PAIN IN MY HEART

caterpillar among the wildwood flowers

 

Up this morning, took sunflower seeds to toss on the gravel where I feed the crows, the doves, the squirrels, whoever finds it, and a handful of carrots for the donkeys. They were up the meadow out of sight. I brayed to Jack. He brayed and came running. His front hooves slid about four feet in the thin mud at the gate, wet from yesterday's rain. It's fun for him to slide in the mud. His eyes sparkled. Jack has a playful spirit that finds play easily. I was especially happy to see them this morning, talked to them while they munched, and rubbed the underside of their necks. They like to be rubbed at the point on their backs where the lines of dark chocolate cross. When I want to touch them, this is the place I start. It calms them down immediately. I make it a point to rub Jack's neck after rubbing Jenny. They pay attention. Jenny goes first for carrots, for grain, for everything. Jenny shows her jealousy up front. Jack holds his jealousy such that I don't see it, but he gets back at Jenny. Feeling jealousy puts him in a bad mood. Jack automatically defers to Jenny, his babydoll, and Jenny's jealousy requires being first. I've learned their individual natures by now. As long as Jenny goes first, we have peace  in the meadow. No way could I ever change a donkey's nature it was born with. Jack adjusts his behavior to Jenny's jealousy about being first, and I do too, so we flow together smoothly. As we humor her jealousy, she needs to express it less and less, which eases her mind.

 

queen anne's lace

 

The morning I realized Caterpillar was gone, Jenny and Jack felt my sorrow. They were especially still. I saw it in their eyes. They could feel what I was feeling. I remembered the time Jenny lost her first baby, me crying with her, my arms around her neck hugging her while we both cried. I held Jack around the neck and cried with him awhile. Both were in deep mourning. I felt like I bonded with them on a deeper level that day sharing their sorrow. This time, they shared my sorrow. They knew Caterpillar lived with me in the human barn. A couple times I held her to let them smell her, one at a time, feel her fur with their lips. She pushed her face down into the crook of my arm. Their heads were bigger than her whole body. They were ok from a distance, but up close, they were frightening. I wanted them to be familiar with her scent, to understand Caterpillar belongs here so they would not hurt her if she were to walk into the meadow. I know she has. I found her once curled up in a bed of grass with wildflowers all around, fairly deep into the donkey meadow when they were in the meadow across the creek.

caterpillar walks among the wildwood flowers

 

Back to the house, I brewed some Sumatran coffee, called Carole and we talked an hour or more. All morning, Caterpillar dwelled in the front of my mind. I read some in a Cormac McCarthy novel and put on a documentary from yesterday's mail, Geronimo and the Apache Resistance. It took my mind off Caterpillar right away. I felt the people, felt their anguish, their determination. I felt like I was there with them. I wrung and twisted, gnawed a thumbnail, tied up in knots on the inside, feeling what those people went through. I'd read enough about them that all the generals engaged in their genocide were familiar names and faces. I felt a deep love for the Apache people. Throughout my childhood, I read about Indians, saw movies, tv shows, identified with the Indians. I knew early that white man spoke with forked tongue. There was no white man in my world that didn't lie to me, including the preacher. All of it was fake Indians, but I knew it. I thought it ridiculous the directors and producers used white guys with dark tan makeup and wigs. However, I lived in the white world and knew white attitudes toward the Indians I did not share, would never expect white film makers to make a film using real Indians. A few were made eventually, but nobody cared.

black eyed Susans and queen anne's lace

I was moderately devastated by the end of the documentary,  though knew their fate already from reading. I came out of it thinking about how devastating love can be sometimes, Geronimo radicalized by losing his wife, kids and mother to white soldiers. I was shaken to the core with the story of the Apache resistance. I have chosen for self the path of love. My unconditional love for Caterpillar made losing her a wound to the heart. My purpose has been to allow heart to open, to go about everyday life with an open heart. I was still reeling from losing my baby when I took in this documentary of the genocide of people I appreciate so powerfully it felt like I surely had some past lives among the Apache. I recall in childhood, a long time before I heard about reincarnation, a day when I became concerned about my white skin. I realized my people would not recognize me in this lifetime. I was born among the enemy. What could I do? Nothing but live out my life as one of the people that killed my people, isolated from my true people an entire lifetime for being born white. It is said, be careful what you hate; we become what we hate. I must have hated whiteman. I'd guess the white population has a large number of Indians trapped in white bodies for hate.

