Inside the magazine, there was Pope Paul VI proclaiming twenty-two African saints. There was an advertisement for crochet granny dresses that might reasonably be expected to shock an actual grandmother. There was Martin Luther King Jr. winning the Nobel Peace Prize. And finally there was Billy Mills, the unknown long-shot American runner, winning the 10,000 meters.
The magazine was nearly a year out of date when the nurse showed it to Rick Overlooking Horse. She’d been saving it all these months for him because of the photo of Billy Mills, arms flung back, chest bursting through the ribbon, eyes closed, mouth torn in joy.
“Look, he’s Indian too,” the nurse said. “And a soldier.” She read slowly, as if she weren’t sure Rick Overlooking Horse could hear, or as if maybe she thought English were not his mother tongue. “A first lieutenant in the Marine Corps,” she added.
Rick Overlooking Horse turned his head away.
“Did you know him?” the nurse asked. She took the Indian’s hand and stroked it.
There’s so much space on the Rez, and so little in between the space. There was so much that might end you before you had a proper chance to begin. There was so much against you.
Of course you ran in packs.
Until even your people could not save you.
Then, you ran alone.
“Yeah,” Rick Overlooking Horse said. “We ran together.”
“What a coincidence!” the nurse said. Her touch was fire to Rick Overlooking Horse. It was acid. It was a skinning. The nurse said, “Am I hurting you?”
Thaté, Again
Billy Mills was the fastest Indian in the world and even he couldn’t outrun the officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs when they came for him and for all the kids between the ages of six and twelve that boreal chorus frog-singing August afternoon in 1952. “When they come for you, run,” the elders had said. By which they had meant, “Our power to protect you ends in that moment.”
So there was Billy Mills and Rick Overlooking Horse and You Choose Watson and a whole, sweet, sweating mess of Indian kids running with a pack of Rez dogs like their lives depended on it, off roads, over the prairie, through gullies, darting this way and that, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs patrol cars bumping behind them. One of the officers had a bullhorn and was shouting something that got distorted in the hot prairie wind.
“We’re here to help you! We’re here to help you!”
Blood pounded in Rick Overlooking Horse’s ears.
“We’re here to scalp you!” he heard. “We’re here to scalp you!”
They caught Billy Mills last of all, but they caught him still. You would have thought they could have let at least one little Indian get away. But, “Kill the Indian, Save the Man,” was the official mission statement of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and they took the first part of that mandate very seriously. They didn’t save Billy Mills the Child either, but they forever ingrained in him the importance of running faster than you think your legs can spin and your lungs can pump.
“Look at Mills! Look at Mills!” Dick Bank screamed in Tokyo in 1964 for the entire television-watching, radio-listening world to hear. “Oh, my God, Mills is coming on!” He sounded so hysterical NBC fired him on the spot.
Italians/Indians Cry Too
Before the Keep America Beautiful campaign that showed Chief Iron Eyes Cody shed a single tear when he saw the mess the White Man had made of the Earth, it was commonly believed by non-Indians that Indians didn’t cry. Sure, in historical depictions they looked defeated, and slumped over on their war ponies. And if you paid attention to modern photographs they looked pretty binged out. But you never thought of Indians as sad per se. You thought of them as stoic.
Skipping lightly over the fact that Chief Iron Eyes Cody wasn’t a real Indian at all, not Cherokee-Cree as he claimed—he was, in fact, of Italian descent—what it did show is that Indians were mostly whatever Other People needed them to be.
The fact is, even with just one eye, Rick Overlooking Horse cried tears like a river for Billy Mills, and not just tears of joy because that Indian had run like the wind and shown the world the power of his mind and the power of his body, but also because Rick Overlooking Horse knew Billy Mills had been through the literal definition of hell to earn those wings. I mean, what were the odds?
