Sunday Morning Meds from Psalm 50

“And the heavens proclaim his righteousness, 

for God himself is judge.” Psalm 50:1

 My uncle told me about it. I’m not at all sure my father even knew. He said that he’d once heard that his own grandparents, the immigrant Dutch Calvinist folk who came to this country in the late 1860s, were buried in the cemetery in Orange City, Iowa, just a hop, skip, and jump from where I’d just taken a job. “You ought to look once,” he said.

I don’t remember what finally tugged me out to that graveyard. At the time, I knew no one else who’d been buried there; but finally I went, dutifully determined to find that headstone. I scouted the oldest parts of that cemetery, where the ancient headstones stand like marbled tongue depressors, leaning in various degrees of sleepy repose. No Schaaps—or at least not C. C. and his wife Neeltje. Maybe my uncle, the family historian, was wrong, I thought. I kept looking.

I found it in the neighborhood of newer graves, a barrel-like, granite monument clearly carved with the family names, relevant dates, and a scripture verse, in Dutch, on each side, for each grandparent.

It’s difficult to describe what I felt right then, and likely impossible to explain to someone who hasn’t experienced such a palpable sense of rooted-ness. Even though I’d never stepped a foot in that cemetery before, I felt, strangely enough, as if I were home. Does that make sense? There was an unmistakable sense of life in the grave at my feet.

It’s 110 years now, since C. C. Schaap died, 102 since Neeltje passed away; but once I found the spot, I felt as if I’d been somehow summoned, and those great-grandparents, who died long before my father was born, were looking me over—Grandpa nodding, Grandma turning up my collar against the cold prairie wind.

Just three days ago I went back to that cemetery, took a nephew out to visit. When we found that barrel-like monument back, there they were, smiling, as grandparents do.
I think of that this morning, as I consider this line from Psalm 50—how heavenly spectators stand there in awe before the Judge. I can’t help but imagine what that Orange City cemetery might look like, the ancient ones standing atop their monuments, a most astounding crowd of faithful.

One of the dreams of the Ghost Dancers in the late 1890s was that “the old ones” would return from the dust, would walk silently into camp and take their places around the campfires. It was a beatific and celestial Lakota vision.

And it’s here in Psalm 50. “The heavens declare the glory of God” is the central line of Psalm 19, a psalm that reverences the heavenly preaching God does each day in sermons the wide open skies proclaim. But here there’s a homily with a different blessing, a new twist, a cloud of witnesses, a ton of great-grandparents, waiting for the word of the Lord.

If I could choose a place to be when such a court is assembled, I think I might choose a cemetery, just to be there when all those ancient tongue depressors fall on cue and the righteous emerge.

Wouldn’t that be fun? There’d be lots to talk about, lots of songs, lots of stories, lots of smiles.

Memorial Day - finis

continued from yesterday. . . 

A couple  of years ago, I spotted a cross in an American war-dead cemetery far south in the Netherlands.  The name is not particularly familiar to me, but it’s recognizably Dutch, as am I.  From what I know of names and origins, I'm guessing he was from Marion County, somewhere around Pella, which means that sometime back more than a century ago before the man died--on his way to Berlin--some of his ancestors left Holland with Dominie Scholte, when that Leiden intellectual took off for the prairies of Iowa with a significant flock of followers, pious folks all.

Sgt. John Van Ooyen may well have died here, someplace close, maybe even not all that far from the neighborhoods his ancestors once left behind forever. Something got him--a bullet maybe, some anti-aircraft, maybe fire from a tank.

All I know is his rank, his company, his Dutch name, and the fact that he's one of 8000 American war dead who are commemorated here, even though what's left of his bones may well be elsewhere.

It's stunning to stand amid all those white crosses and to realize that what's there--row after row after row--is barely a decimal point to the many others who also never came back to places like Marion County, Iowa, or Mille Lacs County, Minnesota. There were thousands and thousands and thousands--and thousands more.

For what? For freedom. For righteousness. For peace. Sixty years ago, for Sgt. John Van Ooyen, an end to the thoughtless slaughter of millions the Nazis thought not good enough for their stupid master race.

My goodness, it cost a lot.

And then there's this. Beyond Van Ooyen’s cross, just a couple more back in a row to the right, is a white star of David--a Jewish guy.

I wonder if this Dutch kid from rural Iowa ever thought about the fact that he was dying for some New York Jewish kid too. I wonder whether that thought was in his head when he enlisted, or was drafted. I wonder if it was something a nice Dutch boy from Marion County, Iowa, ever thought about much at all, that his life was given for people who really were much different than he was.

I doubt it.

When I stopped back then and paid my respects to John Van Ooyen and 8000 other American boys, as we call them, I couldn’t help but thank him and them for what all of them gave up for me and my kids and my grandkids and some Jewish guy named Rudolph Nadel, a New Yorker, who died just two months later than Van Ooyen and who's remembered just a couple of yards down the row of alabaster crosses.

Maybe they knew each other.

Maybe not.

It doesn't matter, really. Jew and Gentile, New Yorker and Iowan, they both gave us what we have. They died for a ton of reasons.

And, strangely enough, I'm one of them.

So are you.

This morning of Memorial Day week, I'm thankful for my Uncle Edgar and John Van Ooyen and Rudolph Nadel, and countless others.

Amid all the celebrations, the fireworks, and John Phillip Sousa marches, it’s good for all of us to remember that so many have suffered, so many have died.

And it’s very good to remember what Job could say in his suffering. “I know that my Redeemer lives.” Finally, of course, that’s the only good news on life and death. But there’s more on this day of remembrance. Here’s what Job said, “And after my skin has been destroyed yet in my flesh I will see God.”

Even if my uncle Edgar’s scrapbook is finally destroyed, that doughboy will be made flesh once again. And not alone. Me and Edgar. Me and you.

Because there will come a day when every last knee on earth—torn cartilages, busted knee caps, —even those fallen into dust beneath the ground, beneath the waves, beneath the radar screen of all of our attention—there will come a day when every last knee shall bow before God’s rule. Everyone.

