13
The Rosebud
The infection that had attacked my inner ear in that summer of 1967 was so far advanced that it affected my balance. After antibiotics knocked out the infection, I had to learn to walk all over again. It was tough—although the nausea had passed, my head still swam. Sometimes it felt as though it weren’t even connected to my body. If I forgot to keep tension in the neck muscles holding my head up, it flopped to one side. Until I learned to walk again, the IHS people gave me a walker, the kind of tubular metal thing I had seen only in old-age homes. If I hadn’t been so sick, I would have been mad enough to kill the doctors who had allowed that to happen.
Lying in bed the following Friday afternoon, I had a visit from Sonny Wain. He ran the Community Action Program of the Office of Economic Opportunity, the Johnson administration’s antipoverty program, on the Rosebud Reservation. My brother Bill had spoken with him that day. When Sonny mentioned that he was looking for an accountant, Bill told him about me. Sonny interviewed and hired me on the spot. “The doctor says you’ll have to stay in here at least another ten days,” he said.
“Bullshit,” I replied. “I’ll be in to work Monday.” I was. I couldn’t drive for a while, but I got help from the Intertribal Car guys. Soon, however, my Navajo pal and Tim went to work running stock on a ranch. The Hopi found some kind of temporary, menial job. Chris Clay struck out, even though he looked hard around the Rosebud. Finally, he took off for Sioux City. Later that summer I heard, to my sorrow, that one night, drinking, he had climbed a water tower or something and had fallen to his death.
I missed the partying and easy camaraderie of the Intertribal Car, but I also enjoyed learning my new job as director of management information systems. For weeks, I staggered around, trying to cope with my balance problems, but I went to work every day at the CAP office in the old BIA boarding school east of Mission. I soon discovered that the OEO was the best thing ever to hit Indian reservations. It was overwhelmingly successful everywhere I visited. Community Health representatives brought medical care to long-ignored elderly and handicapped people, and worked with young mothers to improve the health of their babies. The Legal Aid program was a tremendous boost. For the first time, people in remote communities began to feel that they could get something done, that someone with authority would listen to their problems and help them fight for their rights in tribal, federal, and state courts. Legal Aid lawyers also actively defended the rights of Indians accused of criminal acts. Those OEO programs and others that helped communities form and manage their own organizations, to find solutions to their own problems inspired hope. After generations of despair, Indians began to feel that they could shape their destinies by administering their own affairs. And as I got to know the Rosebud elders at that time, I came to love and admire their way of handling things.
My first task at OEO was to design financial and personnel reporting systems. I’m proud to say that the OEO used those systems for years, until it got computers. Every other Friday, CAP representatives from all the Rosebud communities came in to pick up their paychecks and attend an orientation meeting. I usually spoke at those meetings. As I began to learn my job and meet more coworkers, I had a really good time. When my responsibilities became routine, I was given additional duties that included reaching out to the communities. I often drove to different parts of the reservation.
Once I had collected a few paychecks, I sent for Betty and the kids. We moved into a trailer house south of Mission on Highway 83. One of the first people I met in my new job was Bill Janklow, the bartender at Jim Abourezk’s restaurant in Rockerville where I had danced for tourists in the summer of 1965. Abourezk had recently been elected to the U.S. House of Representatives as a Democrat. Janklow, who had graduated from law school the previous summer, had become a Legal Aid attorney on the Rosebud.
Janklow had already won some important lawsuits, including one against white businessmen who had been trying to repossess property held by Indians living on the reservation. On behalf of his Indian clients, Janklow had won a decision affirming that Indians on reservations were not subject to state laws. He was in the midst of another suit that would also affirm the sovereignty of the Rosebud Sioux.
One of the reasons Janklow was so enthusiastic was because of his upbringing in Flandreau, South Dakota, a tiny farm town near the Minnesota border, a few miles from the quarry at Pipestone, Minnesota. For centuries, my mother’s people, the Ihanktonwan, found at Pipestone the red stone from which the bowls of sacred pipes are carved. Even today, the Ihanktonwan continue to work that quarry. The half of South Dakota east of the Missouri, unlike the part west of there, is very segregated. Janklow grew up in what is called “East River” without knowing anything about Indians or prejudices against them. When he came to the Rosebud, he was flabbergasted by the flagrant racism he saw.
When I started to work at OEO, Janklow told me all the things he was trying to do. He was determined to make big changes. He helped set up a better tribal court system. In the next few years, Legal Aid did an excellent job, not only in strengthening tribal sovereignty but also in enhancing the power of the individual on the reservation. Legal Aid helped people so much that the Congress, prodded by the BIA, pulled the teeth out of the program rather than lose their arbitrary power over every dimension of an Indian’s life.
In 1967, Janklow and the other young Legal Aid lawyers under his leadership were still eager beavers, working hard to overcome a century of neglect and racism. Janklow and I took an immediate liking to each other. He lived at the old boarding school, near my office, and sometimes invited other Indians and me to his place. His wife, Mary, was a pretty blonde. His young son, Russell, looked just like Bill. Once in a great while I went out with Bill, and he sometimes eyed Indian girls, but it never went any further than that. Even if Bill were looking for more, because of colonization, boarding-school life, and the white cops and FBI agents on the reservations, Indian women were deathly afraid of white guys.
