“Tunkashila?” Le-a asked again.
She walked around the back of the teepee. The old, barren mares rested their soaked haunches in the fresh, dawn sun. In the cottonwood trees, ravens burbled and clucked. Wet leaves rustled like silk.
Le-a Brings Plenty Buries the Hatchet, as They Say
The closest Lakota comes to the word for forgiveness is kicicajuju, which literally means “to repay for something on someone’s behalf.” There is no easily translatable word for forgiveness in the Lakota language, because in a culture that values integrity, forgiveness is not something you say, it’s something you do.
Le-a went back into the teepee. She stoked the fire, and put the kettle on to boil. She made a pot of coffee and opened a can of condensed milk. She sliced sun artichokes and fried them with duck eggs, sage, and chunks of corn bread.
Then she felt under the buffalo hide and pulled out the gun.
“Crazy Love?” Squanto propped himself up on his elbow.
“Breakfast is ready,” Le-a said.
Squanto said, “What are you doing?”
“I’ve got to bury this fucking thing,” Le-a said, ducking out of the teepee.
“Crazy Love?”
You Choose Watson’s Very Born-Again Indian Conversion
There are quiet conversions, the gentle arrival at a series of mild spiritual epiphanies. That was how Le-a came to her soul, as if led toward it by imitating the ways of Rick Overlooking Horse until to behave in such a way became practice, and the practice became internal law. Baptism not by consuming fire, but by warm embers.
That was not You Choose What Son’s way. He was all fire and martyrdom, like Saul on the road to Straight Street, Damascus.
“I ain’t done a real, whole good thing in my life. I see that now. I have lived only for my own selfish needs. That has made my suffering worse. The only way out of suffering is sacrifice,” he said all this like he was auditioning to be the youth pastor of a Born-Again minor megachurch.
“Here we go,” Le-a said.
But even she had to admit that artificial light is still light.
It’s no substitute for real sunshine, but it can show the way out of the dark.
A Good Thing for an Indian to Know
You Choose said that most of what he knew in the way of personal experience wasn’t the sort of thing you wanted to pass along to the youth as an example. But he did tell the boys the one thing prison teaches you is some people are willfully incapable of using a toilet.
You Choose What Son was thinking specifically of a Taco Jockey from El Paso.
“A what?” Daniel asked.
“A Spice Rack,” You Choose said. “Mexicles.”
“Really?” Le-a said.
Anyway, the point of You Choose’s story was that when it came right down to it, that Taco Jockey didn’t take a shit. The shit took him. In the end, the Mexican’s cellmates complained and complained, the COs had to move him to a dry cell with wire mesh over a drain hole in the floor.
Then there’d been a waiflike Swamp Yankee from Florida. He had acne-scarred skin that gave him an air of wounded tragedy, and he had a predilection for falling in love with all or any of his cellmates. He’d spent much of his cell time crouched in front of the toilet, with his finger down his throat until he blistered the inside of his mouth.
“What no one tells you,” You Choose wanted the boys to know, “is that you don’t only serve your own time in prison. If you ain’t careful, you also serve the time of everyone around you. Overtime.”
“Okay,” Le-a said. “Enough said here. Enough said.”
You Choose Watson, Indian Activist
It was almost inevitable that You Choose Watson’s American Indian awakening be accompanied by a growing sense of American Indian outrage, followed by furious if somewhat haphazard American Indian activism.
The summer the boys were fifteen, You Choose Watson suddenly chained himself to a sobriety checkpoint barrier in Whiteclay in mid-July to protest the sale of alcohol to Indians. What a performance that was. By the time the Nebraska state troopers managed to hack the chains off his wrist, You Choose was faint with dehydration. Although shriveled up like a prune or not, he still had to spend a week in Sheridan County Jail in Rushville, Nebraska.
A few weeks after getting bailed out of there, You Choose What Son was part of an ongoing Indian protest against an oil pipeline in North Dakota. It was something to see, Indians swarming the state troopers on their war ponies, whooping and ululating. And the troopers all having to back up, as the Indians pressed and swarmed.
“I ride for the water!” a girl on the grey mare shouted at the troopers.
“Hoka hey!” You Choose What Son roared, brandishing a trembling fist at a North Dakota state trooper.
They arrested him for that too.
He was an expensive Indian.
Four hundred dollars on average, every time he had to be sprung from jail.
The boys handed over all their earnings from the Indian Races, but it was never more than fifty bucks a shot. Squanto got his job back at the hospital as security guard, three nights a week, and one or two days a week he helped Gordo Gonzales, proprietor of Speedy G’s Taxi Service to ferry rides around the Rez. Le-a took her fry bread and stew to every Powwow and charged fifty cents more for her food than the Mexicans did.
“My Indian tax,” she called it, even though she knew figuring out how to pay the White Man’s bills on a Red Man’s wage was an exercise in futility.
But it was like Squanto said: You had to give it a go before you went completely outlaw, because once you were outlaw, there was no going back to the possibility of being a token Indian, or a good Indian, or the poster-child Indian. Once you went outlaw, then you were there, and that’s where you stayed.