 Think of it—men and women in cemeteries like this one emerging like hearty daffodils to shake off the slumber.

So, this holiday's week, let me add this image to the Mosaic. Think of a God who can, with a wink and a nod, turn this cemetery—and all of them--into Grand Central Station.

That’s the big story, really—bigger than a Washington crossing the Delaware River, the slaughter at Gettysburg, the raid on Pearl Harbor, the withdrawal to the Imjim River Line, the Tet Offensive, Operation Desert Storm, or the messes right now in Iran.

The big story this Memorial Day is the return of millions and millions of Edgars—and those who loved him, those who loved all of them from the beginning of time.

That’s the book on Edgar Hartman, an old story that, like the other worthwhile old stories, needs to be told over and over again until each of us recognizes it as our own.

That’s my addition—and his, this Great Uncle Edgar—to the mosaic.

Memorial Day iii

(cont. from yesterday)

What exactly happened to this man, shown here with two little children, one of them my uncle, the other a cousin, Uncle Edgar standing across the street from Wykhuis Store, which is now the Pizza Ranch in Oostburg, Wisconsin?

 

Well, his story is here too, at least what one man claims is Edgar Hartman’s story. My grandmother’s documents include a two-page, hand-written note from a man named Leo B. Zastrow, who described doughboy Edgar.

    He was a member of my platoon but was in another squad about         300 yds to the left of my squad of which I had command in a                 sunken road leading to Ville-Savoy they were dug in the banks of         the road. We had just finished a barrage of 15000 rounds for a             covering of our infantry’s advance across the Vesle River. They             were fired upon by German one-pounders immediately after our         barrage and according the Corporal’s information to me he was             instantly killed.. . .I later seen the body when relief came to my             Division on my way from the front and recognized the body only         by identification tags.”

As to any last words or message, Zastrow says he has none, but he wishes to assure Mr. Hartman’s folks that “he was my most trustworthy man.. . .I can assure them that he died a ‘Hero’ (capital H). And then, strikingly, “Hoping this information will be of value to you.”

My scrapbook also includes an impressive obituary from the Sheboygan Press, June 18, presumably 1920, which tells much of the story I’ve already related, and adds this: “In the village he was regarded as one of the most prominent young men. He was of a quiet disposition and was well liked by his friends.”

 On the final page of this scrapbook is the solitary picture of a solitary cross in a sprawling military cemetery, somewhere in France, I suppose. In very light letters on the cross piece, the words “Edgar Hartman,” and the number “178.”

Edgar Hartman was one of 126,000 American doughboys who didn’t return from the French killing fields or oceanic cemeteries. He was 28 years old when he died, single, and had been employed at the local lumber yard when duty called. He left behind a girlfriend, who later married and had her own life.

It’s entirely possible that no one at Hartman-Lammers American Legion Post knows much about Edgar Hartman, so think of this: if next June some prairie monster tornado would lift Sioux Center, Iowa, off the gently rolling plains of the American midwest, scattering the household goods of the James Schaap family hither and yon, and this scrapbook of all there is to know about Edgar Hartman were to disappear from the face of the earth, then no one could ever know much at all about the man. His story would be gone, his life as indistinguishable as his body the day that one-pounder killed him in a French ditch.

To hold this scrapbook in my hands has always been a profoundly humbling experience, not only because what’s here is all there is left of this man Edgar Hartman, but also because one can’t help realize how many others–my ancestors and yours, hundreds of millions of earthlings–have vanished from this world without leaving even a trace of themselves. My Edgar Hartman scrapbook, placed on a shelf above my desk, has become my own memento mori, an memento of death’s reality; because what’s truly humbling about having everything anyone on earth knows about Edgar Hartman between two covers of a Wal-Mart scrapbook is the nearly inescapable perception that someday each one of us will also be less than a memory.

But there’s really no big news here, is there? “Dust to dust, the mortal dies,” we used to sing, “both the foolish and the wise.” Later the old song says, “Yet within their hearts they say, that their houses are for aye; that their dwelling places grand shall for generations stand.”

I need Edgar Hartman. We all do. “No young man believes he shall ever die,” wrote William Hazlitt, long ago, and I don’t think he was discriminating.

But today, Memorial Day, 2026, it’s good for me to think of the anguish in these letters, many months after the Armistice was signed at five a.m., in a railway carriage in France, November 11, 1918. It’s good for me to think of what my grandma went through, not knowing. It’s good for me to think of that anguish repeated 125,000 times in one year here in this country during and after World War I; 8,500,000 times, worldwide by the end of that war. It’s good for me to remember the cost of freedom, just in that almost forgotten war itself.

Memorial Day ii

(cont. from yesterday) 

Had I known Uncle Edgar, I suppose I would feel slightly different than I do. Had I known him, grief would certainly play a role in way I feel when I sit here, paging through the photographs. Honestly, I don’t feel the grief my grandma certainly must have when he didn’t come back from France. For years, my mother says, our family’s attendance at the Oostburg Memorial Day cemetery “doings,” as Grandma herself used to call them, was mandatory. After all, her only brother had died in “the war to end all wars.”

In fact, my grandmother’s anguish is vividly here in my Uncle Edgar scrapbook. You can feel it. You can see it in an old envelope that never got through to her brother, and the letter it holds, dated March 14, 1919 (four months after Armistice Day, November 7, 1918), and written on her husband’s stationary–“Harry H. Dirkse, Village Clerk,” it says; that note, written in a much livelier hand than the scratchings on the back of the photos, is signed “Your sister, Mabel.” That’s my grandma.

Here’s what it says: “Dearest Brother, Am making another attempt to have you hear from us. I have now had eleven of my letters returned to me but none the last month so will send another in search of you. We have been unable to find any trace of you up to now, nor received anything from you since your field service card reached us on August 7th. We are all well and have a fine baby girl 3 mos. old awaiting your return. Will write more when I learn whether or not this reaches you. With Love.”

The “fine baby girl” is my mother.

