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A Slight Detour on The Road to Promise
Today marks the end of an era in several ways: it's the final flourish for #LetsBlogOff and the final post (for a while, at least) for The Road to Promise. You can read why Paul and Gerard have decided to cease the bi-monthly blogging phenomenon here. I've decided it's time to try to publish The Road to Promise in book-form so I'll be putting my energies into a book proposal for the foreseeable future. I would like to express gratitude to everyone who has visited this blog for the past several years, and to thank Paul and Gerard for giving us an exciting forum on which to exchange writing and ideas. Wish me luck, would you? I'll let everyone know if I manage to snag a book deal; until then, best of luck to everyone in their life/work endeavors...
No Power In a Square
The snazziest party spot in Wagner on any given Saturday night was the local VFW, where you could chow down on juicy prime rib and dance the polka until you were ready to drop. Elmo was as patriotic as any of his fellow Wagnerites, hanging out at the VFW with that sheepish look on his face, which told anyone who knew him that a joke was on the tip of his tongue. Despite this easy-going demeanor, he also made it clear that he believed the government had ruined his people by handing out money instead of making them work. He remarked that each administration seemed to grow worse, as if each President was trying to outdo the one before him in what Elmo considered to be unwise practices.
I had come across a quote in Ian Frazier’s Great Plains stating that William T. Sherman, then General-in-Chief of the Army, maintained the government’s plan was to remove all Native Americans, who were being divided and forced onto reservations at the time, to a safe place and reduce them to a helpless condition. Maybe the dole did continue to encourage dependency, but the condition was forced upon them by what Mary Crow Dog called an "alien, more powerful culture."
With late autumn, our spate of trips bringing volunteers to South Dakota had ended so we had moved from our little house to the Sleepy Pine Motel because it would be just the two of us during the dreary winter months. I immediately felt the stricture of having only one small, high window after having had greater access to the prairie sky and its abundance of light through the ample windows in the house. I had been reading about the transitional period from the camp circle days to “acculturation” and had learned that Spotted Tail had disliked the mansion the government had built for him so he had moved back to a nearby camp and installed each of his wives in their own tipis. The conical tents were cooler in the summer than houses without air conditioning had been. This was one of the reasons Native Americans gave when explaining why they’d had a difficult time transitioning from the round structure to the square one. Black Elk had remarked that residing in the first log houses built on the reservations was "a bad way to live.” He declared, “There can be no power in a square."
Elmo's sister Edna had become quite affronted by my regurgitations of the long ago, displaying a frustration which ran counter to her normally serene personality when I repeated some anecdote I'd gleaned from a book. She seemed to be growing weary of my ramblings about the larger-than-life “Indians” who had roamed the surrounding prairie before the coming of wasichu. These personae often seemed more alive to me than the people I saw going through the motions of life on the reservation. When I asked her if she had ever slept in a tipi, she adopted an unusually sarcastic tone, telling me in no uncertain terms that she thought the people who claimed they wanted to return to the old ways were ridiculous. "I'd like to see how long they would last without their carpeting, their heating and their air conditioning," she retorted; “much less how they’d feel about giving up their televisions.”
Edna was one of the Native Americans who held no grief over the passing of their former ways of life. She credited her mother for her advocacy of the Episcopal Church, saying it was easy for her to be faithful to her religion—to try to protect it as it was—because she could remember the devotion her mother had displayed when she walked to church every Sunday, even trudging through deep snow to get there. "I think about always following those footsteps," she remarked, her pensive look illustrating how much she missed her mom.
But there were those who said they'd grown tired of what they saw as empty promises made by Christianity, which they believed had only given lip-service to equality. I felt as torn as the culture I was interacting with as I straddled the past and the present. A powwow at the middle school brought a great surge of emotions when I heard the wailing and the drumbeats of the native music for the first time. Watching the sun glinting from the thimbles on the jingle dancers' costumes, I longed for a flash of emotional clarity; one that would show me whether I had a right to the grief I felt, as this was not my history to mourn.
It was then I came to realize it was my own internal pain being reflected back to me, not theirs, causing me grief. The history of oppression that had deposited trauma in these people echoed a milder incidence of oppression in my own life. But I had been choosing to focus on the external chaos around me—fixating on them rather than on my own feelings of despair. It was true that for the luck of the draw, I could have been the Native American woman slumped over on the curb a few feet away, clutching the empty bottle of booze and her tattered dignity. But this was not my path, as much as I wrongly identified with her pain.
These realizations were confusing ones, and I struggled to keep fear from overriding my admiration for how they held their lives together. After all, it must have required a great deal of strength and courage to face each new day knowing what was ahead in the way of poverty, racism and turmoil.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
Mniwakan Wacipi
After a 2pm session with Davelyn, Jim and I headed to the airport for a particularly long trek to South Dakota, which took us through Memphis and Minneapolis where we landed at midnight, rented a car and drove to Wagner. I’d had a tough time staying awake as we cut through the drenching dark of farmland on the furrowed lip of the Great Plains.
Knowing the connection-heavy time in South Dakota was going to take up a great deal of energy, I had been feeling desperate to get back into my writing. The most stimulating attempt I had managed was reading an essay by Tom Wolfe in Harpers titled “Stalking the Billion-footed Beast” on the plane between Memphis and Minneapolis. In it he declared the realistic novel a form that wallows enthusiastically in the dirt of everyday life and the dirty secrets of class envy. “Dickens, Dostoyevski, Balzac, Zola and Sinclair Lewis assumed that the novelist had to go beyond his personal experience and head out into society as a reporter,” he wrote. “Zola called it documentation, and his documenting expeditions to the slums, coal mines, the races, the folies, department stores, wholesale food markets, newspaper offices, barnyards, railroad yards, and engine decks, notebook and pen in hand, became legendary.”
It was Zola who coined my favorite declaration, “If you asked me what I came into this world to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.” Oh if I could only figure out how I might do this, I thought; realizing I had been so stymied I was frozen in time and doomed to silence. We had pulled up to the little house in Wagner in the wee hours of the morning. Ragged and drained, I had given Sam a drink of water and fallen into bed. Jim was out the door early in the morning, hoping to catch up with Elmo and Rocky at the Spot Café. I turned on the television to see the horror that everyone else was seeing: a massive earthquake had devastated San Francisco. “A quiet crunch” is how one woman described the falling buildings. I marveled at the highway system in the images—buckled and broken into sections, and tossed around, the roads in some parts of the city looked like pieces of a toy racetrack scattered haphazardly or left in a heap of disarray. One of the earthquake survivors said, “Almost nothing could blow me down now that I’ve been through this. I’ve survived and I have a different perspective: I’ll now just have to start over and find my purpose.”
