Chapter Eleven
The Faithkeeper

Chief Oren Lyons’s main attraction at first was that he reminded me of my father: average height, muscular and chesty without seeming aggressive, and calm. Like Dad, he was so calm you couldn’t read his mood and thoughts. Unlike most people, neither of them mimicked the expression on your face. Both of them were unfailingly pleasant, confident, yet somehow wary, reserved. When I first met Oren in 1984, Dad was eighty and Oren was fifty-four. So he reminded me of my father when I was just starting out at the Times.

I had gone up to the Onondaga Reservation near Syracuse, New York, after a story I thought would let me move away from the relentless geniality of my Sunday Morning sports essays. Something edgier. Dennis Banks, a founder of the American Indian Movement, had become an FBI fugitive after a gun battle on a South Dakota reservation. The Onondagas, as a sovereign nation, had given him asylum. In return, Banks was running health and sports programs on the reservation and had organized the Jim Thorpe Longest Run, a pan-Indian solidarity event that would send young runners from reservation to reservation, starting at Onondaga and finishing at the 1984 Olympics in Los Angeles. It was a long shot, but I thought that might be enough of a sports angle to justify coming back with a producer and crew.

After a long discussion, Banks agreed to an on-camera interview if the Onondaga chiefs approved. I was introduced to Oren, who heard me out, nodding and grunting like Dad. He was just as decisive. “Be good TV,” he said. I had no idea he was an international Native American diplomat, a university professor, an artist, and a former all-American college athlete. He was just a chief in running shoes, jeans, and a beaded shirt.

We toured the reservation, a hardscrabble community of 2,000 or less (no census takers admitted) on 7,300 acres of junkyards and vegetable gardens, rusty trailers and suburban-style homes. I noticed elementary school boys and girls slamming hard rubber balls against the brick wall of their school with lacrosse sticks and teenagers choosing up sides for boisterous scrimmages in muddy backyards. Some older men were clearing debris from a sports field. Oren noticed my interest.

“Guhchigwaha,” he said. “Means ‘Bump Hips.’ The Jesuit missionaries called it lacrosse because they thought the stick resembled a bishop’s crozier.”

“You guys still play it?”

“It’s the lifeblood of the Six Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy. It’s the Creator’s game. There are two times of the year that stir the blood. In the fall for the hunt and now for lacrosse.”

He had me at Guhchigwaha. Sorry, Dennis, I just found a Sunday Morning story.

Banks and his run got into the piece, but it was mostly about Oren and lacrosse. There was a great news peg: the Iroquois were cranking up to compete in the international arena after a long absence (they had been banned on trumped-up amateurism violations when they got too good). Also, white college and club lacrosse was booming, and Native American teams were playing both an indoor and outdoor version. Oren himself was coaching several Onondaga teams, one starring his son, Rex, and his nephews, Scott and Kent, another his grandson Montgomery. Generations.

Even after the piece ran, I kept going back to Onondaga or meeting Oren at lacrosse matches, conferences, the United Nations, where he was an international diplomat for indigenous peoples. He was running a close second to Gerard Papa as a subject who had entered my personal life. Oren slept in my apartment in Manhattan, I slept in his cabin on the res. I wrote magazine pieces and newspaper columns about him. Over the years, what he represented to me changed as I changed, but from the beginning he was symbolic of a masculinity I could admire: tough without bravado, shrewdly self-reliant, generous as a friend and mentor. Like Papa, Oren was a source of positive energy in a world of sucking black holes. Like Papa, he knew who he was, and he was comfortable, almost to the point of being smug. Was it a flaw or just confidence?

Oren attributed his sense of self to his upbringing on the res. Hunting was Oren’s first rite of manhood. “My father would give me one shell. If I missed, he’d send me home. If I killed, he’d let me stay. The discipline of the hunt is very important. You’ve got to eat. You learn to respect skill. And you stay in touch with everything around you.”

Sports and art, traditional tickets out of the slum, had given young Oren some early fame on the res. He was a good amateur featherweight boxer, and his drawings of eagles and wolves were of magazine illustration quality. (“Isn’t it interesting,” he once said to me, “that the only kind of taxes the United States lets you vote on is school taxes, and then you go out and cut them, which is like cutting off your own foot. And what do you cut, sports, which gives you strength and health, and art, which gives you that balance, sensitivity.”)

