Then I was told of the White Coyote, a boy found of all places in the Pine Barrens of New Jersey by an ancient Apache sage. How the Apache got there must be looked upon as a miracle in itself. This aged Indian made the boy into a white shaman who now teaches survival skills to the unenlightened.
In California I saw a pamphlet that was being passed around, with a traditional-looking drawing on it, a pipe with eagle feathers, offering vision quests for $1,500. It said: “This includes your meals and four nights of camping.” They even had children’s rates. They were tacking these up all over the place. About a year later Rudi met the man in the Susanville penitentiary. The Indians were told: “We’re going to bring in some spiritual advisers from the streets, to sweat with you, talk and teach you about the pipe,” and so on. So who shows up but that fellow. I won’t mention his name because he is dead now. Rudi confronted him on it: “Hey, bud, you’re selling the medicine—I’ve seen your pamphlets around.” The guy got mad, but he didn’t deny it. And he left. Rudi apologized to the circle, but they said: “Right on. Fuck that dude.” Later I heard that the guy was offering “sacred medicine bundles” for sale.
There is this elderly white woman in Texas who provides a perfect example of white people muscling in on the medicine. Again I won’t mention her name. She is actually nice and sincere. She has witnessed a number of our ceremonies and it has gone to her head. She imagines that Crow Dog is her grandfather “who gave her the gift.” She runs sweats, she puts people on the hill, and she “teaches the Lakota way.” It’s the same kind of bullshit—"Make your reservations now, parking included. And for $150 you are entitled to the following. . . .” This person actually believes in what she is doing, has her heart in the right place, sends us little gifts; but having witnessed our rituals makes her neither a medicine woman nor an Indian. Well-meaning people can do as much harm as the conniving bullshit artists. A few days spent on a reservation, and a few hours reading a book about our ceremonies, do not authorize a person to put on imitation Sioux rituals.
Mexicans do it, too. There’s one fellow, who gave himself the name of a medieval Aztec chief, who says he is a Nahuatl medicine man. They ran him out of Mexico, and now he’s floating around the good old USA, performing a mixture of so-called Aztec and Plains Indian rites.
Then there is a woman who has given herself a Sufi as well as a Sioux name, who performs in ashrams, a mishmash of Islamic and Lakota rites. She is white and from Brooklyn. Another man, actually a friend, witnessed a few sun dances, found spirituality overnight, and the next morning he was a great tribal leader with an Indian name. It’s a disease and it’s catching.
One character who claimed to be Indian and gave himself the usual Indian-sounding name was actually a ballet dancer of Greek and Near Eastern origin. For a while he was accepted by the white public as the great Native American guru and spokesman for the Indian tribes. He actually put himself in charge of the whole new- Indian medicine show and became the darling of the media. After he was finally exposed he told an interviewer: “Shit, man, I am an Indian because I say I am an Indian!” All these people belong to the Wannabe Tribe. They get a pipe, and they misuse it. There’s ways that go with the pipe, rituals that I’ve learned. But some people will take these sacred things and go the wrong way with them. When I was out in California this past winter, visiting friends for a couple of days, they said: “We’re glad you’re here; we need your help with a problem.” There was this white lady who had bought a pipe at a powwow, and she wanted to use it. She’d been on this fasting trip, going up on the hill on her own. So they asked me: “Could you talk to her? We feel that she doesn’t understand the power of these sacred objects.” With us was an Assiniboin lady from Montana who knows and respects her tribe’s ways. So they asked us both to talk to this white woman. Before we could say yes or no, they gave us tobacco, and asked us again if we’d talk to her. So we agreed. Well, this woman had been in sweats and she’d been fasting, and she wasn’t quite all there. We told her to learn more about the ways and how to respect them before she used her pipe. She blew a fit, rolling around on the ground, throwing a temper tantrum, and got really mean and crazy. She said stuff like: “When I’m holding the pipe, it comes right through me.” She was tripping on it like it was LSD. She didn’t know the meaning of the pipe. She thought it was some kind of crystal, and that through it she could talk to the spirits. I told her how the pipe came to our people and what it represented. I told her that she should go to a ceremony, just be an observer—listen to the old people, You don’t have to participate, just observe, and learn. Don’t just try to jump into everything. We’ve shed blood, sweat, and tears over our religion for generations. I said to her: “If you want I can take your pipe back and give it to someone to keep, an elder, and if you ever come you can talk to someone who’s knowledgeable.” So she handed over the pipe, although she didn’t want to. It’s an example of how people get into these sacred things, and they’re so powerful that if you mess it up, you can get hurt. And it’s an example of a white person who wants to know about our religion but won’t listen.
