I’m craving another cup of Suzy’s chewy cowboy coffee. I’m happy that we’ve taken a few steps toward his little ranch house, toward caffeine nirvana, when Vernell abruptly stops, turns, and bumps into me. “Almost forgot,” he says. “I need to check on those crazy wasicu survivalists in Yellow Bear—need to make sure they are still surviving. You might want to meet them.”
“What about coffee?”
“No time. I’ll leave my windows down, and if that doesn’t work, I can always kick you.”
For this trip, we hop into Vernell’s red pickup truck, the one emblazoned with WHITE THUNDER RANCH in bold white letters on the back fenders. This is not one of his carefully restored, souped-up vehicles … it’s mud splattered, the doors are creaky, the key left in the ignition needs to be turned three or four times before the engine starts. There is much clutter in the cab, empty snack food packages and soda cans, flashlight, gloves, snow chains on the floor, a pocketknife, a hacksaw, and old editions of the Lakota Country Times newspaper. The moment the truck sputters to a start, the radio comes on full blast … KILI Radio, Voice of the Lakota. More of the old-time country music, the same laid-back, likely stoned announcer we heard earlier on our way back from the bombing range. We rumble up the gravel driveway, over the cattle guard, and turn left onto the main blacktop, where for the first few miles the view out my side window is very beautiful but oddly motionless. I might as well be looking at a landscape painting, perhaps by the great John Mix Stanley—rolling carpet of pumpkin-orange prairie grass; chartreuse knapweeds, their tiny purple buds pushing out like crowning heads of the about to be born; intertwined tentacles of a snarling oak tree, leafless, as are the tangled sagebrush and chokecherry branches. I see a few abandoned vehicles and machines around one-story frame houses in dire need of general repairs, but no children playing in the dirt. No old people sitting outside, smoking. No dogs, no horses. No motion. The road curves this way and that. It is serene, and with my caffeine tank empty it is no that surprise I doze off, start dreaming that I’m driving a shiny red 1947 Ford coupe that Vernell has restored for me across a flat plain of tall grass on a wonderfully warm breezy day when out of the distant sun I spot a squadron of P51 Mustang dive-bombers screaming down upon me. With a tight grip on the steering wheel, I turn sharply down a steep embankment as my eyes open and I realize I may have been dreaming about dive-bombers but the embankment is all too real. Vernell’s truck violently descends into Yellow Bear Canyon, a stomach-churning near-vertical plunge on a road that should have but doesn’t have switchbacks. Wide awake, I scream for Vernell to SLOW THE FUCK DOWN, but instead of hitting the brakes, he stomps on the gas and hollers, “Hoye! Hoye! Time to wake up, Bunka Dude!”
Luckily, my hands shoot out to brace myself against the dashboard before my soft head smashes into the cold hard metal in a world where there are no neurosurgeons. Vernell, of course, thinks this is funny. When I give him my best evil stare, he only chuckles.
By the time I calm down enough to look out the window, the road has leveled off. I see that Yellow Bear Canyon completely engulfs us and it’s an entirely different world, a billowy world of evergreen trees and shrubs, stately lodgepole pines, naked trunks packed together like anxious runners at the beginning of a big-city marathon. But there’s very little room overhead for sky, which I find disquieting.
Vernell slows to a crawl. “People call this Yellow Bear Canyon, but its original name is Skokpa, Sh-coke-pah, which means ‘down in the valley,’ named for the Oglala people who first settled here. Yellow Bears came much later.”
Pointing with his left hand out the window, Vernell continues: “That creek along here is called No Flesh. No Flesh was chief of the Cut Off People. He went to Washington with Red Cloud in 1880-something when they tried to explain to us the Dawes Act, how the government was going to divide our lands into individual pieces.”
My heart no longer fiercely beating, my vision back to normal, I chime in sarcastically, “We generous white folk are going to give you poor Indians a few acres of the land you already own so you can learn how be farmers, not communists.”
Vernell laughs. “Worked out for my grandfather. He built up his land by trading horses for additional allotments—most people ended up with nothing.”
