Ohitika Woman

by Mary Brave Bird

  Rudi met a lot of Chicano gang members from L.A. who said to him: “Hey brother, I’m part Indian, but I don’t know nothing about it, I grew up in the barrio, right in East L.A., but I’d like to learn something about Indian ways.” And Rudi would take them aside and teach them. There were even full-blood Indians in the joint but they grew up in East Oakland, or San Francisco, and they’d never been on the res, and they’d want to know more about their culture. The drum used to really bring them together. When you start drumming, people gather. They want to see what it’s about. And that’s when they start to learn. That’s when you feel that you really accomplished something. To sit by the fire and sing, and hear the drumming, sitting with Indian and mestizo people, talking about the res; it’s like you aren’t a part of the joint anymore when you’re on Indian ground. Rudi would be on Indian ground drumming, and the gangs were inside fighting each other. They had their knives. The Indians had the pipe. The Indians were better off.

  Rudi learned barbering in prison. He still cuts hair very well. He also got certificates in bricklaying, welding, and in carpentry, and he did electrical work and plumbing. He learned drafting and design too. He can read and write music and he plays a number of instruments: the guitar, bass, congas, and a little bit of drums, piano, and flute. And he can cook and bake for a thousand people.

  Rudi escaped a couple of times from prison. They took him to the hospital one time and he escaped from there but was immediately busted. He escaped again from the institution and got caught. The last time he ran, he got into a high-speed chase with the Denver police. They had a hard time catching him because he’s a good driver, but they eventually ran him off the road with a roadblock. He went off a bridge and got hurt pretty bad, breaking his ribs and shoulder. He woke up days later in the hospital. He lucked out, though, because he ended up beating all the escape charges, and just got returned to the penitentiary.

  After Rudi had served his sentence, he got into a fight in Denver in which he ended up in the hospital with a broken leg. After Rudi got out of the hospital he was walking down Forty-fourth Street early one morning, really bummed out, sick of the city, and the bars, and the drugs, and everything that goes on there. Then a blue van pulled up beside him, the door swung open, and there was my sister Barb and Jim, who had just pulled into Denver. They asked him: “Do you want to split?” Rudi said: “Yeah,” and left with them for South Dakota without even bringing clothes or anything. He just had on a pair of shorts, a tank top, and a hat. He was so sick of Denver, and the kind of life he was leading, that he just wanted to leave. He made a promise to himself that drugs would not be a part of his life anymore. He made a promise to Tunkashila to follow his ways, to give the medicine a try, to go back to the good red road. And he prayed that he’d meet a woman who would take him for what he is. He had known about me for a long time through his sister Rocky, and had talked to my family over the phone, from inside prison. And when we finally met, we gave each other strength. He was at Jim’s house, and was really nervous—he didn’t know what to talk to me about. He had looked forward to meeting me for years, but he never had the opportunity to because he was in and out of prison. I never thought I would fall in love again, but I dug Rudi. Then, as we got to know each other more, and we were talking about our lives, it turned out that he was at the same point that I was—he was disgusted with the drugs; I was getting that way about alcohol. So along he came for me, and along I came for him. We’ve got a lot of struggles ahead of us, but we’ll hang with each other. We’ll deal with whatever lies ahead.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Skin Art

  Traditional Lakota people, and even the not quite traditional, have tattoos, mostly on their wrists. These are not the elaborate designs you see in tattoo parlors, but lines, little stars, unconnected letters—small blue marks pricked into the skin for no apparent reason, certainly not for their beauty. But there is a reason. Our people hold the widespread belief that, after death, the ghosts start out on Tachanku, the Spirit Road, which is the Milky Way, to go to Wanagi Tamakoche, the Spirit Land. On the way they have to pass Hinhan Kaga, the Owl Woman, who acts as a sort of gatekeeper to the Land of Many Lodges. She examines every passing soul, looking for tattoos on their wrists, which are a sort of passport to the spirit world, and if Owl Woman does not find such marks, she throws the soul down from the Milky Way into bottom-less space. I was told that in the old days there was always one man or woman to do the tattooing. Such persons marked out the design on the skin with clay and, with an awl, pierced the skin. Blue clay was put over this, even when there was still bleeding. When the clay dried, it was rubbed off and the dark blue marks remained. A long time ago, people were tattooed with a blue spot on their foreheads or with two lines down their chins so that the Owl Woman would let them pass. Nowadays, it seems any kind of simple design will do, but faces are no longer marked that way, just the wrists.

