Jamie Lee

Below is a piece I wrote several years ago. It has never been published or even read-more a part of my personal journal, but I like it and so offer it here. I missed my post last night after a long day in Pine Ridge at meetings and such. Oglala Lakota College classes begin next week and I’ll be there.

Honestly Speaking

In the Hardees on East North Street in Rapid City, South Dakota, I corner myself to write. Across from me, asleep in a booth, is an Indian. His name is Melvin. I only know this because a policeman just came in and called him by name.

Melvin has a large X tattooed on the back of the palm, painstakingly built with pin and ink. The mark reminds me of the kids I grew up with on the Leech Lake Reservation in northern Minnesota. Melvin’s hat is on the floor and a half-eaten hamburger sits in front of him on the table. He is very, very drunk, and his eyes try to focus on the face of the policeman but he is unsteady and palsied.

How easy to sit here in my little booth with a fresh white page in front of me and judge Melvin and think “drunk Indian.” Political (and racial) correctness warns that I stop short of that assessment, drunk Indian, but I don’t. I let it sit with me, and with Melvin, and watch the policeman convince Melvin to move on. The cop was kind and gentle in getting him to go, but I also know it isn’t always this way.

I know nothing about Melvin except his first name and that he is drunk. It is impossible to see what broke his heart or his spirit and put his nose in a bottle. If I could, see that, perhaps my assessment could move past empirical observation and become more meaningful. As it is, Melvin is no more representative of an Indian than the one at the pow wow in full traditional regalia competing for the big prize money.

Melvin is gone now. The friendly young policeman took him off. Will he go to detox, to jail, or home? Does the policeman know Melvin’s brother or his wife and will he take the unhappy man home to sleep it off?

Behind the Hollywood set or the harsh realities of people like Melvin there are a whole lot of just plain ordinary people who happen to be dark-skinned and have a history very different from most salad-bar European-Americans. Our travels have introduced us to all kinds of Indians. They are lawyers, doctors, teachers, rodeo riders, business people and subsistence hunters and fisherman. They get married and have babies and raise families and shop at K-Mart or Safeway or Walgreen’s. When a child of theirs makes a wrong turn, their hearts break just like ours do. Why is it so hard to imagine? Why raise a pole and stick them up on it and expect them to be something they are not?

Probably the saddest Indians I have seen are the mixed or even full blood Indians that act like “wannabes”. I can somehow tolerate white “wannabes” trying to be Indian but there is something deeply disturbing about an Indian wannabe trying to fit some outside opinion of what an Indian should be.

Now there is a cowboy or rancher sitting in the booth next to the one Melvin recently occupied. He’s wearing a black cowboy hat, smoking a skinny cigar, sipping a cup of coffee and staring out the window. He has on a shiny, satiny turquoise jacket that has something like The Ranch B-7-3 Beef Bulls on the back. The 7 and 3 are linked and together look a lot like the Sanskrit symbol for “Om”.

The sages say “Om” is the sound heard when the universe was created. I could fantasize that Mr. Beef bull is partly responsible for the heavy burden that Melvin carries. It isn’t likely that the friendly young policeman will be back to remove Mr. Bull for smoking a cigar or sipping his coffee. But then, he is not drunk and asleep in the booth.

What is there to learn from Indians? Not a whole lot of it has to do with the current Indian culture, does it? The stories of our journey into Indian country are fun but not profound. The people really are just so ordinary. How can I distill anything of real merit from this rich experience without going back to the romantic model and creating further illusion? Have we then succeeded in making them “just like us” only poorer and in lousy health? If I try to squeeze the stories and extract little pearls and gems from thin air, am I not doing exactly what others have done in the past? I would be better off to make up a great, wise “Cherokee” grandmother and have her hand me the wisdom of the ages to share with the poor white man.

This is a problem. Who would want to read about ordinary people doing the most ordinary things like Danny, the Tohono O’odham man hefting his cute little grandson on his knee with one hand and petting the dog with the other? Or Lee, the Mic Mac cutting off thick slabs of bologna and frying them in a pan to slap between two pieces of the whitest of white bread.

If I pick out only the rarest of the many moments we spent in Indian country, they would, perhaps, only have special meaning for me. Like Mary Greene (Makah) stringing shells and beads and presenting them to us with a song from her sons. Or Rhonda Funmaker (Ho’chunk) cutting off huge slices of butter from a one-pound block as she cooked us one of the most fabulous meals I have ever tasted. Sure, she is a healer, lives in a Wigwam, is a traditional gardener and told me incredible stories of how her Grandmother warned her not to be too friendly with the little rock people because they like children a bit too much. Or how she could remember her first plate of spaghetti in a restaurant. But the highlight of the entire experience was the pleasure I got from sitting on a picnic bench in her warm kitchen watching her cut slab after slab off that brick of butter and knowing that I was going to eat what she cooked.

Then there was Maggie Paul, a Passamaquoddy woman from New Brunswick who wore an old red sweat suit the first time I met her-but who made me cry when she opened her mouth to sing. She told me stories of flipping the knob of her family’s old radio and learning the Christian hymns and then racing out of the house and up the hillside to practice singing them to the sky. Her mother braided sweetgrass and sold it for a living and every year, during the season, she would put all their furniture in the yard to make room for the grass.

Maggie made me smell that sweet grass and gave me two braids of my own before we left. One I left on an alter to the sage, Bagawan Nityananda, in South Fallsburg and the other I carried home to South Dakota. (Blessings need to move around.) Later I danced with Maggie during an all night ceremony under a starry sky in Mexico. We joined arms and flew around the outer circle like two sister sparrows.

I want these very real people to pop off my page like those glorious little cutout cards that jump when you open them.

In truth, the only real sign that we had actually entered Indian Country in our travels had to do with sheer economics. The small shabby houses, the dead cars that somebody hopes will one day be resurrected, the clothes hanging on the line and the dogs are what really let you know you have passed into Indian country. Indian country is poor, our third world in one of the riches countries in the world. Perhaps I could romanticize economic inequality and poverty and say that Indians have transcended all human need and simply don’t care about money-and that would be false.

Indians are people. First, last, foremost. Like you and me.

Mitaye Oyasin-We are all related.