black-eyed susans and queen anne's lace

It is so very difficult to attempt to live in this world with an open heart. To do so, I allow vulnerabilities. I have come to believe shutting down vulnerabilities hardens and closes down a heart. I lived so much of the early life with a closed heart, it took awhile to allow it slowly to open, slowly from fear. I know how it hurts to lose a loved one, cat, dog, human. Caterpillar and I grew closer and closer in the recent months and years. I thought about it sometimes, when it is her time to go, I'm really going to feel some pain. That's ok. Eighteen years of unconditional love both ways is worth a few days of intense sorrow, weeks and months of grief. I've come to see grief is the last gift I can give my friend. I go ahead and feel it, unafraid, knowing from experience I come out of a period of grief with an inner clarity I did not have before. My mind was occupied today with how painful love can be sometimes. It's not all about Cupid shooting candy arrows. I've learned that real love is about engagement, not talking like an undertaker. I've even wondered if I over-loved Caterpillar, literally loved her to death. No. There is never too much love.

caterpillar

photos by tj worthington

 

 

*

 

 

 

COME ON SECOND COMING

north carolina

I see varieties of crazy news events being uncovered by internet news so fast it's kind of alarming, the quickness. A black man in Florida picking up a pack of cigarettes in his own car that was parked in front of his own house, two cops shot seven rounds, hit his car three times, the house once, his leg once and two more no telling where. Jimi Hendrix echoes in my head, They shot him down to the ground. He survived it with time in the hospital. Evidently they got him pretty good. I thought cops shot to kill, but these being Florida cops, maybe they do like LA gangbangers, bang-bang-bang, hoping maybe one will connect with target. We get crazy news like this from towns all over the country. It gives the impression these events are new and happening more. I think the case is that this sort of goof-ball police behavior has been going on everyplace. The kind of news that makes the local evening news shows, but doesn't have enough blood to make the multi-national corporate news. News that is not making the news is making the internet, bringing forward much that has been overlooked for many years. In this way the internet has become so beneficial for the gum-chewing masses, Murka Inc may find probable cause to put an end to the internet, or, more likely manipulate it the way they manipulate the news to make the victim look like the criminal and the criminal the victim.

Internet is the people's power, ideally, but I can't imagine it going very far before it is labeled terrorist. I see Limbaugh and Hannity have lost so many sponsors the radio station is now running them at a serious loss until end of year when evidently their contract runs out. That is heartening, unless the only thing it means is they have tilled their soil, planted their seeds until they're not needed any more. They sure as hell moronified the white men of Murka Inc over the last twenty or more years. I know a couple of twenty-somethings whose daddy (a preacher) made them listen to Rush (some pigs are more equal than others) Limbaugh every morning before they went to school. I feel sorry for his kids, now parrots of the Reagan Revolution. I feel a longing hope democracy is really not dead in Murka Inc, but that's like standing over somebody's grave wishing them back. What's gone is gone. From here on, it's going to be hell to pay. Corporate Bank has absolute control and will not let it go. That's square one, the starting place. It troubles me that the home of the brave, the land of the free, is now just an old-timey song of another Age, like it's as far away as the Roman Empire.

 

It seems like all that went before, all the progression to make America the Great over about four centuries of nation building, killing the continent's population, putting survivors into concentration camps called reservations for over a hundred years, poverty enforced by FBI. We have a great karmic debt to the people whose land we call our home. At the same time I look at the white tsunami that swept the native peoples off their homes, I recall among the Plains Indians the story of White Buffalo Calf Woman, who came to I think it was the Lakota people and introduced the peace pipe, taught them about living in peace amongst themselves. She said if they took to warring with each other, a force would come from outside and wipe them all away. It came true. Now the Indians wait for her return. The Jews continue to wait for Jesus. The Christians still wait for the return of Jesus from the clouds. Maybe the passing of the planet Nibiru could inspire some astrological force that would raise the consciousness of all life on earth to where we humans might say, Lets' really live in peace, and mean it. Could it be that easy?

