Now it’s lawful to return these artifacts to the tribes or families from whom they were taken.
Rudi had a house in Denver and Jim and Barb moved in with him and shared the rent. That’s when Rudi got really tight with Barb and found out that I was her sister. As I said, Rudi always had his eye on me, though I didn’t know it. When he heard that I had left Crow Dog he at once came hotfooting up to South Dakota and snagged me. He was so obviously head over heels in love with me that it bowled me over. He said: “I’m glad I waited for you. I want you to be my wife. I think it was fated by the Great Spirit.” So we got together.
Well, that’s Rudi for you, where he is coming from. What is he like? He is a big teddy bear of a man. Right now he is putting in a flower bed for me. Last week he fixed Mom’s roof. He is a talented artist, on paper and canvas. He can cut your hair or bake a pie. He can frame a house, or put in a swimming pool for some rich homeowner. He is good to me. So good that it makes me nervous, because I’m not used to it. Sometimes I am mean to him, snap at him, just because it makes me jittery to be pampered. He keeps me from drinking. I have not touched a Bud or Jack Daniel’s in over a year.
I recently heard that Crow Dog also has a new wife, not merely in the Indian way, but legally, with a marriage license and all that. I am glad for them, and wish them all the best, but I am also much relieved. With Crow Dog having done this, it makes me feel less bourgeois and establishment for having done the same.
CHAPTER TWENTY
The Iron House
At least half of all the Indian men and women I know have spent some time in jail. I have. It seems that we can’t help it. In South Dakota about 6 percent of the population are Indians, but we account for 43 percent of arrests and 50 percent of all convictions. You can walk into the infamous Pennington County jail at Rapid City and find that more than half of all inmates are skins. Many get jailed for political reasons, because of racial prejudice, because of cultural differences, or just because they are Indians. I think any white jury—and all the juries are white—would find even Jesus Christ himself guilty of murder or child molesting if he happened to be a skin and a member of AIM. Especially here in South Dakota people sometimes go to jail for having done the right, moral thing. I remember a case that was tried when I was still a young girl. A traditional family was having a wopila and give-away, an honoring feast for a dead relative. There are often up to a hundred or even more people at such a feast and all have to be fed. Well, the family sent one young man to get the food from the store. He took a friend along. At the store he said: “We are having a wopila. I need a side of beef from the freezer, and so many pounds of potatoes, coffee, sugar, and so on.” The store owner and his clerk got those things and piled them up on the counter, or wherever. The owner was new. He said: “Well, that’s so and so much. Just pay me and take your stuff.” The young man said: “I can’t pay you right now. We pay you when the lease money comes in. Write it down in your book and I’ll sign my name to it.” “Sorry,” said the owner, “I don’t sell on credit. It’s cash on the barrelhead.” “Don’t you understand?” said the young man. “We’re having an honoring feast. I just got to have that food. The old man who ran this store before you always let us have credit against the lease money.” “That’s probably why he sold the store. He was going broke, Sorry, no deal.” The young man went back to his old pickup and took his double-barreled shotgun from the rack in back of his seat. It is common for people around here, both white and Indian, to have guns in their pickups. The young man pointed the gun at the owner and his helper, telling his friend to load the food on the pickup. “I’ve just got to do this,” he told the storekeeper. “We’re having a wopila and have to feed our guests. You get paid when the lease money comes in. You sure are a mean, tightfisted son of a bitch.” Then he drove off with his friend, and his family had a nice giveaway. Of course, the store owner called the cops on him and the young man and his friend did time for armed robbery. But from our point of view they had done nothing wrong.
In my early teens, I and my friends stole things from the trading post—small stuff, like candy, or a can of food, or, in the case of the older teens, cigarettes. The trading post owner had started out as a little peddler and wound up as a millionaire by overcharging the “dumb Indians” and we felt perfectly justified taking a tiny little bit back. Again, the white folks did not see eye to eye with us on this.