The field service card she refers to is here too, in my hands. “Y * M * C * A,” it says at the top, with the words “With American Expeditionary Force” beneath it. The message is terse: “Dear Sister M, Just arrived safely in England will write again as soon as I have an address. Edgar.” It is not difficult for me to imagine how closely my grandmother must have guarded that postcard over the ensuing months.

And there’s more. My Uncle Edgar scrapbook has a childhood picture of the two of them, brother and sister. 

There’s even a baby picture, as well what seems to be an eighth grade graduation picture taken about 1905 or so—that’s him, back row, second from the tallest.

 There are five pictures of him in his military uniform. In one, he’s saluting; in another, a fat cigar juts from the corner of his mouth, while he stands beside his brother-in-law, my grandfather, behind him Oostburg’s Main Street as it must have looked in the early years of the century, a horse rail clearly recognizable out front of my grandfather’s blacksmith shop in the very middle of town.

The scrapbook also includes other things—a stamp-less post card from Basic Training in North Carolina, which mentions having to hike fifteen miles, a number of letters, the only historical record of what was on his mind in those last years of his life–amazement at the unending length of army chow lines, news of the mumps that kept him from sailing overseas with his company in April of 1918, joy on having run into another Oostburg boy–“good to see someone from home,” he writes.

And I have here in my scrapbook the official letter from the War Department, The Adjutant General’s Office, Washington, deeply-stained and dated August 23, 1919, more than a year after his death, and almost a year after the war’s end. It’s addressed to Mrs. Harry Dirkse, Oostburg, Wisconsin, and concerns a man the army noted as “201 (Hartman, Edgar J.) CD.”

“Madam,” it begins, and then, “It is with profound regret that I confirm. . .” You can guess the news.

On the next page is another document, equally official. “Army of the United States of America,” it says in a headline that tents over the top of the page and includes the official symbol of American government, an eagle with palm leaves in one grand claw, arrows in the other. “This is to certify that Edgar J. Hartman, Private, Machine Gun Company, 58th Infantry died with honor in the service of his country on the sixth day of August, 1918.”

The date for the certificate is itself profoundly sad. “Given at Washington D. C., office of The Adjutant General of the Army, this eleventh day of June, one thousand nine hundred and twenty.”

Memorial Day i

 

I was never formally introduced to my great uncle Edgar Hartman. He was dead long before I was born, even before my mother was born, in fact. But I knew of him by way of his only sibling, my grandmother, who used to tell me the same story, over and over, whenever I, as a boy, mowed her lawn.

A single ice-cube floated around at the top of a glass of lemonade she’d always bring out when I’d finish the grass on the north side of her house. She’d set that lemonade out, wave me to the porch beside her, then push that glass at me with a warning.

“You drink that slowly now,” she’d say. “Years ago, I brought my brother Edgar a quart jar of lemonade when he was working in the canning factory–one of those hot summer nights.” Her head would rise slightly, her eyes lose focus as she’d bring back the incident. “Edgar drank it in one gulp–never even brought it down,” she’d say, not without some admiration. “When he was finished he took one look at that empty jar and passed out–right then and there, flat on the floor.” She’d point at the lemonade. “Not so fast now.”

That was just about all I knew of this great uncle Edgar. I knew he was dead, of course, and that the local American Legion Post was named after him–Hartman-Lammers Post–and that he’d died in the Great War, World War I.

I was a kid then–maybe ten–and a half a century had passed since Uncle Edgar took leave from this vale of tears. He died somewhere in France, maybe in a scene like this—I don’t know—but for years the only story I knew about him featured a bout of heavy lemonade chugging and a quick trip to the cement floor at Oostburg Canning Factory, circa 1910.

Years later, my grandma passed along fistfuls of old scrapbook stuff to me, thinking, I suppose, that of her grandchildren, I seemed most fascinated by her stories of the past. Those old pictures and documents continued to yellow in a box I’d come heir to, each dutifully described in her chicken-scratch writing so I’d remember who was who and what was what.

When Grandma died, I dug into that bundle and found a bunch of things having to do with her brother Edgar. Odd. I was 500 miles from the Oostburg Canning Company and American Legion hall, but here I was, fated to be the sole caretaker of a life most everyone else had forgotten.

Edgar Hartman was not married when he was killed instantly by what his commanding officer called a German “one-pounder.” He was just one of millions killed in the endless horror of trench warfare that came to define the military madness of World War I. My mother never knew him; she’d been born a month and a half after his death. As far as I knew, no one alive knew my uncle Edgar.

 I suppose that’s why I put all those Uncle Edgar documents, photographs, and letters my grandmother had given me into a scrapbook with “Photo Album” embossed in gold across a non-descript, tan cover. There’s no picture of him sprawled out on the floor of the Oostburg Canning Company here, but there is, quite frankly, everything else anyone on earth knows of him. I’ve got all of that here in this scrapbook, so when I hold it, as I am now, I have in my hands every last shred of the life of a real human being, a man who happened to be my great uncle. You might say, I’ve got the book on Uncle Edgar.

"Above the Clouds"

For a time at least, the fog on the mountain was so thick that literally no one knew what was going on. A goodly chunk of the Battle of Chattanooga was fought in fog so burdensome that blue and gray soldiers had to look each other in the eye before they knew whether to shoot or embrace the indistinct figures in the chilled overcast. 

Basically, the intent of the Union and  Confederate armies were simple: for the Union, break through the obvious battle lines the Rebs had set up; for the Rebs, hold those lines down. But one of the enemies of both sides was the terrain of the fighting, terrain that prompted the Battle of Chattanooga to be dubbed "the battle above the clouds."

In 2010, Covenant College, right there on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee, asked to visit for a semester, to teach a writing course as a visiting professor. It was a joy to be up there on the mountain, neighboring such a historical setting. If I'd been a quicker learner, I'd have come away with a better understanding of what happened in the "batte above the clouds," but I take some comfort from knowing that books--lots of them!--have been written about what happened here in late November of 1863, military action that opened the South to General Sherman's march and, eventually, the Union successes.