My foundations were crumbling, but I was not certain it was a quiet crunch. Not so unlike those who had to find ways to rebuild on the West Coast, I was starting over—beginning to build a self that I hoped could withstand the life I was living. I’d turned to M. Scott Peck’s The Road Less Traveled in order to understand character disorder, as I had learned it was my diagnosis. As I was reading about what created this condition, it occurred to me that the government (the controlling parent) had created a nation of character-disordered children, not just with the non-assimilated Native Americans on reservations but in white culture within America’s borders, as well.
“Who are you?” Davelyn had asked during the session just before we had left town. This should have been such a simple question to answer but for the life of me, I couldn’t. When I wasn’t able to give her anything concrete, she pressed, “Put your observer to work; tell me what you like and dislike, even if it’s trivial.” The only thing I could come up with was how good it felt to be smart. Later that day, I realized I had likely said this because Jim had mentioned in conversation the night before how proud he was of my intelligence. How was it that I needed my husband to give me the words for a self I should have known innately?
With each passing day, the excitement of those who would worship in Woniya Wakan grew exponentially. With the foundation, walls and roof in place, I was called upon to begin cleaning the one-hundred-year-old stained glass panels we had painstakingly lifted from Holy Fellowship. On one rare afternoon when the saws and hammers were quiet, the door's slamming reverberated, jarring me from concentration. I was alone on the jobsite as a Native American man approached my worktable, his unsteady advance alarming me because it seemed he was ready to topple with every faltering step he took. I feared for my own safety and for his—feeling uneasy at the thought that his head would hit the concrete floor if he stumbled, but dreading even more my own vulnerability if he remained upright.
Reaching the table, he clumsily leaned onto its edge, extending one hand toward me with the dirt-streaked palm turned upward. He swayed there for a few seconds then muttered, “Please.” His breath was sour and runnels of mucus caked his upper lip in varying stages of viscosity. He had entered this building because he wanted to be saved, but he didn’t come seeking Jesus, who extended one hand toward him from the panels of glass spread across my worktable. He came to beg for money with which to buy mniwakan wacipi—liquor—as he knew the fiery liquid would stop the trembling that was heaving the foundation of his existence, a solace the concept of Jesus couldn’t possibly offer him in his desperate state of mind.
I was seeing this disintegration of the Native American psyche with regularity by merely walking down the street. The mornings had grown cold and my body shivered as I made my way to the jobsite, thinking about how late-summer seemed to have suddenly fled, leaving autumn's crisp breath in its wake. When I approached the church, I noticed the chill was no deterrent to a Native American man sleeping on the sidewalk. He leaned against a street marker—his back slumped and his chin on his chest—with one knee pointing skyward and the other leg splaying awkwardly in the opposite direction. He remained in the same spot when I passed again at mid-morning, this time on my way to the hardware store. An assemblage of dogs had gathered around him as if wanting to keep him company. A particularly scruffy one, large and black, muzzled the face of the barely conscious man, who had just enough consciousness to shoo him with a wave of his hand. When a few passes of his palm did nothing, he gave up, slumping deeper into his stupor.
The rays of the afternoon sun had strengthened when I passed on my way to the Spot for a short break later in the day. The drunk man still hadn’t moved, and the dogs had stayed with him in spite of the increasing heat, many of them panting in an effort to stay cool. As the day drew to a close, I left the church to head home and even as dusk’s shadows signaled night’s progression, he remained in the same position—the large black dog his only companion. Did the canine feel akin to this man, who seemed to have lost his ability to desire comfort, or was it feeling protective of someone who no longer seemed to have the capacity to care for himself?
The whites in Wagner had seen so much of this descent into an inebriated abyss that it seemed to have created loathing. I had seen the distasteful looks on the faces of the town's upstanding citizens when they passed an intoxicated Native American. Did seeing them activate their own fear, one that whispered they, too, would become victims of a life leaving only one mode of escape if they didn’t reject the behavior wholesale? The cultural breach was as wide as the oceans; the liquor was equally deep and just as unfathomable. This was indeed the edge of the world as far as I could tell, beyond which no man (or woman) survived without being forever scathed.
I could understand why those outside the Native American culture would assume their struggles were due to weakness, as I was harboring my own measure of judgment. But shouldn't we at least try to view what was happening to those who slipped into the chasm of hopelessness through a lens of compassion? If we did, maybe we wouldn’t be so quick to declare their culture a failure; would find a way to break the cycle of prejudice that had begun with the momentous arrival of Columbus, who had pompously assured the natives he had come from heaven. He had written in his log that he believed the Native Americans he found could easily be made Christians because they seemed to have no religion. If only this beginning could have been rewritten! In fact, I longed for a different start but as far as I could tell no one had created a pen with enough power to reach that far back into history; or, if they did, no one seemed to care enough to set its nib in motion…
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks again for stopping in!
Today’s post is a Let’s Blog Off sound-off, the theme of which is “The edge of your world.” To see the tipping point for the other LBO participants, click here for an ever-growing roster.
The Voice Which Calls
Elmo and Edna continued to surprise me as I grew to know the brother and sister better. We’d invited them to dinner one evening, and as I spooned a generous helping of the chicken casserole I’d made onto her plate, Edna said, “We were poor when we were growing up; we would go weeks without a dollar in the house. Even so, mother told me to always give something—whether it was something I’d made or as little as a penny. She said it wasn’t the amount you gave, it was how you gave it.”
Like Edna, Betty Zephier, had been telling me her life story. Her ancestry was a mix of Chickasaw and Choctaw she said one afternoon as we visited over cups of coffee. She was making me a morning star quilt and sewing a war eagle quilt for Jim. I’d never seen hand-work as perfect as hers—and that was saying something because both of my grandmothers, who’d quilted their entire adult lives, would have fawned over the remarkable artistry of the tall, beautiful woman with swarthy skin. Her profile was sharp, and her jet-black hair—lightly teased and combed back from her prominent forehead—gave her a regal appearance in spite of a pronounced shyness in her mannerisms.
As I was studying Betty’s features in an effort to remember her well enough to write them down, Faith Spotted Eagle walked into the Spot Café and approached our table. I had been told that Faith was one of the parishioners whose views bordered on activism, a fact that was proven during many of our conversations as she lamented how history had played out. After greeting us in her gentle but determined way she joined us, telling us about a trip she had taken to Greenwood with her husband the week before. They had traveled there to fish from the Missouri River, she explained, and as the sky had darkened to night, hundreds of fireflies set the river aglow. She said there was an eerie quiet and stillness to the evening, and it made her feel as if she had been touched by the spirits of all those who had been there before them. This was an example of how alive a nature-based spirituality remained in the culture of these thoughtful people.