As early as 1967, Janklow was among the people who had helped to uncover and publicize the fact that quite a few Indian families were living in abandoned car bodies during the bitterly cold Great Plains winters, and that countless reservation Indians suffered from severe malnutrition. Those children had sticklike arms, sunken chests, and distended bellies—kids in the America of 1967 who looked like the children in those gut-wrenching photos from Biafra later, and like the television pictures from Somalia in the 1990s.
That winter, volunteers from the CAP program, including the Legal Aid lawyers, bagged up candies and peanuts and food baskets to pass out to Indian families on Christmas Eve. Bill dressed up like Santa Claus. Along with another lawyer, we went out to deliver some of the gifts. We had just gotten on the road when a blizzard hit, but we continued through the fiercely blowing snow, driving through the whole night to visit remote communities.
We couldn’t always drive all the way to the houses, so we walked, pushing through deep snowdrifts. In Grass Mountain and other places, we visited people living in shacks so tumbledown that snow leaked through the roofs. We saw homes where people had spread waxed paper all over their bedding and clothes to try to keep them dry. Some of the women and old men broke down and cried when we arrived. No one had ever before brought them anything for Christmas. Since joining Legal Aid, Bill had been in a few such homes, but that was the first time he and the other lawyers had really been hit in the face by such misery.
Some of the children had never heard of Santa Claus. Indian children are told about jiji men, bad spirits. When Bill appeared in his red suit and false whiskers, they shrank from him, thinking he was a jiji. He explained that he was Santa, and asked them to sit on his knee. Of course, they wouldn’t do it. Then the parents and grandparents, who were happy to have the gifts and food we brought, told their kids that Bill wasn’t a jiji, he was a good white man. After the kids got over their initial fright, it was wonderful to see them react to Bill in his Santa suit. It was a beautiful, heartrending learning experience for all the volunteers, white and Indian.
A couple of our vehicles got stuck that night, but when cold daylight came on Christmas Day, we had finished all our deliveries. We went to a bar for a few drinks. When Bill walked in, still dressed as Santa Claus, he cracked me up. Later, he ingratiated himself with the Indian community, especially many of the elders, by learning to speak a little Lakota. To this day, there are Rosebud Sioux who have stood, and will stand, by him through thick and thin. Years later, when Bill was elected governor of South Dakota, they all got jobs.
When I knew Bill in 1967 and 1968, I considered him a good human being and a close friend. He was the first of many who tried to convince me to go to law school. I’m glad I didn’t, but he made me think about it. Late in 1969, we happened to find ourselves in Washington, D.C., at the same time. We went to Congress and watched Jim Abourezk from the House of Representatives visitors’ gallery. I asked, “Are you still friends with Jim?” Bill said, “Oh, sure. You don’t let politics get in between friendships.” I thought that was a great statement. I wish he could have lived up to it, because my memories of Bill remain positive. He was young and full of fight then, but I would come to wish that I had known that he was also very ambitious. In time, it was ambition rather than politics that would get in the way of friendship.
Besides hanging around with Bill Janklow, I renewed my passion for rodeo. For two years, I entered bareback and bull-riding events, but I got bucked off almost every time. Near the end of the 1968 rodeo season, I was bucked off a Scottish Highlander bull. The bullfighter clown, whose job it was to keep the bull from trampling or goring riders, had gone off somewhere. I was prone in the sawdust, so I lifted one leg, hoping my spur would catch the bull’s face. Instead, he hooked my right buttock with a horn, and I sailed ten feet through the air like a rag doll. Then he came after me again. At the last instant, a Lakota cowboy named Jim Calumb jumped off the fence and threw a body slam into the bull. Then a couple of other cowboys ran up and distracted him until I got over the fence. My wound wasn’t serious, but I had trouble sitting down for a few weeks. That was the end of my rodeo season.
I had worse problems than not making it as a rodeo rider—my CAP job. The system began to corrupt itself. There were opportunities for abuse, so people found them and used them. It took me a while to learn how bureaucrats operate. I didn’t know I was supposed to pad my expense account. I was actually logging the correct mileage. Most of the others claimed mileage even when someone else drove, and they routinely increased the distances they drove, to get more money from the government. Some people abused per diem—reimbursement for government-connected travel expenses. One of the reasons I had been hired was to establish systems that were more accountable, but I wasn’t prepared for the politics-as-usual mentality among civil servants. I learned that whenever anything in Indian country is successful, as with all colonized peoples, everybody wants to get in on it and then remove those who preceded them and put their own people in. Sure enough, that’s what happened in the Rosebud’s OEO program.
After rumors began to circulate that I was drinking on the job, my boss, Sonny Wain, fired me. I don’t know for sure who started that talk, but it was absolutely untrue. I had partied too long and missed a few workdays now and then, but otherwise I did all my drinking on my own time. I fought the dismissal. Because I hadn’t been accorded due process, I was reinstated. Then I quit. By then I was getting tired of drinking. I had two beautiful kids, and I wanted my marriage to work. Betty and I talked it over and decided to go on the relocation program. I applied for Cleveland, figuring it was about as far away from Indians as we could get. There was no Indian center in Cleveland, and no Indian bars—and that, we thought, would improve our family life.
In the middle of July 1968, we packed our belongings into our blue ’62 Chevy and headed for Cleveland in what Betty and I hoped would be a fresh start. Our lives were about to change, but as we drove toward Ohio, we had no inkling of how profound those changes would be—or what they would do to our marriage.