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 it 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.

Pope Donald I

In 1960, when JFK was running for President, a Roman Catholic, was running for President, an uncle of  mine went on a little speaking tour to local Protestant churches, where he'd warn parishioners what was going to happen should the war hero be elected to office: we'd no longer have a President because he would be, of necessity, a pawn of the pope.

I was just a kid, 12 years old. I remember hearing him hold forth in our church brandishing a fervent warning about our democracy descending into chaos at the hands of a man sworn in allegiance to the papacy. I remember thinking my uncle's appraisal was whacky, that he was overreacting in some way. He wasn't an embarrassment to me because by my assessment  most people in our church believed he was right even before they heard his arguments. Voting for the Massachusetts senator was like voting to turn America Roman Catholic: Rome would be calling the shots.

JFK won, and an assassin's bullet took him out of the office just two years later. My uncle, like his crusade, went off-line. 

Things have changed. Today, it's not the Pope looking to undercut the American spirit, it's a man with strange hair and a huge personality, a man who rarely sleeps, it seems, who is seemingly incapable of tempering his bravado about himself. Now, somewhere in his own Magic Kingdom,  he's got his own statue up for genuflection.  Here 'tis, a masterpiece.

Surprise!!!  Trump loves it. 

Pope Leo doesn't.

So Trump disparages Pope Leo. 

My uncle is long gone, unavailable for reference in this case.

Barring some mad quest to stay in office--with Donald, all things are possible--we're almost finished with the Orange man's madness. His time is short.

Which is why he seems devoted to finding ways to make his reign eternal, like a golden monument.

Well, some like my uncle might say, at least he's not Catholic. 

Very, very sad.

“. . .the sun will not harm you by day, nor the moon by night.”

It may be hard to believe but that old kid’s classic Goodnight Moon, written by Margaret Wise Brown and illustrated by Clement Hurd, has been around now for almost seventy years. My grandson, who wasn’t the easiest chap to get off to sleep, absolutely loved it. Goodnight Moon is a sweet old mood-enhancer whose magic somehow prompts delightful sleepiness.

For years, our grandson would search the dark sky. “Way da moon?” he’d say, as if he has to be sure that it’s up there watching over us.

Maybe it’s that book that makes me wonder about this line from psalm 121. Goodnight Moon is such a meditative story that just thinking about it makes me want to yawn. It’s difficult for me to remember moments in my life, or even in story, when the moon, as the psalmist here in 121 seems to suggest, actually made me scared.

Darkness, surely. I was never quite as scared as I was one night on the shore of Lake Michigan, when, with a couple of other boys, we were completely lost in rolling sand dunes. Truth be known, we weren’t completely lost—we couldn’t have been more than a quarter mile from the lake. But we were out somewhere in the dunes—I have no idea why—when, in the darkness, we realized we had no idea where to go to get out. I was scared witless and spitless, even though I’m sure I never admitted it.

But I don’t remember the moon playing any role whatsoever in that fear. Darkness lit up our nerves, sheer darkness. The moon would have been a blessing.

To some Hindus, the moon is full of soma, an elixir of immortality only gods can drink. For the Fon of Abomey, in the Republic of Benin, Africa, Mawu, the goddess of the Moon, is an old mother who lives in the West and brings with her cool temps amid torrid summers, the goddess of night and joy and motherhood. As those t-shirts used to proclaim: “No fear.”

One night years ago up above Chamberlain, South Dakota, a number of us laid in the grass and watched the stars appear, the moon lighting the world bountifully overhead. An astronomer friend explained ancient mythologies as their stories appeared above us—it was pure joy. On our way down the steep hill we’d climbed to get there, the footing was treacherous because sheer darkness had arrived, even though we hadn’t noticed it. Once, a guy fell and rolled down a ways. That was a little scary. Thank goodness for the moon. Would have been much tougher without it.