I had watched a National Georgraphic special on PBS the night before she related this story to me, and the program had fascinated me because it explored the different sites of ancient cultures in the Americas. Archaeologists had explained some of their findings, and the narrators of the show were animated with excitement and respect for these ancient peoples. Why is it, I wondered, that there is still scorn for the ways of the plains Indians? Why didn’t they deserve the same respect as the Anasazi and the Navajos? I could certainly understand there was a difference in temperament involved—the plains Indians being warring tribes whereas the desert Indians were peaceful—but the prejudices I’d seen made it clear that our world was permeated with double standards.
As I pondered questions like these, Jim and I moved between the disparate worlds we occupied. In fact, life seemed a logistical nightmare at times. We had arrived in Tennessee to find it rainy and dreary—Bridal Veil Falls was flush with rain as I sat like a purring fat cat on the screened porch. It was almost impossible to believe that anyone in the world could be unhappy at that very moment. Then, I remembered the children and alcoholics of the housing community on the Yankton, those struggling to make sense of life on the Gaza Strip, the massacres of China’s Tiananmen Square and the damage being done by Colombia’s drug cartel. Measured against the drippy grayness I looked out upon, these flashing realizations brought my morning into paradox.
As the thoughts of South Dakota intruded, I wondered, How could you possibly approach the subject of alcoholism with a people who seemed to use it as their only means of escape from oppression but for whom it was said liquor’s deadly grip was physiological? I had picked up the habit of thinking of such things rather than pondering my own plight, which was becoming clearer as I continued the painful process of seeking healing. I was in therapy again—this time in earnest and with a new therapist, Davelyn, whom I sensed was going to help me figure out why I was struggling so, something that had been so long in coming. I felt she would not be one to give lip-service to my pain; rather she seemed determined to help me name it and understand where its sourced resided within my psyche. I longed to become a whole person; felt this process would help me to find a rich writer’s voice, not the thin, puny one I was using just to get by.
Somehow, I think she understood how desperately I wanted to save my own life. I’m not sure she knew how important writing would be to my survival, as I didn’t yet understand that piece of the puzzle myself because my desire to reach great depths with my words—to offer something to humanity—was just budding. I guess this fact did prove I had a mission after all, but mine was one with a selfish purpose at its core—shoring myself up as the world swirled around me and finding a voice that would be strong enough to leave something meaningful to the world. I was growing to despise the title “missionary.” Jim could call himself anything he wanted, but I was not at all comfortable with that albatross around my neck. I was becoming less ashamed of my struggle, but I also wondered if those who might read my work someday would feel as if they were drinking great cups of sadness—like giant mugs of espresso, the bitterness hard to take after the first few sips.
I wondered why I even bothered to write such darkness down. As this forlorn thought popped into my head, the sun emerged, igniting the trees as if they were suddenly wearing jewels—the droplets of water dancing on their leaves turning to prisms as the wind nudged them into the light. In her early diary, Anaïs Nin wrote nearly 70 years before that moment of luminosity, “I long to write. I feel that if I were left alone for a long time, I could do something; I could discover the source of the voice which calls me night and day. I wish for tranquility, for solitude.” I felt a great surge of emotion welling in my throat as I read her words. If she was to be believed, my struggle wasn’t as unnecessary as Jim and our priest contended, the two colluding to “pull me out” of my self-absorbed wallowing. Nin went on to say, “somehow, even as an old maid, an author, an unnoticed individual, I am going to be useful and do something worthwhile during my life.” The word “worthwhile” traveled through the corridors of my mind, and I marveled at how closely I felt her struggle resembled mine when she declared, “the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.” Was this time approaching for me? Or would the compressed bloom of my desire to express myself wither and fall from the stem of my life before I had the courage to turn my face toward the light?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This post is a participating entry in today’s #LetsBlogOff, the theme of which is “a favorite flower story.” I was the flower at the point in my life when the above snippet of my story took place. How pretty the bud of my struggling self appeared (or not), I will leave for my biographers to decide. All I knew is that I kept hoping beyond hope that at some point in time, the sun would shine brightly on me so I could bloom in my own way. I have survived and I open my face to the sunlight as often as I can remember to do so in the fast-paced world of my life as it is today. This post is a celebration of talented therapists like Davelyn—the first to show me what it meant to keep my petals intact even when life’s ferocious winds buffeted me from all sides.
Here is the Spirit of the Lord
Norman Rockwell's "I Will Do My Best."
I walked the streets of Wagner feeling as if I’d been drawn into a vacuum; as if I had been shunted back in time to when I was a kid in Lookout Valley. Every time I tried to push myself to a better explanation, I always came back to the premise that it felt just like moving through a Norman Rockwell painting. With my past coming up so often, I couldn’t help but draw some parallels, one of which was the fact that southerners shared with Native Americans a penchant for telling tales. Grandpa Joe Packard was a prime example. He was a natural storyteller with an ease of delivery that made his humanitarian lessons he plucked from the mundane events of everyday life and infused with spiritual admonitions refreshing. He often presented the sermons when Father Hobbs was away—pacing in front of the congregation with his hands folded behind his back, his head slightly bowed in concentration.
His baggy, threadbare pants—about a size too large for his frail frame—were cinched to his waist with a disintegrating leather belt. The frayed collar of his shirt, only partially closed under a haphazardly knotted tie, encircled a thin neck the color of cinnamon. He was missing more teeth than he had retained so his smile puckered his swarthy face when he was amused, lending him the appearance of a wizened old coot with a tender core. His habit of removing his badly smudged glasses to wipe his brow with an oversized handkerchief created a series of small silences throughout the service. Though he wasn't doing this for the dramatic effect, a certain tension built as he slicked back the few sprigs of gray hair clinging to the top of his head, replaced the dark rimmed glasses and jammed his hanky back into his pants pocket, leaving the pointed end of one corner trailing down the leg of his trousers.
One of my favorite sermons recounted a man's visit to his home. The fable opened with the visitor saying he'd heard that two of Grandpa Joe's three horses were for sale. They talked briefly about care and feeding; and then the man, whom Grandpa Packard called a fine Christian fellow, left. The next morning when Grandpa Joe awakened, the two horses were missing, leaving his lone saddle horse standing in the enclosure.
"They must have gotten out and gone down to the crick," he said to the attentive congregation, "so I headed in that direction." When he rode past the barn belonging to the man who had paid him a visit the day before, the horse he was riding sounded. In reply, the missing horses whinnied from inside the barn. He swung from his saddle and slung open the barn doors, releasing the horses from their confinement. Once he had returned home and secured the horses inside the corral, the "so called friend," as Grandpa Joe called him, paid him another visit. He told Grandpa Packard he would need to be compensated for keeping his horses safe overnight since they had wandered onto his land. Grandpa Packard told him that he wasn't paying him for stealing his horses.
