Midway up Ridge Road, on the blacktop road now marked “SETTLEMENT TRAFFIC ONLY,” is where I first embraced the moonlit face of Selene Buffalo Husband. It was the summer of 1974. I was twenty-three and she was sixteen. Near the area known as “Doc’s Driveway,” where “the butterfly enchantress” and I held each other closely in romantic admiration, there are now new houses. Twenty-one years have passed; my love for Selene remains strong. Sometimes as we pass this area by car, I gaze at her secretly and marvel that the girl who captured my heart so long ago sits next to me as a beautiful woman. For young and old alike this place is no longer a party place, however. Lots of memories, good and bad, were made there. Today, from the benefits of the tribal gambling enterprise, new houses dot the hills to the north on newly bought tribal land.
There have been extensive changes—in our lives and that of the tribe.
Located less than a mile from “Doc’s Driveway,” over what used to be cornfields, is the Black Eagle Child Casino and Bingo Extravaganza. Because of the twenty-four-hour casino-related traffic, Ridge Road no longer intersects with Highway 30. What was formerly the northern Black Eagle Child Settlement entrance is now an elaborate highway mixmaster that orchestrates traffic toward and away from the casino.
To look at this place today in terms of people and geography is to realize things have been radically altered. Having endured cataclysmic misfortunes in the progress and resistance modes of a tribal society, we are about to be rolled down the hill physically, so to speak, by a greater nonhuman priest. We have been overswept by greed and hypocrisy. The land is a barometer of our own mortality.
A question therefore arises: In one’s short lifetime how can geographical markers—such as gravel roads and whole countrysides— be razed and replaced by something as audacious as “income-generating architecture,” complete with gigantic parking lots and sparkling neon-lit highway billboards? According to the most sagacious Earthlodge clan elders, we have entered a critical stage that is infused with apocalyptic themes. They are far from being wrong when vivid indicators sprout up around us.
In any other world where there “ain’t a damn thing wrong” with capitalism, everything “would be cool.” There, not only do the real remnant groups sell themselves but they relinquish their status as nations, jeopardizing ours in the process. Or so it has been argued. Convincingly. In the eyes of Big Brother they have the authority. In the eyes of their own particular Earthmaker—I’d wager as someone who disagrees 100 percent with this “we are one tribe” slogan—they must be a nightmare.
For an ancient Woodlands tribe like the Black Eagle Childs whose culture is still intact, these electronic highway billboards that bear the name given us by the Well-Known Twin Brother contradict the very practices of tribal isolationism. They are, in fact, foreboding. You wouldn’t think so, however, by the long lines at the tribal center for bimonthly per capita checks. The Black Eagle Child gambling and recreational complex is more reflective of where we are going than who we are and were.
Change is either inescapable or controversial here.
Toward the latter part of summer 1990 a message that many tribal members thought originated from the Holy Grandfather came down from the dark gray central Iowa sky, using the exact path taken long ago by the aged but menacing Arbie’s Pig Feeds Ford. In the guise of inclement weather the Holy Grandfather unraveled a rare whirlwind on land that was long heralded by the Earthlodge clans to be tornadofree. Although it couldn’t quite be classified as a twister per se, it had the same heart-pounding effect.
On the northern tier of the Black Eagle Child Settlement the whirlwind swept down from the clouds “like a goddamned seagull,” jumping Highway 30 and causing a semi-truck loaded with chicken eggs to jackknife into a ditch. After demolishing the monolithic neon-lit casino sign and a new utilities power substation, the scornful wind headed straight toward the Black Eagle Child Recreation Complex, where a tribal celebration was in progress. Amateur video captured the path the invisible force took, choosing its victims and their vehicles indiscriminately. The KRCG television crew that was there also documented the pandemonium from the press box before it collapsed. From under the debris the camera operator continued to film for the ten o’clock news. Blinded by the dust and electrical sparks, a “stretch” limousine collided with a BMW. Over the parking lots, casino security guards scattered about aimlessly looking for their posts that were no longer there. A charter bus that was loaded to the max was headed toward a soybean field. Inside were passengers who were oblivious to the fact they were driverless. No different from a jet-plane movie disaster, the bus driver had been sucked right out of the cab.