  Tattooing was performed in almost all Indian tribes, usually having religious or ceremonial significance. Often rituals and special songs were performed while somebody was tattooed. Awls, needles, sharpened bones, cactus spines, porcupine quills, or fish bones and teeth were used for skin pricking, depending on the tribe. The Wichita used the most elaborate forms of tattooing, covering large parts of their bodies, which is why early French travelers called them the Peaux Piquées, the Pricked Skins. Among the Osages, pipe keepers and members of the medicine society were tattooed, the men on their eyelids. The Caddos marked themselves with the designs of plants and animals, tattooing also the corners of their eyes. Among the Assiniboins, women had three vertical stripes tattooed on their chins, below the lower lip. Omaha women were marked with a circle on their foreheads, representing the sun and daylight, and with a star on their breast, symbolizing night. The Kiowas tattooed round dots on their women’s foreheads. The Ojibways got themselves tattooed as a cure for toothache. The Hidatsas also used simple designs to denote war honors. Early depictions of southeastern Indians show their entire bodies covered with elaborate tattoos. Most men I have met from among Plains tribes bear some tattoo marks, even if they no longer know their significance and just follow an old tradition out of habit. I know a man in Rosebud, the son of a former tribal chairman, who has WINE tattooed under one nipple and BEER under the other.

  For all these reasons I was intrigued to find that Rudi was into tattooing. He calls it “skin art.” He learned it in prison—naturally. He is a good artist, anyhow, and that shows in his tattooing. Tattooing was developed years ago in the Orient, and they used to tattoo with bamboo. For a long time in the U.S. it was identified with prisoners and bikers, but now it has become fashionable among the public. Now every year they have tattoo conventions. The best tattooists will get together and compare their work. They have contests just like an art show. Rudi entered his stuff, and a lot of it has come out in Outlaw Biker magazine and Easy Rider. He did a tattoo on an Indian brother, of a medicine wheel with some pipes, and out of the smoke an Indian was holding a pipe to the sun, and it came out really good. He sent it to Easy Rider magazine, and they displayed it on a color page. Rudi has been tattooing for fifteen years. He uses a cassette motor and a guitar string. He makes an electric pencil with the motor and bends the guitar string like a little drive shaft, so that it runs through the ink pen, and the needle comes up and down. You just dip it in ink and draw with it. It’s really easy. There was a biker in prison with Rudi, a Hell’s Aagel named Shotgun, who was a fantastic tattooist. And his wife, Star, owned one of the biggest tattoo parlors in San Francisco. W hen Rudi got out, he got a job working there for Star. Right now tribal designs are really hot. That’s what people want. Down their chin, or on their shoulder, African or Indian tribal designs. There’s good money to be made, and there’s a big market for it. Nowadays if you open a parlor, you have to have the Department of Health in there, to make sure you sterilize your needles and wear rubber gloves. One time Rudi made about thirty-four hundred dollars in three days at Sturgis, tattooing th
e bikers at their yearly get-together. He’s done that a few times. He has tattooed on the boardwalk in Santa Cruz. He says that he’s easily done five thousand tattoos in California. When he first started, Rudi was really good at tattooing skulls, demons, lizards—that’s what people go for. They don’t want a deer drinking water on their back. They’d rather have a skull with a snake, and crossbones.

  There’s a lot of gang stuff that one has to be careful with. Sometimes guys would bring Rudi a pattern, and it would be a Hell’s Angel’s logo, their colors, and you’re not allowed to wear that if you’re not one of them. He’d have to tell a lot of them: “I can’t put that on you, bud.” If you ever see someone with stars, they got that tattoo in a federal prison, and each star means five years. The teardrops coming out of dudes’ eyes, representing killings in the joint, those are gang symbols. A lot of people don’t know that—they’ll want a teardrop on their eye because they think it looks good. And you have to tell them that this identifies you as a gang member.