Daniel and Jerusalem (Don’t) Win a Thousand Dollars
The twins heard about the race at Thunder Basin, Wyoming, via Tray Tor via Theo Lone Tree via the nurse at the Lakota Oglala Sioux Tribal Hospital. The prize money was enough to cover You Choose What Son’s legal bills, plus buy Le-a some time off her feet. It’d be an easy thousand, fifteen hundred if they took first, and second, which, Tray Tor figured, they might. “You should do it,” Tray Tor said. “Does you good to get off the Rez once in a while.”
Jerusalem and Daniel had to ride a hundred miles just to get to the starting line of the three-hundred-mile Thunder Basin Endurance Race across unfamiliar territory, sleeping in a cattle yard on the Wyoming border. And then when they got there, riders from Oregon, Washington, and California with their fresh Arabians were clattering expensively out of trailers.
“Ho-lay,” Daniel said.
“Ho-lay,” Jerusalem agreed.
There was concern among the race organizers about the fitness of the boys’ horses to run, but the White vet declared the Native Americans’ ponies sound in spite of their salt-crusted coats. They had hearts like drums and legs like logs, she said, no denying it.
After that, the organizers said how nice it was that Indigenous People had chosen to race here.
That night the boys slept alongside their grazing horses wrapped in thin blankets. A few dozen people wondered if the Indian kids would be trampled to death in the night. Although a few others expressed the opinion that these Rez donkeys—forgive the expression—were too placid to trample their owners. Also, they said, Indians knew how to sleep with animals, like that.
At dawn, the boys rose, washed in the ablution block, and then walked their horses to the starting line and waited. At six o’clock, bareback except for the thin blankets, with nothing between them and their horses’ mouths but a length of horsehair rope, the boys took their places in the middle of the competitors.
They left in no particular hurry, but certainly faster than the White riders, who seemed attached to the race’s beginning. Then fifty miles into the ride, just as t
he day’s heat began, the boys found a tiny lush meadow in the cool shade of a stand of quacking aspens near a shallow spring. They dismounted, drank deeply from the spring, and rubbed their horses dry with knots of grass. After that, they slept while their horses grazed.
The other riders clattered ahead out into the long open meadows of sage, past the gloomy aspen grove where the boys rested. Hours later, at dusk, they mounted their horses and jogged, slowly at first, toward the very distant line of headlamps of the other riders picking their way on the steep and winding trail ahead.
On a steep downhill, one that fell away from a cliff, they took flight past all the other riders.
Daniel first, lying almost flat against his horse’s back, hands flung above his head for balance, legs stretched out around the horse’s shoulders.
Then Jerusalem.
“Hoka-hey!” the boys hollered.
After that, the four souls carved their way through the darkness. The drumming of bare hooves on flinty ground, the percussion of breath, branches whipping.
By the time the boys arrived at the finish line a full day ahead of everyone else, the organizers had been able to find at least three reasons to disqualify them.
“But do stay and join us,” they urged. “For the pizza. We always have a pizza party after the race. It’s tradition.”
Wanted: A Job for Indians
People talk a lot about drunk Indians, unemployed Indians, welfare Indians. They say head onto the Rez any time of the year, and you see squalor and filth.
People ask, “Who lives this way?”
They say, “Who sits here and rots like this? Wouldn’t they rather assimilate? Wouldn’t they like a job?”
The summer the boys turned eighteen, the only people with jobs on the Rez were soldiers, tribal cops, Catholic priests, and undercover Drug Enforcement Agency narcs.
You could tell the narcs because of their too-shiny kicks. No one has shoes like that on the Rez. Everyone is so goddamned, bottomed-out poor. There’re a lot of Indians that don’t make one soaking-wet red cent from one winter to the next. Not one cent.
Television crews out of Washington and New York came onto the Rez and filmed segments about the violence and the gangs and the diseases. They showcased all the HIV, TB, diabetes, cirrhosis, and rape they could find. They talked about alcoholism, and black mold. Men and women were dying like flies. Like Haitians, they said.
The Rez lost its wild promise for the boys. Or maybe there’d never been any promise except for the broken, damaging kind.
The summer turned sullen and sad and oppressive.
It was all those things the television programs said. It was the false starts, and the no starts, and the dead ends that got into the souls of the boys. It was the broken past, the stagnant present, and the unhopeful future.
It seemed the only way to survive on the Rez was to leave.
Leave until you could afford to come back and live so close to such an unforgiving wind.
Ride this current wrong, and there was no going back out for a do-over. You were liquid spill on aisle six.
The Recruiter
There are a lot of Styrofoam Indians on the Rez, who don’t know their souls from a bar of soap. There are a lot of drunks on the Rez, let’s face it. There are a lot of people half dead on drugs and abuse. So you can’t always believe what you hear.
People were saying there was a recruiting officer from Canada for Disneyland France on the Rez. They said he was looking for two real Indian boys for Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show. Everyone said you knew what that meant. There’d be a German pimp on the other end of that string. Why not? German women were obsessed with the Lakota men. Why wouldn’t German pedophiles be obsessed with Lakota children?