"You can't expect to come to church and say, 'Here is the spirit of the Lord,' and then live without religion in your everyday life," cautioned Grandpa Joe in conclusion. "God must also be in your home for him to be real." Witnessing the faithfulness of these Native Americans who had fully embraced Christianity seemed to be pushing me into a silent but intense rebellion. Why was it so hard for me to respect that they were willing to trust an institution that had mistreated them in the past? I fumed. The stance of the church had certainly changed for the better over time, and I had no idea what it meant to want to be accepted by an exclusionary culture in almost every other way. These loyal Episcopalians seemed to have no use for the question "Where was God when the Hotchkiss guns were blazing?" so why should I? I knew it wasn’t that simple; knew the ideal of the Christian God they held in their minds wasn’t responsible for the fact the white man had slaughtered so many Native American people. But the wasichu—categorically responsible for the atrocities—had forced the deity down their throats along with everything else white culture had deemed sacred.
Christian scripture proposes that the church was built on the foundation of God. Those who came to spread God's word seemed to have relied solely upon this immovable foundation—like a concrete slab, a crushing weight—forgetting that Christianity's most important building blocks were the humanitarian teachings of Christ. Had we come any closer to treating those who are different from ourselves with respect and equality? I questioned, knowing full well the answer was that we had not. The disadvantaged situations in which so many of the Native Americans still lived proved we had made so little headway as to have essentially gone careening backwards.
I let the arguments filter through my mind as I enjoyed the late autumn sun, which was still strong enough to allow me to sit outside in a lawn chair with only an occasional shiver from the brisk breezes. I was reading Ian Frazier’s Great Plains, fascinated by the author’s descriptive abilities and his natural style of relating history—both painful and playful. His story of bumping into Le War Lance, an Oglala Sioux, on the streets of Manhattan was one of my favorites. Little did I know, ten years after reading this, I would make my own move to New York City. The thought of that would have sent me into hysterical fits of laughter at the time, as there was nothing about my life that would have predicted it.
Frazier recounted conversations with Le War Lance, the last of which ended with the Native American singing several songs for him in Sioux. “Then he opened his eyes and looked at the Sixth Avenue masses hurrying past with shopping bags,” Frazier wrote. “’Immigrants!’ he shouted. He shook his head and said, ‘Pasta!’ Did I hear that right? Yes; in tones of exasperation, as if this was really the last straw: ‘Pasta!’”
The only Sioux music I’d heard on the reservations was a wide range of Christian hymns sung in the lilting language—the oddity of hearing the plodding rhythms intoned in the foreign language not quite strange enough to keep the songs from sticking in my mind long after the service had ended. “Rock of Ages” was flowing through my head as I walked into the house for my weekly call to Davelyn, my therapist—one of the only things keeping me glued together during the upheaval I was experiencing.
This hymn, sung in Navajo, proves my point that the tune still carries even though the words are unfamiliar. Today’s installment of this memoir is a participating post in the Let’s Blog Off series. To see what songs drive others to the brink, click here.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
The Heavens Cannot Contain You
Emily Dickenson wrote, “You cannot fold a Flood—/ And put it in a Drawer.” As I left Costa Rica behind and became more entrenched in South Dakota, I felt this was my task as I labored to make sense of the impressions and feelings I’d been gathering during our work in the mission field. The church in Greenwood was haunting me a bit because removing the stained glass windows had made me feel as if I had marred its historic beauty.
In her account of the Church of Holy Fellowship in That They May Have Life, Sneve states the little chapel was first built in August 1870 from logs gathered by the Native Americans who wanted a church on their reservation. In 1873, W. Hobart Hare, then Bishop of the newly created Missionary Jurisdiction of Niobrara, arrived at Yankton Mission and chose the church for his cathedral, making his home in a small room built onto its side.
The frame structure as we found it in 1989 was not the original; it wasn’t concecrated until 1886, a little over one hundred and three years prior to my setting foot within its interior. One of the things I enjoyed about the history of the Native Americans I was reading was their embracing of their own brand of mythology, something they seemed to do as naturally as any culture since the ancient Greeks. In fact, they were steeped in their version of it before the wasichu, white perople, came along and tried to snuff it out of them. In Yankton, one of the earliest bits of folklore relating to the Episcopal Church and its entrée into Sioux society was the story of the conversion of Tipi Sapa, then the chief of the Yanktonai whose name in Dakota meant Black Lodge. Once “Christianized,” Tipi Sapa had been given the name Philip Deloria, and was lauded as “the best known of all the native priests.”
Sneve tells the story of the day his interest in the church was first recorded. Tipi Sapa rode by the chapel in full war regalia when he heard the congregation singing “Guide Me Thou Great Jehovah” in Dakota, stopping for a brief time to listen to the words. He didn’t enter the chapel at that time but returned another day to hear the same hymn being sung. It is said the words of the hymn made a great impression on the young chief, a response that eventually led him to approach Bishop Hare about becoming a Christian. When the bishop told him he must give up his chief’s position, cut his hair and become a simple man, he balked, stating he was a powerful chief. He did eventually agree to be baptized, and was sent to Shattuck Military School for the beginning of the inculturation process. After completing the educational and service requirements to enter the priesthood, he was ordained a deacon at St. Stephen’s chapel on the Cheyenne River reservation, then spent forty years on the Standing Rock reservation as a priest, returning to the Yankton reservation in 1925. His story expanded beyond Native American culture when his visage was placed in the reredos of the high altar in the National Cathedral in Washington, D.C.—one of only three Americans among the 98 “Saints of the Ages.”
My stewing about the abandoned chapel in Greenwood was the counter opposite to how the parishioners were feeling. I could have taken a cue from my grandmother, who loved to say the more you stirred shit, the worse it smelled but I couldn’t let go of my disgust over how the church had treated Native Americans in the past. My viewpoint was not shared by the Wagner congregation whose excitement had reached a fever pitch by the day Bishop Anderson was visiting for the groundbreaking. Just before his closing comments for the ceremony that day, the Bishop read a prayer: “Oh Lord God of Israel, the heavens cannot contain you, yet you are pleased to dwell in the midst of your people, and have moved us to set apart a space on which to build a house of prayer: accept and bless the work which we have now begun, that it may be brought to completion, to the honor and glory of your Name; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.”
He then remarked how the great spirit had waffled through the framed shell of a building we had been standing within, the studded walls surrounding a rough concrete slab foundation still fully open to the elements. “The heavens cannot contain you,” he said, raising his hands to let the wind stir the papers he held. I thought this was a fitting statement considering how the strong breezes had fluttered our clothing and programs throughout the entire service. The pages of the Bibles the lay readers had been holding danced as if in a ceremony of their own as the men tried to keep their places. Finally, the Bishop ended his closing statements by declaring the wind was indeed the spirit, or breath, of the “word,” because it had joined in the celebration of a new beginning for the Church of the Holy Spirit.