 

I'm all for the Lord coming again, though I don't know what it means. I have a fair certainty it is not going to be the body of Jesus from 2000 years ago drifting down from a cloud ever so slowly and dramatically like Mary Poppins for the tv cameras with rainbows all around and angels singing Hallelujah, dropping in on Pat Robertson's 700 Club, first stop. Hallelujah Praise the Lord. Ever thought about how cold it is up above the clouds? He would have to descend slowly to thaw gradually. It's my understanding that when this whatever it is that's called the Second Coming occurs, it will be at a time when the situation humanity is in looks like a no way out corner. When we're all freaking out because there's nothing left to do but fill the air with nukes programmed to specific destinations, that's the kind of time it takes. One of the nuttiest aspects of humanity I've seen in my lifetime is the apparent dependence on believing something or somebody is going to come along from outside, from some yet-unknown place and save us from ourselves. If some sort of Divine intervention occurs, I'd like to be living to see it, to see how it manifests. We need some intelligent help. The intelligence of humans has been eaten by television.

      

 

 

 

*

ONCE A REDSKIN ALWAYS A REDSKIN

jim dine, tomatoes 1974

A notice by email today from high school class about a hall of fame, a list of names unfamiliar to me. I went to high school at North in Wichita, Kansas. Wichita is an island in the vast sea of Kansas prairie. It's a couple hundred miles by road (bridge) to anyplace you can set foot. Parents moved to Wichita when I was beginning the 10th grade. The week before we moved from Kansas City, the news told about a 19 yr old guy in Wichita killed by bikers (1957). I was thinking: Thanks, daddy, just where I don't want to go. It happened only about a mile from the house we were moving into. That was my first impression of Wichita. After landing there, I thought it was the ugliest place on earth. I despised it from the first day because it took me away from my life where I knew everybody and locked me down in a place where I knew nobody. Even the church was worse. I had a real respect for the preacher in the KC church, but respect for the preacher in Wichita diminished as time went by until he threw what respect I had down the toilet. He is someone I'd prefer to forget, but he hangs on in my memory as the mf'er who betrayed my trust unforgivably. I still have a grain of sand in my heart for the memory of him. I don't even care what his justifications were, my contempt for him as a human being is unparalleled by anyone else I have ever known. I don't wish anything on him for punishment other than what came back to him for the betrayal. I'm sure something bounced back to him. I don't care what.

Strangely, that's the first memory to pop up when Wichita comes to mind. I kind of had a little bit of an urge to go to the 50th class reunion. But I went to the 30th college reunion and regretted it, because I didn't know anybody. I read names of high school classmates and only about three do I recognize. It would have cost about $1500 to go, a thousand of it gas. I didn't have the money and wasn't about to borrow it, knowing in advance it would not be worth the expense. I'd rather spend that kind of money on a piece of art. It would have meant standing around with a plastic cup and a paper napkin in my hand with probably gingerale in the cup, "glass," whatever it's called, running my mouth with somebody I don't know, everybody dressed up, a couples party, everybody acting like their parents they swore they'd never be like, everybody grandparents with adorable great grandbabies. I would feel like I'd died and went to the Ozzie & Harriet Show. Ozzie and Harriet were 1950s America like Beavis and Butthead were 1980s America, the grandchildren of Ozzie and Harriet. Their son died free-basing cocaine in a private plane.

The letterhead from Wichita North said at the bottom, "Once a Redskin, always a Redskin." I had to double-take. After all these years of political correctness, they're still hanging onto Redskin. Back before that kind of "awareness," which is the wrong word to use where PC is concerned--PC is unawareness, Parrot Chatter--redskins meant Indians to me. I was caught up inside with the Indians, sympathetic with them. Couldn't talk about it much, because all the white guys around me were sympathetic with the US Army killing Indians. Indians were the enemy. Over years of knowing people, I've come to suspect that ones who are Civil War buffs participated in the Civil War a few lifetimes ago. I have been an Indian buff all my life, leading me to believe I was likely involved in the Indian Wars on the Indian side. I have no interest in the Civil War except as an historical force in the evolution of the nation. But I'm deeply interested in the stories of the Indians.

