Old Henry had a whole trunkful of very impressive papers, yellow with age, covered with seals to which red and blue ribbons were attached. He always shuffled and reshuffled these documents, saying: “There it is, this proves all that land you see, from here to over there, belongs to us.” Maybe, but way back in the 1880s, the government had unilaterally abrogated all the treaties they had made with us, taking our sovereignty, our nationhood, away. So all these thousands of pages, with their golden seals or their red wax impressions, aren’t worth anything. When the old house burned up, Old Henry’s camel-backed trunk with all these papers went up in flames, too.
But we fight not only for our own, much diminished, Rosebud Reservation. We also fight for what rightfully belongs, or did belong, to all Sioux and Cheyennes—the sacred Black Hills. There has been a legal battle going on over this for a lifetime, and the white lawyers who worked for us on our claims have become millionaires, and that is the only result so far. The government and the highest courts in the land have admitted that this huge area was stolen from us. But stolen or “bought,” Uncle Sam never gives any Indian land back. Instead he has forked over some 122 million dollars to pay for the stolen land. But we have not accepted it. What we are saying is: “Give us the Black Hills back. Then, maybe we will accept the money you are holding in escrow for us as payment for all the gold and uranium you have taken, and are still taking, out of the hills.” Fourteen billion dollars in gold alone have been taken out of our sacred land and they offer us 120 million in compensation! That’s like someone stealing my brand-new car and coming back twenty years later saying: “I’m sorry I stole that car from you but I want to make it up to you. Here’s twenty bucks.” So we are at a dead end. As the Crazy Horse Advocate of December 1976 put it: “The Black Hills are sacred to the Lakota people. Both the sacred pipe and the Black Hills go hand in hand in our religion. The Black Hills is our church, the place where we worship. The Black Hills is our burial grounds. The bones of our grandfathers lie buried in those hills. How can you expect us to sell our church and our cemeteries for a few token whiteman dollars? We will never sell.” Of course, there are always some quarter-bloods who’d like to take the money and run. So far we who do not want to sell what is our Jerusalem, our Mecca, still outnumber them.
There should be billboards all over the Black Hills reading: CAUTION, RADIOACTIVE GROUND! About twenty-five years ago the Great Uranium Rush began. By 1980 there were 2,345 square miles of the Black Hills under uranium exploration, with almost six thousand uranium claims staked. Union Carbide had planned to stake out a full quarter of the Pine Ridge Reservation for uranium exploration. Luckily, the tribal council refused to let them come in. What did come in was a rumble of eastbound trucks transporting radioactive material through Pine Ridge and Rosebud. Most of the stuff came from the Edgemont area, at the southern edge of the Black Hills, which is the most contaminated part in South Dakota. Some people in that area had even used radioactive tailings for their foundations without being aware that this was “hot stuff.” For them it was: “Get out or get cancer.” Union Carbide dug some six thousand test holes prospecting for uranium throughout the area. Another center for this mining activity was Craven Canyon, which is the site of many rock paintings that are sacred to us. There is billions of dollars’ worth of this dangerous stuff under Lakota treaty land and, as far as we are concerned, it should just stay there. The longer and deeper, the better. During a protest against the desecration of our sacred land, Russell Means, as I remember it, said: “They have to kill us first. They’ve shot me three times, and they’ve stabbed me, and they’ve clubbed me, but if they shoot me ten times more I’ll keep fighting. I’ll die fighting right here on this ground.”
You can’t even find out what these huge companies are up to. If we inquire about specifics they tell us: “This is classified, secret,” or “This is competitive information.” We get nowhere.
The way these companies were looking for uranium was to drill down, take water samples, and check them for radioactivity. If they got a high reading they knew that the uranium was there. When they were prospecting in Pine Ridge, they found that the water on the res was incredibly radioactive. The groundwater had already been contaminated by all the mining activity and shaft sinking in the areas around us. We started joking around: “Am I already glowing in the dark? Am I glow colored?” or “We want bread, they give us yellow cake.” But the matter was serious as hell. At Pine Ridge, we had 101 miscarriages per 1,000 births, seven times the national average, and our cancer rate was four times higher. The closer you were to the mining and drilling, the more likely cancer occurred. We even had some mutations. It was Madonna Gilbert and WARN, Women of All the Red Nations, who, in the early eighties, led the fight and conducted the investigation. We demonstrated, carrying signs: GOLD KILLED CUSTER, URANIUM WILL KILL US ALL!” or HUG YOUR GEIGER COUNTER, HE’S GOT NEWS FOR YOU! I have been told that one pound of plutonium could give every man, woman, and child on this earth lung cancer. That is a good reason to worry.