A half-breed orphan raised in poverty in the 1950s on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation who nonetheless survived boarding school and got an athletic scholarship to the University of Kansas and who had once stood on the edge of a hotel window after a college track meet and considered his body in flight, or really in free fall, without wings, and somehow decided against it. “Can the dark one step out of the picture?” the photographer had asked that afternoon.
In the end, when he had won the gold medal and everyone wanted him for their hero, they couldn’t put the dark one into enough pictures. They made movies about him, and wrote books, and built a community hall in Pine Ridge village in his honor. And they gave him a Lakota name, Makata Taka Hela, meaning, Respects the Earth. Which became inconvenient for the U.S. government trying their best to staunch the burgeoning environmental and peace-love-and-tolerance movements sweeping across the land. “Loves his Country,” they decided was a better, more patriotic sounding translation of the phrase, more in keeping with their needs.
Mina Overlooking Horse Drinks Coffee as a Substitute for Having a Feeling
Rick Overlooking Horse returned to the Rez after a year and a half in the hospital. He had a shaved head and a black patch where his left eye had been. His skin had the stretched, shiny appearance of melted plastic. The freckles on his nose, passed down from the Irish Pony Express rider, had run into brown-purple ink stains across his cheeks.
Mina said, “Ayeee, is that you? But oh, they made a mess of you.” She wheezed a little. “They came, you know, with a telegram. But well, I never did open it. Nothin’ I could do about it anyway, except pray, I guess. Although if you wanna know the truth, I been all prayed out for about thirty years.” Then she flapped her hand in front of her face. “I like a cup of coffee at about this time,” she said.
Rick Overlooking Horse didn’t hug his grandmother, but he did put his hand on her arm. Mina looked at his hand for a moment. “For the love of mercy, the kettle got burned a hole in it. So now I ain’t got no kettle.” She closed her eyes and rocked back and forth on the backseat of the 1935 Ford coupe. “Oh, I’ve had the living dog kicked outta me.”
Rick Overlooking Horse filled a pot from the 30-gallon plastic drum by the door and put it on the stove. He stoked the fire, added a log, and stoked it some more. Then he sat on the old wooden chair pulled up by the window. Through the greasy glass he could see the flung debris of a people born with the urge to move, but with nowhere to go; lawn chairs, old cars, buckets, a blanket, several sprung mattresses, a rusted-out oven.
“I heard that little Tapeworm went up north,” Mina Overlooking Horse said. “But I ’spect he’ll be back one of these days. He won’t like all them fish them Indians eat.” She wheezed some more. “Oh, my heart got badly broke and broke and broke. You don’t know how badly broke.” She grabbed at the flesh above her heart and gave it a squeeze.
The water started to boil. Rick Overlooking Horse got up and scooped some coffee into a cone of newspaper. The newsprint that came through the hot water gave the coffee an extra bitter taste, which Mina Overlooking Horse preferred to coffee without the taste of newsprint in it.
“I tell you something else.” Mina took a sip of her coffee and sighed. “Three whole bags of sugar that little Tapeworm ate to get himself outta the war you got yourself into. He better not come back here expecting me to wait on him hand and toe.”
Thaté, Yet Again
Rick Overlooking Horse found a teepee some California hippies had discarded after their Rez dreams had frozen stiff half a winter into their experiment. Then he swapped almost everything he ow
ned for a blanket, five pounds of cornmeal, a pound of buffalo jerky, a sack of beans, seeds, and a bucket of lard. After that, he moved out to a piece of empty land the other side of Porcupine Butte, southwest of Kyle village.
Some of Rick Overlooking Horse’s Immediate Relations trekked out to see him in his meadow and grumbled that he should not move so far out into the middle of nowhere at a time like this. He was young. He was wounded. And his grandmother was old. She was seizing up. “You should stay and take care of her. Maybe she’ll get her second wind.”
But as far as Rick Overlooking Horse was concerned, he and his grandmother were on a parallel journey. Wind was wind whether it was first wind, or second wind, or the breath of the Great Mystery.