There are instances where people used the sacred medicine to snag a lover, or used it as an aphrodisiac. They want to have “genuine Indian orgies.” All this makes our religion look cheap, like it can be bought. It is partly because some of these white people have lost their own gods and mislaid their souls. They have trouble dealing with reality, with death. They are vaguely bothered by the decay of their cities, the homeless lying in the streets, the collapse of their own ethics. They are looking to us for an answer that we cannot give them. They want us to fill the emptiness they have inside themselves. No thanks! There are white women, groupies, who are looking for “a medicine man who will put the power right into me.” They are hungering for “a deep sexual experience.” They’ll sleep with anybody who wears braids or a choker.
I would like to warn those white “cosmic channelers” and “psychic interpreters” that it is very dangerous to play around with our sacred things. In the end it will hurt them, hurt them badly. What goes around comes around. Our faith cannot be bought. The grotesque things that these fake medicine men are doing are all aspects of a dying civilization. I only pray that its death will not drag us down with them and become our own undoing.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
A New Love
I was married to Rudi in Santa Fe on August 24, 1991, after being at the sun dance run by Crow Dog and Lame Deer. I had been married to Crow Dog in the Indian way. A medicine man had put a blanket around the two of us, put a pipe into our hands, feathered and cedared us. And that was that. It was not the kind of marriage recognized by white American officials, so we did not need a formal divorce. But my marriage to Rudi was a regular one, done by a justice of the peace in a proper setting, with an exchange of rings. Afterwards we got a marriage certificate, sealed, stamped, and signed. Also, I wore a dress and a white silk hat improvised by Marilyn Pailey, a white friend whom I had met during the 1970s in New York. And I got presents—from Richard and Jean a beautiful turquoise necklace, from Marilyn very fancy earrings, from Sid a southwestern blanket and, as he said, “A bunch of love,” and from an Indian artist friend, Nelson Gipp, a sculptured eagle. I felt a little guilty. Here I was, a radical female Sioux activist doing such a bourgeois—or “bushway,” as we used to pronounce it—thing: a legal wedding. But then it felt so good. After so many years of hardship, strife, and a nomad’s life, wasn’t I entitled to a little bit of normalcy? I wasn’t getting out of the movement, which was barely breathing anyhow, but I was getting older. I was a thirty-six-year-old grandma. Still—a dress, hat, rings, and certificate—it felt a little strange.
Afterwards we celebrated at a campsite in the Santa Fe National Forest, halfway up to the ski basin, among the pines and aspen trees. The sun was shining, the air full of birdsong and the wonderful scent of cedar and wildflowers. We had a big table there and an outdoor fireplace with a big iron grill. And I was among old friends. I lov
e Santa Fe because for some strange reason you always find there lots of skins, including many Lakotas, and friends who have been in the movement. So up there in the forest with us was Sid Eare St. Pierre. He had been, together with me, among the young AIM kids who had taken over the Bureau of Indian Affairs Building in Washington, D.C., in November of 1972, the culmination of the Trail of Broken Treaties march. And there was Jossie Ramos, with her beautiful full-blood face and the thickest, longest pigtail I ever saw, who, long ago, had painted red Teddy Roosevelt’s statue in New York. And Richard and Jean Erdoes, at whose place in New York I had stayed, in 1975 and 1976, together with my baby boy while Crow Dog was doing time in Lewisburg Prison. There was Marilyn Pailey, another old friend from New York, and Al Lostetter, a very good artist, who had just pierced at the sun dance, together with his wife, Kathie, and their two sons, and Delbert Lee, a Sioux Mandan construction worker, and Nelson, the sculptor, a North Dakota Sioux. And my sister Sandra came with her baby daughter and Brad. We call Sandra “Poko,” after Pogo, the comic-strip character.