  Rudi likes to do Indian art and biker art. Usually women will want something small and dainty like a flower. One time he did barbed wire on a woman’s breast. She asked him to do it, and it came out really nice. After that he must have had a hundred women come in: “Are you the one who did the barbed wire?” It became a hot item. He put it on their ankles, on their wrists, on their breasts; some wanted it around their necks. On one woman he put a holster with bullets around her waist, with a .45 on the side of her leg. Janice Joplin had a little red heart on her tit; they used to call it the Janice Joplin heart. A lot of girls wanted that. It used to take him five minutes to do it, and he’d charge them sixty dollars.

  Then you’ve got the nuts. Bikers who want a picture of a woman naked, with her legs spread open. One man wanted a picture of a dog with a big old weenie pissing on a fire hydrant. Rudi said: “Man, do you really want this on you?” They’d bring him nasty pornography. In Hustler magazine, they had a little penis in tennis shoes chasing a little pussy in tennis shoes. He tattooed that design on some guys. He asked them: “Does your mom know you’re putting this on you? What’ll your wife think?” Bikers don’t care. You can tell by a man’s tattoo whether he’s a sailor, thief, pimp, mafioso, or biker. Some people won’t rest until every inch of their body is covered with designs—flowers, butterflies, snakes, skulls, and daggers. Rudi met a guy who had Christ’s head put on his bald pate. Another had two eyes tattooed, one on each of his buttocks, making his ass look like a face. People who want to be tattooed don’t always have good taste.

  An old Apache man told me a story, that years ago the elders had gone into the mountains to make medicine and Grandfather came down, and he opened up the earth and showed them hell, and a lot of the people down there were tattooed. In the Bible, God tells you that your body is a temple and not to abuse it. But among bikers it’s the fashion, and among Native Americans, it’s a tradition.

  I was toying with the idea of Rudi putting the design of a waterbird on me—the symbol of the peyote church—but I quickly dropped the idea. He has been working for over a year on my brother-in-law’s stomach. It is very big—the stomach as well as the design. It’s a very ambitious project—eagles, and tipis, and Sitting Bull, and whatnot. I wonder whether he’ll ever finish it, call it part of an Indian-Chicano-biker-prison tradition. Well, this was just a little wandering off the track of my story.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Here and Now

  After my marriage to Rudi, we both moved for a few months to Phoenix, Arizona. I made and sold beaded and feathered earrings. Rudi did some construction work. But then I got home- sick for the res and all my relatives and friends there. So here I am again, back at Rosebud. Rudi and I, together with all the kids, now have a home on the res. It’s a tiny, so-called transitional house way out in the boondocks but we like it. While it’s small inside, it is big outside. We have a large garden, a ceremonial ground for rituals, and a corral for horses, though we don’t have any at the moment. The place is situated in a little valley between two hills, with a big old creek running through the grounds. There are lots of trees all around and you can see eagles and hawks sitting on the branches. You can’t see any other house, just endless prairie wherever you look. In the evening, at twilight, mule deer come down to the creek. At night there is a tremendous sky with millions of stars—pure magic—and you can hear the coyotes howling at the moon when they are not busy going after rabbits. Silhouetted against the moonlight, the cottonwoods along the brook look like mighty ghosts waving their arms around. So the nature around us is inspiring, but living so far out on the prairie has its drawbacks. The road is terrible. When it rains we are surrounded by a sea of mud so that we can’t even get the car out. Last winter, after a blizzard, we were snowed in for three days and just had to stay put, cut off from the rest of the world. But the beauty around us makes up for everything. The house once belonged to my uncle, Clifford Broken Leg. It was in terrible shape when we first moved in. I called it a bunkhouse. It must have been a place for cowboys once, because the designs of cattle brands were scrawled all over the walls. It consists of two very small bedrooms and a tiny front room. So, with three kids and the new baby, we are kind of cramped, but we are used to that. We have an old cast-iron stove and, in winter, Rudi is constantly hauling wood to keep us warm. We use propane for cooking.

