us could whip the shit out of the whole Sioux Nation together with the entire AIM crowd.” She answered back: “That’s what Custer said. Why don’t you come over and try us? We are ready to fight.” Well, they stayed put, busying themselves with eating sandwiches out of their little lunch boxes. Lou also told them: “I’d rather hug a rattlesnake than anyone among you.”

  A special friend of mine is MICHELLE RICHARDS, whom we call Mickey. She was one of the strongest women at the Knee. Then, when she was big with child, she and another Wounded Knee sister dug Annie Mae’s grave. She did something truly heroic by refusing to testify before a grand jury against a brother who had shot a vicious drug dealer—in Valentine, Nebraska, of all places! She said that as a traditional Native American woman she could not be made a tool of the white criminal justice system. For refusing to testify, she was held without charge for three months. She went on a hunger strike, going without food for thirty-nine days. Then she refused to take even water. They took her to the hospital to force-feed her, shackled to her bed, and placed her under round-the-clock surveillance, but they could not break, her will. They finally gave up and let her go. We admired her for what she did. Mickey just shrugged it off. Mickey hates the goons, and for good reason: They shot her mother through the butt and her young nephew through the arm. She is a grandmother now, still living on Pine Ridge, married to a Sioux from the Standing Rock Reservation.

  And I remember a Lakota woman named IRMA, who sneaked in and out of the Knee with her heavy backpack bringing food into the perimeter. You had to come in from Porcupine, which meant each time doing a nine-mile hike through terrain infested with trip-wire flares, marshals with infrared sniper scopes, and attack dogs. And there was MILDRED, who, when surrender was discussed, gave the warriors a pep talk: “The same ravines they massacred our women and children in a hundred years ago, we are now in, the same place, the same gullies, the same chankpe opi wakpala. They want us to come out and give up our guns. We are not that crazy!”

  Among the brave-hearted women who came from the East was CARLA BLAKEY. A Salteaux Indian from Canada, she was for some years married to Art Blakey, a black jazz drummer. She grew up in a place where you ran into polar bears on the street. She came to the sun dance last summer and was honored, being given the little rainbow-colored patch that all Wounded Knee activists are proud to wear. With Carla came TRUDY LAMB and CHARMAINE LYONS. Trudy, who is from a tiny New Jersey tribe with a tiny reservation, brought her flute. Charmaine was a Cherokee from North Carolina, and from the Six Nations. I also remember a woman from the Northwest who told me: “You are fighting for your land. You’ve got a special relationship to the buffalo. Well, I came here to fight for our brother, the salmon.”

  And what about SAHRA BAD HEART BULL? Her son, Wesley Bad Heart Bull, was knifed to death by a white racist, Darold Schmidt, at the little hamlet of Buffalo Gap, on the edge of the Black Hills. The trial began just a week before the occupation of Wounded Knee, in the town of Custer, deep inside the Black Hills. We all went there—AIM people and Sioux from Pine Ridge and Rosebud—to see that justice was done. Custer calls itself “the town with the gunsmoke flavor.” It sure lived up to its name, because when we found out that the murderer would go free on a second-degree manslaughter charge, we set fire to the courthouse and the chamber of commerce, which was in a sort of phony log cabin. This, as one of the guys put it, “sent up a hell of a smoke signal.” Sahra, the victim’s mother, was stopped from entering the courthouse. When she tried to get in some pigs with helmets and face shields pushed her so that she fell down the stairs. When she tried to get up, one of the troopers choked her with his long nightstick. Then all hell broke loose. I remember that big fracas vividly.