Upon reaching the recreation complex, where the Black Eagle Child Field Days and Chautauqua had been forced indoors, the whirlwind began rattling the aluminum panels of the circus tent-like structure. Huddling inside the giant skeletal framework were two thousand wide-eyed powwow goers and their families. As the panels flapped violently, the casino goers who had been asked to evacuate the gambling hall could see the powwow goers. They were running in circles and trying to determine which panel would stay open long enough for them to exit the controversial prefab building. Inside, it was later reported, it sounded like an abominable, hellish rattling of hail on a tin roof.
Elsewhere, the giant Chia Pet-type buffaloes who stood at the casino entrance were sandblasted into nothingness: The revolving floodlights that illuminated the night skies were lifted to the cloudy vortex and spun until the gear came down as a heap of crumpled stainless steel and shattered glass.
As it traveled down Milkman Ridge, the whirlwind could have killed many people but instead it injured, leaving people scattered over the artificial turf gymnasium floor. Within minutes the earthlodge elders, along with the agnostics and the good-for-nothings, issued aspersions amid the eagle plumes and cotton candy that were still airborne. All the more reason, they ranted, to disenroll all known and suspected disbelievers and their mixed-blood cohorts. The dissenters, those who didn’t have it their Burger King way politically, pounced upon the tragedy, crying, “There should have been a referendum!”
Selene and I were home when it happened, loading the PA system into the truck for the Young Lions, our singing and drumming group. We quickly ran to the safety of the trailer and soon freaked out on the trees as they bent halfway toward the rain-saturated yard. Next thing we knew, a caravan of powwow goers cruised by like a funeral procession.
Within a week a videotaped segment was broadcast nationally on NBC’s “Eyewitness Extra.” Horatio Plain Brown Bear III, a fourteen-year-old boy who volunteered to hold down the elaborate, modern big top made the front pages of the Central Plains Register. He was suspended twenty feet in the air, holding on to the cables and being lifted by an aluminum panel. Behind him a banner of the powwow’s theme read “GOODWILL & HARMONY FOR YOUTH.” This photograph was then picked up by the New York and Los Angeles Times Sunday newspapers. The London and Sydney newspapers reported that “Mongo, the Texaco Man,” the powwow chairman who also served as an emcee, kept repeating, “Sing and say the Indian way,” in a state of delirium.
With the world as audience at their punishment, the elders were devastated. Before, the tribal celebration had all the makings of a fantasy powwow—one hundred dollars a day just for dancing and fifty dollars for children under twelve. The organizers were an unlikely crew: veterans, some of whom had been kicked out of the service, and the tribal casino personnel. With financial backing from the casino’s management firm, GSIA, Gambling Says It All, the celebration created community excitement. Famous dancers and singers arrived a week early, and the local hosts who made out as if they were friends of the comely professionals were stuck with motel and restaurant tabs.
On that same day of the whirlwind, a young white woman who had moved from southern Iowa to be within proximity of the casino fatally shot herself due to meager gambling debts. Out in the country roads an old white man was robbed and beaten to death, “a random crime,” with tire irons after winning at the casino. The deaths of these two white people occurred for less than six hundred dollars. (I asked: If the old white man and the girl hadn’t come here to gamble, wouldn’t they still be alive? F. A. right!) Because the media toned down the connection between the casino and crime, GSIA bought lots of space and key time slots to advertise the Black Eagle Child Field Days and Chautauqua: Five thousand dollars was offered to adults in all dance categories—traditional men’s and women’s, men’s grass dance, jingle dress dance men’s fancy feather, and women’s fancy shawl.