Father Hobbs, who led the congregation, had spoken of miracles during the service, his list including the $55,000 grant from the United Thank Offering, the construction knowledge Jim brought to the project, and the free labor given by all the volunteers who traveled with us from Chattanooga. “The miracle of this spirit of volunteerism will allow the church to be debt free,” he said: “a luxury, yet a necessity in the life of this small parish.”
A feeling of pride that we had brought something of value to a group of people who’d rarely caught breaks in our country was battling it out with my feelings of regret. Would our hymns sung in English have drawn Tipi Sapa in if he’d rode by on horseback today? I questioned. The only answer was the breeze stirring the skirt I’d worn, the fabric whipping into a frenzy as the Bishop walked over to shake Jim’s hand. The silence of the undulant air provided no answer as I smiled and tried to appear gracious while my emotions buffeted my heaving mind. Where would this turmoil lead me? I wondered as the Bishop embraced me in a gentle hug.
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in Let's Blog Off. To see how my blogging compatriots chose to answer how the preceding generations had made an impact on their lives, click here.
The Depository of Arrogance
We drove the long stretch of road cutting through miles of farmland and ranchland between Wagner and Greenwood, home to Peter Cook who often brought lovely beaded jewelry and barrettes he created to church to sell afterwards. His beadwork was as impressive as his baking abilities, as I had experienced by relishing his incredible apple pies. We were there to remove several stained glass windows from the Church of the Holy Fellowship, one of three abandoned chapels set like unpolished crystals on the ragged banks flanking the Missouri River. I walked along the moist earth wondering how much money had been spent on the reservations trying to bridge a cultural gap that couldn’t possibly be spanned with money.
The Episcopal congregations had been dwindling for a while because the seniors, who made up the bulk of the worshipers, were dying away. Maybe it had always been inevitable that these churches, monuments to a foreign deity, would become empty laboratories of coercion, their experiments doomed to fail. After all, how much clout could a religion sustain when it replaced a spirituality vitally alive each and every day with a building staying locked more often than it remained open?
With the decreased activity caused by so many defections into Wagner, the neighborhood now languished with only an occasional dog's barking to interrupt the quietude. It saddened me to add to the decline of this spot, which once saw the dockage of paddleboats as they stopped on their way along the pre-dammed Missouri during the rowdy days of the westward expansion. The new church in Wagner—soon to be consecrated the Church of the Holy Spirit or Woniya Wakan—would only sentence Holy Fellowship to further decline.
Truth be told, the church had fallen silent long before we came to build a new one. Rather than hold services embraced by the warm patina of the wooden pews and the gentle ambiance of the clapboard chapel, the parishioners of Holy Fellowship had been worshiping in a community center next to the empty lot where Woniya Wakan would stand. The center was an institutional prototype: impersonal, cold and bland. The floor was irrevocably dirty—a fact the swarming flies seemed to appreciate—and the tic-tic-tic of the overhead fan kept the silence company between liturgy, prayer and song.
I loved singing hymns in Dakota. I struggled through the breathy language, appreciating the rhythmical intonations, the nuance of sound, the inflections. But I grew to dread the Bible readings. As soon as I took my seat in one of the rickety metal folding chairs, I’d scan the handouts holding the Collect, the Psalm and the readings to see if what was printed there was disdainful given the events of the past 150 years, as it happened more often than not. We read the Collect in unison: "Remember those who are ill treated, since you also are in the body." How insulting that these Native Americans were being told to remember what we had long ignored. The prayers were no less disturbing to me: "Guide the people of this land, and of all the nations, in the ways of justice and peace, that we may honor one another and serve the common good."
I found it ironic that I had been embracing a religion which professed to bring justice to people when the rights of the Native Americans had been completely disregarded early on. I left these services in a confused daze, wanting to apologize, yet not fully understanding why I was compelled to say I was sorry. Forgive us for we surely knew not what we were doing, I silently begged. But the resigned awareness I sought would not hold. By examining a more honest account of history than the one I had been presented when I was a student in the public school system, I was now learning that those who were in power during the colonization of America did indeed know what they were doing, as cultural annihilation was sanctioned by both the government and the church.
The push to save the "heathen" souls had resulted in an evangelical frenzy which brought both the Catholics and the Episcopalians to Indian Territory. When asked to select the "official" religion on the reservations, the Native Americans chose the Episcopal faith because its priests wore white cassocks. The Catholics wore similar robes; only theirs were black. Good triumphing over evil? Cruelty is cruelty, regardless of the color in which it veils itself, I fumed as I read about the abuses these clergy members brought with them.
The mission schools, irrespective of the denomination, seemed to be the worst offenders. Stories of priests punishing Native American children for speaking their own language at school were plentiful. One man, who was caught speaking Lakota as a boy, remembered when a priest took him out of the lunch line at the mission school where he was forced to board, pulling him to a boiling pot on the stove where he held the boy's hand to the searing metal in order to “teach him a lesson.” How could I feel good about being associated with the Christian faith when stories like this left me horrified? I sat and silently pled with the Native Americans in the church services to stop dutifully listening to liturgy that had been rendered empty by these abominations but I couldn’t know what battles had been fought by them and lost, nor could I understand what comfort might have been gained by this supplication each week.
And wasn't my attitude just as arrogant as the stance of those who had come to conquer rather than to respect? Was I not simply one more white person attempting to impose my will upon them? It was certainly, at the very least, a variation on the same theme, which reared its ugly head when any of us outside their culture asked, How can we solve their problems? This one seemingly meaningful question, I believe, had done irreparable harm. Why add one more ounce of condescension to the depository of arrogance? I asked myself.
Though it was difficult not to question how things could have been righted when witnessing the level of dysfunction resulting from the collision and the haphazard amalgamation of two disparate cultures, I would have to hold myself accountable by remembering I didn’t have the answers to the unruly questions presenting themselves at every turn. I often wondered what change I could have inspired had I been able to turn back time: might I have had a positive influence on history? It was a ridiculous exercise, of course, because those days when consideration could have steered Native Americans to a more powerful position in our society were far in the past. All I could possibly do was to try and make my own peace with how things had been handled. But how?
If you are new to my blog and you'd like to start at the beginning, here's the link to the first post. Reading the "Start Here" sidebar on the homepage gives you the earliest information. Thanks for stopping in!
This is a participating post in Let’s Blog Off, the subject today being “If I could turn back time…” To see the full roster of bloggers who are riffing on the subject, click here.
And the Book Becomes a Reality!
The Let's Blog Off topic today is "What are you looking forward to in the new year?" Hands down for me, besides adroyt being a smashing success, is a book deal for The Road to Promise. I thought I'd take this opportunity, as this is the first post of 2012, to thank everyone who has stopped or continues to stop in and read my ramble through my past. Happy New Year to all of you, and don't forget to read the other forward-thinking posts by our merry band of revelers. Today's installment follows: happy reading everyone!