  I was outside with all the AIM people, while Dennis Banks, Russell Means, and Leonard Crow Dog were inside the courthouse. They had only a handful of guys in there. We were trying to get in and the riot squad was blocking the doors when all hell broke loose. The pigs were beating up on the people. I saw two of them dragging a young girl through the snow. They had ripped most of her clothes off so that she had only her bra and pants on. There was a girl next to me who hit one of the troopers with a hammer and broke his face shield. When Russell Means came out of the courthouse, the pigs clubbed him down, hitting him on the head with their big hardwood sticks. I saw him sitting in the snow, handcuffed, with a dazed look on his face. I was pregnant at the time and big as a hippo, or rather, as a whale. We were making Molotov cocktails. Carter Camp, Dace Means, Stan Holder, and Victorio were taunting the riot squad guys: “Come on out. What are you hiding behind the bushes for?” but those pigs stayed put. They didn’t want to die, seeing those AIM guys were for real. It was just like a war zone, like a Vietnam movie. They were throwing tear gas grenades at us. Then Dennis came around in a big, old propane truck, driving right through the flames. It freaked out the state troopers. It was funny because at the same time those buildings were burning, everybody was lining up at the gas station filling up their tanks—free of charge. We took a back road out of Custer, back to the Mother Butler Hall in Rapid City. The cops tried to stop us, but Crow Dog told them: “You can’t search this car. We have sacred things in here.” Strangely enough, they let us through. Later, in Rapid City, everybody was jumping into cars to go downtown and confront the rednecks. A whole busload of us got arrested. Somehow, I was overlooked. That’s when I cut a white woman’s face. She screamed at me: “You fucking dirty Indians, why do you come here where you’re not wanted? Get your fucking red asses out of here!” I took one of those glass ashtrays, broke it, and slashed her face.

  Well, for making a nuisance of herself on the steps of the courthouse, and protesting her son’s murder, Sahra Bad Heart Bull got three to five years. Although she was an elderly lady she was strong, fighting the riot squad guys like a wildcat. Her son’s murderer got two months’ probation. Nothing unusual about that.

  I had two other friends from the Knee. TONIA ACKERMAN was in her early twenties while at Wounded Knee. She grew up in Montana, worked her way through several years of college, and became a teacher and counselor at the Little Red School House in St. Paul, an alternative AIM school for Indian kids. Tonia was a real scrapper. She had triangular steel points at the tips of her cowboy boots, so-called shit-kickers, and she sure knew how to use them. MADONNA GILBERT was already the mother of three children when she came to Wounded Knee but it was not her first siege. She had spent nine months on Alcatraz Island during its occupation from 1970 to 1971. She worked also as a teacher in survival schools and became prominent in the Indian women’s movement. She’s into powwows now, a champion jingle dancer.

  LIZZIE FAST HORSE was one of our strongest older women at the Knee. In 1971, already a great-grandmother, she climbed all the way to the top of Mount Rushmore, stood on top of Teddy Roosevelt’s head, and joined a demonstration led by Lehman Brightman to reclaim the Black Hills for our people. They stayed up there on top of the mountain with John Fire Lame Deer, about a dozen Sioux men and women from Rapid City, and our white friends Richard and Jean Erdoes. Also among this group was MINNIE TWO SHOES, an Assiniboin Sioux. She later came to Crow Dog’s Paradise to have her first baby. Leonard’s sister Christine acted as the midwife. I saw Minnie not so long ago up in Montana. She has more kids now and has her hands full raising them, so she can’t be so very active anymore in the cause.

  It is not necessary to have been at Wounded Knee to have been a fighter for Indian rights. My husband’s sister Rocky became involved in the movement when she was in her mid-teens and she has been very active ever since. She is well known in Colorado for her fight for the civil rights of both Indians and Chicanos. She teaches both Native American and Hispanic studies at a college in Denver. She is also a curandera, a healer with herbs. In her home she has racks of plants, ro
ots, and berries. And she knows them all. She is also into helping the homeless. A real close friend of mine, she takes part almost every year in the sun dance at Crow Dog’s Paradise.

  I met Rocky in the summer of 1974, at the sun dance, when Pedro was still a baby. We really got together during the time when I had to do a lot of cooking, and she always helped in the kitchen, and with the tobacco ties, getting sage and other things that needed to be done. She really contributed. Later on, we got to be real good friends. We ended up sun dancing together. When we were traveling through Denver, she’d always have her door open for us.

