THE INTIMACY OF READING

ralph stanley and the clinch mountain boys

oil on canvas by tj worthington

A facebook friend posted today his thoughts and experience on a lifetime of reading, looking at the books, in particular, that were important to him, that stay with him. Like I look at a bookshelf and my eye falls on One Man's Bible, by Gao Xingjian, a Chinese dissident living in Paris. I feel the same glow in my heart as when I gaze at the window and see a squirrel at the birdfeeder, tail curled behind its head, nibbling a seed. The spine of the book reminds me of the content, as powerful for me in the time of reading it as Henry Miller's Colossus of Marousi in the time of reading it. James Lord's biography of Italian/Swiss/French sculptor, Giacometti, was important, because I came to know him, admire his mind, his vision, how simply he lived. At the end, Giacometti died and was buried. I closed the book, sat in the chair and cried for half an hour. It was the same as hearing of the death of one of my closest friends. I see a piece by Giacometti today and feel his presence in it. The only tool he used was his pocket knife, which inspired use of minimal tools in my own art making. I use a drill, a saw, a brush, and a palette knife, wood glue. 

philippe petit

I see the title, Man On Wire, and remember Philippe Petit, who walked the wire between WTC towers. I have three newspaper articles I've kept because they said something powerful to me. One was an article from the Village Voice when Andy Warhol was shot. Another, Philippe Petit's amazing event walking the wire. The third, an article from a newspaper about Johnny Weissmuller, a famous Tarzan from the Fifties, kept alive a vegetable in an Acapulco condo on the beach, tubes and round the clock nurses. Couldn't talk from stroke after stroke after stroke, unable to die because heart was so healthy from a lifetime of rigorous exercise. All he could do was give out a Tarzan yell from time to time and run shivers through the whole condo. I think the Tarzan story told me exercise aint what it's cracked up to be. Why was Petit's event so meaningful for me? He walked a wire between two buildings that sway, up high in the wind above the city of canyons. I know that I could not even stand on the roof of a skyscraper, could not step out of the elevator or stair well door. I sure as hell could not stand at the edge and look down at the street two tenths of a mile below. I don't know all there is to know about self, not even close, but I do know that. Him crawling over the edge and just stepping onto the wire rates my total respect. I'd rather read about him than Henry Kissinger. 

johnny weissmuller

The Lance and the Shield, by Robert M Utley, a biography of Sitting Bull, hit me as deeply as the Giacometti biography. By the end, I knew Sitting Bull, the man himself, who he was. I felt something I had never before felt from a biography, that I knew this man, knew him well. His values were mine. He seemed as familiar as reading a memoir by someone I already knew well. Like Wendy Salinger's, Listen, a beautifully written memoir of living through sexual child abuse by daddy, illustrated for me why my friend Wendy was wired tight as a banjo string. Sitting Bull, I felt I knew as well as I knew Wendy. I spoke with a woman friend about it who was somewhat psychic. She told me to ask him. I said I don't know how. She said, Yes you do, just do it. Later, at home, I went into a kind of meditation, settled down, and appealed to Sitting Bull in spirit. He appeared. We were in his tipi, either side of a small fire in the center. We smoked the pipe. I was in awe, hesitant to speak. I was thinking this is about more than a silly question. Eventually, I asked him why he is so familiar to me, why I know him so well. He said, "I am your real father." We spoke a little bit more, though mostly sat in silence. I visited him a few more times, no more questions and answers, only silence. I painted a portrait of him that is on the wall maybe four feet from where I sit. My version looks more like Gregory Peck in brown face. 