“I would say less than nothing.”
This time his hands are completely off the steering wheel. Pointing to both sides of the road (hopefully steering with his knees), Vernell says, “Notice how the utility guys mowed the left side but not the right.”
Sure enough, I can see that the foliage on the left from the edge of the road up to the barbed wire fence is short. But on the right it is long and wild; you can hardly see the barbed wire.
“I told them not to mow on the right side. The transmission hub for all this area is on my land. I paid for it, so I can shut it down whenever I want, and there is nothing they can do. They send me a royalty check every month for my electricity.”
“That would make you the John D. Rockefeller of Pine Ridge.”
Vernell either doesn’t understand or just ignores my bad joke. “Shortly after No Flesh went to Washington, a white man named Richards married Chief Yellow Bear’s two sisters, who then lived in this area. One night, Richards got terribly drunk and beat up his wives. The next day Yellow Bear went over to talk to him, but Richards murdered Yellow Bear with an ax. Most recently a retired white lady schoolteacher sold this land to the people living here now.
“Some developers from Rapid wanted to buy it for a bed-and-breakfast, but I said to them, ‘I cannot stop you from buying this land, but I can legally turn off your electricity.’”
When we reach the bottom of the canyon, Vernell veers right where wide tire tracks have forged a pathway through the thicket onto a clearing of muddy ground. There’s an old battered Dutchmen trailer parked in front of an immense prefab industrial steel building. Scattered about are the camping and construction tools you might expect to see: sleeping bags, a wheelbarrow, and, most conspicuously, a stone garden sculpture of Mother Mary.
“People living here don’t need my electricity,” Vernell says. “They live off the grid.”
It looks like no one is home: no parked vehicles, no barking dogs, doors and windows shut. Vernell puts the White Thunder pickup in neutral and pulls the emergency brake, leaving the motor running. He opens the driver’s door and jumps out. I hear the sharp crunches of his deliberate strides as KILI Radio still blares away; I hear a loud knocking at the door. As this cacophony of human sound goes on, I think I am warming up to this little spot of terra firma, thinking how lovely it might be to live disconnected from the haywire of modern life. You wouldn’t know who won the Super Bowl; hell, you wouldn’t even know what teams played in the Super Bowl! Rising sea levels might obliterate Manhattan, Bono might become president of the Republic of Ireland, and the Chinese stock market might crash—who cares? I’m easily lost in this fantasy when the front door opens. Vernell turns to look back at me and shouts, “Shut it down! Come inside!”
Stopping for a moment at the doorway before I enter, I can see that this is not a well-lighted place. A small lattice window above the door is the only window on my end of the building; two double-hung windows at the other end are small. A single strand of LED lights runs along the walls near the ceiling like the cheap Christmas decorations you buy at your neighborhood Dollar Store. Vernell vanishes into the darkness. There is something eerie about this shadowy cavern, and I feel apprehensive as my eyes adjust to its dimness. But then a portly man with a fastidiously trimmed beard emerges; he wears a light brown short-sleeved dress shirt, dark brown khakis held up by suspenders. Spooky, but the slightness of his stooped frame makes him less threatening. A funny thought comes to mind: stick a briar pipe in his mouth, add a tweed jacket with patches on the elbows, and he could be a Berkeley professor, someone you might run into while strolling across Sproul Plaza—the Nobel Prize–winning chairperson of the math department. The space behind him slowly comes into focus: an expanse of unadorned concrete, a large wooden table, a few metal chairs, and what looks to be a newly installed kitchen sink and counter; tools and instruction booklets are piled high. In the gloom I spy three other human forms that I think could be teenagers and a child in a playpen. Apparently, we’re interrupting a busy day.
Vernell says to no one in particular, “I’d like you to meet David; he was my teacher. He’s the reason I can’t spell.”