  A very great leader is JANET McCLOUD, a Puyallup from Helm, in Washington State. For many years, Janet has been in the forefront of the struggle for Native American rights—fishing rights, women’s rights, all kinds of rights. She is now the head of a large family because her husband., Don, a wonderful man, died some years ago. They are a close-knit family, mostly fishing folks. To them the salmon is what the buffalo was to us Sioux. Janet, the founder of the Northwest Indian Women’s Circle, keeps herself busy with lecturing, giving interviews, and editing her newspaper, Moccasin Line. At an Indian women’s conference in New York she said: “They call this a feminist meeting. I’d rather call it a strengthening. Indian women have to be strong. They have no choice So much rests on their shoulders. Can you understand that?”

  At the same conference, SHIRLEY HILL WITT, an Iroquois anthropologist and one of the founders of the National Indian Youth Council, spoke about the stereotype of the “bronze nubile naked ‘princess,’ a child of nature or beloved concoction of Hollywood producers. This version is often compounded with the Pocahontas legend. As the story goes, she dies in self-sacrifice, saving the life of the white man for whom she bears an unrequited love, so that he may live happily ever after with a voluptuous but high-buttoned blonde.”

  Shirley Hill Witt’s talk about Hollywood stereotypes reminds me that we are not all that happy with Dances with Wolves. While the movie was visually breathtaking, it was also the same old story—the hero and heroine were, as usual, white.

  Talk about Hollywood also makes me think of another friend, SACHEEN LITTLE FEATHER. She made headlines in 1973 when Marlon Brando persuaded her to be his stand-in at the Oscars. After it was announced that he had won the award for his performance in The Godfather; he had Sacheen go up and tell the audience that he was rejecting the Oscar because of the shabby, stereotyped image Hollywood habitually presents on the screen. On that occasion she made a passionate speech about the plight of Native Americans, denouncing the injustices done to her people. As a result she was blacklisted by an outraged movie industry and her career as an actress was ruined. Brando did nothing for her. She told me recently that she had not heard from him in more than a decade. She was homeless for a long time. She said to me: “When I really needed help, Brando ignored me. I was just a pawn in his game.” They really exploited her. They twisted her arm to pose in the nude for Playboy, “to show the beauty of the Indian woman.” She was young and naive then and fell for this crap, I met her again in 1991, when I was in California to promote my book, and Sacheen is still gorgeous. She was really happy about my book, telling me: “It’s about time Indian women started speaking out for their rights. We’ve been oppressed too long.” She has never stopped being an activist and working for the people, fighting alcoholism among both Indians and whites, giving lectures on health, trying to help the homeless. Sacheen’s brother died of AIDS and now she is active in the fight against this dreadful disease. She goes around to the street people, handing out needles and condoms and giving out information about how to avoid getting infected. While I was in L.A. she cooked a dinner for me. We sat around the table—Sacheen, her boyfriend, a guy from the American Indian Treaty Council, and myself, and it turned out that we were all left-handed. It was really funny because as my mother has told me: “You know what the traditional Sioux say about left-handed people—they get into mischief all the time.” That is certainly true for me. Trouble always finds me. I agreed with Sacheen when she told me: “First you have to get angry for what happened to you before the healing can begin.”

  Through Richard and Jean, I met BEVERLY HUNGRY WOLF, a woman from the Blood people, who are part of the Blackfoot Nation. She is also an author, like myself, and has written books about the ways of her people. In her tribe, if a woman dreams that she will be a medicine person and healer, then she can become one. Many religious rites were given first to the women by the sky dwellers, not to the men. Dreams often come to women rather than to the men. Many ceremonies cannot be performed without women playing a part in them. The Bloods have women’s as well as men’s societies and in some cases a woman can even join a man’s society. They have holy women who put up the sun dance lodge and who fast to fulfill their vows. People go to a holy woman for prayers and to get face paint. It was good to learn how highly respected such women are in Blood society.

  Last year I found a new friend in YOSSI RAMOS, who is half Mexican but has a classic full-blood face. She now lives with her daughter in Santa Fe, but she also spent years in New York and sun danced both at Crow Dog’s Paradise and at Big Mountain. She was part of the Indian civil rights movement back in the seventies, long before AIM.

