Then he slipped into third gear and made a calculation that he had enough gas to work four more shifts this week if he slept over at the hospital a couple of nights. Which would give Le-a time to calm the fuck down, or to get wound the fuck up into a real state, one of the two.
Squanto tapped the car radio; then he smacked it. Nothing came from KILI 90.1 FM radio. Then he jiggled wires, and finally the jaunty, familiar voice of Tray Tor Two Bulls came at Squanto, “Well, I ain’t got no timepiece, so it’s skin-thirty here on the Rez, innit? Stand by for a detailed weather report from our expert meteorological team, coming up next.” There was a pause. “Yep, I just looked out the window, and here it is, straight from the Tray Tor’s mouth. Lila oh snee, Indians! You cold yet, All My Relations? Because she’s only gonna blow colder.”
Squanto lit a cigarette and prayed the hill at Wounded Knee wouldn’t be blown over. Rezercise, they called it, when your car bottomed out and you had to walk. Squanto shook his head and sighed out a plume of American Legend. The glorious, short life of the Rezzer. If he ever got around to it, he would write a book about it, set the record straight.
Because Squanto believed that the Rez, also known as Prisoner of War Camp #334, also known as the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, also known as the Oglala Lakota Native American Reserve in the southwest corner of South Dakota was a godforsaken patch of land with the propensity for extreme weather.
But Squanto believed too that the Rez was mysterious, wild, and glorious, and there was beauty and freedom here along with all the poverty and hardship, and sometimes miracles ensued.
Somehow, as they say.
Somehow miracles ensued.
One Common Myth About the Rez, Dispelled
People who do not know the Rez say it is a complicated place. They are confused by what they do not understand.
The Rez is not a complicated place; it is an essential place.
Essential. Meaning, there is nothing more that can be taken away, removed, or forgotten.
Essential. Meaning, there remains only what is absolutely necessary.
Essential. Meaning, it doesn’t get any more real than this.
Le-a Brings Plenty Gets Many DWIs
The 1965 Chevy Impala was Le-a’s and it had taken on many of her characteristics; stubborn, unpredictable, and with a steering mechanism that seemed to work on the basis that it was reluctantly prepared to take suggestions but not much more than that. It was also prone to show up on the wrong side of the White Man’s law when you ran the license plate. Although, to be fair, the lawlessness wasn’t entirely the fault of the car: For one thing, having inherited the car on her mother’s death, there had been no one to give Le-a driving lessons.
The tribal cops, knowing better, mostly stayed out of Le-a’s way, but she accumulated tickets in a seven-state area—South Dakota, Montana, Nebraska, Wyoming, North Dakota, Iowa, Minnesota—tickets that sat in a yellowing, unpaid pile on the dashboard. “My DWIs,” Le-a called them, “Driving While Indian,” and she sure as shit wasn’t going to cough up a dime for that maggoty-assed, trumped-up, genocidal, nonoffence.
Of course, Le-a had her license revoked, then canceled altogether, which didn’t stop her driving. “I don’t need a crackerjack’s certificate to tell me if I can drive on Native Ground,” she said. Eventually, in November 1990, a week after her seventeenth birthday, she’d been arrested at a sobriety checkpoint outside of Rapid City, South Dakota. The state troopers, dipping with Breathalyzers into every car, like huge black butterflies, lingered longest over cars stuffed with Indians.
They found Le-a sober, but without any papers to prove she was legal to drive and even fewer to prove the Impala was legal to be driven. Le-a suggested the sheriff’s deputy shove his traffic ticket up his fat, pink, donut-fed ass.
For which Le-a landed herself a driving suspension, and seven months in Pennington County Jail.
Le-a Brings Plenty’s Father Issue
According to Thunder Hawk Brings Plenty, Le-a technically was missing a biological, earthly father. “Just like Jesus,” Thunder Hawk had told her when the child was five and beginning to ask questions.
Le-a stood in front of the murky mirror in her mother’s bedroom and stared at her face in its reflection. She traced her nose, her mouth, the way her hair fell. It was true she looked strikingly like a smaller, rounder version of Thunder Hawk. It was as if there were nothing of a father’s cells or tendencies or blood inside her. It was as if she had been cloned straight from her mother.