The professor laughs a bit too loud for my taste. I’ll call him William and change the names of his family members too; he is accompanied by a shy young man looking down at the floor beside him who is six inches shorter and fifty pounds lighter, his teenage son, James. The lovely young woman with a big Kate Hudson smile whom I like instantly is his daughter Eleanor. She is on her knees playing with a darling toddler who giggles and shrieks. William makes a point of telling me that Eleanor’s older sister, Helena, is the toddler’s mom; at the moment she is out running errands with her husband, Daniel. There’s one more member of this pioneering family, William’s wife, Deborah, who is in Minneapolis seeing relatives.
“Good day for you to visit. The first day we’ve had functional electric lights.”
William invites Vernell and me to sit with him at the table. I soon learn that he is a geologist from California. Just as we arrived, he finished hooking up the solar-powered generator that runs the LED lights. It will eventually power the refrigerator I saw sitting out in the yard, plus water pumps, power tools, heating, better lights, and, most essential to this enterprise, an Internet connection. If William is to maintain the consulting contracts he has with old-school brick-and-mortar companies on the West Coast, he will have to be online. James, who has been standing stoically at the kitchen counter, raises his head and sputters to life as if there is now enough energy in the room to trigger his programmable memory. “Our family mission is to become energy self-sufficient, raise or otherwise procure all our food, live off the land no matter how harsh the weather, demonstrate to the native people that they can do this too.” James’s eyes sparkle just like the LED lights, only brighter. “We already have a goat. Tomorrow we are going to buy one of Vernell’s horses.”
“When it gets warmer,” William adds, “we’ll get some chickens, a few ducks, and, hopefully, a milk cow. We’ll plant a garden. There are many wild strawberries all around here, and my Helena recently shot her first deer.”
I am shocked. “Really? She shot a deer?”
Eleanor says she’s made goat’s-milk yogurt and offers us some, at the same time profusely apologizing for not having any honey or jam to sweeten it. Vernell has zero interest in yogurt, but I happily try a bowl. It’s amazingly refreshing and delicious—goat’s-milk yogurt on the Pine Ridge!
“When I lived here,” I tell them, “I was lucky to get tripe soup at Sally’s Cafe.” At this point, William is cautiously circumspect and James has returned to his taciturn state, but Eleanor is obviously thrilled to have a little company, happy to tell us about their many adventures. “When we arrived last spring,” she says, “four of us slept in a tent; Helena, Daniel, and the baby stayed in the trailer, where there is heat. For water, we ferried buckets up from No Flesh Creek.
“An early blizzard last October nearly wiped us out. Dad, James, and I were still sleeping in the tent. During the first night, twenty inches of snow fell every hour. When the tent collapsed, Dad woke up to the sound of my screaming. I didn’t know what I was pushing and beating at; everything was mixed up in a bad dream.”
William jumps back in. “I woke James up, and the two of us were able to rescue Eleanor. We moved into the crowded camper for the rest of the night, and next day we found refuge at Our Lady of Sorrows in Kyle. We lived in the sanctuary until we could move into this building.”
I glance over at Vernell, see the top of his water-stained cowboy hat as he is looking down, fidgeting, and crossing and uncrossing his legs. He doesn’t appear to be listening, but I know him; he is always listening. Always attuned to the moment … very little slips by Vernell White Thunder.
Irrespective of their idiosyncrasy, I am impressed with these survivalists—who wouldn’t be?—but there is a long history of white people with good intentions coming to the rez, hoping to save the Indians, show them a new way, lift them out of the morass. Volunteers come every summer—they plant organic gardens, build bunk beds for children, install protective skirting around mobile homes, spay and neuter pets, hold technology workshops. Mostly they do good things, but in terms of making a lasting difference … it’s dubious.
Vernell stands up, jokingly says, “We got to go milk the buffalo.” I shake William’s hand, wave good-bye to James and Eleanor; tell them I might be back this way one of these days, say perhaps I’ll drop in to see how they are doing. William walks us to the door, and we return to the White Thunder Ranch pickup. As soon as we are out of earshot, I ask Vernell what he thinks about white people thinking they can teach the Lakota how to be self-sufficient.
“He is skeptical and doesn’t approve of their self-imposed hardships. He worries for their safety.”