We had steaks under the pines, along with hot dogs, hamburgers, corn, and spuds. Also quite a few twelvers of Bud and two bottles of vodka. I had been on the wagon for quite some time then, thanks to Rudi and the support he gave me, but, what the hell, you don’t get married legally every day, so we made an exception and indulged. Anyhow, you could not have a Sioux wedding without booze. We didn’t get totally itomni, just a little mellow, though one of the young skins later ran his car into a ditch. No harm done otherwise. I even forced Richard to play spinners and quarter pitch, but he has no talent that way. So, next morning I woke up legally married, still young, though a grandma. So, now we are respectable as well as civil rights minded.
My new husband, Rudi Olguin, is proud to call himself a Chicano. He is a Zapotec, from the same tribe to which Benito Juarez belonged. Rudi even has some Lakota relatives.
Rudi learned early about the Indian ways and the Chicano ways, which are mostly Indian anyhow. His dad was from Watrous, New Mexico. He used to go there when he was a kid. He remembers the old log cabin his grandfather used to live in, that his father was born in—in a frying pan—literally. Out of the womb into a frying pan. He remembers the herbs hanging from the ceiling, the pictures of saints and Montezuma, and his grandma mumbling strange incantations. They had their own medicine ways. His grandma always made different teas and yerbas. Osha was for the teeth and gums. There was one tea that was pretty much good for everything, good for your bones, good for your blood, but some of them really tasted wicked. Or they’d make medicine with potatoes. These were their medicine ways.
When he was in school he learned about George Washington, and baseball, and apple pie, but never about his own people. They never told him about Pancho Villa, or Emiliano Zapata, or for that matter, about Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull. Rudi knew his culture but not his people’s history.
Rocky, Rudi’s sister, is a curandera. She studied medicinal plants for years with many tribes in Mexico. She knows the secrets of healing herbs and should not be confused with one of the so-called New Age primitive healers. Whenever Rudi got sick he’d go and see Rocky, who would doctor him up. She has whole racks of plants, herbs, roots, and berries. She knows them all and is respected for this. She is chairperson of the National Chicano Human Rights Council in Colorado and a teacher at the local college.
When Rudi was a kid, his grandma used to tell him about mountain spirits. He says he can still feel them in the Black Hills of South Dakota. He was told about witches who could change themselves into owls, and about the Jarona, an old Mexican witch who ripped the eyes out of her babies and then took them to the river and drowned them. The Jarona was blind, but would walk the streets at night and steal babies that were left alone in their cribs. She’d take them to the river and kill them. And she’d be on the rooftops crying for her babies. Another story was that she had red eyes that were like a cat’s, and hooves like a goat’s. There was a dance in an old barn, and a white dog appeared at the dance. They chased the dog down the street, and when they got close to it, it was the Jarona, dressed in a white veil. Earlier she had been at the dance, and she had eyes that were red. When she took off, she ran like a goat, and they couldn’t catch her. The Jarona goes back thousands of years in the Mexican culture. Rudi said these stories scared the shit out of him and he would never tell them to our children.
His father kept fighting chickens and he had a real warrior of a rooster who was a prize bird, a killer. He murdered scores of opponents, particularly with steel spurs on. Cockfighting is outlawed now, but it still goes on. As for his dad’s prize rooster, someone ran over it, I think on purpose. He had caused a lot of folks to lose a lot of money. Rudi’s family always kept dogs and horses, too, and he learned to ride almost before he could walk.
Rudi was all right until he wound up in the Denver barrio. He was ten or eleven then, and on those mean streets he got into trouble with drugs and the law.
Rudi grew up in the clays when the Chicano movement was going strong, with Corky Gonzales and César Chavez. Plenty was happening. In New Mexico, in the little town of Tierra Amarilla, there was a shoot-out as Reies Lopez Tijerina and his people faced tanks and armored cars when they tried to reclaim their ancient fields under the old Spanish land grant. In California, the Black Panthers made headlines. In South Dakota, AIM was on the rise. Kent State happened. All in the late sixties and early seventies. And then came Wounded Knee. Rudi got involved both with the struggle for Chicano rights and with AIM. He says that the fire still burns in his heart, that it will never die.
