Fort Laramie National Monument, Wyoming, Summer 1979.
After having been put on academic probation by Montana State University the quarter before, I get a job with the Young Adult Conservation Corps (YACC) in Yellowstone National Park. It is the older sister program to the Youth Conservation Corps that I worked for in Glacier four years ago. During the winter months it’s a group like me—people who, for one reason or another, have nowhere else to go. During the summer months, the YACC employs a lot of students in transition, to college, summer break, after college. So far I’ve worked as a teacher’s aide, a secretary, and a custodian, and I am now in purchasing. The purpose of the program is to help young adults, ages eighteen to twenty-four, gain important job skills. I don’t get the skills so much as I get a paycheck. In two months I will attend the University of Montana, where I’ve applied to and been accepted. I’ve learned an important lesson from the last educational fiasco; school will need to come first.
But now it is July, and I, along with five other people, have been chosen to drive six twelve-passenger vans to an event being held at Fort Laramie, a National Historic Site. I don’t know anything about Fort Laramie. I don’t even know where it is. After six hours of driving beneath the searing Wyoming sun, I find out it is in eastern Wyoming, near the Nebraska border.
At the time I had no idea of the history behind Fort Laramie, other than a bit that I’d read in James Michener’s Centennial, mainly because high school history classes were more concerned about names and dates than about events that tumbled and cascaded into one other like dominoes. Fort Laramie was the symbol of untrustworthiness, especially in terms of American Indian treaty law. For American Indian tribes, treaties with the federal government were a fact of life. Francis Paul Prucha writes in American Indian Treaties: A History of Political Anomaly, “Between 1778, when the first treaty was signed with the Delawares, and 1868, when the final one was completed with the Nez Perces, there were 367 ratified Indian treaties and 6 more whose status is questionable.”
The Treaty of Fort Laramie of 1851 was one of the six questionable treaties. That treaty had been attended by ten thousand members of the Sioux, Cheyennes, Arapahos, Crows, Assiniboines, Gros Ventres, Mandans, and Arikaras. Each tribe was to appoint one chief to speak for every member of that tribe; that one chief would also be the one to sign the treaty. The 1851 treaty required that tribes would agree to get along; they would agree to one another’s territorial boundaries; they would allow the U.S. government to build roads and military posts within those boundaries; and they would make reparation for any harm caused to whites who crossed their lands lawfully. In return, they would receive protection from harm caused them from white settlers, as well as an annuity of $50,000 paid each year for fifty years. The annuity would take the form of merchandise, food, domestic stock, and farm implements.
The problem was that when the treaty was submitted to the Senate by President Millard Fillmore, it was amended without the tribes’ knowledge. The discussion centered on the length of time the annuity would be paid. After many back-and-forth arguments, it was decided that the annuity payment would be decreased from fifty years to ten, with the option of the president to continue payment for no more than five years after that. As amended, the treaty was approved by a vote of forty-four to seven, all without the tribes’ knowledge or consent. As far as they were concerned, tribal representatives had signed their names to $2.5 million rather than the $500,000 to $750,000, the annuity had become.
Prucha explains the change from the senators’ point of view: “No doubt [the Senate] felt that $2.5 million over fifty years was too much for a treaty in which no land cessions were made, and the new policy of strictly limiting the duration of annuities ran counter to a term as long as fifty years. It was hoped the civilizing provisions would have taken effect sooner than that.”
Representatives began to obtain consent, but by 1854 only three tribes had given theirs. No other approvals were sought. As a result, the treaty never was officially proclaimed by the then president Franklin Pierce, although annuities were paid over a period of fifteen years. In the 1920s the Department of the Interior attempted to get the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851 proclaimed, but the secretary of state argued that the Act of 1871 forbade further treaties; therefore, ratification of the treaty came to a halt.
In the tribes’ eyes, this was a broken treaty. Fort Laramie was also known for the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1868, which, in some ways, was more nefarious, though legally ratified. The idea of assimilation through civilization became apparent in the types of provisions, goods, and equipment that the U.S. government would provide American Indian people. It also became clear, through the treaty’s language, how Indians should use their land: like white farmers. Indians would willingly make the reservation their home, land that would be described as arable. Trade buildings would be constructed and the education of Indian children would be compulsory. The treaty required that Indians’ leather clothing would be replaced by garments made from wool and flannel and calico. In addition, the U.S. government would determine the property, the government, and the workings of the reservation.
Not all the Sioux agreed to these terms, and the terms of the treaty were not all met. Promised provisions of clothing and food were interrupted, if not altogether halted. White settlers crossed Indian lands without permission, and the so-called arable land was eaten up by buildings, roads, and railroads that tribal members had no intention of using.
As the agreements, outlined by the treaties, deteriorated, so did the tribes’ patience. Brutal wars erupted, including the Great Sioux War of 1876–77 and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. In retaliation, the U.S. government launched massacres, including the Wounded Knee Massacre, where more than two hundred men, women, and children of the Lakotas had been killed.
I had no idea, when I worked at Fort Laramie for those five days, that these were the issues that fueled the Occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, which my father and I never discussed that summer in 1974.
On our first day of work we shuttle people a quarter mile from the parking lot to the fort and back to their cars. The temperature is already in the mideighties by eight o’clock, and I know by three it will hover near a hundred. We drive all day, back and forth, between the dust-choked parking lot and the fort itself, making four runs an hour. Tiny particles of grit coat our noses and choke the van’s vents and blankets seats. We are encouraged to wear watered-down handkerchief masks, but it feels too suffocating, so I decline, not thinking about the finely ground soil now settling deep into my lungs. It is the same dust that obscures the parking lot, all but the cars whose windshields reflect the fierce midday sun. The vans run constantly and so do their air conditioners; the cool air is the only thing that keeps us sane. We live for evening, when we can shower and wash the day’s accumulation of sweat and grime from our bodies, drink a beer, and poke fun at the clientele.