Werewolves wail at it, and coyotes and real wolves, for that matter, which reminds me of an oil painting that inspired Willa Cather, in My Antonia, to tell a horrible tale about a wedding party entirely devoured by ravenous wolves—at night, of course. But I don’t remember moonlight in that painting. Even as a sliver, it’s hard for me to see the moon as anything but beautiful, sleek.

I don’t know that I’ve ever been afraid of the moon, but we all know fear, as did the psalmist. We all know the paralysis fear creates in us, even if it arrives only in our dreams.

And we all know the terrors of the darkness, the times when no matter what we try, we simply can’t find our way. At one time or another in our lives, everyone knows what it’s like to wander around with no light, with no direction, with no way home.

To those of who know that kind of loss, this psalm, Psalm 121, is special gift, a blessing. God is watching us always, even in the dark, even in light of the moon. So, well, "Goodnight Moon."

That Christmas. . .and today

Maybe I was ten, as I remember, old enough at least so my feet went all the way down to the pedals. It's hard to believe, but I don't think I even tried to ride the thing that Christmas Eve. It was a cold Wisconsin winter--aren't they all?--and riding it out of the living room on Christmas Eve would have been impossible--well, improbable anyway. Even though the bike never made it out of the living room that memorable night, in every other way that gift, that year became a highlight of my life. It was totally unexpected. My parents must have done a ton of thinking to figure out how to keep that bike out of my way in the house, to keep the present hidden. 

It was Christmas, which is to say, dead of winter  outside, so getting the new bike into the house and hidden away in the living room before the after-church opening-presents ritual took some doing. How do you hide a 26-inch J. C. Higgins in the living room? Stealthily, I'm sure. 

Somehow they got me out of the house when they brought that beauty in. I don't know whose idea it was, but  that Christmas Eve jumped forever to the very top of my never-to-be-forgotten holiday seasons: the Christmas I got my first real bike.

Went something like this. It was Christmas Eve, after the Sunday School program at church. We lived a block north, so I expect that I raced home, hoping my parents would do likewise. In all likelihood, they did. I don't know that they could start the drama fast enough. 

Opening presents is an engagement that requires ritual. What you don't want is bedlam--the once-a-year joy is too good to race through. It calls for deliberation. When my sisters and I got a little older, I'm sure we were handed the mantle to distribute the goods. Back then, I think Dad took care of it. Slowly.

What I hadn't noticed was that the entire vestibule had been emptied, all those coats and jackets spread evenly over the back of the couch. Honestly, I never noticed. What I do remember is a sense of being cheated, a sense I would never have admitted back then, but something as palpable as the carols Mom had playing on her Magnavox stereo to set mood. I wasn't getting my share.

I'm sure I didn't hear a thing. It was Christmas Eve, for pete's sake, the biggie. I'm sure we worked at it--one present at a time: first Judy, then Gail, then me catching the spotlight to see what emerged when the wrapping paper came off. And I've never forgotten the palpable sense that I was getting rooked somehow, that my bounty was solely in arears, that I wasn't getting my share until finally Dad told me to take those jackets and coats off the back of the living room couch.

That's when I knew I'd smacked the jackpot. Just like that, a shiny handlebar found its way through deliberate lie of the pile of coats. There was something beneath all those things--good night! it was a bike, a full size, 26-inch beauty, shiny-new, the most memorable Christmas present I'd ever received--and I had absolutely no idea it was coming.

That Christmas remains as one of the, if not the most memorable Christmases of my life.

All of that rides back from my memory from the late 1950s, when my parents must have determined that it was time their son had a good bike, his own bike, and went out like drunken spendthrifts and bought a brand new 26-inch J. C. Higgins for their son. It was a pure surprise, a shock so full of joy I can feel it yet. Whatever pictures I had are likely gone with the flood, but I know very well what the bike looked like when I pulled it from behind the living room couch, where it had been so stealthily hidden.