There was a time I wanted to possibly teach at a school on a reservation, do some kind of work to benefit the people in the concentration camps called reservations. I felt like my white people were the ones making it so hard for the Indian people that I was drawn to do something to help people on reservations. But I also came to realize that I did not know what would benefit them, and surely would end up doing the opposite of benefiting them, as presumption from outsiders always does. Among them I would be a representative of the white world, no matter what I was like inside and my motivation, and I'd be feeling apologetic about context I had nothing to do with. At least living in the white world I don't represent the white world. In Kansas I felt like all the ground was Indian land taken from them. It almost was like walking on a grave for me. To some extent, I feel that way here in the Southern Appalachian mountains. It's difficult for me not to feel sorrow for the genocide of an entire continent of people, the survivors kept in concentration camps over a century with FBI for reservation police. I have a problem with being part of the whiteness that keeps these people incarcerated in the worst kind of poverty. I applaud casinos on reservations, white people giving their money to the Indians.

Once a redskin, always a redskin ran through me as a minor quake. In high school I did not miss the irony of killing off the Indians, then naming places after them, like Wichita. That's not an English name like Wellington Chase. I was told once what Wichita meant in Indian language, but didn't want to know and forgot it right away. Out there on the prairie in Kansas I imagined herds of buffalo horizon to horizon in all directions. I imagined arrows flying through the air. I imagined riding a horse full tilt inside the buffalo herd. It was Indian country for me. I felt like the cities and towns in that prairie were a travesty. The buffalo kill-off and the Indian kill-off, both so incredibly without conscience, inspired a streak of shame through my whiteness. I wear my white skin without pride. It's for the way my race historically has regarded everyone of any color. I am not one to believe the privilege of race is legitimate. So I've never used it, that I know of. I can't solve any of those big racial issues beyond myself. Inside myself I can be as I am and it doesn't have to be political. I've come to see that if I, an individual of any race, this time white, regard everyone I come in contact with, of any race, even my own, with basic human respect, that's what all the movements are about. In myself I can handle that part easily. It's an individual thing for everyone concerned. For myself, I like the Buddhist principle, do no harm.

* 

KENT NERBURN'S THE WOLF AT TWILIGHT

photograph by andrea galvani

Reading in Kent Nerburn's The Wolf at Twilight, part 2 of his earlier book Neither Wolf Nor Dog. In the section I read today, Dan, the old Indian man, Lakota, told the history of the white invasion in just a few pages starting with Columbus. It parallels our history from Columbus to now, but from the other side of the us and them divide. Different words, but it's all there. Our story is from the point of view of the ones that killed the Indians, theirs from the point of view of the ones killed, whose land was taken away. "Boat people" he calls us, the ones that came over on boats, cut down trees, put up fences and placed surviving Indians on the poorest land the white people didn't want. They were told to be farmers, after nearly all others had been killed. The old boy, Dan, speaks to Nerburn naming him personally responsible for all that the old man was telling him. Dan sent him a message to come to the reservation several years after the first book about him, Neither Wolf Nor Dog. He wanted to tell Nerburn some more before he dies.

All through this second volume, Dan tore into Nerburn for attention to the clock, always in a hurry, looking at the clock, wondering what time it is, living by the clock in his head. Dan and another old Indian named Grover, a friend of Dan's, who was with them on the trip by car they're on in the pages I'm reading, acted as a translator for Nerburn of Dan's particular ways. They were driving to the boarded up building that was once the Indian school where Dan spent a great portion of his childhood, the very most traumatic extended period of his life, Indian school. The Indian way of reasoning was very different from Nerburn's, a white suburban middle class PhD professor, writer. Like the time they were out on a highway on the reservation in the morning, stopped someplace where Dan wanted to get out of the car. Grover wanted to drive up to the next town to get some cigarettes. All the time Grover was gone, Nerburn was fixated on why he wasn't back, when he'd had plenty of time. Nerburn couldn't get it off his mind, Dan would talk to him about letting it be. Grover is wherever he is and he's doing whatever he's doing where he is.