“Why Jesus?” Le-a asked.
“No special reason,” Thunder Hawk said. “But it reminded me, any story about a father that doesn’t live with their kid is an unlikely story. It doesn’t work in real life to say your Dad’s invisible.”
The point is, Thunder Hawk explained, no one can tell you who your father is, or is not, especially not the Bureau of Indian Affairs. “If they believe Jesus said he was the son of God, I’m not going to let a bunch of office clerks decide if you’re Indian enough for them,” Thunder Hawk said. “I’ve already told them whose blood you have.”
“Whose?” Le-a said.
“Mine,” Thunder Hawk said. “What more do they want?”
Le-a’s Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood
So, Le-a Brings Plenty’s Certificate of Degree of Indian Blood said she was seven-sixteenths Lakota, five-sixteenths Maricopa, and four-sixteenths Pima. But although Le-a got a small check for some federal gravel-mining entitlements down on the Gila River Indian Community, that place was not her home. She knew this because after her mother died of tuberculosis, leaving Le-a an emancipated orphan at the age of fourteen, Le-a headed south in search of nine sixteenths of her people and found those Indians missing a season.
Afterward, Squanto asked her if she’d ever considered going to Palestine to look for her father.
Le-a said, “You mean, I should go all the way over there and track down all the male delegates that attended the Second Annual Meeting of the International Society of Displaced Peoples and ask if any of them slept with a Lakota woman in Ramallah in the winter of 1973?”
“Well, yeah,” Squanto said.
Le-a shut her eyes.
You Do the Math
During the Siege of Wounded Knee in the early weeks of 1973, Le-a Brings Plenty’s soon-to-be mother was in Palestine on a trip funded by the International Society of Displaced Peoples. Afterward she said it was the best thing she had ever done, and the worst.
Because just for a start, there she was: Thunder Hawk Brings Plenty—an American Indian woman from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, no less—whose people were currently sitting in protest at Wounded Knee.
Thunder Hawk represented everything having to do with refugees and internally displaced people. Everyone agreed that a poster child for a cause had never been so striking, so authentic, and so imminently endangered. It was a sudden and unwelcome prominence. Thunder Hawk said over and over, “But I’m not even with my people. I need to be with my people.”
Thunder Hawk couldn’t sleep. At night she paced the streets and watched the strange constellations make their ways across a clear desert sky and she longed for the hearth fires of her own village. She was overcome with an irritable restlessness. Some mornings she awoke to find herself a day’s journey from where she had started, with only the haziest recollection of arriving there.
She was certain she was in the process of losing her mind.
One night, she was asked to speak at an event honoring local leaders of indigenous groups around the world. When her turn came, she stood up on the stage and saw a wall of faces staring at her. “I am Thunder Hawk Brings Plenty from the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. I wish I did not know what I know,” she said. “I wish my people were on their land, and that I did not need to be here.”
There was a rustle through the audience.
“They
can say what they like about what happened to Indians in my land. They can rewrite history, and erase our stories. But what my mind hasn’t been allowed to know, my body has always known,” Thunder Hawk said. “I am an undeniable, inconvenient body of knowledge. Read me.”
And then Thunder Hawk Brings Plenty stood in silence for fifteen minutes in front of her live audience.
Of course, fifteen minutes is not long enough to know the whole undeniable, inconvenient history of the Oglala Lakota Oyate, or even the whole undeniable, inconvenient history of a single Lakota-born woman. But it is long enough for people to begin to know discomfort, and that’s a start.
A Secret Is Something You Don’t Already Know
Thunder Hawk kept only one photograph from her time in Palestine. In it, she’s standing next to Yasser Arafat on a ramshackle rooftop. There are chickens and a dog with a curly tail at their feet. Thunder Hawk is holding a rifle across her belly. The wind is blowing Yasser Arafat’s keffiyeh across her mouth. Behind them, there are a few dusty buildings blazing in the sun, and a narrow two-track dirt road that melds indistinctly into the desert. The sky is the color of a gas flame.