All of that comes back to me now because if the dealer has it right, I'll be getting a  huge box full of another bike, this one actually a trike. It's coming today, seventy years or so later--not a J. C. Higgins, but a specialty brand made just for seniors like me who've lost some balance. One can't relive one's history, and  I won't try; but pardon me if I don't, just  now, feel a bit of the kid in me. 

Today, I'm getting a new bike. . .well, trike, and I'm thrilled.

___________________________ 

The tank was red, like the one up top, but so was the rest of the bike. I haven't a clue what happened to it, but I'll never forget the Christmas it was right there in the living room with us. 

What I did on my summer vacation

 

Oops.

The guy must have thought that someone back home would get a big kick out of the picture, that it was, therefore, a suitable souvenir of the time he spent somewhere out fighting a war some place other than his Jewish home. If you listen close enough, you can just about hear him chuckling, or maybe his buddy, the guy with the camera, who grabbed this shot when his friend leaned in to make it look like sport.

He got what he wanted, I guess, a record of his stupidity, of his callousness toward a major world religion, more Catholic than Protestant, I imagine, but just as offensive toward any and all major world religions.  

I'm not entirely sure that this soldier's being Jewish matters all that much. What he's up to is an act--giving the virgin a cigarette--that's just plain vulgar, an act so decidedly so that is to almost anyone a sacrilege. Such things happen in war, I guess, even though both sides in any conflict would much rather not have a bunch of these kinds of photos lying around awaiting publication. You can bet that this guy and his buddy with the camera thought helping the Virgin light up was a scream.

I guess you had to have been there. 

The Middle East has been a tinder box forever really, and will likely continue to be, next week, next year, next century. 

Which is not a reason to stop working for peace. Try to imagine, if you will, seeing the Middle East as something other than a tinder box, a place for instant aggression, a place for holding on to resentment as if it were a blessing, not a curse.

Some guy thought it would be a scream to stick a butt in the mouth of the Virgin. Almost certainly, he got some encouragement. Such a riot! Sometimes war can be fun. 

Sometimes peace can require another world altogether.    

Small Wonders--the Guernsey Tracks

They're sweet these days, as long as they stay in their banks. When and if they flood, they're a pain. Most do flood come spring, unless they're damned up somewhere and disciplined into behaving. Outside of a now-and-then outpouring, they're a darling feature of our landscapes, home to ducks and geese, and life for deer and coons and a whole gallery of wildlife living nearby. But, that's it.

Their placid nature makes it easy to forget that rivers like this one--the Laramie in southeast Wyoming--were once upon a time our interstate highways. If you were traveling a great distance, say, across the country, you never left a river valley because the livestock, not to mention the wife and kids, couldn't go without what rivers had in abundance, water.

Today, come summer, some residents of Guernsey, Wyoming, get out old tubes and ride the Laramie, I'm guessing, although right now you'd suffer. In the fall, maybe kids shoot ducks out here--or try. Snowmobiles likely find the Laramie a fun winter highway. Cattlemen may well grab what they can of the Laramie for center-point irrigation, but mostly, like this old bridge--constructed in 1875-- the Laramie's real life is, as they say, pretty much o'er.

Forty years before the bridge, hundreds of thousands of emigrants left their tracks here literally, on the Oregon Trail. The Guernsey Tracks are like none other, trust me. They predate the Civil War. They're worn into the soft sandstone because those hundreds of thousands of people knew well that you couldn't be haphazard about time or place if you were going to make it all the way west. You needed to stay near water on a trail that would keep you from the most horrendous climbs through the Rockies. If you were going to Oregon or Utah or California, you stayed with the rivers and made tracks where others already had.

These tracks are there own kind of funnel. Everyone had pass to this way, what seemed to the Lakota an almost endless train of Conestoga wagons and Mormon handcarts, more white people than they'd ever seen or even imagined, extremely concerning. Taking a path anywhere north or south would have been a heckuva gamble. My guess is that everyone remembered this place; yet today, this place remembers everyone.