Mina Overlooking Horse said to Rick Overlooking Horse, “What’s all this talk around the place of you keeping me company? You never talk. You ain’t no better company than a rock.” It wasn’t disrespectful of rocks the way she said it. She was just stating a fact.
Mina made a motion like she was trying to clear hair from her eyes. “No, no, no, we’re done, you and me. You go ahead and do whatever it is you were put on this Earth here for. Whatever I was put here for, I’ve been and I’ve done it. And I ain’t doing it again, no more.”
Mina Overlooking Horse Crosses (the Hell) Over
In spite of everything that had happened to her people and to her, Mina Overlooking Horse could never completely shake the feeling that she counted for something. No matter how many indignities and insults stacked up to prove her wrong, Mina could never quite get rid of the idea that her little haphazard piece of life was of consequence to someone, even if that someone was only herself.
Or maybe, even, Wakan Tanka.
Oh, Wakan Tanka.
This had better be a plan to reduce us to mettle.
Mina Overlooking Horse sat down on the back seat of the 1935 Ford coupe in a state of slightly stoned distraction, which is what comes of taking a large dose of sacred weed with strong coffee first thing in the morning, before eating.
Find the light, see the light, be the light through all this shit.
“Holy shit,” Mina Overlooking Horse said suddenly, sitting bolt upright. “Oh, holy, holy, holy shit.”
MINA OVERLOOKING HORSE, 1904–1966
One of the Immediate Relations considered herself a medical expert on account of having spent a month in hospital in Scottsbluff after a series of suicide attempts culminating in an ultimately near-fatal mix of rainbow-colored prescription pills and purple over-the-counter cough medicine plus about five cans of urine-colored King Cobra.
I say about five cans, because there were originally fourteen, but not all of them stayed in the Suicidal Immediate Relation’s stomach, not by a long shot.
The Suicidal Immediate Relation said it was obvious Mina had died of a massive stroke, and at peace. And All the Other Immediate Relations had to agree Mina looked much happier dead than she had ever looked alive. It was as if she had finally seen the answer to all of life’s mysteries, and it was one vast cosmic joke.
She was also stark naked, which came as a bit of a shock, and was not as easy to rectify as you might hope. A few of the Immediate Relations tried to cover Mina up, but blankets slid off unless they were put all the way over her head. Then the spectacle was more obscene than ever: Mina’s bare legs poking out from under a blanket. In the end, it took several of the Immediate Relations a full hour and a half to wrestle Mina into a respectable winter dress and lay her down on her bed. By which time they were all sweating.
“Already,” said one of the Immediate Relations, wrinkling her nose. “She’s turning. We should . . .”
“We should watch over our Little Mother Mina Overlooking Horse for a day and a half in the hope that she may revive,” one of the Elder Relations interrupted.
“A day and a half! In this heat? That’s gonna be . . .” But that Indian was silenced with a look that could have altered the orbit of heavenly bodies.
The Bright, Shining Beginning of the End
Mina Overlooking Horse was sixty-two, which you couldn’t really say was young or old, since so much of her life had been incidental and unaccounted for. It would be more true to say she was timeless, having been born in the No Time of her people, twenty years before Indians were officially made citizens of these United States, fifteen years after the Sioux were taken off their land, and a year after American Indians were technically guaranteed the vote.
In as much as that means anything.
They buried her at Wounded Knee in the family plot, near where her great uncle, Spotted Elk, had been felled by the 7th Cavalry on December 29, 1890. Spotted Elk, his head wrapped in a scarf, his arms like broken wings cocked at his sides, frozen in death, as if attempting to rise from the earth, not quite ready to be swallowed by it. They had stacked his body along with the other frozen bodies of the Lakota warriors, women, and children, and threw all three hundred of them into a mass grave.
Some say more, some say less.
So let’s say, between one hundred and fifty, and three hundred Oglala Lakota.
Roughly.
Meantime, precisely twenty Congressional Medals of Honor for Valor were awarded to members of the 7th Cavalry for the so-called Battle of Wounded Knee, more than for any other military engagement in the history of the United States.