Whites break the law too, but it is always the poor and the nonwhites who actually do the time in penitentiaries. Some of us just stay in there, forgotten by the outside world. A white judge will let a white defendant off with a gentle slap on the wrist but will put a Native American in the slammer for the same offense—particularly here, in South Dakota.
AIM, the American Indian Movement, was born in the “iron house.” Four Ojibway brothers founded it while doing time in a Minnesota jail. And, of course, long after everybody was released at Attica for having taken part in the great prison riot there, one lonely young guy was kept behind bars, Decajawiah Hill, a Mohawk Indian. Native Americans, used to an outdoor life, going along unregulated, on “Indian time,” have a really hard time being imprisoned. Many commit suicide in the pen. I know of a sixteen- year-old who hanged himself in his cell and I still grieve for my friend Pewee, who did the same thing.
I’ve been in jail quite a few times, in the white man’s jail for political reasons, in tribal jails for drunk and disorderly or driving without a license. Tribal jails are not exactly pleasant, but not really bad. Tribes are allowed to handle only the petty stuff. Domestic arguments, speeding, driving while under the influence, penny-ante things. The feds handle the so-called major crimes, which are mostly not major at all but stuff just a cut above a misdemeanor.
Rudi has been in jail a few times. When he was fourteen years old his mother was in a car accident. She was the strength of the family, working as a private secretary. The accident left her crippled and brain damaged. It broke up the family and meant hard times for Rudi. It was the sixties and the barrio was drowning in drugs. His family had spread out in all directions so as a teenager Rudi was bouncing around more or less on his own. He hustled to keep from starving. He ran with a group of kids who were all in the same boat. They were not basically criminals, they just stole to survive. Then he started using heroin and stole in order to support his habit. Rudi grew up in the barrio on the east side of Denver where the poor had been crowded into the projects and the young did not have any alternatives but to shoplift or deal drugs. He told me: “Politicians, businessmen, and brokers steal money all the time, mostly in a legal way. The only difference is that they are much bigger thieves than a homeless kid from the barrios. I know I have to answer for what I did, but I don’t have to answer to them.”
Rudi is honest. If he likes you, he tells you, and if he doesn’t like you he lets you know it. He lays his cards on the table. He doesn’t bullshit you or play games with you. When I first met him, he leveled with me right away. He told me: “I’ve been in the joint. I’ve got a shady past and I don’t lie about it. Thinking back, there’s a lot of stuff I did that I’m not proud of, that makes me shake when I remember it, but when you’re young and crazy, drinking wine and smoking weed, you do dumb things.”
I told him that I didn’t care, that I knew where he was coming from, that I had been there myself. He asked whether I cared that he wasn’t a Sioux. I said: “You’re a human being just like me.”
He told me: “You’re the first woman who didn’t try to judge me. You’re straight down. Some women I meet, when I tell them I’ve been in prison, it’s like they smell shit. Yes, I did some things wrong, but that doesn’t make me a bad person. I know one day I’ll have to stand naked in front of Grandfather and he’ll knock fire out of my ass—I’ll have to answer for what I’ve done.”
Rudi has a colorful way of expressing himself. Much of his language has been formed in the joint. But, he is an eloquent and fascinating speaker. He has been with AIM, taken part in ceremo
nies, and lived with us Lakotas. He told me that it was Indian tradition and religion that kept him going while he was in prison, that it was the pipe and the sweat lodge that made broken-down people whole, that made whitemanized men Indians again. He told me about the long struggle for Native Americans to be able to hold their ceremonies inside the joint, and to have medicine men come in, just as the others can have their priests, ministers, and rabbis. He told me about the battles he’d had with the wardens who call our rituals “heathen superstitions” and our holy men “bullshit artists.”
