What I learned at Oahe

 

I've got this thing about dawns. That's why I was out there. It was forbiddingly cold, but if you want a stunning picture, pros say you've got to be there; so me and my camera went out early, a half hour straight west of a town named Gettysburg, to stand on the frozen banks of Lake Oahe, looking east into the dawn, looking for beauty. 

I was there because I wanted to see if I could get something of a glorious dawn into the lens of my camera. I wanted to see the landscape decked out most beautifully, at sunrise. I drove out to the region to look closely because I'd never been there and I was working on a novel that was on the cusp of a reservation, where relationships between Euro- and Native Americans is a given. Setting would play a role in this novel because, quite simply, on the Great Plains it does.

It was dead of night when I left the motel, but I figured if there was a great place to view the dawn, it would be there, across the bridge, looking east on the morning sun over what was once the Missouri River but now is Lake Oahe, an immense reservoir of 370 thousand acres, fourth largest man-made lake in the country.

But it's January. Really cold. Really, really cold. 

I was alone. Not surprising. No cars passed. It was just me and the camera and the sun coming up across the water. Cold?--maybe thirty seconds and you lose your fingers. 

I take a few shots, like the one above. The morning is beautiful, worth the trip, worth the cold.

The warm car's a haven when I get back inside. I stay a while. Sunrise lays its Midas-touch over everything, so even leafless trees in the prairie grass take on a patina of heavenly grace.

Two years later, the novel is finished, titled appropriately, Looking for Dawn. Oddly enough, I happen to be back here, same place, on the reservation side of Oahe. It's mid-afternoon and I'm accompanied by a 100-year-old WWII army nurse, who is telling me her story. She's Lakota, Cheyenne River Sioux. The reservation is hers.

I'm helping her write her story, and I've asked her to take me to places rich in importance in her life--what we can see and document of her childhood, for instance, where her parents are buried, her ancestors: show me where you grew up, where you went to school. I didn't tell her that, oddly enough, I'd been right here before, but I recognize the place clearly, even though this time around we'd come from the west, and a water-skier is out on the lake cutting waves in some fancy ballet, here and there a fishing boat in a drift a long ways off. 

"You want to see where I went to boarding school, Jim?" she's said. "You want to see where I worked as a nurse when I got home from the war?" We got in the car earlier and went east to a a slip of land surrounded by Oahe. I'd been here before. We're looking west. She points at the water, says nothing. It's a beautiful day, shimmering azure, sky and sea, and what she is saying in silence didn't register right away. "There," she said. 

All of that life, all of that history, years of her story and her people's story, was under the water of a huge man-made lake. All of her history was gone, her tribal history drowned. 

"There it is," she said. 

The old Cheyenne River Agency, the school, the hospital, the town itself--there it lies. Look for yourself. It's gone.

Forty per cent of the state's "angler use" occurs here. Half of all licensed South Dakota anglers fish Lake Oahe. Ranchers have abundant water these days, a scarcity in drought years that come along regularly "west river," as South Dakotans say.  The brochures say, "If you want a big lake experience, you’ll find it along the Missouri River. Four large reservoirs were created along the length of the 'Big Mo,' thanks to dams near Pierre, Fort Thompson, Pickstown and Yankton. All four lakes offer an abundance of fishing and hunting along with recreational boating, jet skiing, sailing and fun."

That's all true.

But there's another story beneath sparkling water, a story that has nothing to do with championship walleyes. 

That's my friend at a memorial right there at the water's edge. "Four Bear," listed in the fourth column, is her grandfather, who signed the 1868 Ft. Laramie Treaty, a man who became a "Fool Soldier," who rescued three women and eight children taken hostage when a Dakota war party attacked a white settlement at Lake Shetek, Minnesota Territory in 1862. 

"The Pick-Sloan Plan was, without doubt, the single most destructive act ever perpetrated on any tribe by the United States," says Vine DeLoria, in his introduction to Michael L. Lawson's Dammed Indians. "A natural environment was completely wiped out without any consideration of what was there and was replaced by a mechanical electric grid system and large holding dams.. . .This is a moral violation of ourselves as human beings."

Pike-Sloan has been a giant blessing to most Dakotans, but when we walked away from the edge of Oahe that summer afternoon, I wasn't the same person who'd stopped with a camera two years before in January cold. 

In some places, today, November 27, isn't just Black Friday, it's also Native American Heritage Day. Research says that 40 per cent of the American public believes Native Americans are gone. They aren't, even though lots and lots of us have tried to make it so.

That January morning I was out there was as cold as it was beautiful, but I had so much to learn about looking for beauty. I took this picture that morning from the west side--no idea about what was in front of me that simply wasn't there.