Dances With Wounded Knee?

Alternate title: Dance With My Knee at Wounded Heart?

On the road now, headed south on my seasonal migration, not at all in a hurry, as September/October, even in the high desert, is uncomfortably hot. So yesterday I only did about 150 miles, about the same the day before, when I left my ‘home town’ of Spearfish, South Dakota. (Still more scare quotes, different reason than usual.)

Yesterday, I think, is worth a few words.

To set the context, I’ll start with last night and work back in time. Having pulled into a closed up rural gas station just over the Nebraska border, a town called Hay Springs, I was in the mood for a movie, so I browsed Youtube’s freebies. Dances With Wolves came up. Hadn’t seen it in years so I hit play.

Didn’t take long to realize the irony of my pick. (I’ll assume you all are familiar with the story, but for our purposes the crucial element is the very noble and sympathetic portrayal of Native Americans. Also relevant: The ‘noble’ tribe depicted in the flick is the Oglala Sioux.)

See, in the afternoon I’d tooled through the Pine Ridge Sioux Reservation and had two encounters with tribal members (three, if you count the cow, how it came to be there and in that condition), and in fact had more or less fled from the second. 

First, I’d stopped at a tribal-run supermarket, a huge quonset hut disarrangement plopped down in mid-nowhere on the vast prairie. (Although I verified with Wiki, I recognized that Dances With Wolves was shot (at least primarily) in South Dakota; the prairie in that part of the country is that distinctive.)

The food store was crowded with… fuck it, with Indians, and every one was wearing a fucking mask. Plus I was immediately accosted by an employee and told I had to wear one. You can imagine how that went but I’ll tell you anyway. 

‘Why?’

‘Because you have to.’

‘Says who?’

On second thought, enough predictable details. Suffice to say it went on from there, with me getting more and more aggravated as I explained to the dead-eyed squaw all the reasons that masks don’t work and can even kill you. Blah Blah. What occurred to me, though, as I rambled, was that I was only a few miles from the site of the Wounded Knee Massacre (it’s on the map and capitalized), and was planning to stop there, maybe even spend the night. Pay some respects. Get depressed, which I always seem to welcome.

‘The masks and the vaccines are the latest in the U.S. Government’s continuing attempts to kill you all,’ was my parting shot, referring back to Wounded Knee. I said it loud and as I wheeled my cart away I noticed that pretty much everyone in the place was staring at me. I of course could not read their expressions, what with the masks and all, but no one was nodding in agreement.

Please try to imagine Dances With Wolves playing in the background as you read this, especially the scenes — pretty much the whole goddamn movie — wherein the Sioux are depicted as ‘noble savages,’ spiritually advanced folk from whom the nasty white man could learn a thing or three. (It just occurred to me that this is actually pretty important if you guys are going to get the intended irony.)

Maybe ten minutes later — and I’m pretty sure the byway I was on was ‘The Crazy Horse Memorial Highway’ — I pull off onto the ‘Historical Marker’ named for the Wounded Knee Massacre. (I’ll embed the sign if you want a refresher on the event, which was the last ‘armed’ U.S. Army conflict with the Sioux [the scare quotes here meaning that the Sioux were not really armed]).

There was a wizened old (meaning about my age)… uhh, person by the sign, a Sioux, I assumed, with a table spread of trinkets and, well, rocks (‘minerals,’ I suppose) for sale. I could not tell if I was addressing a male or female (see photo), so I sidled up as we spoke (the voice told me nothing) and peeked to see if there were female breasts under the shirt. Looked like there were. Problem is that when I intro-ed myself, I got back ‘Jimmy’ as a name. 

So I’m sort of at a loss re pronouns here. It was discouraging that I might have run across some sort of LGBTD (or whatever it is) phenom amongst the remaining Sioux, those noble warriors of the plains. 

Jimmy wanted to bum a cigarette and when I said I didn’t smoke, I got a raised eyebrow and a gesture at the cigar in my pocket. ‘Don’t smoke ’em, just chew ’em,’ I said, then realized I’d cornered myself.

‘You want one?’

‘Sure.’

Okay, so Jimmy wanted a cigar. But I saw breasts down there, I think. And I could swear they jiggled a bit. Jimmy was way too thin to have ‘man boobs’ (not really scare quotes in this case, right?)

The only other gender-hint was dropped when I enquired about Jimmy’s Dallas Cowboys hat and got the reply that Jimmy was a ‘big time’ Cowboys fan. (In fact, Jimmy was itchy to get home since there was a Cowboys game on right now.)

Addendum: Yes, there is of course some added irony here, of the ‘Cowboys and Indians’ variety but it’s hardly worth a mention, given how my day went from there. (And also given that there are no cowboys in Dances With Wolves, which I do hope you are keeping in mind [as context] as I ramble on.) Our conversation did take a potentially interesting turn as Jimmy complained about the NFL’s renaming of teams — the (Washington) Redskins and the (Kansas City) Chiefs come to mind — for reasons of PC. Jimmy didn’t give a shit about PC.