But in the end, when he came door-to-door, the recruiting officer for Disneyland France turned out to be not a teepee-creeping German pimp, but an ordinary enough Cowboy from Calgary who had spent most of his career playing a chuck-wagon Cowboy and also Benjamin Pontipee in Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.
Of course, everyone said, he might still be a pimp, but at least he wasn’t German.
The Audition
The recruiter was very careful to point out a highlighted section of the contract: “The successful applicant [henceforth known as the applicant] will maintain the appearance of a stereotypical Lakota male youth. He will maintain a full head of hair of at least 30.48 centimeters [one foot] in length from the nape to the point of the skull.”
Half a dozen Indians were weeded out right off the bat.
First the fat kids and the kids with short hair were sent away; also, the blatantly fetal-alcohol syndrome kids; then, the wannabe gangsters who showed up with pants too baggy at the ass. And a few kids were dismissed under suspicion of being under the influence of intoxicants. Finally, only six kids were left to show off their real Indianness to the chuck-wagon Cowboy from Calgary.
“Cowboys and Indians,” the recruiter said. “Comprendo?”
The Youth of Today
When the boys came home with signed contracts from Disneyland France, Le-a Brings Plenty blamed You Choose What Son for racking up White Man’s bills. She accused him of encouraging the boys to be such Feather-duster Indians in the first place.
She blamed him for all of it. “You brainwashed the boys.”
“I taught them how to be proud Lakota.”
“So how are they now Disneyland Indians?” Le-a shouted.
“The boys need to head off the Rez and see the world for themselves,” Squanto said. “We all did it.”
“I only headed off the Rez because they arrested my Red Indian ass. I had to be dragged off this place.”
“What about Arizona?” You Choose asked.
“Don’t bring up my Pima people!” Le-a shouted. “My Maricopa! They have nothing to do with any this! They were minding their business in Arizona.”
The argument swirled around and around the teepee, Le-a and You Choose hurling accusations at one another, Squanto trying to remind everyone that nothing was forever. The boys fled and rode horses above the meadow, chasing through the pines, and the white, dusty ribs of the bluffs where the herd grazed in the winter.
Squanto was half right.
Nothing is forever.
But so is everything.
Marne-la-Vallée
Twenty miles east of the center of Paris there’s a new town built in the Paris Basin where once there were fields of wheat, oats, rye, and lavender.
Marne-la-Vallée, they called it when mapping it out in 1965, as if inviting a flood.
A modern town hastily built in a river valley that was once covered in peach and apricot orchards; fields of tomatoes and onions, now the headquarters of a large French airline.
There’s the Val d’Europe Shopping Center.
Employment!
Designer clothes at outlet prices!
Also, Disneyland Paris, the most visited resort in Europe!
The towers of the Enchanted Palace rise medieval and pink out of a hill that was once good roosting for pheasants.
The Big Thunder Mountain with its Colorado-inspired redstone cliffs, and artificially rickety Rocky Mountain-seeming cabins, loom over a greenish pond where there’d been, within living memory, some of the best rabbit shooting in the whole of the Paris Basin.
A famous restaurateur in the 6th arrondissement was said to have died of a broken heart when the first bulldozer dug into the earth where he’d harvested rabbits for his kitchen since boyhood. Either that, or all the butter and strong cigarettes finally did in his arteries.
Nonetheless, fucking Americans.
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Disneyland Paris
First Goofy, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, and Donald Duck dance around a covered wagon. A campfire flickers. Actually, it’s a hologram of a campfire. Goofy, Mickey and Minnie Mouse, an
d Donald Duck dance around the hologram of a campfire. They sing, and encourage the audience to join in. In the background a sunset pulses.
Then Goofy and everyone skip out of the arena, and the music becomes somber, a bit like the sort of pompous military marches favored by South American dictators circa 1975. In a puff of dry ice, Buffalo Bill rides into the ring on a showy dappled grey gelding, all leather fringe and silver fastenings. The sunset goes crazy; purple, pink, yellow!
In real life, Buffalo Bill is Robert “Bob” Davies, a logger from Sandpoint, Idaho. But he grew up riding horses, and everyone always said he was a dead ringer for Buffalo Bill. Plus, keeping a waxed mustache and satisfying the fantasies of overweight European tourists was much easier than keeping up with protected nesting spotted owls and the tree-hugging greeniacs moving into the Rockies from California and, worst of all, Portland.
Bob Davies prefers unreal life.
The dappled grey gelding’s neck is arched like upholstery, its tail and mane are crimped. It stamps and paces, as if its heart will burst. Buffalo Bill is unsmiling under his handlebar mustache. He squints out at the audience. It’s that thousand-yard stare. His horse stamps around a bit more, as if it could go crazy if it felt like it. But Buffalo Bill is heavy in his stirrups, deep in his seat.
“I brought some friends along tonight to meet you,” Buffalo Bill says every night. “From the prairies and the Rocky Mountain states of Texas and Wyoming, Colorado and Montana,” he says. “Raise the cover on your heads for my friends.”
The cover on your heads?
Who has ever said that?
But the spectators get to their feet, and those with hats take them off.
A platinum-blond Annie Oakley in a long blue dress canters quickly into the arena on a very white horse, shooting the living dog out of everything she sees.