  Rudi has done wonders to make the place livable. He repaired the plumbing and the electrical system, laid tiles, put in a new floor, and painted the walls. Outside, he put in flower beds for me in the front yard. He pulls up weeds, rakes the grounds, and makes the kids help him. Financially, the setup is not so good. The house belongs to my cousin Clifford, who is a tribal councilman. He charges us only seventy-five dollars per month, which is very reasonable, though I tried to get him down to fifty bucks. But that’s the good part. The house is about three-quarters of a mile from the nearest drivable road. It is six miles from Parmelee and twenty-eight miles from Mission, where we have to go for our groceries and all other supplies, and where we go with our food stamps. So a round trip to the local supermarket is about sixty miles. It takes a full tank for our old crate. The businesses on the res have no competition, so they mark up all prices 15 percent. A full tank, which would cost us twenty dollars anywhere else, is thirty dollars on the res. Often we are marooned for the simple reason of having no gas money. That’s also one reason why rents are cheap out here.

  Rudi tries everything he can think of to support his “instant” family. He discovered that he has many relatives on and around the res—on Grass Mountain, in Yankton, in Rosebud—people like Uncle Robert Moorehouse, who just died, Edna Whipple, and several DeCoras. But the few jobs around here—and you can practically count them on the fingers of your two hands—are reserved for tribally enrolled Rosebud Sioux, and that disqualifies him. He jokes: “You can’t even support a family anymore as a criminal. You’d need a regular job during daytime and do your robbing moonlighting at night.” So he hustles every way he can. He hauls wood for three dollars an hour and hot-tars roofs for four or five bucks. He always works with his hands. He makes beautiful peyote fans and falls back on his old standby—tattooing. Some people want just a little symbol, a star or sun circle, to please the Owl Woman, but others want more elaborate designs. He did a nice picture on a man’s shoulder blade, and then covered another guy’s whole back with a beautiful, intricate design. It shows an Indian dressed for the sun dance in a fringed shirt, holding a sacred pipe up to the sun. The whole is framed by a medicine wheel surrounded by zigzag lightning bolts. Rudi got paid sixty bucks for this. The man is so proud of it he shows off his back everywhere—a living advertisement for Rudi. June Bug, who has a talent for art, is fascinated by Rudi doing tattoos. He can sit next to Rudi for hours, watching every move, asking questions like: “How do you do this shading? Does it hurt? How do you get ideas for your designs?” Rudi said that this drawing on the man’s back “has motion,” that it is “severe.”

  Rudi i
s a good father. He cusses a lot, using every four-letter word there is, but he is kind and patient, spending a lot of time with the kids, and they love him for it. One thing that a lot of people would consider a drawback turned into a blessing for us. Situated in a hollow overshadowed by the hills of a rolling prairie, we have very bad TV reception. So, instead of sitting before the idiot box, with my and Rudi’s encouragement the kids read a lot. June Bug and Jennifer got good grades and became honor students.

  I have a harder time with Pedro and Anwah. Pedro is twenty years old and now the father of two. He dropped out of school a few years ago. He looked up to Crow Dog, who saw no value in education. That’s understandable. But things are different now. Archie Fire Lame Deer is a medicine man and sun dance leader, but his daughter Josephine is a mathematical and scientific genius and Archie has encouraged her to apply for a top college. We have enough medicine men and enough high school dropouts. What we need are Indian lawyers, doctors, teachers, and scientists. Illiteracy will get us nowhere. There is no reason why you can’t perform a ceremony even if you can read and write or maybe know enough to balance your bankbook, if that’s the road you want to travel. Pedro doesn’t like school. He thinks education is a lot of crap because it doesn’t seem to get a young man a job. He thinks it is ridiculous for a father of two to go back to school for his GED. But he has no income and his family is on welfare. Now and then he’ll try turning over a new leaf, try to get interested in school again, but Pedro never gets along with his instructors. He’s always had trouble because he grew up in the movement, learning to be antigovernment, anti-the system. He had such a hard time that he just dropped out. I told him that he should go back to school because now that he has a wife and two children, he can’t support them with just doing powwows. I always told him to keep away from the violent element, then he’ll be okay. If he could channel his energy somewhere else, it would be good. I even told him to try boxing—there’s a boxing team for boys—but he was against it. Pedro’s seen a lot of spiritual ways, but he’s seen a lot of the dark side, too—the drinking and the violence.