There are other spots where wheel ruts still tell the story, but if you're anywhere near Guernsey, Wyoming, you really should pass by. After all, 175 years ago--no foolin'--hundreds of thousands did.

As you can tell, in stone, 175 years later.

There will be visitors this summer, but no Disneyland crowds. It's too bad, really--it's a wonderful monument, full of moral implications--and not changing anytime soon. 

But not forgotten

 

In a work of fiction, it's almost impossible to make a character as supremely loveable as Nebraska's Willa Cather does with the great earth-mother Antonia, in her century-old novel My Antonia. This Antonia isn't one bit divine, but her zest for life, notable throughout a childhood Cather recreates, is perfectly enchanting. If you've read My Antonia and you love the novel, as gadzillions have and do, then you probably adore Antonia, or Tony, as Jim Burden calls her in the story.

Tony is not untouched by the dark side. She is the oldest daughter of an immigrant Bohemian family struggling to make a go of it on uncooperative Great Plains land, one family of thousands, many from all over Europe, who believed that this new country was their chance to escape the bondage of poverty. For some, that dream was real. For others, just staying alive required every last stich of strength and perseverance. Some didn't make it.

Tony's father, Anton Shimerda, was something of an aristocrat in the old country. But he'd married a tyrannical woman, then lost himself in the vast expanse of treeless prairie he found himself in here, bereft of the art and music that had enchanted his soul.

Tony's father ends his life by suicide. She was just a girl back then. His death not only emptied her life of her father's presence and grace, but forced her to take over the hard, hard work of breaking ground for a sustainable life.

Still, like Jim Burden, who cannot forget her, readers can't help but love Tony Shimerda, who eventually came to town to work for well-situated town folks. What she and the other hired girls take with them is rowdy earthiness of their country ways. Off-limits to town boys of means, the country girls just want to have fun. Jim Burden's parents, in sanctified righteousness, forbid him from going to dances, where the country girls just plain shine. They're thought to be loose. 

No matter, like Jim, who tells the story, most readers love her zest. Besides, the hired girls are great and sexy dancers.

Quite suddenly, Tony finds herself with child, and on a train to Denver, where the father, Larry Donovan, a passenger conductor on the railroad, told her he'd meet her, marry her, and raise a family. 

In Denver, he was not to be found. Tony Shimerda was pregnant and abandoned.

She can do nothing but return. With her brother, she slaves through harvest season and into winter, when one night she locks herself in her bedroom and delivers her baby boy herself. 

You can't help but love the woman. And, well, hate this scum, Larry Donovan. 

If you've never been to Red Cloud, Nebraska, schedule a trip sometime soon. Because Willa Cather used so much of Red Cloud and its history, the town's heart and soul is their favorite novelist daughter. You can visit the little old Catholic church where Tony eventually married the farm boy who gave her the rest of her kids. You can visit their farmhouse, the Pavelka place, north of town.

Tell you what--take a car tour through the whole wide country where Willa Cather remembers her childhood so fondly.

And be sure to stop at the tiny cemetery plot at the beginning of the tour. You can't miss it--it's right there along the gravel. In it stands the stone of the man who abandoned Antonia Shimerda, in real life, Anna Pavelka. 

Of course, his name isn't Larry Donovan; for the record, what's etched there in stone is "James William Murray." There's the stone all right, just where the tour notes claim it is. And here's the thing: the bottom of the stone bears this old cemetery cliche: "Gone but not forgotten."

No kidding. "Gone, but not forgotten." Every year thousands of people take that gravel road tour, and nobody forgets what Larry Donovan did to your and my Antonia. Poor James William Murray: in Red Cloud, Nebraska, so much just can't be forgotten. 

Visit sometime. Stop there at the grave and tell him he was a cad. Or worse. Good night, was he ever. Like a hundred others, tell him he's gone all right, but not forgotten.