In Denver there was a lot of killing during the protest days. The Chicanos would have a demonstration and the police would show up in full riot gear, and a little confrontation would turn into a tear gassing and shooting. The police beat people to death and got away with it. An Indian brother, Sidney White Crane, was picked up on a drunk charge and they beat him to death in the elevator. When they put him in his cell he hemorrhaged and died. Nothing was ever done about it.
The protesters tried education and persuasion. They tried to be nonviolent. It was the cops who started the violence. Rudi told me that the police were always dying to stop a car full of Indians or Chicanos and beat the shit out of them for no reason. Detectives in Denver took Rudi to the mountains in Golden, Colorado, beat him severely, and left him up there—no arrest, no charges; they took him for a “Chicago ride,” maybe because he was sporting a beret, or because he belonged to the movement, or because Rocky was one of the leaders. Then he got involved in the “Platte Valley Action” riot. This happened when a large group of Chicano and Indian people got together at the Platte Valley Action Center. The cops just pulled into the alley and started, as Rudi calls it, to “fuck the brothers over.” The police opened up and started shooting into the crowd—at men, women, and children. They were firing tear gas, and shotguns with wooden plugs. If you get hit with one of those, it’s going to bust you up, it’s going to hurt. They bashed Rudi’s head wide open and labeled him a no-good, violent criminal. But he was just a victim. He still has a bump on his head. So we had similar experiences at about the same time—he in Colorado and I in South Dakota. We were fighting for the same things.
Rudi got involved with AIM during the days when a lot of Chicano people from New Mexico, Colorado, and from below the border were coming to the sun dance, dancing at Big Mountain and Crow Dog’s Paradise. It forged a bond between Native American and Mexican Indians. There were a bunch of sun dancers out of Colorado who called themselves the Red Vest Society and they all turned up at Crow Dog’s place. That’s when Rocky first started to dance with me. We became the closest of friends and called each other “sister” and adopted each other. And at that time my sister Barb adopted Rudi as a brother. Barb’s husband, Jim, has the same background as Rudi.
Jim and Barb lived for a while in Colorado but eventually settled down on our Rosebud Reservation, at Mission. Rudi was always visiting them and that’s how I me
t him. He fell in love with me right away. He often tells me that, but he did not dare to show it, because I was, at that time, still with Crow Dog. I have to admit that I was hardly aware of Rudi then, wrapped up in my own problems.
Rudi got into Lakota religion while in Denver. Whole caravans of AIM people and Native American Church members were always passing through Denver, on the way to Big Mountain, to the peyote gardens in South Texas, or to the Coast. Many pulled in at Rocky’s place, whose house was always full of Indians. She knew all the AIM leaders and they were always welcome to stay with her.
A friend of Rudi’s, Thomas Lopez, had a sweat lodge in Adams County. They called it the Eagle Lodge, and it was open to anybody who wanted to sweat. And Rudi went there a lot and through the lodge also met many of the movement people.
Rudi has done some crazy things for his Indian brothers. The Denver Museum of Natural History had in its possession a lot of medicine taken from a burial ground—a pipe bag, an old Indian war shirt, beaded and quilled artifacts—that belonged to the Red Cloud family. Some people got mad and they “liberated” it. They said that stuff didn’t belong there, that it belonged to Chief Red Cloud. The museum offered a reward for its return; they wanted these things back, bad. The FBI got involved. The people who had the artifacts came to Rudi, because at the time he knew Marlene and Marietta Red Cloud, descendants of the famous Red Cloud family. They wanted Rudi to take the stuff back to the Red Cloud family in South Dakota. This was before the Knee, and things were really bad in Pine Ridge. Everyone was carrying guns, and none of those sun dancers wanted to do it, so right away it was: “Put it on Rudi, he’s not scared, he’s got balls.” He said no because he had just gotten out of the reformatory in Buena Vista and was on parole. If he got caught with these objects in his car, he’d go to federal prison. But they kept asking him, and they talked him into it. So he drove all the way up to South Dakota, where he met Marietta and Marlene’s grandfather and all those Red Clouds. They really honored him up good and told him he was an adopted brother forever.
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