He has seen a lot of people who came to the medicine in prison and it turned their lives around. He had one friend in prison, Pete, who came in hard-core, a killer off the streets, but he went back to the Indian beliefs and now is a sun dancer at Big Mountain and at Crow Dog’s, Pete got out before Rudi and kept writing him letters of encouragement. Barb and Jim, who knew him long before he and I met, wrote to him also. He still treasures an old letter from his sister Rocky in which she wrote him words of strength:
“Brother, when you seem to get yourself down, teach yourself to think like the eagle always, and let your spirit soar high. Feel the strength of his wings, and feel the beat of his heart so that your spirit soars high and you can look down and see just how small things really are.” That kind of support helped Rudi overcome days of despair, when he was just ready to go off and hang himself, or try to escape. That’s when he’d have to smoke his pipe, pray, and think like that eagle.
When Rudi was in prison, he vorked a lot for the Indian and Chicano cause, and for the Freedom of Religion Act, so that we could worship and have the pipe, sweat lodge, feathers, and medicine in the institution. He helped mostly with the legal work and typing. He had a friend named Owl, an old man who was a Mono from the Tule River Reservation, who was very instrumental in bringing the sweats into Folsom and San Quentin. They were broke, and it cost a lot of money to file the motions and the writs. Oddly enough, Charlie Manson lent the Indian people a lot of money to get the sweat lodge into Vacaville. He gets royalties on his book, and he came through.
The first prison sweat lodge erected in the country was in San Quentin. The second one was in Vacaville, then Susanville, then Folsom, and so on, until now there’s been a lodge in just about every institution. The first time Rudi sweated in a prison was in California, in San Quentin. A fenced-in area called “Indian land” is where they erect the lodge, and Indians from the outside come and help to build it. This area also serves as a meeting place, which is good because in California there’s a lot of gangs, and Indian people are not into that. There are many tribes in California—Porno, Karok, Mono, Hupa, a lot of different nations, while in the Los Angeles area you can find Native Americans from every part of the country. So the lodge was always intertribal. The spiritual advisers who run the sweats come from the outside, and to get in they have to have what’s called a brown card, just as if they were a priest in the Catholic or Protestant church. Rudi sweated a few times with an adviser named Cedro, who got fired over an incident involving a death row inmate whose grandmother had died. The inmate cut off his braids and wrapped them in sage. Then he asked Cedro to take them to be buried with his grandmother. When Cedro was leaving the prison, they found them on him and fired him for violating the strict rule that forbids anything going in or out of the prison. That’s when Richard Williams took over as spiritual adviser to the lodge. He was in charge of the northern part of California—Folsom, San Quentin, Tracy. He’d go to a different institution each week, and sweat with the brothers, and teach them.
For years Rocky sun danced with me. She’d visit Rudi and show him the scars, saying: ‘These are for you. We suffer so that you’ll straighten up.” She would always pray that Rudi would stay with the medicine, with the red road. And he’d tell her: “Your prayers are felt, and they help a lot.”
When Rudi was fourteen he met Archie Fire Lame Deer in Lompoc. Back then Archie’s father was still alive, and Archie was the spiritual adviser to the lodge. It was good, because Rudi came in young, and he was able to learn about these traditional teachings before he got caught up in the bullshit that goes on in penitentiaries—gangs, stabbings, and drugs. I’m grateful to Archie for that. Rudi sweated with spiritual men from different tribes—Shoshones, Navajos, Huroks, Karoks, Lakotas—and was able to learn their different ways. He learned songs from many different tribes. And he learned respect—for everything—the whole universe—mankind, animals, the earth, the air, the water. Without spiritual strength I don’t think you can make it in this world.
If you’re in prison you’re stereotyped as a tough guy, a criminal. It’s not like that. Most Indians in prison are there because they’ve made mistakes in their life, because their culture is different, that’s all it is. Less than one in ten are hard-core criminals. Most are young guys who got into trouble either drinking or doing drugs, or hurt someone in a bar fight. Rudi first went in when he was fourteen years old under what they called the Youth Act. They don’t have it anymore because it was declared unconstitutional. At that time if you were arrested for a federal crime you were tried as an adult. There were a lot of young kids, fourteen or fifteen years old, in the federal institutions then.