Gumption
We had made our way back to Wagner to begin our work on the church, and the quirkiness of the contradictions held within the town’s boundaries were apparent from the start. We had rented a house the color of crème caramel with dark brown shutters and a perfectly manicured yard. The china hutch in the dining room held a carefully arranged collection of plates stamped with Norman Rockwell's nostalgic vignettes. By stepping out the front door, I could find any one of these twenty Rockwellean scenes superimposed on life!
Most mornings, the counter at the Spot Café on Main Street was filled with farmers and ranchers in frayed overalls. Their white tank undershirts shone through the wash-worn fabric of their faded plaid shirts, and their cleanly shaven heads nodded as they discussed unrelenting weather, unyielding land and the day's news.
These hardy men fit the stereotypical image of the American farmer, fixtures at the popular diner every morning, just as Elmo was. It seemed to me that he had been sent to teach me a lesson about stereotypes because he looked nothing like the Native American I had fixed in my mind's eye before traveling to South Dakota. In fact, he was practically indistinguishable from those stalwart men whose backs rose like stout tree trunks above the swivel stools except that his age and elderly leisure had softened his once robust build. He shuffled into the diner our first morning there, swinging his cane, which he used to oblige his rhythmical rolling gate, as he launched into a monologue about Columbus Day a few weeks away.
The fact that he had latched onto the subject proved he had a joke for every occasion. He asked me if I knew why they celebrated the holiday on the reservation. I had actually wondered why they would commemorate an event that had introduced so much turmoil into their culture and I was genuinely interested to hear where the conversation would go. He didn’t disappoint, answering, "Because it's the day the tourist trade opened in America!" I recorded snippets like these in my writers notebook, recording how he laughted heartily at the cleverness of his joke, my legs crossed on the toffee-colored sofa awash in a sea of oatmeal-hued blandness in our temporary living room as I relived my conversations with our new acquaintances. Each time I was treated to Elmo’s boyish humor, I thought about how Vine Deloria, Jr., had been so right about his treatment of even unsavory subjects, a trait Deloria claimed was common among Native Americans.
The author maintained that it’s a great disappointment to them that most experts who wrote about their lives rarely mentioned their propensity for humor. Jokes about Columbus and Custer were especially popular because these men had left indelible marks on their culture, mainly negative ones. The more desperate the subject, Deloria pointed out, the more humor was warranted.
In the southern tradition that had shaped me, we were more likely to grow maudlin when extenuating circumstances left us reeling. Far too many of us had bought into the myth that we were doomed to the inferno of God's Baptist-sized wrath, which was mirrored by our hellishly hot summer climate. How, after all, could the intense heat of purgatory be any worse than that of the deep south in August? went the refrain. Maybe the impudence displayed by the Native Americans who made fun of their oppressors could have taught me something about lightening up! And yet, I wondered whether the humor was merely scabs covering deep festering wounds.
As I was journaling about their ability to be lighthearted, I felt the need to name it and I hit upon the word “gumption.” My mother’s mother had had it, as had my father’s father on his side of the family, but it been beaten out of the next generation to come along so I inherited none of what passed for backbone. I wanted to get my gumption back—and I was trying—but it wasn’t playing very well with my husband who wasn’t accustomed to being contradicted. Elmo was worth watching, I thought to myself as Jim and I walked through the late summer sunlight in the mêlée of Wagner’s centennial celebration. Maybe I could learn how to have a voice while keeping my pluck in check. Piece of cake, right? Hardly!
An insanity had gripped the small town, transforming it from sleepy to frenetic. It was Americana run amok as I had never seen it—an arts and crafts fair had taken over the park; there was a rodeo in the afternoon; an outdoor dance went into full swing on Saturday evening; and the parade, which lasted the good part of an entire day, was a spectacle to behold. The variety of entries traversing Main Street was astonishing, including everything from covered wagons to a veterinarian in a dog suit on his four wheeler onto which he’d fashioned a mechanized dog’s leg raising and lowering as a kid in a fire hydrant costume walked beside it! Hundreds of people crouched on the curb or lounged in lawn chairs as they watched the long line of tractors, trucks and horse-and-buggy rigs move by. Participation by Native Americans was almost non-existent, with Elmo and the other representatives of the all-Indian American Legion being the largest group. Thirteen of them marched in a color guard formation while six preceded them in the bed of Elmo's battered blue truck—too frail to make the trip on foot.
Soon after they made their way past, a National Guard tank lumbered down the street. The small children ran to their parents to hide their faces from the huge, noisy machine while the older kids jumped up and down, shrieking with glee from the adrenaline rush. They supported Uncle Sam with gusto in this town as the proliferation of painted wooden replicas of the gray-haired gent, his finger pointing relentlessly from front lawns, proved. The tractor still represented a symbol of strength and continuity, and they had models from 1920 to the current one rolling down Main Street. But nothing made the kids go crazier than the tank, its articulated metal track grating on the asphalt as it chewed its way along.
I had decided to bring my buddy Sam with me for a taste of life in Wagner, and we walked him to the park to take in the arts and crafts, bumping into Edna, Elmos’s sister, and another parishioner named Rocky once there. Jim went to the bank with Rocky to meet “everyone who’s anyone in town,” as he put it, and then to get a haircut with him. I wandered around for a while, noticing how the tumult of the Midway increased after the sun set. The children’s faces were luminous in the neon-soaked air, their screams ricocheting from the buildings surrounding the square as bodies were jostled about—slung one way forcefully only to be quickly jolted in the other direction. It was difficult to walk because the kids were so excited to make their way from one ride to the next, they didn’t care whether anyone was in their way. Arms stretched forward, they simply plowed through the adults milling around without a thought to manners.
A group of Menonite girls stood in front of me as I watched the beauty contest. The uniformity of their outfits—made alike from a variety of conservatively-patterned materials—brought them stares from everyone else gathered around the stage. The black scarves covering their long curls were held in place with clips so that the wind didn’t expose them. I wondered how they felt watching the girls on stage, their bare shoulders gleaming with the lights trained on them and their high heels clicking on the planks of wood. Did it rankle them to see those teens being celebrated for their physical beauty, their prettily coifed hair blowing free in the breeze? Was there an ounce of feeling in them that life wasn’t fair? I couldn’t help but wonder. Or were they relieved to be free from the burden of adornment?
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Incurable Untimeliness
The hawk was keening in the distance, likely as displeased with the steamy air it slogged through as my writer’s notebook, its pages rippling as the hot moisture seeped into the fibers. I had not been exploring myself there for a while and a fear had been building in me. What if, once I was able to get back to the blue lines and black ink, I would not like what my handwriting would record? Even worse, I thought, what if nothing would flow from my pen at all? It was a sad thing I had been becoming and I wanted to rewrite the script but I was having the toughest time with the beginning. Truth be told, it was so difficult to start because the ending scared me to death. Once begun, somehow I knew there would be no turning away from that trajectory.