Turning the key, angrily revving up the engine, Vernell slips the clutch so that the wheels of his truck ominously kick up a vast splodge of dirt, much like a Lakota war pony might do before charging into an early morning camp of the hated Pawnee. “Let me show you where I grew up with my grandpa and grandma. You will understand how we Lakota were self-sufficient.”
As we spin out, I take one last look at this unlikely modern sod house, chuckle at the thought that these homesteaders settled here 150 years too late. The sun begins to dip behind the mysteriously steep hills; I begin to feel a chill, am thankful we don’t go far.
Vernell turns off KILI Radio, slows his truck to an idle, turns left off the ungroomed side of the road, drives across a shallow gully, a nearly hidden creek, over a thick bed of ferns to a broad clearing nestled in a cradle of hills, bare-branched cottonwoods, sweet grass, and sage. What a splendid womb of nature! Much larger than the barren survival camp, it is, I can see, protected from howling winds, blowing snow, the searing heat of summer.
Coasting to a stop, Vernell shuts down the motor. “Here is where my story begins. Let’s get out and take a look around.”
The one-room log house where Vernell spent the first eight years of his life is no longer standing, but he points out chunks of concrete that once made up its foundation. In back of the house, dug into a hillside, is what remains of the corral where Vernell’s grandfather kept the wagon team horses.
We walk down the other side of the hill to the bed of a small but fast-moving creek. “Right about here,” Vernell says, “we had a wooden box where you could keep butter, milk, whatever needed to stay cool. Grandma also dried a lot of meat, stored it in canvas bags—you never see that today.
“We had a huge garden—tomatoes, corn, and green beans, some of which my grandmother preserved in clay jars. We stored potatoes and turnips over there in our root cellar, and we had goats … there was always goat milk, but no goat cheese or goat yogurt; only wasicu eat these things.”
Walking along, Vernell kicks up pebbles with the scuffed toes of the Apache boots he’s been wearing for as long as I can remember, and with each kick, he uncovers old memories, memories as numerous as the pebbles.
“David, we were rich compared to others. When my grandfather butchered a cow, neighbors came for a feast; everyone went home with something. Grandfather used to say, ‘Grandson, there are spirits watching over our food, making sure it is good and plentiful. If you share, they stay. If you don’t, they get angry and leave.’”
Vernell was only two months old when his parents brought him to this very spot, left him to be raised by his mother’s parents, George and Emma Poor Thunder. It was late August 1954, Moon When the Chokecherries Are Ripe. Vernell is not sure why his parents abandoned him, nor does he seem bitter about it. “Perhaps with three other children,” he says, “taking care of me was too much for them.” Already in his eighties, Vernell’s grandfather was a legendary horse breeder and traditional medicine man, and his grandmother was the granddaughter of the great chief American Horse.
* * *
Before moving to Yellow Bear Canyon, George Poor Thunder lived on the Rosebud reservation, where he was one of the last breeders of highly prized Appaloosas, the remarkable spotted-coat war ponies of the Nez Percé.
“Appaloosas would be forever extinct if my grandfather hadn’t understood Nez Percé breeding practices.”
“What were those?”
“I wish I knew them all, but gelding inferior male horses was part of it.”
“Wonderful.”
“Whenever a white man came to Grandfather and wanted to buy a saddle-broken Appaloosa,” Vernell said, “Grandfather would tell him the price was two hundred dollars a head. Most would angrily say it was too high and leave, only to come back in a day or two with cash in hand because there was nowhere else to buy horses like these. ‘That was yesterday’s price,’ Grandfather would tell them. ‘Now it will cost you two hundred and fifty.’”
After marrying Vernell’s grandmother Emma in 1908, Poor Thunder moved to Yellow Bear Canyon in a buckboard wagon with his wife and children, including Vernell’s mother, Mary. They were leading two hundred head of the most beautiful horses in the world.
Only twelve at the time, ninety-two-year-old Guy Dull Knife, interviewed by Pulitzer Prize–nominated writer Joe Starita, remembered the spectacle of Poor Thunder’s arrival, and more interestingly, his appearance: “Poor Thunder had long gray hair and wore a full-length overcoat, two pistols stuck in the waistband. His lower lip came up over his upper lip, making him the scariest-looking man I ever saw, but my father admired many of his good-looking horses. After Poor Thunder had settled, they became good friends.”