“He’s very ugly,” Le-a said.
“I ate pigeon with him,” Thunder Hawk said. “And camel meat.”
“What did it taste like?”
“Salty,” Thunder Hawk said. “But also like you’d imagine. Like the smell of camel, which is sort of greasy and gamey. It was a little off-putting at first. But after a while, you didn’t notice so much.”
Le-a Does Her Time
Le-a nearly drove the corrections officers crazy demanding her religious right to purification ceremonies, and fasting on Thanksgiving Day, “the National Day of Mourning,” she called it, and declaring herself a political prisoner. She had a Leonard Peltier quote prison-tattooed on her right arm—“Spirit Warrior”—and the two feathers of the warrior society prison-tattooed on her left arm. And she hollered and yelled her name, the correct pronunciation of it, “You can’t read? What’s wrong with you? The dash ain’t silent. It’s Ledasha, you asshole. Ledasha!”
Then when some well-meaning do-gooders came from the local well-meaning do-gooder society to do arts and crafts with the inmates, Le-a hid little pots of red and black paint under the cover of her orange jumpsuit and after that there were scrawls all over her cell block, the shower block, the rec room: SACAGAWEA, GUIDING LOST WHITE MEN SINCE 1804; MY HEROES HAVE ALWAYS KILLED COWBOYS; FREE LEONARD PELTIER. She was put in the Secure Holding Unit for three days after that, and set off the sprinkler system burning sage that she had secreted in places you can’t imagine sage might be comfortable.
During those three days in the Shoe, a sock draped over her eyes against the buzzing white light that was never switched off, Le-a Brings Plenty planned her future. There would be dozens of teepees set up in a meadow, and young Indian warriors everywhere, all braids and camouflage. She would be in the middle of them. A Stars and Stripes would be flying from a lodgepole pine, upside down. In accordance with the Flag Code of the United States of America, the flag should never be displayed union down, except as a signal of dire distress in instances of extreme danger to life or property. “You can bet my Red Indian ass I’m in extreme danger,” Le-a would say.
When her term was up, Le-a Brings Plenty walked out of the jail gates unbowed, a few pounds lighter than when she went in, her fist raised high. “The Indian Wars are not over!” she shouted.
“Jesus wept,” her CO said. “You lost. Get over it.”
“Hoka hey!” Le-a yelled back, flipping her CO the bird for a final time.
Then she crossed the road to a phone booth outside the Taco Bell and reversed the charges. “Tell All My Relations to come fetch my Red Indian ass,” she told Tray Tor Two Bulls when he took the call. “Put out a broadcast on KILI 90.1. Tell them Le-a Brings Plenty is out of the slammer.”
“Le-a, is that you?” Tray Tor asked.
“You bet your scrawny Red Indian ass it is. And oh yeah, tell them Le-a Brings Plenty is looking fine, and she’s on the love path. Got that? Love path. Tell them I’m in the market for a soldier.”
The Battle of the Junkyard
Although, at first glance, Squanto wasn’t most people’s idea of a soldier, at least not by any U.S. Army handbook definition of the word. Squanto’s entire war was the length of one five-hour, possibly accidental, battle, and he had stopped fighting, or even pretending to fight, about half an hour into it. Maybe even less.
Like just about every battle in the world, the Battle of Rumaila had a few names. Some people called it the Battle of the Causeway, or the Highway of Death, but the name that stuck was the Battle of the Junkyard. Boxed into a kill zone, the several hundred Iraqi vehicles streaming out of the Euphrates Valley toward Baghdad didn’t stand a chance. They lay smoldering on their sides, or blasted down to their wheels, draped over with the bodies of their trapped passengers.
Afterward, questions were asked, not least because when the Battle of the Junkyard happened, on March 2, 1991, the war had been officially over for two days, and formal peace talks were due to take place the following day. Still, if it wasn’t an official war, whatever was going on would sure as hell do until one in uniform showed up. Squanto watched the desert burst into black plumes of smoke. When the smoke drifted and cleared he could see men running into the river to swim to safety. Aircraft strafed everything: the sand, the river, and roads.