I had taken a break from reading about Native American culture knowing we’d be back in that world soon enough. I had turned to some kinder, gentler authors—Robert Frost and Henry David Thoreau among them—as I researched an article I was writing. Being so steeped in nature through their words brought me great pleasure and I thought about how influences like that could seep into a writer’s work without him or her realizing it. I had seen this happen in my narratives: as I read these “mentors” my writing seemed to naturally deepen to a point that everyday subjects, especially where nature was concerned, were infused with significance through a personification I was somehow driven to achieve.
I was carrying a book of Frost’s poems to the screened porch when I caught sight of a spider web spun tightly to the railing on the deck. It caught my eye because the dew had collected in spots and the droplets were tiny prisms as the morning light flashed into being. I was always in awe of these webs—so beautiful in their artfulness while being deathtraps for winged things. How could the murderous snare look so pristine in the freshness of the dawn? I wondered, thinking of Frost’s poem “To a Moth Seen in Winter.”
Just as a spider web could be considered in a deeper context, this poem held reverberations for me. A moth, destined to die from the cold, lights on the poet’s hand, inspiring a reverie that has great emotional depth. The spider web I continued to examine from the shade of the screened porch and the unfortunate insects who ended up being the arachnid’s meal held echoes for me, as I felt caught in the web of a life that kept me from having the peace I dreamed was possible. If only, was the refrain that pressed itself into my mind over and over. It was as if Frost’s last three lines were as much a caveat for me as they were for that moth: no one could touch my life, much less save it, if I couldn’t figure out what it would take to solve my own dilemma. If only…
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- Posted from East Hampton, NY
Land of the Free
Once we had exited the Rockies, driving from Steamboat Springs to Wagner, South Dakota, was a lesson in monotony, the Plains stretching into oblivion as we struck a straight coarse on the shaft of asphault that ran right up to the horizon. We passed over so many dried creek beds, I wondered how anything could survive on the sun-scoured expanse of brittle grasses. Old Woman Creek had packed up and gone, leaving behind a scattering of brittle bones and the splintered scaps of cottonwood limbs begging for rain while the sky refrained.
The first elevation relief came as we neared the border between Wyoming and South Dakota in the form of the Black Hills. They were being pounded by a scowling storm, visible from as far away as Newcastle—its cloud-choked head feathering heavenward and its dark heart bearing down on the outer edge of the hills. The closer we drew, the angrier it seemed, I thought, and I was right: once we reached its proximity, we were pounded with hail so thick we could hardly see to drive. At one point, we were barely advancing as quarter-inch-sized balls of ice blanketed the ground an inch and a half deep.
I was thankful we were in such a macho vehicle—the old Bronco had seen much worse having been through four college-age boys in succession as Jim passed it from one son to another and had weathered a decade of being kicked around by the partying set that took over Steamboat each winter. Though it never shrugged, the sound of ice striking the thin metal of its hood and roof was deafening at times. I’d had kinder welcomes but in spite of the weather’s tantrum, I decided I wanted to return to the Black Hills someday because it was where the Native Americans believed nature had the most amplified spiritual voice. She had certainly been exercising it that day as we drove past tourist traps and tacky intrusions on a gorgeous backdrop of jagged peaks covered in the verdant thickness of pines reaching high into the sky.
Once past the Hills, the flatness of the land returned until we reached the Badlands, an incredibly bleak and frightening landscape if there ever was one. It was as if the earth was eating itself, and the bleached-out, bone-dry colors were the counter opposites to the Black Hills’ lush infusion of blue-greens and deep grays. I wondered how quickly it took the Badlands to change as plateaus and buttes melted away, then formed again as the edge of the grasslands caved in on itself. Is anything ever constant here or is this a treacherous world of continual dissolving? I wondered.
We skirted the Buffalo Gap Grasslands to see its buxom namesakes grazing—some in pairs and others wandering the expanses in small groups. The first prairie dogs came into view as we dipped a bit further into the park, their “Prairie Dog Town” a field of dirt mounds, some of which had the straight-backed homeowners themselves popping up from within as they haughtily surveyed us from their tunneled residences.
It felt as if it had taken weeks for us to make our way to Wagner, though it had been only a day and a half. When we arrived, we were greeted by the stalwart parishioners of the tiny town, and it wasn’t long before one stood out. We parked the Bronco at the house Jim had rented and made our way to the community center where we were being honored with a dinner, and I knew immediately who was going to be Jim’s favorite among our new friends. The minute we entered the open room, Elmo’s booming voice and thin cackling laugh, which shook his large girth, welcomed us, not once letting up during the entire evening.
He reminded me of an overstuffed teddy bear with its ears torn off because his head was shaved and his jowls were so pronounced, his tiny ears seemed tucked away behind the protruding cheeks. He wore baggy pants that had never been “in fashion,” the thick suspenders holding them up smudged where he would fiddle with them as he pontificated about one subject or another. His smile was so endearing to me because it reminded me of my grandmother’s when she was soaking her false teeth at night—the indented oblong of his big grin hiding his lips as if for safekeeping.
His eyes were perpetually twinkling because he was always thinking of his next joke or a riff he could interject into any conversation, whether it was actually fitting or not. That night, he pulled a leather pouch from his pocket. It was darkened and worn smooth from being handled innumerable times. He held it in front of him and paused for effect, finally saying with a drawl, “Well, lookie here!” As he said it, he slowly pulled a fly from its interior, which prompted Jim to ask, “Do you fish?”
Elmo answered, “Not anymore; but if I got stranded on the river somewhere I could catch my dinner!” He broke into a hearty laugh at his own joke, the only thing making it funny besides the fact he’d not likely been on a river in decades. As evidenced by his portliness, he did like to eat. “My Grandpa told me to always get a look at the cook before I eat at a restaurant,” he said that night. “He told me, ‘If the cook is skinny, don’t eat there; fat, jolly cooks mean a good meal because they constantly sample their own cooking!’” He referred to himself as a Siouxwegian because his ancestry was a mix of Sioux and Norwegian. When he explained this to me, he slapped his knee and shook his head as he sniggered, seeming so particularly amused he must have been hearing the fact for the first time, though that was not the case.
I couldn’t help but giggle myself as I scribbled my impressions of Elmo into my writer’s notebook on the flight home—a 12-hour journey that left me feeling exhausted but happy to see Sam after nine days away from him. I had picked up a number of books in South Dakota, among them Custer Died For Your Sins by Vine Deloria, Jr. It was a scathing book aimed at white culture but the chapter about the Native American sense of humor gave me extra insight into Elmo’s personality. I was working my way through the tough material during mornings on the screened porch—feeling my skin burn with shame that a people’s civil rights were still being breached in our country, especially since we were so fond of proclaiming we were the land of the free. I was receiving a painful education as to the ways of the world, the ways of our government and the ways of ugly racism.