Already revered among traditional Lakota as an old-style medicine man, Poor Thunder began to take charge of the spiritual ceremonies held around Yellow Bear. In the summer of 1911 he presided over a large Sun Dance held in a secret location in the nearby hills, attended by many friends and relatives. People remember his long graying braids and the traditional way he draped his blue medicine blanket about his body, which presented a picture of power and dignity. The Sun Dance was illegal, but the local Lakota policeman who knew about it was not going to make any arrests. He rode up to the Sun Dance lodge just before the painted dancers marched in with their sacred buffalo skulls. Poor Thunder told him, “If we lose the Sun Dance, we will no longer be a people. We will be something else, but no longer Lakota.”
The policeman stayed to listen to the drummers and their songs, which recalled the thundering buffalo herds that once were so plentiful, but he had to leave before Poor Thunder skewered the dancers’ chest muscles with the razor-sharp sticks known as chawakha. He dared not witness this torture nor watch as the dancers frantically flung themselves backwards for hours and hours until the chawakha ripped away, leaving ragged bits of flesh to be trimmed away with a ceremonial knife and then laid on a bed of sage as an offering to the sun. To see this would make the policeman complicit in what the agency considered a serious crime. He would lose the job that gave him prestige and many privileges.
* * *
Hands in his pockets, Vernell briskly strides up the hill behind the dugout where his grandparents once kept the team horses. Because he’s never told me such stories before, I don’t want to miss anything he says, so I struggle to stay abreast of him.
Grandfather was very powerful. People came to visit him because he was one of the last yuwipi men. He presided over this traditional ceremony where you ask for help from the spirits to cure a sickness. The missionaries called yuwipi “devil worship,” so we had to be very careful.
Before the yuwipi, they would put all the furniture outside, cover the doors and windows with heavy tarps nailed to the wall so no light could get in. One time my uncle Daniel left the plate of food for the spirits on the roof while he assisted my grandmother.
We had little kittens then, and they were under her feet, getting in the way. She said to me, ‘Grandson, please take these kittens outside.’ I threw them on the roof so they would not chase me back inside.
Uncle Daniel and the other helpers prepared the sacred altar in the center of the room. Four coffee cans filled with dirt were placed on the floor to form a square, each containing a colored piece of cloth representing one of the four directions—white for north, red for east, yellow for south, and black for west.
They connected the cans with strings of tobacco ties, small squares of colored cloth filled with a pinch of tobacco representing the spirit helpers my grandfather would need. Sometimes there would be four hundred of these ties. Grandfather placed his sacred objects on a bed of sage: the eagle bone whistle, his pipe and pipe bag, rattles, and other things. Before sealing the door, Daniel went back outside to retrieve the spirit food, but when he took the plate down, it was empty. Everyone thought the spirits had eaten the food! They went “Aawe! Aawe!” Everyone but Grandmother—she gave me a stern look and said, “Shilasica!” which means “bad little boy.”
Having reached the top of the hill behind where the log house once stood, Vernell stops. “Here is where the garden stretched all the way back alongside this ridge. Corn on this side, cabbage and lettuce over there, and rhubarb along the back. My job was to bring the water up from the creek, sprinkle it all across the garden, and pull out the weeds.”
“That must have been some garden, but I would really like to know more about the yuwipi.”
“Some of these things are private,” Vernell says.
“I heard many things about yuwipi when I lived here. I just want to know what it was like for you.”
“I will tell you parts. Maybe when I feel closer to the call to the Spirit World I will tell you everything, but not now.”
“OK.”
“Yuwipi ceremonies would last all night. The helpers bound Grandfather’s arms behind his back and bundled him in a star quilt tied by a long rope. Laying on a bed of sage, he would sing the songs of the yuwipi, use his sacred objects and powers to contact the spirits, talk to them in a mumbling voice, ask how he might cure the sickness. When I stayed awake, I could hear spirits entering and leaving the darkness, and I sometimes saw flashes of light. It was really scary when the floors and windows began to shake.