But it was lacrosse at which he made his mark. He was a teenager then, playing in the shadow of his own father, a renowned goalie who would eventually be buried with his lacrosse stick.

“My father told me, ‘You have to concentrate, have to keep your eye on the ball. No matter what happens, don’t let them catch your eye, ’cause then you’re done.’” Oren paused, cocked an eyebrow to punctuate the metaphor. “That’s all I ever took from him, but it’s all you need.”

Roy Simmons, Sr., then the lacrosse coach of Syracuse University, told me some years later about watching Oren play on the reservation in the late forties. “Oren was sensational. He was quick as a cat, entirely courageous. I wanted him. But there was no way. I think he only had about a year of high school before he dropped out.”

“I quit school in the eighth grade,” said Oren. “I had such a head on with the teacher, just hostile to me, didn’t like me. I recognized it was beyond me because I never offended that teacher. I tried my best. I was lucky to understand early it wasn’t about me, it was racism. And resisting it helped me sustain myself.”

Oren boxed, drank, sketched, and raised hell until he was drafted in 1950, at twenty. He joined the 82nd Airborne. At twenty-three, he returned to the res and supported his wife and baby daughter by painting boxing portraits on the walls of local bars at $10 each.

Coach Simmons rediscovered Lyons. “My kid, Roy, was entering Syracuse and I was anxious for him to play on a good team. I knew Roy would score plenty of goals, but I needed a goalie who would keep the other team from scoring. And there was Oren.

“The semester had already started, so I grabbed the dean of admissions and dragged him down to this restaurant, Norm’s Arena. There was a painting of Jack Dempsey, looked like he was going to jump out and hit you. That got Oren into the School of Fine Arts, and I got the best goalie I ever had.”

Eventually, with Oren in goal and two other all-Americans on attack, Roy, Jr., and the future NFL star Jim Brown, the 1957 Syracuse team went undefeated.

“Oren was different from other Indian athletes,” said Roy, Jr., who replaced his father as coach. “He was on time, he accepted discipline. But most Indian athletes are hard to read. Stoic. Never cry or admit pain. Winning and losing are not as important to them. They like to play the game, give and take licks, and when the dust settles, when it’s over, just shake hands. They’ll accept not being number one. And they’ll never admit they made a mistake. That’s hard for a white coach to deal with.”

“It’s perplexing to white coaches,” said Oren. “Self-respect and individuality are very important to Indians. They’re very sensitive, they expect rejection. You can’t yell at them, or they’ll just drag up and go. They walked out on British officers who barked orders at them during the Revolution, and they walk off steel when the foreman yells at them, and they’ll walk off teams.”

After graduation from Syracuse in 1958, Oren moved to Madison Avenue. In ten years he rose from paste-up artist to head planning director for seasonal lines at Norcross Greeting Card Company, an experience, he says, that “grounded me in the American psyche.”

Club lacrosse took him into the dark upper reaches of that psyche. The last time Oren went hunting with white men was in the 1960s. A group of his lacrosse teammates, Wall Streeters, organized a Catskill Mountain hunt on the first day of deer season.

“That’s a fierce sight, white men unleashed. Twelve-inch knives strapped to their thighs, bandoliers. They almost hit some guy in another party, missed him by six inches, and he fired back. They went to slug it out. I stopped it and volunteered to stay back and cook dinner. White men have all the rules, what kind of guns to use and which dates to use them, but not how you treat each other. I didn’t want my kids growing up in that environment.”

Oren’s disdain for the white world was almost casual, an engaging combination of disgust and amusement. None of that fierce red-man resentment I remembered from the more enlightened Westerns that Dad and I had gone to on Tuesday nights in the summertime. Oren wasn’t Geronimo or Tonto. He acted as though he came from a superior culture that hadn’t given up battling the bully. With Oren, I never felt sorry for Indians, that it was my duty to stand up for them. They could stand up for themselves, given an equal chance. It was my duty to go after the big assholes who think they can get away with anything.