For five days we drive. There is no time to walk among the buildings, so I study them from a distance as I commute back and forth on my route. The site consists of a spread-out collection of restored officers’ homes, army barracks, stables, mess halls, and supply posts, all surrounding the parade grounds. The structures, with their freshly painted white exteriors, sit harsh against the golden-brown backdrop of the American prairie and waver in the brutal heat. I watch as a small breeze spawns a dust devil, sending it scurrying across the landscape. It is easy to see how an upper-class officer’s wife from the East would find these surroundings repugnant.
At the age of twenty, I am not only innocent; I am unaware. I don’t know this place’s significance, or my heritage as an American Indian within it. To me, it isn’t much different from the other forts that rest on the western landscapes, reminders of a fractious history, that the enemy had been conquered. It will take years for me to fully accept that the enemy that white America is talking about is me. In movies, in textbooks, in literature, we were “savage warriors” who attacked innocent settlers as they caravanned their wagons across the vast prairies of the United States, looking for free land to make their own. The Indians’ price for their savagery was to be rounded up and placed on reservations. Like many people, I didn’t question where that “savagery,” that anger came from.
In years to come I will be shocked to find out that more than one thousand wars were declared on tribes by the U.S. military; that President Andrew Jackson considered treaties to be nonbinding, empty gestures to placate Indian “vanity”; or that the largest mass execution in U.S. history occurred the day after Christmas in 1862, when thirty-eight Indian men were hung in Mankato, Minnesota, for their role in the Great Sioux Uprising, a protest of their starvation and death due to illness, lack of provisions, and exposure.
But now, at this stage in my life, I’m not sure of what it means to be Indian. And one look at my brown skin, burnished beneath an unforgiving sun, says I’m not white. For now I don’t think about these things; I push them to the back of my mind because they make me uncomfortable, and I sense they make others uncomfortable as well. So I drive the mind-numbing and repetitive route and grow quieter each day, no longer chatting with people who get in, get out, get in, get out. I am tired. I am tired of the endless hot days that have taken my good nature and tossed it to the afternoon winds that gust across the empty landscape. I am tired of people complaining about the weather, the heat, and the dust on the seats, on their faces, in their mouths. I am tired of making small talk about where I’m from, where they’re from, when they’re going home, when I’m going home.
I don’t think about what it means to be Indian until I get ready to pull away from the fort and see a man flagging me down, holding up one hand to indicate his interest in getting on this van. He lopes easily toward me, as he holds his white straw cowboy hat in place against a breeze that has begun to stir. As he jogs in front of my grill, I see he is tall and slim. A moment later he climbs in, grabbing the back of my seat as he does so, jarring me into yet another level of annoyance. I study the rearview mirror to make sure he’s seated before pulling the automatic gearshift into drive and starting forward. He catches my gaze and grins, showing long, white teeth that nestle in his chiseled jaw.
“Well, that’s quite the place!” Cowboy says, his voice booming in my ear. I look at him, nod and smile. I have to. It is a requirement of my job, outlined the first day we arrived. The others in the van remain silent, gazing out the window and fanning themselves in the stifling heat, probably wondering if the weather is going to follow them to Kansas or Montana or Colorado or wherever their next stopping point is. “Yes sir,” Cowboy continues, “that is quite the history.”
“Where are you from?” I ask. He has to be local.
“Cody, Wyoming. What about you?”
“Montana,” I answer. My annoyance grows at the aviator sunglasses that hide his eyes. I watch people’s eyes because they tell me what words don’t.
“Well,” he says, as he looks out the window and mulls over the landscape, his arm thrown lazily across the back of the bench seat, “I don’t care what they say about you people; you’re okay.” And he laughs, a big rolling laugh that takes me off guard. He’s still chuckling when I leave him off at the parking lot. As he exits, he turns around, touches his finger to the brim of his hat, and saunters away, the grin still on his face.
You people? You’re okay?
The laughter is meant to make it seem like an inside joke, but the meaning is unmistakable. As an Indian, I’m different from him, but not in a good way. He has to tell me we’re okay. He gets to decide whether or not we’re worthy. And that’s when the discomfort settles in. I’m Indian, but I’m as white as he is. I’ve gone to the same schools, schools filled with people who look like him. I’ve had the same classes, the ones that tell me about our savage history. Hell, all the men I’ve dated look like him, with their brownish blonde hair, their blue/green eyes, their tan that evaporates in the winter. So where does he get off telling me that I’m “okay”?
When I tell this story to different people, over the next days, weeks, months, years, I realize many of them are fine with his statement. He probably didn’t mean anything by it. He laughed, right? It was a joke. But I’m familiar enough with the lingo of the West to know that even though statements like his sound fine, beneath the surface they’re meant to keep me one notch down, a member of a conquered and forgotten race.
And I then have two choices: let it slide because I don’t want to get into a heated argument, which then translates to, “You are passive; you know your place”; or I can get angry, in which case I’m told I’m overly sensitive, too ready to take offense. I have a chip on my shoulder. If that wasn’t true, people reason, others would be getting excited about the conversation. The thing is, I might have heard the same slur, in different words, ten times that month.
But in the summer of 1979, I didn’t know the history of the ways non-Indians perceived American Indians. I didn’t understand the anger and animosity that each group felt for the other. All I knew was what I experienced, my perceptions filtered through the eyes and knowledge of white America. Is it, then, any wonder that I felt confusion at being me?