“One time I was still awake after they had sung the last song and turned on the lamp. Grandfather was sitting alone in the center of the room; the bindings and star quilt in a pile on the floor. His hands and arms were free.”
“Did Poor Thunder always agree to perform a yuwipi? it seems like such a major commitment of time and energy.”
“Not always. I remember when our neighbor Seymour Rouillard was nearly killed by lightning. His family brought him to us in a wagon for a yuwipi, but my grandfather said they had to take him back to the top of the hill where the lightning had struck him. ‘Once you are there, dig a hole in the ground, and you will find something very unusual; bring it back to me.’ When they dug the hole, they found a large ball of ice, which they brought back. Grandfather boiled it in some water with magic herbs from his medicine bag, gave it to Rouillard to drink. It healed him right away. We had a celebratory feast, and the family went home.”
Sensing my discomfort standing all this time in the same spot, Vernell motions toward the stump of a fallen tree. “Sit. This may take a while.” And then he continues:
“As Grandfather might say, all these memories fill my mind like a tobacco pouch at the beginning of a long journey. I have told you too much, but I need to share some things with somebody or I’ll go crazy.”
Walking back and forth in front of me, Vernell’s eyes seem to be focused far away but he does not stumble. Something I haven’t seen from him before, he gestures excitedly with his arms and hands as if he is drawing pictures in the air around him.
Every morning I would wake up when it was still dark, but my grandparents would already be sitting there talking, drinking coffee. After breakfast, Grandfather and I went to get the team horses, hitch them to the wagon. We came to Kyle many times in that team and wagon. On hot days, sitting in the back, I would pull a tarp over my head to stay cool. We stopped under chokecherry bushes. Grandmother stood up on the wagon seat and picked them. She always let me eat as many as I could.
We’d be coming by No Flesh Creek, getting close to the Broken Rope camp; someone would shout out “George!” We would go over there, and they would feed us, give us coffee. At Little White Man’s camp, it was the same thing. Two Crows’s as well. By the time we got to Kyle, we were stuffed like white people on Thanksgiving. Sometimes at these stops we would pick up kerosene jars to get filled at the store in Kyle. We’d drop them off and go to my mom’s house. Before we went back, we’d pick up the full jugs so we could return them. When we got home, Grandmother would go into the house, light the lamp, cook something. Our job was to take care of the horses, come back to the house, eat, go to bed.
Pointing now to where the log house once stood, Vernell says, “Grandfather’s bed was on the side of the house, right about there. Above his bed on a windowsill he had an old set of ceremonial drums. Sometimes he would take one down and sing to us. He also told stories, not short stories like the iktomi [spider] stories you probably know; these were very long stories—buffalo hunts, war parties, and creation stories.
“Like Grandpa, I tried singing the old songs, telling stories to my children. Sometimes they listened, but not always. No one tells stories today; they are being lost. Today kids watch TV, play video games … they cannot be still long enough to hear an old story.”
“Vernell, you were lucky to have lived with your grandparents, learn about the old ways. But it is too bad Poor Thunder died when you were so young.”
“Well, I was young, but he was ninety-eight.”
“Do you remember when he died?”
“My little brother, Anthony, and I came to Kyle with Grandfather on a brown-and-white Paint horse named Happy Jack. We were going to the store for kerosene. On the way back, my grandfather and Anthony got on the horse. It was my turn, but for some reason, I did not want to. When I finally did, Happy Jack bucked all three of us off. Anthony and I were OK, but Grandfather got hurt. He had internal injuries from this fall.
“Everybody was mad at Happy Jack, but not Grandpa. He said it could not have been the horse’s fault. He was right. When my uncle Norman took the saddle off, there was a nail stuck in it that must have poked the horse. The nail caused it to buck.”
Vernell pauses for a moment to fish out a small pocketknife from his blue jeans; he opens it and starts digging out some of the tar-like dirt from under what’s left of his obsessively chewed fingernails.
“I take it you got him home, Vernell. What happened next?”