I found myself wondering time and again why these weren’t the stories we were taught in school: why did our lessons stop after the Pilgrims and the Indians shared that supposed meal on that first Thanksgiving? Should it still be looked upon as such a thankful day? I questioned, closing Deloria’s book and wondering what other inconsistencies were about to come to the fore. According to the history books, the Native Americans gave their best to the Pilgrims who’d made their entrée into their world during that lauded celebratory meal, and I had just experienced the same level of generosity during a dinner in Wagner when a group of Native Americans who had so little to give provided us with a delicious and heartfelt experience.
I had been told that many Sioux took the rations they received from the government—cheese, sugar, flour and butter, for instance—to the dump and tossed them into the trash to make a point. Peter Cook was not one of those. He brought several of the most magnificent apple pies I’d ever seen or tasted to that dinner. As I watched his face gleam with pride when Jim relished his first bite, I thought about how very different history could have been. If only I could rewrite it, I’d include a great deal more true “thanks giving” and a lot less fanfare.
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God is Wakantanka
I had learned a painful lesson (once again), one that I need not have repeated—a writer’s conference has never been a good environment for me and that remained “my truth.” I was simply not at all comfortable talking about myself or my work to strangers who had the same terrified look in their eyes invading my own when my work was the subject of scrutiny. It was rather pathetic, really—I could say this only because I felt I was pitiful when I used the side trips from life as a search for acceptance from others who had the same insecurities as mine. The simple truth was that I needed to be the one accepting myself because until I did, anyone else attempting to validate me was a lost cause.
Hoping to quiet the storm the conference had awakened within my head, I retreated to our friend’s house tucked into the lush spruce-speckled hills with a book I had been given during our first trip to South Dakota—Virginia Driving Hawk Sneve’s That They May Have Life: The Episcopal Church in South Dakota 1859-1976. The boys—Jim and his friend—took fly fishing trips to area lakes and went into town to play while I devoured the recount of the church’s history with South Dakota tribes. It had become an important piece of literature documenting the actions of the Episcopalians working among the Native Americans, and Sneve wasted no time in getting to the crux of the matter, beginning her first chapter “God is Wakantanka” with this paragraph:
“When the missionaries brought Christianity to the Dakota or Sioux Indians, there was a great change in the native value system. Some Indians were able to retain old values and integrated them into Christian beliefs, so that the old was combined with the new and conversion to a new religion was an easy extension of the old. For others the conflicts were insurmountable and there was hostility and resistance to the missionaries and to Christianity.”
As I lumbered deeper into the past through her words, I felt a great ache for people who had been duped time and again by church and state, and I realized I had gleaned something that made my one day at the writer’s conference worthwhile. The evening speaker the night before had said, “Effort is the key: know your subject and work at it.” I used that as my battle cry, the only thing that made plowing through the material showing how the past had spiraled around the Native Americans like a snare tolerable. I was intellectualizing it all, of course; I knew better than to think such trauma could be emotionally understood by someone like myself who hadn’t experienced it. I was okay with that, as I felt I could at least be a witness to a subject no longer brought to the fore in our culture’s consciousness; and I just might instigate change at the very most.
“…in times of crisis and disorder,” Sneve wrote, “many Dakota slipped back to the old traditions and religions. Christianity among the Indians became very much like Christianity among the whites. Those who remained faithful Christians and accepted the new order realized that the old Dakota way of life was doomed: it could not stand against the stronger white civilization. They knew if they were to survive, they must adopt Christian standards and behavior.”
Sneve regresses in time, telling the stories of the missionaries’ interactions with the Sioux, noting the first convocation which took place in Santee on October 5th and 6th 1870, well over a century before I had attended one. With her description of the reservations reverberating in my head, we drove out of Steamboat heading toward South Dakota in an ornery Ford Bronco Jim had left at his friend’s since selling his half of another Steamboat retreat several years before. We would be using the brute of a vehicle for our transportation in South Dakota and it felt like the perfect workhorse as it thrust through the thin high-mountain air in the crispness of a late summer morning.
With the first touch of light coming into the sky, we drove the winding road as the brightness turned magnificently blue against the stark relief of the peaks looming black and bold. Along the road, the tips of wheatgrass sparked like paintbrushes dipped in a radiant sheen, and the racks of the antelope grazing in the fields glowed as the sun illuminated the summer’s velvet covering their horns. I juxtaposed this predawn beauty that enveloped us as we drove out of the Rocky Mountains with the words of Issac Heard, who wrote the History of the Sioux War and Massacres of 1862 and 1863. Sneve quotes him in her book, his descriptions of the Great Plains as the earliest reservation dwellers found them terrifying:
“It was a horrible region, filled with the petrified remains of the huge lizards and creeping things of the first days of time. The soil is miserable; rain rarely ever visits it. The game is scarce, and the alkaline waters of the streams and springs are almost certain death.”
With these images floating in my mind, we descended into the high plains and the land known as Wyoming, its resolute flatness stretching as far as the eye could see. It would have been ominous to traverse the dry and dusty high-valley floor on foot as many of the Native Americans did in the early days. We drove through the color of gold-kissed beige for so long that my eyes began playing tricks on me, making me believe everything around me was radiating like the scene was being filtered through heat. It was as if there was no other color existing anywhere in the entire world, as parched grass was interrupted only by the occasional tumbleweed clinging to the grid upon grid of barbed-wire fences.
The Bishop had certainly been right about the proliferation of land being cordoned off, an ironic fact given that one of America’s greatest mottos had always been “Don’t fence me in.” I had already convinced myself that if we had only had the good graces to have remembered this caveat when first interacting with the natives of our country, history could have been vastly different. What were we thinking? I wondered as we moved through the flatlands that comprised the middle of a country I had assumed I’d understood, only to come to realize I didn’t recognize it or its politics at all.
As the light harshened into late afternoon, I found myself missing home terribly, knowing the soothing surroundings of the world I had created for myself were farther away than ever before. Was I meant to be continually jerked away from anything closely resembling a haven so that I could serve as a testament to what was transpiring in the world around me? It seemed this continued to be my fate while all I wanted was my own bed, my own pillow and a room of my own in which to unravel all of the angst that the world brought tumbling into my life. Home, I thought; what a breathy word when spoken, what an emotional one when contemplated. I had had the opportunity to choose where to make my home. According to the books I was reading, the Sioux had been denied that privilege, and I was having a difficult time reconciling the fact in my heart and in my head.
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It just happens to be Let's Blog Off (on Twitter as #LetsBlogOff) and #TravelTuesday again. See how my pals are answering the question, "What is home?" here.
