Red Man

Montana bodes some of the most beautiful skies I have ever seen. Thick, sensual clouds caressed by a diaphanous cerulean- like whipped topping that blurs the horizon containing silk like hills of green and dark brown. It looks like a real live Bob Ross painting. Big sky country is most suitable for this place. The sky demands your attention and awe. I drive past a small expanse that is Wyoming into a state that houses horses and cows grazing freely at every bend. Country music on the radio as well as 2 NPR stations.

Tractors and pickup trucks, but not in the inbred white trash way.

This expanse of highway is easy to drive, straight and unencumbered with speed limit signs or state police, or even exits. It looks untouched almost, as if God was saving this part of the world just for himself.

My purpose for coming here was to visit 2 Indian Reservations, the people of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe and the Flathead Indian Reservation that housed some Sioux as well as the Confederation of Salish and Kootenai tribes. The reservations are on opposite sides of Montana and quite different in geography. The Northern Cheyenne’s tribal lands are flat, peak less and dry, and much smaller than the Bitterroot land by square mileage. But still breathtaking. The first building I came to when I hit the reservation’s border was the college. It’s a modest structure, with a beautiful awning in the front to help you find it. Chief Dull Knife College was founded in 1975, specifically for the education of the Native people of the land of the Cheyenne. I went to an HBCU, so I felt akin to the students and faculty there. They were doing sacred work. They knew it.

I went into the building and spoke to a woman named Millie (Black Feather), a sweet, zaftig smiling woman about 5 feet tall. We exchanged niceties and she let me look around. I asked her about the programs and cultural activities on the reservation, and she happily told me about a POW wow on the neighboring Crow reservation that was going down this weekend.

She also told me that the college has a great Native Studies program that specializes in Indian language and History. Cheyenne’s language originates from the Algonquin language stock. There is also a Boys and Girls club situated on eh campus, as well as a Job training and readiness program, a GED program, and a recovery meeting, which is held once a week in the campus library when the Catholic Church is not available. Also, there are times when the college has food drives.

Lame Deer, the city named for the Cheyenne Warrior who would not surrender at eh Battle of Muddy Creek, is a focal point in the reservation and college takes its students to this site every year.

Millie and I talked for a while about teaching, education and so on, and then she took me to the main drag in the center of town. She wanted me to see the People’s center buildings, but I wanted to talk to the people. We talked for a while longer and then we parted ways. I walked around town for a while, trying to get a feel for the place.
Almost every man I saw had a car, had to apparently, there isn’t a really reliable transportation system on the reservation. Children ran around with no shoes on, looked after by smiling mothers and grandmothers. Tents were up in parking lots, and at midday, people were deeply sleeping under them. Dogs populated the street like they do in the third world.  I came to building that was boarded up and saw a beautiful mural on it, one that depicted old Indians marching toward a meth needle. A large eagle screamed in your face, admonishing. The word, “Genocide” was scrawled at the bottom of the mural. I stood there for a while, trying to swallow the pain in my throat that welled up when I saw two young women staring at me, smiling, with not a tooth between them. Drugs have hit this reservation. Hard. The Cheyenne have evolved past alcohol and are now dealing with a full on crystal meth epidemic.

A small skinny whisper of a kid with the word “DOPE” stamped on his hat came up to me and asked me if I like the mural.
“I do.”

“I can take you to some more if you want.”

I followed the boy, he called himself Thomas because his mother was Catholic, and his father called him “Great Whisper” after his grandfather.

He was a light brown slip-tall and lanky with huge eyes and hands. His mouth was flat and wide against his face. His nose made his profile look like the Crazy Horse statue. At first glance one would almost assume he was Mexican. But he was full blood Native American.

“My boy does a lot of these, he’s really talented.”

Truer words have never been spoken. The brick canvas was covered with a scenic rendering of the same hypnotic Montana sky that beguiled me. A giant blackbird kept watch over a group of Indians on horseback, focused on a burning teepee next to a railroad track, broken, trudging through Indian land. A flowing river kept cadence with the warriors, as if it were on their team.

“I can show you some of mine, if you want,” he blushed.

“Yes, please.”

I put the boy in my car and we drove up to Lame Deer High school, the only structure of what seemed like the road to hell. It was not paved, just uneven dirt and rocks that I am sure left school busses broken every year and confounded my poor VW. Thomas was silent and at ease in the car, the opposite to my awkward nervousness-what if this boy tried to rob me? What if he killed me? My New York spider/rat sense wasn’t tingling, so I tried to make to small talk and asked him about the school. He was a student here, he said after he graduated he would probably join the army like his brother. From talking to him and looking around the reservation I realized that this was the plan for many Native men. Even at the college there were scatters of young boys in uniform registering for the coming semester’s classes.