Later, Grover returned and they went on their way. Nerburn eventually asked Grover what took him so long. Grover said he thought Nerburn and Dan needed some time to talk. The funny part is that Nerburn had his mind focused on Grover's return with his car, and missed what Dan had to say. One of the many aspects of these two books I like is neither Dan nor Grover are shamans or chiefs. They're just men who happened to live long enough to get old. From time to time Dan passes some Indian wisdom to Nerburn that is told from how the Indian sees things. Here is something he said about children, The boy is in all of us. That's why we got to be good to the children. The boy always lives inside the man. Isn't it so, to the chagrin of their wives who say in exasperation, When are you going to grow up? Much of the time through the narrative, both Indian men are picking at Nerburn and lecturing him on his white ways, lack of patience. Nerburn knows it's in good humor, though there are moments he has to stand up for himself and tell them they don't understand his world either. Which, of course, means nothing to them, because they don't want to, they understand it more than they want to already.

To give an idea of the difference of how they thought, they had gone to a highway bar for lunch. Dan ordered 28 french fries, and sat at the table telling Nerburn the genocide of the Indians from their side. Nerburn was impatient with him. Dan had ordered 28 french fries the man at the bar had to fry to order. He salted them. At the table, Dan was telling Nerburn the history of the destruction of the Indian way of life and the Indians themselves, Dan would break each french fry in half, rub them together to rub the salt off, "the doctor said it wasn't good for me." He gave one half the french fry to his dog, Bronson, and ate the other. Nerburn asked, "You could have just asked the guy to hold the salt." Dan said, "Whoever heard of french fries without salt?" The difference was far greater than that, but this exchange shows one does it one way, the other another way. You have this old Indian man who is not what you'd call a "wise" man, but just a man. What Nerburn was intending while telling his story of a man without a title, it appears to me, was to show the attitude and the thinking of the reservation Indian, descendants of the ones that rode horses. 

Dan asked Nerburn to write his story. This is the second volume of Dan's story. In the second volume Dan tells about his time in Indian school as a child. Parents let kids go to Indian school for a place where they could have some food in a time when the white invaders were starving out the survivors of genocide by war. The humor running through the story is the problem Kent Nerburn has, not much experience understanding the culture of the Indian people, like people new to the mountains do not know anything about mountain culture. As always happens when you're new in a culture and don't know your way around, the people laugh at you in a light-hearted way for language interpretation, words with different meanings in the 2 cultures. Just a white man's arrogance stands out among people in a culture of poverty. It's not intentional arrogance, just an attitude that comes through tone of voice, words and actions. Dan and Grover respect Nerburn to the point of trust among white people. Though he knows Indian history as an historian, he still doesn't know Indian ways. He has a clock in his head, they do not. He wants to know about details, they don't care about details.

I'm reminded of my first months and years in the mountains. It was a lot to learn, an entire culture without written history, and sometimes I'd be frustrated, just like Nerburn, but different circumstances. There would be times I'd drive to Winston-Salem to go to a movie and drive around in traffic, just to have an experience from my own home, Flatland, in my own culture. A mini-vacation. I'd go to my spiritual retreat that is 500 acres of virgin forest between Myrtle Beach and North Myrtle Beach, between Hwy 17 and the sea, cabins around in the woods and communal kitchens. There, I'd be among my Flatland friends and talk Flatland style where everything is comprehensible. That was as much what I'd go there for as spiritual regeneration, which I also needed, Flatland or mountain. I like Kent Nerburn's way of making his own puzzlement in the Indian culture a part of the story. It helps emphasize the cultural difference, a way of saying it's another world in the Indian way of thinking. Nerburn deals continually with translating different ways of thinking. Sharing his frustration gives me a far deeper understanding of the differences, and gives a better understanding of the Indian ways. Their ways are not lesser versions of our own, the same as mountain culture is not a lesser version of Flatland culture.  