But it wasn’t to be.
The whirlwind hovered directly over the gambling hall before slamming down on the powwow after Grand Entry and during the introduction of the visiting dignitaries. A Native American Hollywood actor who made an asshole of himself by admitting he couldn’t “talk Indian” started everything through his rendition of a Christian prayer in sign language. The aftermath was a sad, shocking scene. “Mongo,” in his Texaco service man outfit, emerged from a nearby cornfield and staggered out on the giant big-top panels. On his head a crumpled war bonnet. All around paramedics, stretchers, wailing ambulances, and a severed microphone in his muddy and bruised hand. Under what was once the big top’s arena, the Rocky Raccoon Singers could be seen in the video clips. In their zeal to be A-i dependable, they had remained steadfast in their chairs. Many remarked they were stupid not to run. Trying to be cool guys, they were videotaped humming a song together while being cut out from the cables and basketball court partitions by the emergency crews with acetylene torches. In graphic slow-motion “Eyewitness Extra” footage, an aluminum harpoon shot out from the skies, puncturing Rocky Raccoons’ concert bass drum, missing the singers by inches. The powwow music disemboweled.
Rumor, like the whirlwind, spun out of control.
Blame the casino, decried the traditionalists.
Blame transgression and taboo, said the priests.
Blame the family who failed to isolate a girl in her initial menses, whispered the innocent women at the Gracious Senior Citizens’ Center.
Shit, blame yourselves, countered the girls with maximum cosmetics plastered on their faces. Did she open the curtains, churning the winds with her fiery eyes? the tight skirts added sarcastically. Hey, old fogies, why don’t you guyses blow a Trojan and float away, okay?
The cheap aromatic smell of the girls’ perfume, “Bobbie Sex,” mingled in an undesirable way with everyone’s cigarette smoke and politics. All of the buffoons pointed to each other accusingly. Others double-barrel-fingered.
Ah, what the hell, blame youth, debated the old men playing cards. Blame woman for the downfall of man. Fists were pounded atop the green table. Cards flew and the coins chimed in agreement.
Hey, wait a minute . . . you guys aren’t Pine Sol clean either! shouted their grandsons dressed in baggy clothes, baseball caps, and heel-lit tennis shoes.
Alright, you yellow-shitting punks, challenged the elderly com-, bat veterans, you come here and say that!
A bold-faced high school Explorette Scout leader stepped between the two groups and gave her opinion: I blame the ignorant traditional dancer who carried another tribe’s ceremonial staff into the arena. Blah, blah, blah.
Excuse me, interrupted the long-legged schoolteacher, but isn’t he too fat to be dancing, anyway? And isn’t his wife the one who does a stupid imitation of a Northern Plains woman’s cry? And aren’t you the Texaco Man’s mistress?
How about you, teacher lady, aren’t you the one who wraps long legs around men like an anaconda, making them fartsy, making them cry? the slobbering old men audibly whispered.
Hey, chuck that filth, alright? pleaded the atheist Indian artist, the one who was extricated from his moped with the “Jaws of Life” and charged with drunk driving.
Yeah, she’s state-certified, said the ineffective tribal social services worker.
Hoping she wouldn’t be seen, Grace Disgrace, the tribal grants writer, took advantage of the ruckus and excused herself to go take a crap, complaining she should have gone sooner.
Go on then, Ma, get out of here, she was told by the fifth executive director we had had in eight years, Scotty Disgrace, convicted embezzler and wife beater.
Blame taco salad, if anything, said the intellectuals as a sarcastic joke to Grace Disgrace’s ill-timed exit.
In addition to the main Disgraces, you’re all a disgrace, spoke the members of Weeping Willow School Board, who had just been canned by their employers, the Tribal Council.