We pulled up to a lonely high place on the opposite side of the building’s entrance. There was a silhouette of a naked Indian woman, drawn in all Black, glowing beams of white, surrounded by coyote and prairie dogs. This was the antelope woman. When a Cheyenne draws a woman with likeness of animals around her, this is homage to her fertility, her beauty. She will never be drawn naked, like the Victorian, her silhouette will be shaded and she will be ensconced in life.
Thomas was truly a talent.

“You know, you’re pretty amazing. Have you ever thought of goin to art school?” I smiled at him; squinting from the mothering sun that beamed so intense it seemed to sit witness to our conversation.

He just smiled. “Nah, not really. It’s something I like to do, to pass the time, you know?”

I stood silent to agree, even though every cell in me wanted to scream, “FUCK NO!!! NURTURE THIS!!!!”
We drove back down to the town center by the college. By this time conversation flowed easier.

“Why do you have so many knives in your car?”
“Because I am a woman traveling alone across the country,” I answered.

He laughed. “Yeah, I guess. At first I thought you were gonna kill me and put me in the trunk.”

His smile was so pure, like stock photo footage. Looking at his profile against the scenery out the window was like watching puzzle pieces at the moment when they slide into each other, fitting perfectly.

Down the paved part of the road he rolled down the window and called out to a pretty dark brown girl pushing a full stroller with 3 more small ones behind her.

“Hey- stop a minute- hey!”

The girl was his sister. The children were his younger siblings.

“NIgga, I been look for your ass!” She chastised her brother and stared into the driver’s seat and looked at me with a contrite smile, as if apologizing for her greeting.

“It’s all good, I was just showing this lady around. What’s your name?”

I wanted to tell him my name was something spectacular like, “Sexy Feather” or “Expensive Flip Flops”.

“Breeanne. Nice to meet you.”

Thomas’ sister was named Jennifer, she wouldn’t tell me her Indian name, she was a shy, thick bodied, beautiful teenager who chewed gum with her mouth open and cursed at the young siblings, which apparently she took care of as if she birthed them. She and Thomas had the same father who was dead; the younger ones had the same father, who was deep into a meth addiction that caught their mother as well.

They were on their way to the college to go get some food to put away for the week.

Everyone piled in my car, since there was no room for the stroller in the trunk; we affixed it to the roof since the ride was only about ½ mile.

This was an amazingly fun ride for me, even though I was silent, listening to Thomas and Jennifer go back and forth about food provisions and bath times and their mom- I had a fantasy that when I got to the Mexico leg of my journey I would smuggle a Mexican family across the border in my trunk. My brother has since talked me down from this fantasy, as he is unwilling to front the bail money that it would take to get me out of prison if my plan failed, so this was my second best attempt.
Interesting how God works.

When I got back to the College, Millie was just leaving, about to get into her car. One of the little ones opened up the door even before I had come to full stop. He hadn’t any shoes on, he ran straight for Millie and she picked him up and smiled at me.

“I see you made some friends,” she covered her eyes from the sun.

“I did.”

“Thomas, we got the pictures from last year’s spirit run up in the library. You should stop in there and take a look.”

“Oooohh,” Jennifer teased.

“What’s the spirit run?” I asked, now holding one of the children who climbed out of my car. He had two pieces of the raisin bread from the loaf in my back seat in his mouth.

Thomas had participated in a Cheyenne tradition that pays homage to the ancestors who were tapped in Fort Robinson Nebraska in 1879. They were locked in the Fort with no food water, or heat for 5 days. A group of them tried to escape and were shot immediately upon exit. Some, like Chief Dull Knife managed to escape make the long, rigorous journey back to their homeland.

400 miles. The run begins in January, just like it did in 1879, through Nebraska back up to the reservation in Busby Montana. Thomas had completed the spirit run twice, which I assume was why he was so skinny, he had a runner’s body.

I fell completely in love with him when I found this out. He smiled at me, that same, perfect flat smile and took his little brother from my arms.

It was then that I understood why he would never go to art school; he would never leave this land. He knew it. At that moment when he looked at me, he knew I knew it too.

“Come on,” Jennifer commanded, and like ducklings everyone fell in line and followed her up to a trailer in the center of campus where the food pantry was.

“Thank you,” I said to Thomas before he brought the rear of the brood.

“Yeah,” he replied, sheepishly, and then hugged me, and turned and walked away.

Maybe it was Thomas, or the immense beauty of the land contrasted against the abject poverty but I was almost moved to tears as I drove away.