A lot of Indian inmates would sometimes have a problem with the northern Mexicans in the yard, or the blacks, and they always had Rudi represent the Indians and talk it out. Usually they were fighting about stupid stuff—a pack of cigarettes, a dirty look in the hall, a TV program, or some other crap—but it would lead to a war, so Rudi became a mediator in the institution.
One time there was almost a full-scale riot involving the Crips, a black gang out of East L.A. The Indians had gone into a dorm and were watching some TV when the black guys came in and turned it off. The Indians turned it back on, and it turned into a fight. This time it involved the southern Mexicans, because two of them were Mexican and two of them were Indians, so they had all the Indian and Chicano people backing them up and the Crips backing up the black guys. That’s a lot of people. You’re talking about five or six hundred people ready to get down. They were ready for war. The cops were already on the tower with guns. So Rudi, representing the Native Americans, the shot caller of the Crips, and the shot caller of the Mexicans were brought to the lieutenant’s office and told: “You dudes better talk and get this thing over with, or we’re going to lock down the whole institution.” Rudi talked to the others and got it all settled. When you talk man to man from the heart they listen to you, and Rudi is a good talker. They all prayed together and everybody shook hands. So that’s how Rudi kept peace in the institution.
Native Americans doing time had a lot of outside support, especially from people praying for them at the sun dance. At San Quentin every year the prisoners used to make a staff, tie their medicine bags and feathers to it, and make offerings. Then Richard Williams would take it to Big Mountain for them. A lot of people prayed for Rudi at Big Mountain and at Crow Dog’s Paradise. In the eighties, after the Longest Walk and the Longest Run, people started having runs to support the prisoners, the Indian people who were doing time. They would have runs to the prison, and in there they’d have a powwow, a lecture, or a ceremony. That was going pretty well until Ted Means’s daughter, Kimberly, died. They had been running relays along the highway, between Rosebud and the prison at Sioux Falls. She ran across the road, was run over by a car, and died. She must have been around ten years old. I don’t think they’ve had many runs after that. But they have annual powwows. Such medicine men as Archie Fire Lame Deer and Crow Dog have done a lot to bring Indian religion into the penitentiaries. Two years ago, they even managed to get Indians out on a short leave from prisons at Sioux Falls and elsewhere to sun dance at Crow Dog’s Paradise—even a man like White Hawk, who’s doing life for murder.
All the institutions in California have Indian groups. Since Rudi could type, every time he’d go to a joint, they’d say: “Hey, Rudi, why don’t you be the secretary of the Indian group? Why don’t you help us with
the paperwork?” Sometimes he’d get into trouble because of his involvement with Indian groups. They’d bother him because he was a talker, a spokesman for the Indians, and he was right up front about this. And he’d be the first person called to the captain’s office whenever something happened. They’d threaten him, or move him—like from San Quentin to Soledad. He’d stay there four or five months, and after he filed papers, they’d send him back to San Quentin. By then he’d have lost his cell, his job, and all his property. They were good at that. Whenever you were sent to another institution, somehow your TV, your property and stuff, would take six months to get there, and when it did, you’d find that your books and paperwork somehow were destroyed or misplaced. They set Rudi up with minor shit like: “We found a razor blade in your locker; that’s a concealed weapon.” Stupid shit like that. They were always screwing the Indian brothers around. They’d get ready to have a sweat and there’d be no wood. They had to get paperwork done in triplicate just to get the wood brought in. One thing about California was that each Indian group kept in touch with the others. Every month Rudi would write a letter to the Indian circle in every institution and let them know what was happening. And he’d get letters from brothers in Folsom, or Chino, or wherever. It was their way of reaching out to each other. People had to fight for everything—to have a powwow, or to take the drum out into the yard and play it and learn some songs. And every time they would have to go through security and they’d search everything. They knew they were just taking the drum to sing some songs in the yard, but they make a big issue out of everything.
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