I’ll say something for Union Carbide, the TVA, Gulf, Chevron, Anaconda, Kerr-McGee, Peabody Coal, and all those other conglomerates. They are not racist. They’ll drill and mine the land of white ranchers and farmers too if they think their area is “resource rich.” So we told those white folks: “You’ll be next, you’ll be the next Indians.” And they responded. One white guy in a bar told me: “This is cattle country, not uranium, coal, or oil country, and I have a gun over my mantelpiece that says so. We’re all Indians now.” As a result, the Black Hills Alliance was formed, uniting whites and Native Americans. They have done a lot of good work, but whenever we lose a battle, some people get discouraged and fall away. The big companies call the Lakota land a “Nuclear Energy Park,” or “Black Hills Multinational Energy Domain,” or even “National Sacrifice Area.” I ask myself: “Who and what is to be sacrificed here?” It makes me shudder. Some people say: “The collapse of the Soviet Union will kill the uranium mining and that will be our Indian ‘peace dividend.’” I don’t believe it. They’ll still find plenty of use for that evil stuff, and they’ll always find Indian land as the ideal site to test their weapons on. In 1942, the government seized 133,000 acres of the Pine Ridge Reservation as a gunnery range to practice aerial bombing. This was near Sheep Mountain in one of the most scenic parts of South Dakota. We never got that land back. More recently, Honeywell tried to make Hell’s Canyon, full of ancient rock paintings, into a testing range for something called the “antitank depleted-uranium-tip guided missile system.” We barely managed to defeat that plan.
And then there is all that oil, gas, and coal under Indian land, in South Dakota as well as in Montana and Wyoming. On the Cheyenne Reservation, the strip miners in order to get at the coal actually uprooted old Indian graves, throwing skulls and bones all over the place. They even wanted to mine at Birney, where the Cheyennes’ sacred tribal bundle, Issiwun, is kept. Coal companies are building so-called gasification plants near the res. They pump live steam through burning coal and “cook” it into gas. What this does to the environment is a horror story. All these various types of land exploitations are exposing us to toxic waste, radiation, and the pollution of our water supply. All these enterprises gulp up water at such a rate that some people predict that in thirty-five years our water will be gone. The little of it left will have turned into a toxic cesspool. To many of our people, who still make do with an old wood stove and a kerosene lamp, the white man’s senseless waste of energy is mind-blowing. We have an old proverb: “Indian build little fire, keep close, keep warm. White man build big fire, keep warm chopping and hauling wood.” Except that now poor minority people have to do the hauling for him.
We tried to reclaim the Black Hills on several occasions by taking over this or that site. In 1971 and 1972 some of us took over Mount Rushmore, which old John Fire always called the “Giant Tourist Curio Ashtray.” It is the ultimate desecration, the faces of the conquerors squatting on top of the land of
the conquered. Our guys formed a human chain, peeing on Teddy Roosevelt’s nose, an action the women could not participate in, lacking the proper equipment. We also planted a feathered coup stick on top of the mountain. Most of the thousands of tourists below never noticed it. In 1981, AIM took over eight hundred acres inside the Black Hills to establish the Yellow Thunder Camp. It was named after Raymond Yellow Thunder, a gentle, sober Pine Ridge elder; he was attacked by some white racists who stripped him naked from the waist down, forced him to dance at gunpoint, and then beat him to death—just for the fun of it. I went to the camp with Crow Dog. He told the crowd: “Is this wonderful thing really taking place before my eyes? Do you see it, my Indian people? The spirit of Wounded Knee lives on. It lives right here in this camp. It never dies.” Indians occupied the site for over a year, all the time under threat of arrest for “interfering with multiple use activity and environmental assessment.” I can never get over the government’s inventing word monstrosities when they want to get official. In the end, Yellow Thunder Camp died, like all such symbolic takeovers. You cannot get back land symbolically.