*  

TURTLE ISLANDERS

sitting buffalo bull, 1884



Just home from Justin & Crystal's earlier seeing the baby sleep. The baby feels to me like she is where she wants to be. It's not at all like put me back, I don't want to be in a body. When she sees either one of them or hears their voices she smiles and relaxes. I feel awe looking at the little thing just a few days in a new body, ceiling light, window light a little too much for the new eyes, the first thing baby needs to get used to in the physical world, light that's different from the light where the soul came into the body from, light nonetheless. I have a feeling the baby is responding to the love between Justin and Crystal.

Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee was playing on HBO. Justin suggested we rewind it and watch it from the beginning. Their tv does that. Unimaginable to me, but so is about everything else. This was a fairly recent production. I don't know when it was made, but recently in years. It was not a documentary of Dee Brown's book from the late 60s, but a dramatization of the same period of time, same events. Though I know it's acting, directing, lighting, etc, I still gaze deep into the landscapes, the faces of the Turtle Islanders playing the roles, seeing descendants of the people who were so driven into the ground, graves, by the American military, lies and treachery. At a poignant moment in the story, I think it was Sitting Bull who said, 'We will be known forever by the tracks we leave behind us.'

It must be a time for me to be thinking about the Turtle Island people. A few weeks ago I talked with a woman who is Mescalero Apache, living here in the county, and while we talked I noticed she used the term Native American and I said Indian. I have a personal argument with Native American in that it's a white middle class term of political correctness that has no meaning. The same as Indian, it is devoid of meaning. Columbus did not discover India, but when the ships landed they thought they were in India and called the people Indians. For some odd reason it stuck. I say Indian because I heard Graham Greene, the actor perhaps best known in Dances With Wolves, say in an interview that they laugh at Native American. They're Indians. For my own understanding, I see they are neither. The continent was not America until the Europeans named it. They are Turtle Islanders like someone from Hawaii is a Hawaiian or Hawaiian Islander, someone from Fiji a Fiji Islander.

I like Turtle Islander because it has meaning. Indian and Native American are names that came to the people from outside. Turtle Island is the land they live on. It's still Turtle Island to them. I say 'them,' because, alas, there are impenetrable barriers between me, a white man, and any Turtle Islander. I cannot imagine in actuality that any Turtle Islander would want to talk with me about any of that. I don't even feel right about my own racial and national shame regarding the situation of the red people. I've often wondered about the karmic debt we share collectively as a nation for what would certainly have turned out to be genocide were it not for the New England liberals and the press. It's thanks to Yankee liberals the genocide was not a complete success out in the field. 

In the company of a Turtle Islander I feel racial and national shame. I'm inclined to want to apologize for my race, but I had nothing to do with it. And it would be sentimental, not believeable, and rightfully so, because it comes from the mind, not the heart. Where the heart expression is concerned, I feel like the only valid expression I can make is whenever I meet a Turtle Islander, to speak and act from the heart, person to person. No more than that is needed.

The history is in the past. Today, we deal as we deal with whatever our situation may be. I'm not one to make something of being a political liberal about racism when I feel compassion for the people of all races beat down by the white race for centuiries. That's pointless and meaningless. All I know to do is regard people of other races the same as I do white people. It's from the heart, so it's real. Unfortunately, sometimes people of the minority races are braced against me anyway, assuming I'm against them. What can I say? I'm not like that at all? That's equal to saying I am. So it has to be whatever it is. It's too complex an issue to worry myself sleepless over. There's nothing I can do to change it. I'll call the Native American Indians Turtle Islanders from here on. When I met the Apache woman, I felt an overwhelming inclination to bow like the Japanese, inhibited it and did it within. Within was the only place I felt it really had meaning. No need to explain.