Like all battlefield memorials, what's here at Chattanooga's Lookout Mountain, was well as Missionary Ridge conveys inevitable seriousness. You're surrounded by so many monuments to sacrifice that it's difficult not to evaluate your self and your motivations. There's no escaping seriousness up on the mountain, where the battle above the clouds once happened,

This week, the Supreme Court paved the way for Southern states to reverse legislation that provided for minorities to have representation in national politics because racial preference, so said the conservative majority, is just another form of racial prejudice.

Almost immediately, several of those Southern states did what they could to rewrite legislation to shut down what we've come to call "affirmative action," thereby almost certainly limiting minority representation in the Congress. 

It seems the battle above the clouds, 160 years later, isn't yet concluded.

 

"The Cross of Snow"

That Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, one of America's very first great--which is to say "national"-- poet/treasures did not want you or me reading this particular poem of his is manifestly obvious. Longfellow never read "The Cross of Snow" publicly nor touted it for publication. I suppose it lay innocently among his papers, his letters and notes to friends--just another scribbled sheet of paper, where someone cleaning up his life picked it up and read it, then, probably immediately, wondered why no one on the face of this green earth had seen it before. 

Longfellow was an America-sized celebrity poet at a moment when great poets were lavishly celebrated. Everyone knew Longfellow and quoted him freely; but the sad truth here is that no one saw this particular poem, nor read it, until some relative, probably post-mortem, cleaned up his office and happened to find it where the great American poet clearly intended it not to be found.

No one familiar with Longfellow's work would call him or his poetry "excessive" or "overwrought," certainly none of his contemporaries. This particular poem, "The Cross of Snow," is so brutally honest that it's not difficult to see why America's favorite poet would not want it published: it painfully reflects upon grief--his grief-- at his spouse's accidental death right there at home. 

Fanny Longfellow died a frighentingly awful death when her dress caught fire. Just one day later, her heroic attempts to save her notwithstanding, his beloved spouse passed away. It's impossible to imagine his agony, but you can stand beside his grieving by reading his tribute to her in "The Cross of Snow," a poem America's  most famous poet never intended you or me to read.

When you do, you'll feel the grieving husband and see for yourself the immense cross of snow pitched up against the mountainside. A full 150 years later, the intense aching in Longfellow's soul is still here in the lines:

There is a mountain in the distant West
  That, sun-defying, in its deep ravines
  Displays a cross of snow upon its side.
Such is the cross I wear upon my breast
  These eighteen years, through all the changing scenes
  And seasons, changeless since the day she died. 

Eighteen years after he lost her, the image of that snowy cross still brings Longfellow back to grief, as if she'd not left. His heart is still shorn, jagged and bloodied.

The photographer William Henry Jackson took the immense landscape photograph that wrought such intense emotion from Longfellow's grieving soul. Jackson is best known or remembered for his remarkable photographs of compelling Western landscapes like the landscape featured here in this remarkable image.

And there's a back story: Jackson had heard of a disappearing cross in a mountain view and determined to capture the image, if that could be done, a job that required more strength than sense--a huge camera, 10 x 13 glass plates, an armful of chemicals and equipment, all of it lugged up a mountain across a valley from the snow cross when the temps were just right for that cross. to be there at that moment that day. Hundreds of pounds of equipment got toted up an adjacent mountain to a spot Jackson judged to offer the finest perspective.

The landscape photo William Henry Jackson took in that place on that August day, 1872, prompted Longfellow's very personal but memorable response. 

The cross of snow is more difficult to see these days, erosion on the mountain alters the image with each passing season. Once it offered hope, like an old favorite hymn. Even today, for some at least, the story offers. The snow on this mountain has meant much more than just snow on a mountain. 

     

Wounded Knee -- vi

 

A souvenir

Now look down at the sign where the reservation roads cross, three hundred yards from where we’re standing. In summer, you might see a car or two. Go ahead. Walk down. People there beneath a brush arbor—Sioux people—will be happy to sell you some keepsake from your visit.

I have one—a little cowhide drum, two inches across, decorated with beaded fringe and hand-painted on both sides—on one, the image of a red drum; on the other, the words “Wounded Knee” painted in above a single eagle feather, two dates, one on either side—“1890” and “1973.”

Cost me twenty dollars. I bought it from an angular man in a Western shirt who had three of them strung over his hand when he showed me his goods. His dark, expressionless face was pockmarked, his eyes blood-lit. I am sad to say he looked far too much like the caricature some of us hold of reservation people today.

“My wife makes them,” he told me slowly, handing me the one that now hangs on my wall. He pointed into an old Ford parked just ten feet away. I looked into the interior where she was sitting on the passenger’s side. She didn’t move, her head bowed as if she were asleep. Maybe it was my own sinful prejudice, but I couldn’t help think the worst.

I picked a crisp twenty out of my billfold and handed it to him. He took it and left. I suppose the next day he would return with the other two he’d shown me.

I don’t know that I can unpack the whole meaning of that single twenty-dollar transaction—what percentage of what I gave him may have come from pity, what percentage from blood guilt, what percentage from the very real desire to take some icon home to remember Wounded Knee. I honestly cannot interpret my own motives, in part because I don’t know that I want to look that closely into my own heart.

But I’m happy that little cowhide drum is here beside me as I write these words, not because it’s cute—it isn’t. I have no doubt that some enterprising wasicu could create a kiosk and churn out Wounded Knee kitsch far more marketable—refrigerator magnets, ball-point pens with pinto ponies that run up and down the shaft. But there’s something about the people who sold it to me that I can’t forget, just as surely as the tawny prairie landscape all around and the entire awful story that gives the valley its ghostly life. Mystery and the sadness are here in my little buckskin drum, a drum that really doesn’t sound.

Mostly, at Wounded Knee, there is silence. When you visit, you won’t read or hear many words at all. If you’re white and you want to understand, you’ll have to look deeply into your own heart, stare into your deepest values, listen to the songs you sing, examine the history your family has lived and the faith you celebrate.

Maybe it’s best to simply to simply stand in awe at Wounded Knee and pray with your silence. That’s not easy. We’re not good at lamentations. White folks would much rather see Wounded Knee as a battle than a massacre, as we have, officially, for more than a century.