For me and for all the Lakota people, the Black Hills are not only sacred but also the most beautiful land in the whole USA. Here are majestic mountains, towers of granite soaring to the sky, sparkling lakes, pine-covered rolling hills, patches of grassland, and caves whose walls are covered with crystals. But this home of the thunderbirds is being transformed into a gigantic Disneyland and tourist trap. Wherever you go you run into such things as the Dakota Dragway (“Thrills and Chills”), the Horseless Carriage Museum, Doll Museum, Western Heritage Wax Musem, Wild West Wax Museum, Life of Christ Wax Museum, Reptile Gardens (“Ride the Giant Turtle”), Marine Life, Calamity Jane Cafe (“Buffalo Steaks, Buffalo Burgers”), Black Hills Gold Jewelry Store, Rockhound’s Heaven, 1880 Train Ride, Taco Del Sol, Black Hills Passion Play, Boot Hill Fun Place, Black Hills Petrified Forest, Buffalo Jeep Rides. Black Hills Greyhound Track, Genuine Indian Village, Flintstone City, and so on, and on, and on. The Grand Old Opry’s put on “mellerdramas” like The Hanging of Flyspeck Bill, The Shooting of Wild Bill, The Hanging of Cash McCall, or Sitting Bull’s Last Fight. Deadwood has become another Las Vegas or Atlantic City, a jungle of lit-up gambling saloons. Bear Butte, sacred to the Cheyennes and Lakotas, now has a parking area and a paved road leading to the top from where gawking tourists with binoculars can watch one of our holy men undergo his vision quest. But the land is still there, beautiful, waiting to be redeemed, and so long as there is still a shred of life left in us we will keep on fighting for it. HECHEL LENA OYATE KIN NIPI KTE, so that my people may live.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Selling the Medicine
All across the country, among all the tribes, Native Americans are angry because the whites are selling our medicine. What Native Americans are saying is that our religion and ceremonies have become fads, and a fashionable pastime among many whites seeking for something that they hope will give meaning to their empty lives. And so our medicine is sold, and hawked about, by fake, non-Indian, so-called “plastic medicine men,” giving them-selves fancy Indian-sounding names like “Buffalo Grazing on the Mountainside,” or “Golden Eagle Soaring to the Sky,” or “Free Soul Wrapped in Morning Mist.” Such names would not fool a ten-year-old Rosebud kid but are very impressive to the gullible wasichu. Their numbers are growing because there is money, real big bucks, to be made in the fake medicine man (or woman) business. It is an offshoot of the New Age movement and the result of Indians being “in,” and of a flood of supposedly pro-Indian movies. After macrobiotics, Zen, and channeling, the “poor Vanishing Indian” is once more the subject of “deep and meaningful conversation” in the high-rises.
One white woman, who claims to have supernatural powers taught to her by a Native American holy woman, and who also says that she belongs to a sisterhood of Indian spiritual women chat doesn’t actually exist, puts on mass sessions of Native teachings. She hires large auditoriums in which she teaches Native wisdom and spirituality to as many as six hundred white participants who pay over three hundred dollars apiece. Members of the audience also have to buy drums and drumsticks, crystals, smudge sticks, a special cushion to sit on, and, especially, the lady’s books. Take pencil and paper and figure out the profits she makes. There are some self-styled medicine people who literally make a million dollars a year by selling our medicine.
Of course, exploiting of Indian religion and wisdom is nothing new. In the 1880s and 1890s the patent medicine entrepreneurs put on the big Indian medicine shows, selling fake Indian cure-alls. There was the Great Oregon Indian Medicine Company—“THEIR CUSTOMERS NUMBER MILLIONS WITH TESTIMONIALS BY THE THOUSANDS.” There were the good folks who sold the Little Wonder Electric Cherokee Rheumatism Belt or the Great Mohee Indian Miracle Oil; there was the Jack Roach Indian Medicine Show and a dozen others.
The biggest of them all was the Kickapoo Indian Medicine Company, selling the “never-failing remedy” Kickapoo Snake Oil, Kickapoo Wonder Tapeworm Remedy, and something called Kickapoo Indian Sagwa, a concoction advertised as curing every sickness known to man They also published the Kickapoo Indian Magazine. Some of their advertisements read;
“Is there some way you can delay, perhaps for many years, that final moment before your name is written down by a bony hand in the cold diary of death? Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there is, by means of that sovereign remedy—KICKAPOO INDIAN SAGWA!”