It was the night before the Fourth of July, and people knew that Grandfather might not recover. My stepsister Theda came to stay with us. The Broken Rope and Dull Knife families camped next to this house. Us kids were throwing those popper things in the campfire. I remember hearing him getting up before dawn to go to the bathroom, and then he went back to bed. A little while later, Grandmother got up, and then my sister got up; they were crying. My sister came over to me. “Wake up, brother,” she said. “Grandpa is dead.”
Someone made a coffin out of some lumber. First, they put blankets and sage in the box, and then my grandfather. Next, they moved all the furniture out of the house and put a whole tub of ice under the window where he had slept. They put the coffin on top of the ice to keep him cool. All this time more and more people were coming. My mom and dad came, and I was mad at them because they were drunk. The elder women sat in the house with my grandmother. The men were all outside. Everyone was wailing and weeping; this went on for four days.
I remember us kids would steal the ice.
Our little dog, Mickey, laid next to Grandfather and did not move except once when he stretched and made a whiny sound like dogs do. The women jumped up and in Lakota said, “He’s alive! He’s alive!” They ran out the door. When we realized it was the dog, everyone started laughing.
Next morning, they took Grandpa by wagon to be buried in Norris, near where he was born on the Rosebud. I did not get to go, but plenty of people stayed around the house. That night we sat at the campfire. It was the first time I ever ate roasted marshmallows. I remember throwing some over the hill to feed the spirits. My grandfather would have wanted me to do this.
A few days later, my parents brought me back to Kyle while my grandmother and her friends were burning my grandfather’s possessions so that they would travel with him to the spirit world. A few days later my parents burned down the house for the same reason, a practice that is seldom done today. Grandmother moved to Kyle, and you already know the rest. Soon they took me to boarding school.
Before we get back into the White Thunder Ranch pickup, Vernell reaches down to pull a few sprigs of a plant with small brown flowers that I recognize as ragweed. It is still dry and brittle because there has not yet been enough spring weather to bring it back to life. As he pulls a stem between his thumb and forefinger and rubs the dry leaves into a powder, Vernell says, “We even had our very own Lakota pharmacy. This plant we called poipiye, which means ‘to cure the swelling.’ You put some crushed leaves into a small amount of hot water to form a paste to reduce inflammation. I used it recently when I twisted my ankle jumping off a horse. Pregnant women make tea out of poipiye to stop them from vomiting. They say you can even use this for diarrhea, but then it has a different name, canhlogan onzipakinte, which means ‘weed to wipe the rear.’”
“You must be kidding!”
“Not kidding, and if we had more time I could show you many other plants we use for traditional healing. But we should go—there is one more place I want to take you before darkness comes.”
I am reluctant to leave this little spot of land in Yellow Bear Canyon, this unexploited Lakota habitat, safely wrapped as it is in the hills and ridges, the arms of Mother Earth. A return visit unlikely, I want to sit here quietly, feel the presence of Poor Thunder, the comfort of his peaceful, contented spirit. Vernell’s grandfather lived much as he would have if Anglo-Europeans had never invaded his lands, never discovered gold in He Sapa. Ignoring the admonishments and laws of missionaries and agency officials, he ministered to the physical and spiritual health of his people according to the traditional ways as they were practiced by his forbearers.
What a far richer world this would be if my ancestors had only had the wisdom to honor the treaties, the foresight to let native people live their lives as they had been living them. What lessons we could have learned! How ironic to have destroyed their ability to live freely off the land, and then complain about lazy Indians on food stamps. How blind not to have appreciated the pageantry of their rituals, the poetry of their songs, the rhythm of their dancing, the exquisiteness of their craftsmanship and their artistry, the power of Tunkashila. How crazy not to have visualized a thriving partnership instead of this lopsided domination. How ignorant to not have understood the will and inevitable triumph of a people who have survived every imaginable deprivation. The Sacred Hoop is no longer broken. The revenge of the red man is coming, I swear it is, and hopefully I will be alive to welcome it.
But we are on the road again, headed back in the direction of White Thunder Ranch.