Look up. Somewhere in that vast azure dome a jet will be cutting a swath across the openness. Inside, three hundred people are sipping Cokes, reading Danielle Steele, watching a movie. Some are sleeping. Some are traveling home.

Do the math. Count them yourself—the thousands each day that only incidentally glance out from corner-less airplane windows as they pass over the spot we’re standing. Then look around and see how alone you are up here on the hill with four silent Hotchkiss guns.

Maybe we’d all rather not know. We’d all rather fly over Wounded Knee.

Visit sometime. Leave the kids at home. Welcome the silence. Stand here for an hour until the keening, the death songs, rise from the ravines as they once did. Look out over nearly a thousands ghosts assembled in space so open it’s almost frightening.

Stand here alone for awhile, and I swear that what you’ll read in the flow of prairie grasses and hear in the spirit of the wind is that, really, despite the tracks of those jets in the skies above and the immensity of silence all around, once upon a time every last one of us was here.

Wounded Knee -- v

 

Aftermath

That afternoon, when the shooting ended, Army personnel loaded 39 of their wounded into wagons, along with their dead, 25. Fifty-one wounded Sioux were located, 47 of them women and children, some of whom—like six of the cavalry survivors—would soon succumb to their injuries. The Sioux dead were left on the field and in the ravines, but exactly how many had been killed will never be known. Native people consider 300 a fairly just estimate.

That night, a blizzard came in on the wind and laid a gossamer veil over the carnage—some say mercifully; some think the hand of white man’s God was simply covering their sin. Wounded Knee was the final military action in the Plains Indians Wars, the horrid, bloody conclusion of a cultural and religious confrontation that, from my vantage point, a white man at Wounded Knee, looks even today like something obscenely inevitable. Millions of white people—my own Dutch immigrant ancestors among them—went west for cheap land they assumed the Sioux didn’t value. After all, where were the improvements, the tree lines, the fences, the buildings, the cut sod? Millions of white people—my own ancestors among them—thought our holy book to a pagan people was a generous gift for the millions of acres those people had once roamed in freedom. My own family included, we wanted to own what they wanted to honor.

But the Lakota people lost far more than those buried on the hill where we’re standing. They lost what the cavalry and the government called “the battle”; they lost the war; they lost their way of life. “And I can see that something else died there in the bloody mud, and was buried in the blizzard,” Black Elk says. “A people’s dream died there. It was a beautiful dream.”

There’s more. You must have noticed because you can’t have missed what’s right in front of us—what’s been there the whole time we’ve been watching what happened. Be careful as you walk around on that promontory because a crumbling block foundation, scattered with crumpled beer cans and trash, marks the outline of what was once a Catholic church, right there where those Hotchkiss guns rained death on the council circle. It’s crumbling, as things do that are not preserved.

The church that once stood here was destroyed in the 1973 Wounded Knee conflict, when, once more, violence occurred not far from where we’re standing. Men and women who held radically different views of Native dignity squared off against each other in this very valley. That dispute brought in U. S. Marshalls and turned deadly, when armed wasicu, here, once again, dug in like the cavalry. For many, those government marshalls were here to defend tribal leaders some thought violent, despotic men who’d long ago sold their souls for fools’ gold.

It isn’t pretty—this crumbling shell. There’s nothing to suggest that what once stood above ground here represented—even offered—the Prince of Peace.

In Coventry, England, you can walk within the skull-like remains of a cathedral destroyed by Nazi bombs during World War II, a remarkable memento of Brit suffering during relentless air strikes. Coventry Cathedral is what much of Europe looked like after Hitler. That foundation is immense, its walls rise and fall jaggedly. But its perimeters are festooned with plaques and flowers and all kinds of memorials neatly commemorating suffering and heroism.

No walls still stand on the foundation half-buried in the crest of the hill where we’re standing. No memorials—just graffiti—decorate what’s there. No one keeps the place up, so what’s left deteriorates in the abusive hands of changing prairie seasons. You can walk into that foundation, if you dare. The empty shell of the church that once looked over the field where hundreds died is nothing at all like the monument at Coventry.

And yet it is. It’s just not sanitized. But then, nothing is at Wounded Knee. Today, there is very little to mark the spot, beyond the sign on the road and the old monument behind us. There is a circular visitors’ center down the hill to the east, the pit toilets stand just outside. The center itself is black, and it’s likely you’ve parked beside it before you walked up the hill to the burial monument. In the summer, the place is open. You can wander into its dark confines, where various displays will tell part of the story. But most of the year you’ll find a padlock on the door, which means you’re on your own at Wounded Knee.

_____________________

continued and finished on Monday. . .

Sunday Morning Meds -- from Psalm 121

 

The LORD will keep you from all harm—he will watch over your life;. . .”

 

My father was an elder in the church, a watcher, a keeper, although I knew very little about what happened when he walked off to meetings on Tuesday nights.  Most of what went on, I know, he was sworn not to tell, and some of it—I know this is true—he didn’t tell me because the knowledge would have hurt me.  I was, after all, a child.

 

One part of his job, I remember, was tallying after communion.  He had to meet with the other elders after the Lord’s Supper to tally who was there, who wasn’t, and who was purposefully not taking the elements, or—even worse, I’m sure—who might have been taking the body and blood even though they’d been barred. I have no idea what the elders called that little gum shoe reconnaissance meeting, but I know that they met.

 

What those elders were watching for were stories, the people who were coming to the table with a checkered past—or in process of checkering their presents. When I became an elder, nobody watched the sacrament that closely. Maybe I remember what went on back then because I knew that behind the effort lay stories I would have liked to know, what lies beneath the ceremony. I still do. Whatever the reason, I remember that he’d come back home late from communion Sunday worship.

 

That post-communion tallying—as well as my father’s own righteousness—may be responsible for the deeply-rooted sense I have that elders really should be Godly statesmen, dutiful, virtuous, and devout. And that conviction may be the reason why, more than any other elderly task, I always loved distributing elements myself when I was an elder, giving away the body and blood of Jesus Christ. It’s a big job meant for the kind of person who grows into the office of elder, having raised good kids and having been the spouse of only one mate, no messes in the scrapbook. An elder was someone not subject to the sins our mutual flesh is heir to.