* 

  

CRAZY HORSE

four bricks



It's looking like my reading has been arrested by a history that entered the house and was put aside for next. Didn't want to get too curious about it, wanted to finish the one I was half way through and enjoying. But the cover said in big letters CRAZY HORSE with images above and below of an Indian drawing of Crazy Horse on his horse in battle at Little Big Horn. It was like a billboard in the house. I was so curious to get into it that I picked it up to read a page or two to get a feel for the writer's flow and have a brief glimpse into it, like peeping through a keyhole, to see something about Crazy Horse. First page, nicely written, lively prose, another page, another, the story is too good to stop now. Unaware of it during the reading, I'm seeing the people he writes about on my drive-in movie screen within, the landscape, the horses. No pictures exist of Crazy Horse. When it comes to white man's records, he's not there, until they stabbed him in the back with a bayonet and threw him in a dungeon where it took him 6 hours to die. He has been a mystery, not much concrete information to go by. A ghost. That is, to white people, the white world of publishing.



Thomas Powers, the author, I heard on Diane Rehm Show and sounded like he could write a book I'd like to read about Crazy Horse. I was a bit apprehensive, it gave the impression of being out of balance leaning toward scholarly, dry, boring. Pages and pages of notes at the end that I never look at. Somehow it seemed like an oxymoron, a scholarly book on somebody who left very few traces for historians. I flipped through the pages looking at it with hesitation, talking myself into believing it will be too boring to start. Since reading in it just a little bit, now I can't stop. Powers' writing has very much a you-are-there quality. It is not boring writing. In fact, not reading in it at this moment, I want to pick it up and start. The Indians of the Plains region in the middle of the country have interested me since childhood on first learning of them probably from television that came into the house when I was 8.



I pulled for the Indians in childhood and continue to pull for them. It's like pulling for a football team that never wins. The one time they did win, Little Big Horn, it only served to set the US Government into all-out assault intent on killing every last one of them. But for the liberals in New England cities, the genocide would have been successful, but thanks to the protests a few redskins have survived in concentration camps policed to this day by the FBI, the worst poverty in our country that is turning out to have more poverty than denial allows. Nothing I can do about that. I've read several histories, biographies and memoirs of the Indian Wars over the years. I'm going into this one acquainted with the names, the places, the culture. Crazy Horse has been a key figure in that place and time with little known about him. I'm actually excited to be starting this tome by Thomas Powers that expands my perspective of what happened then and who did it.



This biography of Crazy Horse falls in right behind one recently finished about the Comanche Indians of the Texas and Oklahoma region. The Crazy Horse story starts in northwestern Nebraska. Lakota country was largely north of there, the Dakotas, Wyoming, Montana, where the buffalo roamed and the winters were from hell. I can't imagine staying in a tipi at 20 below, big wind. Considering, however, the buffalo hide blankets, the tipi sealed tight, a fire in the center. It might have been more comfortable than my house at 20 above. The history concerning the Comanches was Empire of the Summer Moon, by SC Gwynne, another fairly new publication. Gwynne is such a good writer, his tome of extensive research is alive with its characters and landscape. He gives a relatively thorough look into both the Indians and the first white folks to take up in Indian country. He depicted the original Texas Rangers something like Hells Angels bikers on horses, guys that loved killing Injuns and often didn't live very long. Injuns loved killing them.



Only 25 pages into Powers' writing about Crazy Horse, I am liking his way of finding people who knew Crazy Horse for their stories of him. His characters are clear as if present in the reading. His sentences flow from one to the next seamlessly. In the introduction, Powers noted that when he was a child playing cowboys and Indians, he always had to be the Indian. That's how it was for me. I felt such a strong pull toward the Indians, it would have felt like betrayal of my people to fight Indians with the US Army. I was usually the only kid who wanted to be an Indian, so I was missed by a lot of bullets or just slightly wounded in our gunfights to keep the play going on. I've come to believe that people who are Civil War "buffs" fought in the Civil War in a previous lifetime. In like manner, I suspect just as much that people who identified with Indians in childhood and throughout life had Indian lifetimes not long ago. Just speculation that convinces me enough to believe it, but not enough to call it fact any more than I'd call a dream fact.



Website with interviews on the writing of the book: http://www.thekillingofcrazyhorse.com/.



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