What does your firing have to do with the whirlwind? asked the antischool buffoons. Have you gcine bananas, in Lakota zee-skopa-ed? The Missooni Indian woman you hired got smashed at your Halloween party and assaulted her husband afterward on the intersection of Highways 30 and 63. Listen to a local newspaper quote. “Noted for her jingle dress dancing abilities and not her academic credentials, the lady subdued her pumpkin-masked mate with flying roundhouse kicks.” Need we say more?
And it went on like that, day after day, constant bickering until foam from a dozen frothy mouths formed a slough. Whew! Pe-e-eeeooo! Whenever the controversy began to dry up in its own heat, the once-sympathetic elders renewed the attack. Backed by the Tribal Council —all of whom were suspected of embezzling casino cash—the elders presented their sons and grandsons as good examples. Role modelish. Ish is right. Ishi-bound. Everyone snickered. Like prosecuting lawyers in a high-profile criminal trial, the cynics outlined their case item by item. The council members and their records were reviewed. There were loopholes, inconsistencies, and outright hypocrisy.
“Kensey” Muscatine, the pedophile-horticulturalist and former Council chair, for instance, hoodwinked the clans into praying with him for a lenient sentence. Of course, he was assisted by a new generation of informants who had no qualms selling the Earthlodge clan gourds. Only a handful had the guts to leave but in so doing they set themselves up as targets.
These cronies are engaged in sacrilegious doings, said the cynics.
Those who left the “asking for a lenient jail sentence” feast were visited that night at their windows by exotic-sounding birdcalls that changed to loud, electrifying growls of a bearlike creature who stood upright in the moonlight, emitting sparks from its inquisitive snorts as it dropped on all fours and drove away in grinding, mechanical gear sounds.
Those who worship figurines supposedly symbolizing past warriors are fooling themselves, said the cynics. (It was believed the Black Hummingbird Society were sorcerers who replenished their own lives with other lives. Ancient Count Draculas, Jekyll and Hyde characters. Nighttime ceremonies in which arrows of light were seen ascending to the stars through the earthlodge portals scared everyone. Sorcery as religion, they said quietly among themselves.)
At televised community meetings, “Kensey” Muscatine condemned the fate of anyone who wasn’t an earthlodge participant. The room temperature was ice cubish. Save yourselves for the good of the tribe! he urged.
Does that mean forcefully shoving a minors face to your sweaty crotch as redemption? shouted the cynics. Is this why your daughter leaves home every summer because she can’t stand your repulsive BO?
The curious onlookers and assorted good-for-nothings expressed whoas.
Forgiving relatives of “Kensey,” from “Grubby’s” and Horatio’s side of the family, shouted back until the pedophile’s wife, Devonshire Muscatine, keeled over, all 258 pounds of her, knocking over the television camera crews of KORN—Channel 9 Local Access News, ending the meeting.
Above them, the turbulent skies hovered. Devonshire, amazingly, was the only one to witness the revelation. A tiny lavender whirlwind descended into her hairy nostrils until the smell of gunpowder was exhaled, defusing her original opinions. Against her husband’s wishes she forgave the cynics before she was on her cellulite-swollen ankles. She indicated it was “heavenly” that small ceremonies were being done by these families within the privacy of their homes. Belief in the Principal Religion was taught, she added.
But then so is immorality by some of the earthlodge and Tribal Council leaders, retorted Grace Disgrace, who was composed and rejuvenated upon her return from the can. In spite of their superior knowledge, she indicated in her closing remarks, some earthlodge leaders are charlatans!
Not far away, old men wept over disobedient sons. There were insinuations these sons witnessed the seduction of their aunts and sisters while their mothers snored on the floor nearby. Unwanted babies, not long ago, were smothered to assure family dignity. Retroactive fatherhood was inconceivable but it was done.
In the verbal aftermath of the whirlwind no one was right, no one was wrong. For centuries we had gone against the white-skinned people, sensing they carried with them earth’s demise. Into them are we helplessly drawn today. The whirlwind, it was said, exemplified that very possibility.