 

Some years ago I was served the sacrament by two men who were once thugs, criminals—two men who, for many years, valued only their own skin. I took the bread and wine from people who, with impunity, cheated others, stole what they could to line their pockets, used drugs, and lived promiscuously. At about the time I began to understand why my father got home late after the Lords Supper, they were leaving behind a childhood they never had in a Southeast Asian war zone.

 

I know them. I’ve walked into their lives, year by year, even written their stories; and I know that those men—the men carrying the bread and the wine last night—were once so far gone in treachery that not a soul in the church where we sat could probably imagine some of the evil they’ve perpetuated.  Who’d have ever thought that someday they’d be doling out the body and blood of Christ?  Amazing.

 

But the promise of scripture, and the Word of the Lord, here in Psalm 121 is that “the LORD will keep you from harm—he will watch over your life.” And all during those bloody years in war-torn Laos, where those two men grew up, God Almighty, who loves us, had his eye on them as if they were fletching sparrows, even when they were lousy thugs, and probably especially then. 

 

He knew them.  He was watching them, keeping them from harm, when they—and we, all of us—were yet sinners. Those two guys fed me the body and blood of Jesus.

 

Amazing grace.  What a celebration.  Hallelujah, what a savior. 

Wounded Knee -- iv

 

(cont. from yesterday)

“The men are hiding guns,” an officer says.

It’s December, still early in the morning, and the Sioux men are wrapped in blankets. A search follows. In a pile in the middle, almost seventy old rifles lie over each other like fallen branches.

Then, something happens—nobody knows exactly what. The bluecoats draw their rifles and swords. Rifle magazines click open and close; guns are brought into position to fire.

Death

A single troop—who knows who?—tried to wrestle Black Coyote, one of the Sioux men. Some say he was deaf. At the same moment, the medicine man gets to his feet, picks up a handful of dust, and throws it at the soldiers, his shrieking exhortation continuing in the Sioux language. The soldier and Black Coyote wrestle for the possession of a rifle, while down the line another soldier begins struggling with another for a rifle wrapped in the blanket covering one of three young men standing close together. The medicine man keeps telling his people white bullets will not harm them.

One shot. Whose was it? Did it come from Black Coyote in the struggle? No one knows for sure. But in a moment all hell broke loose, and, for less than a half hour, what follows is a fierce and bloody battle waged hand-to-hand in a council circle soon choked by dust and smoke, and thick with bullets, most of them from army issue rifles, bullets that flew indiscriminately, killing many of the Sioux in the middle, as well as bluecoats on either side. That the cavalry could have avoided shooting each other at such close quarters seems impossible, despite claims to the contrary in military hearings conducted later.

An old woman who used to live down our street claims that out here on the prairie we get only about ten sweet days a year. Prairie cold locks life in its frigid jaws; the heat wilts anything that grows; and always, the wind blows. In the summer, it’s capable of sand-blasting your face; in the winter, its bite is not only dangerous but deadly. But that morning, December 29, 1890, the wind stood still. When you look down now, from the promontory where the First and Second Artillery have been firing those Hotchkiss guns into the horror beneath them, imagine a cloud of dust and smoke so thick as to stop breath. In seconds, in the very middle of the fray, combatants cannot see each other, but blindness doesn’t stop the killing. Seventeen miles away, at the Pine Ridge Agency, people claimed to hear the firing.

Just exactly who fired first might never be established, but there is no question whose rifles ended the massacre. With the first shots, hundreds of Lakota women and children run away into that ravine you see just beyond the fighting. With dozens of their own down in the middle of the madness, Forsyte’s men are in no mood to take prisoners, so for several hours after the bloody combat that began in front of Big Foot’s tent, scattered gunfire continues as far as three miles away, up and down the ravines that cut through the tawny prairie around the creek called Wounded Knee. What began in intolerable heat ended in cold-blooded murder.

If you’d like, perhaps you could walk down into those ravines, no more than a half mile from where we’re standing. There are no markers anywhere, like the ones at Little Big Horn, no whited stones to mark the spots where people fell. But even in their absence, ghosts linger.

__________________

more tomorrow. . .

Wounded Knee -- iii

 

What exactly happened?

But what exactly did happen on the morning of December 29, 1890?

With nothing to stop it, sound travels easily on a landscape this barren. So imagine the bleat of reveille cutting through the morning cold. It’s eight o’clock, and the sun rises magnificently, albeit late, winter solstice just a few days behind. Many of the women, some of them singing, are packing for the 17-mile trip to Pine Ridge, where they anticipate meeting relatives and friends. Children play innocently around the ragged tipis and wagons, and for the first morning in many, most have eaten well.

By Indian messenger, Col. Forsyte, the commanding office, calls the men of Big Foot’s band to come to parley directly southeast of us, at the spot where the chief’s tent stands, maybe 300 yards down the hill. Spread around the entire encampment like a huge lariat, even beyond the dozens of Indian ponies just west of Big Foot’s camp and the ravine behind it, 76 unmounted sentries, equally spaced, watch the movement. On the rise beyond the ravine and set against the horizon, a long line of mounted bluecoats wait menacingly, just in front of them, some several dozen of the cavalry’s Indian scouts. From the vantage point of the soldiers, the field seems well in hand, the position geometrically arranged to prevent escape. There is no chaos, yet.

As they were commanded, something close to one hundred men—no one knows for sure—from Big Foot’s band take their places in the council circle. Behind them, those lines of bluecoats move quickly to separate the men from their women and children.

The command is given to disarm. In the face of such untoward odds, the Sioux men are wary—not only does the positioning all around them seem ominous, but to a culture created on institutional violence—a boy becomes a man by proving himself in battle—giving up one’s means to fight is giving up oneself. What’s more, they’d been promised the day before that they could keep their arms until they arrived at Pine Ridge.

Troops are dispatched to search and seize what arms they can turn up in the encampment behind them. What happens is not pleasant. The women do not take kindly to their mistreatment, the sometimes brutal ways the bluecoats plunder their selves and their possessions. When the soldiers return, they have more guns, but also axes, knives, bows and arrows, tent stakes, even beadwork awls.