Perhaps not understanding the situation properly, and having made some other miscalculations, the White Man considered the Massacre at Wounded Knee to be the end of the Indian Wars.
So yes.
They put Mina Overlooking Horse in a hole next to that mass grave up there at Wounded Knee. And when the dust from their shovels kicked up and blew in their faces they thought of the bones and blood of their foremothers and forefathers, and they thought of the dust of those long-ago children who didn’t get a chance to be any kind of age. They wept then for Mina, and for their people, and for the people that were to come. Oh, my Ancestors, those Indians wept.
They wept and wept until the Suicidal Immediate Relation sliced off the tip of her pinkie finger with a penknife. A person can’t just start hacking off bits of her own flesh. I mean, yes and no. But mostly, no.
“Ow!” the Immediate Relation shouted. Then she started hopping about with her hand between her legs. “Shit,” she said. “Shit. Shit, that really hurts.”
After that, the funeral was pretty well over.
Tales of Longing, Belonging, and Camouflage Tricks That Didn’t Work
Five years into her time at the Indian boarding school in Kansas, Mina Overlooking Horse had written to her mother.
“The clerk at the train station there says if I am to come home, it is ten dollars. I can leave without my trunk. None of them old clothes fit me anymore in any event. I can’t stay. Yours truly.”
She had not signed a name, because the new English name she had been given did not belong to her, and she could not now imagine the soft sound, let alone the spelling, of her Lakota name, although it wasn’t so hard.
Mina. Meaning, Eldest Daughter.
Her family did not have ten dollars to send. So Mina walked back to the Rez. She was fifteen years old, and the walk took her three months. Her body grew lean and sinewy. She learned to move like a coyote, trotting in the shadows by day, traveling cross-country at night, eating on the run from the roadside garbage bonanza. Her feet bled, then their soles cracked and hardened like horse leather. So too did her heart, mostly.
One day in late August, walking along an undefended stretch of road in Oklahoma, Mina suddenly saw that her suffering would not be over. This was it. She was walking it; the sun, the sterilized earth, the hostility. And after this walk, there would be another walk like it. Mina’s life would not improve. The blow of this information staggered her.
She was ready to lie down, to let breath leave her body and not return.
She didn’t. But it’s a mi
racle that she didn’t.
Or as they say on the Rez, “Somehow.”
Somehow she didn’t.
Somehow she didn’t lie down and die right there and then.
When she was sixteen, Thompson White Feather, a man of moderate temper and immoderate drinking habits, took Mina under his roof and in return she submitted uncomplainingly to his apologetic and infrequent advances. Before he died from a calcified liver at the age of thirty-five, Mina Overlooking Horse bore Thompson White Feather three children, all boys. And in due time, when the Bureau of Indian Affairs came to register her sons, she wrote their names thus:
Nobody Overlooking Horse.
Anybody Overlooking Horse.
Somebody Overlooking Horse.
She figured there was no power in those names, and in this way she hoped misfortune might overlook her children. But Nobody died of pneumonia his first winter away in boarding school, with nothing to stop the sickening ghosts from blowing right through him in that distant, flat place. And Anybody died on the Rez of diseases contracted during his stint as an airman in New Guinea, surviving malaria and typhus, surviving long enough to father Rick Overlooking Horse, but not surviving subsequent fevers long enough to see him born. Only Somebody stayed in the land of the living.
“Although God knows how,” Mina said.
From an early age, Somebody Overlooking Horse behaved like a person with a dozen lives to spare: He fell out of trees, hit his head on the bottom of rivers, swallowed gasoline and burped fumes for a week. He survived a terrible stint in France as a soldier in the U.S. Army, he slept though a flood in Arkansas, he was knocked unconscious in an earthquake in California and awoke to find himself on the local news. He escaped a house fire in Minnesota, he walked unscathed from four separate car crashes in four separate states, and he accidentally won a drunken gunfight in a bar in Gordon, Nebraska.