The Warrior
An Indian makes a good sniper for the following reason: He can lie belly down in the heat and the cold for days, no food, no water, no rest, no shelter. Hamblechya trained you for that, four days and three nights in Rick Overlooking Horse’s meadow there on the other side of Porcupine Butte with nothing to look at but a meadow, and Ugly Red Stud, and an old buffalo bull, until your lips split and you started to see yourself in a blade of grass, or in the creatures that feed from it, or in all creation.
In an almost unprecedented fit of loquacity, Rick Overlooking Horse told Squanto, “Remember this: There will be nothing to signal the start of your war. There will be nothing to signal its end. There’s just your war. Only you will know it when it has started, and only you can choose when it will end.”
At the time Squanto had been so taken aback at the sheer number of words that had come out of Rick Overlooking Horse’s snapping-turtle mouth at one time, he hadn’t been able to respond.
Now Squanto knew that what Rick Overlooking Horse had said was true. He also knew something else that Rick Overlooking Horse had failed to tell him: That the enemy wasn’t his enemy. The ones that could still move were pouring out of their tanks and vans and pickups like ants away from vinegar. Some of them were zinging back the odd, aimless potshot toward the road. But they were not the enemy.
His enemy was the very unit to which he belonged. The Twenty-fourth Infantry Division led by that maniac general ordering his troops to open fire on a retreating column of Iraqis. Hell, even Squanto could see this wasn’t anything to fight about. But the war had been a quiet one so far, and maybe that’s what had incensed the general. In any case, before you knew it, there were AH-64 Apache attack helicopters streaming overhead and M2 Bradleys roaring into position.
Honestly, what was the point? Squanto heard the Cowboy from Texas in the dugout next to him pop off three more rounds. Three figures running from the burned-out highway jerked forward. Through his sights, Squanto could see what looked like black oil stains spread into the sand around their bodies. Squanto took one last swallow of water and stuffed two packets of cigarettes in his pocket; then he put down his gun and walked out into the battle.
He tore the cigarette packets with his teeth and sprinkled their contents along the road, even though he knew there wasn’t enough tobacco in the world to placate all the traumatized, surprised, crossing-over spirits in this hot, terrible place. “Leave this place,” Squanto said. “Don’t follow us home.” And
he kept walking like that, sprinkling tobacco and inviting the crossed-over to join his Ancestors in the Great Mystery. “You’ll see them,” Squanto assured the Iraqi bodies he passed. “All My Lakota Relations.”
The Easiest Way to Find a Warrior on the Rez
The day of the Fifteenth Annual Gathering of Nations on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation dawned immoderately hot. At the old boarding school near the Red Cloud Cemetery, families without running water in their homes lined up early to fill up containers at the outside faucet. Withholding clouds scudded hastily across the bleached sky, and a seemingly perpetual chorus of grasshoppers sawed a soundtrack of heat.
Squanto put on his full U.S. Army dress uniform for the last time. He walked to the Powwow Grounds on the edge of Pine Ridge village, where kids on horses were wheeling about and showing off, and Chief Oliver Red Cloud, perched on a bale of hay in the back of a pickup, sweated wordlessly under his red and white headdress. A few teenagers set off firecrackers to watch the old war vets startle.
Meantime, on her way from Manderson village, Le-a Brings Plenty had seen a snapping turtle in the middle of the road, dried slime from the creek still on its back. She had stopped for it, and it stopped for her, and they waited like that for half an hour, watching each other, while the sun burned stitches into the earth. No other cars came, but two boys, bareback on Indian ponies, jogged by on the verge.
By the time she got there, the Powwow Grounds already smelled of crushed grass, sweating horses, and Mexican food. Le-a set up her fry bread and stew stand opposite the entrance to the arbor, the better to see everyone coming in. At last, well past the advertised time of one o’clock, the heat bleaching everything pale yellow by now, Chief Red Cloud rose to his feet stiffly and announced that the Wiping of the Tears Ceremony would begin. “All My Lakota Relatives,” he said.