It is early winter, remember, but there is more than enough emotion in the air to ignite the landscape. Fear, prejudice, a history of deception, mutually defiant cultural values, and nothing less than hate lay beneath us here like so much kindling, waiting for the pop of a flame; the whole place is combustible. What exactly happened next may be debated forever, but the trajectory of events is no more debatable than the outcome.

Somewhere on the peripheries of the council circle stands a man variously described as half-crazed or desperate. He was, by all accounts, a man of faith, a medicine man, who considered it his duty to advise the men in council circle of their dignity and their calling. One account describes him this way: “. . .a grand figure. . .with green-colored face and a yellow nose, terrifying to behold. He wore with pride his floating crown of eagle feathers, while his costume was a wonder of wild adornments.” Some name this man Yellow Bird, while others claim Yellow Bird was nowhere near Big Foot’s camp. Whatever his identity, his eccentric look and behavior calls upon the dignity of Lakota history and culture. What he espouses is at least something of the doctrine of the Ghost Dance. He tells the men not to fear. As Crazy Horse, by legend, once exhorted his men before Little Big Horn, this man reportedly cried and sang to his people, told them this was a good day to fight and a good day to die. He promises eternal life.

The sound produced in Native songs and chants begins in the front of the throat; for centuries, white musicians have been exhorted to sing from the diaphragm. The difference is startling. To white folks unaccustomed to the keening, me among them, the sound produced seems more like a shriek than a hymn. As you stand there, those Hotchkiss guns poised just beneath you, listen the medicine man’s seemingly mad music and try to stop your fists from tightening.

_________________________

more tomorrow. . .

Wounded Knee -- ii

 

continued from yesterday. . .

It would be dead wrong to assume that that belief or any other created by the Messiah craze was the single cause for the horror that happened here in December, 1890. Others are far more prominent: the disappearance of the buffalo, the unceasing trek of white settlers onto traditional Lakota land, a long history of broken treaties, distrust on every side, the searing memory of “Custer’s Last Stand,” and, perhaps most of all, the inability of two peoples to understand each other. When you look down on the shallow valley of the Wounded Knee, bear in mind that what happened here is the confluence of many motives, some of them even well-meaning, but all of them, finally, tragic.

The Scene before us

Here we are. Look around. If you stand on this hill in the summer, the heat can be oppressive; but on a good day you might be surrounded by a couple dozen tourists. That’s all. Wounded Knee doesn’t exactly border the Black Hills, and it’s not on the way to Yellowstone. It’s not on the way to anything, really. Right now you’re in the heart of fly-over America, many millions of Americans never coming closer to this shallow valley than, say Chicago. Any time of year, the twisted vapor trails of jets on their way to LAX or LaGuardia float like ribbons in the genial sky.

In the late fall or muddy spring or cold mid-winter—like that December day in 1890—it’s likely you’ll stand very much alone at Wounded Knee. Cars and trucks navigate the reservation roads that cross almost directly at the point of battle, but for most of the year a visit here is unlike a visit to any other North American historic battlefield.

Gettysburg National Military Park offers an aging but impressive Cyclorama, a remarkable circular painting, 356 feet by 26 feet, that puts visitors at the heart of the battle. Little Big Horn’s visitor’s center sells helpful interpretive audio tapes to use as you tour several miles of battlefield from the air-conditioned comfort of your mini-van. But if you want to know what you can about Wounded Knee, the only storyteller there, all year round, is the wind.

Just imagine the encampment before you, and keep in mind the despair, the poverty, and the hopelessness of the dancers. “To live was now no more than to endure/The purposeless indignity of breath,” says John G. Neihardt in The Twilight of the Sioux. Millions of buffalo once roamed here, the staple of existence for thousands of nomadic Native people, the soul of their culture and faith. By 1890, they were gone.

In North Dakota’s horrible winter of 1996, while thousands of cattle died in the monstrous cold, it is reported that only one bison perished. Once the buffalo ruled here. In all the openness all around you, the Great Plains stretching out almost forever in every direction, try to imagine what it must have been like to stand on this promontory and look over herds so large you could see the mass ripple as they shifted slightly when detecting human scent, almost like watching wind on water. That’s what’s gone. To the Sioux, the hunt was a not only manhood’s proving ground, but a celebration for the family, often opened and closed with prayer. Few 19th century wasicu could understand that the disappearance of the buffalo seemed, to many Plains Indians, almost the death of god. I don’t believe I still can, try as I might.

But if I stand here on the promontory at Wounded Knee and remind all that is white within me of grinding poverty, the exhaustive dissolution of a way of life, and the seeming death of god, I can, perhaps, begin to understand the frantic hope inspired by the Ghost Dance.

Today, right behind you, you’ll see fenced-in enclosure where a granite monument, nine feet tall, lists the names of a few of those killed here. “Chief Big Foot,” it says, and then lists “Mr. Shading Bear, Long Bull, White American, Black Coyate, Ghost Horse, Living Bear, Afraid of Bear, Young Afraid of Bear, Yellow Robe, Wounded Hand, Red Eagle,” and just a few more. Estimates vary on the number of dead buried where you’re standing, but most think 150 or so frozen bodies were dumped into the mass grave beneath the cordon of cement. No ceremony—Native or white. Just a dump.

On the other side of the stone there’s an inscription, still visible seventy years after the marker was placed where you’re standing.

        This monument is erected by surviving relatives and other Ogallala and                       Cheyenne River Sioux Indians in Memory of the Chief Big Foot Massacre Dec.            29, 1890.

        Col. Forsyth in command of U. S. Troops. Big Foot was a great chief to the                    Sioux Indians. He often said “I will stand in peace till my last day comes.” He              did many good and brave deeds for the white man and the red man. Many                  innocent women and children who knew no wrong died here.

As Harry W. Paige says in Land of the Spotted Eagle, this isn’t the grammar, the syntax, or mechanics of an Oxford don. What it is, he says, is “writing that weeps.”