The company set up whole Indian villages with dozens of wigwams in which the public could see “Kickapoos brewing their Sagwa in steaming kettles.” The company employed as agents some well-known former scouts and Indian fighters “who by their bravery in war have obtained such ascendancy over the Red Man that they willingly yield to their control.” Most of the Indians in the medicine show were not Kickapoos at all; some were from Peru, and two were actually Irish immigrants. Among the supposed Kickapoo people on exhibit were such characters as Spirit Moon, Princess Red Fire, Dove Wing, Floating Poplar, and one Ma-Chu-Ta-Ga. The desolate, poverty-stricken Kickapoo reservation was described by the Sagwa manufacturers as a “veritable Garden of Eden, inhabited by a race of benevolent, primitive, but noble physicians who have plumbed the secrets of nature.” For many years the company made millions of dollars from their Sagwa and Snake Oil. What is going on now is not too different from the Indian medicine shows of a hundred years ago.
Indian religion is at the center of my life. It is the spiritual side of myself. It is part of my heritage. It made me survive. And it angers me to see it profaned, exploited, misinterpreted, bought and sold. The white impersonators are giving people the wrong impressions about our beliefs, falsifying our traditions, and performing grotesque caricatures of our rituals. Whites should be forbidden to perform Native American ceremonies. Our religion should be protected from defilement. Our sacred things and medicine bundles stolen from us years ago, exhibited in museums and private collections to be gawked and laughed at, should be returned to us. Before 1930, we were forbidden to pray in our language. Our rituals were suppressed. For participating in a sweat lodge ceremony you could be jailed under the Indian Offenses Act. Our beliefs went underground and survived. In hidden places, far from the eyes of the missionaries, people kept on sun dancing, but what is happening now is worse than the old effort to stamp out our religion altogether. They tried to kill our faith and triumphantly proclaimed the “Death of the Great Spirit.” They did not succeed. But they might succeed now by commercializing it and by giving the world the wrong idea of what the Indian way of life is about. They are selling our religion, selling the pipe, the sweat lodge, the fireplace, the peyote. Pretty soon whites will think of themselves as our teachers, telling us how to perform our rituals or how to use our sacred medicine. They might even say: “This divine plant is too good for those dumb primitives. Let’s keep it for ourselves. Let’s corner the peyote market.”
And always it’s money, money, MONEY! Not so long ago you could still go to Custer Stat
e Park, or to Wind Cave, and get a buffalo skull for free to use in a ceremony. Now you have to pay a lot for it, because every New Ager wants a buffalo skull for a wall decoration. There are phony medicine men, even Native Americans among them, who charge $750 for letting you go to a sweat lodge, $1,000 for taking you up on a mountain for a vision quest, and who will make a gullible white man, during one single weekend, into a genuine, gold-plated Lakota Medicine Man, complete with diploma, for $2,500. There are people who’ll put you on a hill, give you a gaudy pipe from the curio shop, stick an eagle feather on your head, and take you for every cent you’ve got. But the’ real Native spiritual person never asks for money for a curing ceremony or some other rite. Our ceremonies are not for sale. So when money is asked for performing them, you know that something is very wrong. The quick-buck people are giving our tribes a bad name and should be stopped.
I was asked to run a sweat in Santa Fe. People asked me: “How much do you charge for it?” I backed out quick. They were polluting our way with their ignorance. To them a sweat is an experience. To us it’s our sacred way, our connection to the Creator. There’s one impersonator, in L.A. of course, who teaches “sacred Indian sex” in group sessions—for a few hundred dollars per person. A white groupie later wrote a long article about her experience. The headline read: I SOAKED UP INDIAN SPIRITUALITY THROUGH MY VAGINA! Actually, I put this more elegantly. She used a much shorter word for her private parts. She also claimed that sacred Indian sex had given her a “spiritual raging fire, atomic explosion orgasm.”
I remember seeing a European movie once—the sun dance as conceived by a sick, fevered wasichu brain. It showed a single white dancer hanging from two meat hooks. He was totally nude except for a little fig leaf around his man thing. In real life there was a nude gay sun dance, also done exclusively by whites, with weird rituals invented for the occasion. I fight these desecrations of our most sacred ceremony, especially as they give outsiders a false and twisted image of the sun dance. It’s just pure exploitation through nudity and sensationalism. It has to stop!
Ohitika Woman Page 25