  In front of the Museum of Natural History in New York stands a big statue of Teddy Roosevelt on horseback depicting him as the macho conqueror of the West. On either side of Teddy walks an African tribesman and an Indian with bowed head. It is a real Lone Ranger and Tonto monstrosity. I have seen it a few times myself. Yossi and her group decided to do something about it. They were mad because the feds had just stormed Alcatraz and driven out 150 Native Americans who had held the Rock for nineteen months. So on July 15, 1971, Yossi and six others went to the museum with buckets of red paint and did some “ornamenting,” paying special attention to Teddy s nose. They splashed red paint all over that bronze cowboy. On the socle they wrote: “Return Alcatraz” and “Racist Killer.” They had done their paint job in the middle of the night, but around 2:30 A.M. they were spotted by some cops from the Central Park precinct and arrested. Yossi and the others were taken to court on a charge of second-degree criminal mischief. Besides Yossi, who was only seventeen at the time, the other women were Janice Kekahbah, representing the National Indian Youth Council, Blanche Wahnee, Marie Helene LaRaque, and Charmaine Lyons. Charmaine was later at Wounded Knee. Helene I am told, now lives in Canada, near the Arctic Circle, fighting for the rights of the Northern Deneh people. Yossi says that it was a worthwhile experience.

  On another occasion, inspired by the “liberation” of Alcatraz, a group of mainly Indian women decided to take over Ellis Island, which at that time was totally deserted and covered with rubble. They almost made it, but their boat started to sink and they barely got back to the Manhattan shore. Unfortunately, two guys who had come from Alcatraz were holding a press conference at the same time: “Indians have taken over Ellis Island.” That tipped the feds off and from then on there was always a Coast Guard cutter hovering around the island. So the women gave up on that.

  Another New York Indian woman I admired was JEFFE KIMBALL, a wonderful Osage artist. She had an unusual life, having studied art in Paris and, for a while, running the Art Students League of New York. She “discovered” many young Native American artists and was tireless in furthering their careers. She was strong in defending Indian rights. She was involved in the attempt to take over Ellis Island. In the sixties and seventies, there were three places where Indians stayed when they came to New York—with Richard Erdoes on Eighty-ninth Street; with Stan Steiner, who wrote The New Indians, on the Lower East Side; and with Jeffe on Bank Street in the Village. Jeffe died of cancer in Santa Fe. At her wake a Pueblo elder appeared out of nowhere, releasing Jeffe’s soul with corn pollen. Native Americans owe a lot to her.

  Back home in Rosebud I have two friends, APRIL and TINA. Whenever some man tries to abuse me they get into it with him—or them—saying: “Don’t fuck with our sister!”
April is a big strapping girl who can fight it out toe-to-toe with any man. Even tough guys are afraid of her. They have battled at my side quite a few times. I could go on and on about strong sisters I’m proud to call my friends, but the list is so long that I better stop here. They are all ohitika win—brave women.

  * * *

  Many years ago I talked to an old woman who is long dead now. She was almost a hundred years old when she talked to me and I was fascinated by what she had to tell me about the old days when she had been young. She was born on the Rosebud Reservation, though some of her ancestors had been Canadian Indians who married into our tribe. She lived on her ancestors’ original allotment north of Antelope Creek. She said that she could “see back five generations.” She had known her great-grandfather and her great-grandmother. She complained that nowadays people don’t know their great-grandparents because “they don’t live that long.” She complained that many kids no longer speak the Lakota language. She told me that her grandfather had to buy his wives with many horses and buckskin hides and that he kept two despite the missionaries always being after him for that. She had been forced to go to the nunnery school, where she had been beaten for praying the Indian way. And although she had little education she still had all her wits about her. She had been taught to be modest by her mother, who had forced her to wear long sleeves down to her wrists and to always have her hair braided in two. She had never seen a girl and a boy kiss in public until she was fifty, and then it had shocked her. She said that nowadays girls were “half naked.” She also told me that in her youth she still had slept with a hair rope between her legs so that she could not be sexually molested.