‘Pisses me off,’ Jimmy said. 

By the way, Jimmy’d gotten the two doses of the vax. ‘The masks and the vaccines are the latest in the U.S. Government’s continuing attempts to kill you all,’ I said again.

I had already taken in the scenery and got a brief description of where the Massacre took place: ‘Right there,’ Jimmy had said, pointing to the clearing by the Wounded Knee Creek, less than 100 yards distant. ‘And up there is the cemetery,’ Jimmy had told me, indicating the hilltop right across The Crazy Horse Memorial Highway. Lots of ‘Indians’ buried up there, Jimmy told me.

I wanted to photograph the cemetery (the Massacre site wasn’t photogenic) but the light wouldn’t be right until near sundown, so I asked Jimmy where I could park, maybe overnight. Jimmy pointed at a dirt road and a nearby copse with a tall oak, fifty or so yards from the highway. After seven years on the road I’ve developed an instinct for campsites, i.e., safe as opposed to iffy. Although there was very little traffic on The Crazy Horse Memorial Highway — I had not noticed any old pickups with gun racks (a bad sign) whizzing by — or run down shacks or junked cars within sight, I did not get a good vibe.

But I really wanted to get the photos, and for some reason wanted to camp on the site of a famous massacre, possibly the most infamous massacre in U.S. Army history, given the recent historical drift of the PC movement. It might be interesting if the site was somehow haunted, I was thinking. (Really.)

So I parked under the oak, just enough out of sight of the road to feel comfortable, let Gus out for a stroll, and reclined in the rig to listen to the audio of The Invisible Rainbow (I’d read it via Kindle but wanted another dose).

All went well for about 20 minutes then I hear a bellowed ‘Hey!’ from right outside my door. Startled the hell out of me, given I’d heard no vehicle pull up (I’m attuned to that sort of sound when I’m camped off grid).

It was a very large… a huge.. very drunk Indian, wearing thin, electric blue nylon shorts and nothing else. I’m talking six foot four/five, 300 pounds, big belly, with flushed, very Indian features, and… as I say… very drunk.Teetering drunk. No question about gender this time.

He wanted money. Just came right out and said so. ‘I want money.’

I’d fucked up and come outside without my pepper spray, which I always keep handy. Don’t know why I forgot it this time, when I potentially really needed it… but Gus, god bless her, was standing right at the Big Drunk Semi-Naked Indian’s feet, looking up at him. Her tail was not wagging (as it pretty much always does when meeting a new human); her ears were slightly pinned back, also an indication of alertness.

‘This is my dog, Gus,’ I said. He looked down at Gus, looking up at him. His expression changed slightly, his swaying seemed to dampen; not to say he sobered up, but he seemed to be calculating. 

‘Twenty dollars,’ the Big Drunk Semi-Naked Indian mumbled. 

 I feigned surprise and a bit of disappointment, saying, ‘You showed up here to ask me for money?’ Yes, sort of rhetorical, given the previous dialog, but I needed a moment to think. I was not going to part with twenty bucks, that was for sure, notwithstanding my forgetting the pepper spray. 

‘Ten dollars,’ the big, drunk, semi-naked Indian countered.

‘I don’t have cash,’ I said. ‘I use credit cards.’

The fucker just stared at me. What was he gonna do, call me a liar? (Had he done so, I would’ve just feigned added disappointment.)

Jesus was he drunk. After what seemed like a long time, he looked past me, seemed to remember something, and trotted unsteadily off into the tall grass and bramble of the Wounded Knee Massacre Site, mumbling something I didn’t catch.

This was a not unpleasant surprise, but I knew time was of the essence so I got Gus in the rig, did a quick walk-around (to see if I’d left something), fired her up and, after several forward/reverse maneuvers, managed to pull back onto the dirt road just in time to see a ratty old sedan appear 20 or so yards ahead and stop in the middle of the road, the big, drunk, semi-naked Indian in the passenger’s seat and another big (probably drunk) Indian behind the wheel; at least he was wearing a shirt. The moron had enlisted reinforcements.

There was tall grass on either side of the road they were blocking but I just floored it and blew past them with a casual wave out the side window. They were visibly startled. I was relieved that I didn’t drive into a ditch or run into a log or some such, which could easily have happened.

I was quickly out of the woods, literally and figuratively. And I was pissed. I don’t have a quarter ounce of guilt in me over Wounded Knee or any other goddamn thing I had nothing to do with, nor over the moron who’d fucked up my day being a fat, drunken fool who needed twenty dollars for more alcohol, Indian or no.

So I drove up to the cemetery and got the photos I wanted, although the light wasn’t great. I had a 360 view of the Wounded Knee Massacre Site, The Crazy Horse Memorial Highway, and of the Indian Movement headquarters about a quarter mile back toward the dead cow that had welcomed me onto the reservation (see photo). No sign of the Big Drunk Semi-naked Indian or the sedan. They had poofed out of my world.

I dunno if this was worth the words. Maybe you had to be watching Dances With Wolves to sense the irony.

Herzog would be clueless.

Allan