When Oren was called by the Nation in the late 1960s, it was easy for him to go home. The Clan Mothers had summoned him back to the reservation to take his place on the council. Women select the Onondaga chiefs, then sit behind them in the Longhouse, silent historians. It was a tumultuous time throughout Indian country, as white men and their native henchmen went after Indian lands for casinos, toxic waste dumps, staging areas for gun, drug, and human trafficking.

In 1971, Onondaga refused to allow the state onto the reservation to widen a highway. The head chief, Leon Shenandoah, with Oren at his elbow, drew a line in the dirt and said, “This is where the United States ends.” Governor Nelson Rockefeller’s presidential ambitions were at stake, and he didn’t want to look weak. State troopers were massed for the assault, facing Onondaga rifles, when they were abruptly pulled away to quell the Attica prison uprising.

As a traditional chief, Oren spoke out publicly against Indians selling out their heritage. The Mafia had supposedly put a price on his head. Once, walking across a meadow on the res, we were fired upon from the tree line. Oren said not to worry; they were Indians and would have hit us if they wanted to. They were merely registering displeasure. (Like most Indians I met, he did not ask to be referred to as “Native American.” “Indian” was fine, although naming the specific nation was preferred.)

Oren supported himself as an associate professor of American studies at the State University of New York at Buffalo but spent more time at the day-to-day work of the traditional chiefs, including the mediation of long-simmering feuds between neighboring families that often broke out in gunfire. The chiefs wanted to keep Indians out of American courts, as well as hospitals. I found such tales of tribal justice irresistible. My favorite was a dog story from Oren’s own past.

Smudgie was a working partner, not a pet, a mean old spayed bitch who hunted with young Oren through the years right after his father left, when he kept his mother, his sister, and his six brothers fed with his gun. He shot pheasant, rabbit, and raccoon, and Smudgie pointed and found them. The woodland was their supermarket. Oren tried not to let Smudgie follow the deer or get a taste for flesh, but somewhere along the way she began to freelance around the reservation.

One night, Smudgie lurched up to the door of the house, her chest blown open. She died in Oren’s arms.

The blood trail made it a simple backtrack. The killer, a crabby old neighbor, had waited in ambush. He had let Smudgie get close enough to his henhouse for a clear shot from his doorway. It would have been easy to chase her, even to let her take a chicken and then demand reparation from the Lyons family. The chiefs would have enforced that. But the old man was bitter and had killing on his mind.

So Oren buried Smudgie and hiked out to the meadow where the old man kept the two horses he used for plowing and transport. Oren shot one of them. Simple justice.

Nothing was ever said.

Thirty-five years later, I asked Oren, “You still think you did the right thing?”

“Absolutely.”

“And it never crossed your mind to shoot the old man?”

Oren looked amused. “That would have been something a white man might do.”

Through Oren, I became a student of Indian history and lore, especially intrigued by the Iroquois concept of Seven Generations, every decision based on its ramifications for children and grandchildren and beyond. As I grew older, I found myself interested in mentoring, in sharing my experience with younger sportswriters and young adult novelists instead of competing with them. But I wondered if that was merely a way for me to opt out of the arena, to give up before I gave out. I watched Oren reaching his big hand out to his nation’s youth, and the lesson seemed clear. What could be manlier than to be an elder of the tribe and to help shape its future? Another lesson I could have learned from my father, had I been listening then. Their basic philosophies were similar, too.

At eighty, Oren still reminded me of Dad. In the summer of 2010, with a new hip and a pacemaker, he looked solid and calm as ever. At his birthday party, he called on us all to “share.” A few weeks later, as a leader of the Iroquois Nationals, he negotiated unsuccessfully with the British government to allow the team to fly to Manchester for the world lacrosse championships on Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) passports. Was it homeland security or once again were Indians barred for being too good?

Once, while we were sitting on the raw plank deck of his hilltop cabin, Oren said, “There’s a moral nut in every human being. We have to keep reminding people, we have to keep exposing them to what’s good in themselves. We have to teach the question, the only question. ‘Is it right?’ So simple. But if people don’t want to follow that, the game is up. It’s all over.”