________________________

more tomorrow  

Wounded Knee i

When it came out in the magazine, it took up tons of space. I was thrilled the editor would take it because I had no idea how much interest I might drum up from an American reading public who had probably picked all the info they cared to know by way of movies that featured Ward Bond or John Wayne. But the whole story wouldn't let me go--I'm not sure why. I thought of Native American history as a subject about which no one really cared--all of it long-gone, another world.  

I sent the essay to John Wilson at Books and Culture, who had expressed some interest, and he took it. I was thrilled.

After using Ian Frazier's The Great Plains in a writing class (f0r years), I found myself  moving closer and closer to really appreciating the landscape directly west of us, a place we call "the Great Plains"--which is not universally easy to appreciate. The Great Plains story that most captured my attention was the Massacre at Wounded Knee, about which I'd known absolutely nothing.

Why not? Because the story belonged to Native America? 

No. It was our story, too. 

Go there, some voice said, just go and stand there, learn something on your own.

So I did, the day after Thanksgiving, twenty years ago. I was alone.

This is the essay that emerged.

Think of it as a tawny ocean stopped in time, a vast landscape of grass, here and there mustache-like strips of trees darkening creek beds or running along the ridges like an old headdress unfurled in wind. Today, the place where the Wounded Knee Massacre took place looks remarkably similar to what it did in early winter of 1890, a featureless, shallow valley in a seemingly unending field of prairie grass that, on a gray day, weaves itself almost inconspicuously into the cloudy sky at its reaches.

On December 28, 1890, four Hotchkiss guns—the Sioux called them "the guns that fire in the morning and kill the next day"—stood on a small, whitecap hill amid this arid ocean, all four aimed down into the camp of a Minneconjou chief named Sitanka, or Big Foot. There, three hundred men, women, and children were camped, hoping to reach Pine Ridge Agency the next day.

More than a century later, it is almost impossible to stand on that small hill and look down into the valley of Wounded Knee Creek and imagine what the place must have looked like so full of people.

But try. Today, a single battered billboard offers the only available outline of the story, the word “battle” crossed out and “massacre” scribbled in roughly above it. Otherwise, there is little to mark the spot. But try to imagine what this yawning, empty space must have looked like, a couple hundred Lakota just beneath the promontory where we’re standing, their worn and ripped tipis thrown up quickly, campfires floating thin plumes of smoke. These folks have been hungry for days—and tired, having just marched hundreds of miles south towards Chief Red Cloud at the Pine Ridge Agency, where they thought they’d be safe.

But there’s more, far more. Across the ravine west—maybe a half mile away on another hill sits is a sprawling encampment of several hundred troops under the command of Colonel James W. Forsyth, the largest military encampment since the Civil War. The scene is remarkable. Doubtless, that many people assembled at this remote spot on the Dakota prairie has not happened frequently, if ever, since. If it’s difficult for you to imagine, just picture a campground of nearly a thousand people in tents, then cut down all the trees.

Big Foot’s people were dancers, Ghost Dancers, strong believers in a frenetic, mystic ceremony, a hobgoblin of Christianity, mysticism, Native ritual, and sheer desperation. If they would dance, they thought Christ would return because he’d heard their prayers and felt their suffering. When he’d come for them, he’d bring with him the old ones (hence, the Ghost Dance). And the buffalo would return. Once again the people could take up their beloved way of life. If they would dance, a cloud of dust from the new heaven and the new earth would swallow the wasicu, all of them. If they would dance, their hunger would be satiated, desperation comforted.

The Ghost Dance

The Ghost Dance, a ritual of what Ian Frazier calls “the first American religion,” is only one of many causes which led to the massacre at Wounded Knee, but for people of faith it merits a closer look.

There was no dancing here on the night before the massacre, December 28, 1890, but for almost a year “the Messiah craze” had spread throughout the newly sectioned reservations, as unstoppable as a prairie fire. A committee of Sioux holy men had returned from Nevada, where they’d met Wovoka, the Paiute who’d seen the original vision. They returned as disciples of a new religion.

Wovoka designed the ritual from his own visions. Erect a sapling in the middle of an open area, like the one in front of us now—the tree, a familiar symbol from rituals like the Sun Dance, then banned by reservation agents. Purge yourselves—enter sweat lodges, prostrate yourself before Wakan Tanka, the Great Mysterious. Show your humility—often warriors would cut out pieces of their own flesh and lay them at the base of that sapling to bear witness of their selflessness.

Then dance—women and men together, something rare in Sioux religious tradition. Dance around that sapling totem, dance and dance and dance and don’t stop until you fall from physical exhaustion and spiritual plenitude. Dance until the mind numbs and the spirit emerges. Dance into frenzy. Dance into ecstacy.

Now look back down into the valley, and imagine three hundred men and women being slain by the spirit, most of them writhing in fine dust. Such mass frenzy made wasicu of every denomination or political persuasion shudder. To them, it seemed madness on a cosmic scale—hence, “the Messiah craze.”

The exultation of the Ghost Dance was the vision given to those who fell in frenzy. When they would recover their senses, each of them would reveal what he or she had seen, a collective vision: life would be good, rich, abundant, everything the coming of the wasicu had ended. Jesus Christ, rejected by his own, had heard the voice of the people’s suffering and would bring them joy.

“The great underlying principle of the Ghost dance doctrine,” says James Mooney in his rich study written already in 1896, “is that the whole Indian race, living and dead, will be reunited upon a regenerated earth, to live a life of aboriginal happiness, forever free from death, disease, and misery.” It was that simple and that compelling, a vision of heaven.

For me as a white man, a Christian, it is not pleasant to admit that in the summer of 1890, the sheer desperation of Native people, fueled by poverty, malnutrition, and the near death of their culture, created a tragically false religion that played a significant role in what we’ve come to call, simply, Wounded Knee.

Throughout the West, the whole First Nation danced. What was peculiar to the Sioux, however, was this solitary tenet: those who wore the ghost shirt or ghost dress—the prescribed apparel of the faith—could assume themselves impervious to bluecoat bullets. Dancers could not die. They were holy.

________________

More to come.