The Lance and the Shield was reprinted years later with new title and some places rewritten, Sitting Bull. I read it. And found later, a book of stories from the life of Sitting Bull that were passed down through the family, by his great-grandson, Ernie LaPointe. They're among the book treasures in the house. Another treasure in the house is Ralph Stanley's memoir, Man Of Constant Sorrow, written for him by Eddie Dean, who wrote it in Stanley's own words, as if Stanley, himself, wrote it. I have to credit Dean, because it is so beautifully written. I carried the copy to a show at Fairview and asked Ralph to sign it. I couldn't speak. I knew if I spoke a word I'd break out in tears that wouldn't stop. I asked him to sign it by opening the book and putting it before him. He got it. He wrote his signature in it, and that was all I wanted. I'm not one to ask writers to sign books, but this was necessary. I painted a portrait of him and his band playing at Fairview Ruritan, drove it to Clintwood, Virginia, and gave it to the Ralph Stanley museum in appreciation for his music. Asked if I'd like to meet him, I declined. I said I'd turn to jello. They said, he's just a man. I said, I know. He's also Ralph Stanley. A biography of the Carter Family, Will You Miss Me When I'm Gone, opened their music to me, one of the great gifts of my life. A few days ago I started Philip Glass's memoir, Words Without Music. I can see already it's going to be one of those books that is a treasure for how deeply it speaks to me. 

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KNOW THYSELF IN EVERYDAY LIFE

sigmar polke

The verse from the Tao te ching I put here a few days ago, #33, has been floating in my mind. Knowing yourself is true wisdom. Mastering yourself is true power. My journey of self-knowledge included about six years of psychotherapy. A time came I felt self-examination with a therapist was the next step, guided, putting aside self-pity. So it was. My main concern at the time, the enigma I could not unravel, was why was I drawn to controlling women? The answer is obvious, but I needed to find why it was obvious. This was just the starting point. Much came up and everything that rose to the surface was dealt with and allowed its place. It wasn't about learning how to be normal, but for peace of mind. Much was brought up for examination, brought into the light of awareness where it can be seen both objectively and subjectively. The purpose was to find my own truth, not a truth outside self. I took it for the path of "Know thyself," first noted by Socrates, then by Jesus the Christ affirming Socrates. I took it to heart as a part of my path. I chose for self the path of love instead of the path of knowledge. I started from no understanding at all to, by now, a heart that can cry with a donkey when she loses her baby. It has taken forty years. By now, I feel I understand love to some degree and live it to some degree. By living love, I don't mean missionarizing about something I don't understand, or getting married or raising kids, or having a relationship. I meant to find love in everyday life, practical love that can flow freely, wherever and whatever the circumstances. I feel like I know the people I know with a loving heart. I train my pets by love and love only. They love me in turn, want to please me because they love me, and perform better when it comes to "minding" than scolding or hitting inspires. I'm told I spoil my pets. So what. 

sigmar polke

People I know who raised kids without hitting them, without talking down to them, raised kids who went through PhD on scholarship all the way. People I know who hit and berated their kids brought up kids full of anger, resentment, low self-esteem, and spikes of guilt in their heads making education difficult to focus on. This online journal is a project in knowing self. It functions in self-knowledge by bringing up particulars of my individual point of view, articulates them, gives me perspective of self in the world out there and the world within. It brings up issues I carry in mind that pop to the surface from time to time and sink back down out of sight to rise again and sink again. They seldom get articulated or examined to see what they're about, what they're telling me. I follow an issue here like talking with a therapist, the one who is now my friend, one of my favorite people in my life, a valuable soul. I'm not even sure talking to a therapist is more important than talking to a friend. I suspect people who talk to friends don't need therapists. By talk to, I mean cry with, empathize with. Writing in this daily journal becomes a meditation, a focus, searching for words, phrases, sentences, bringing up ideas, thoughts, feelings, exploring them, seeing what they have to tell me. It takes about an hour to write one of these paragraphs. Sometimes a little less and sometimes a little more. It is four to five hours of sitting here searching for sentences, one at a time. I think of it at the same time a yoga,  a meditation. I will not start with an agenda and follow it through. Avoiding agendas is number one guideline for self in this journal, except when I want to write about an agenda. Missionary is not my style. I start with no idea where I aim to go, just write a sentence or two, whatever I have on my mind, then the next sentence and the next. A time comes soon when I see where it is headed, open up and flow with it, see where it goes. One thing leads to another, and another. 

sigmar polke

I feel like I have a far better understanding of self than I did five years ago when this exercise was in its first months. Driving on the round trip to town yesterday, I was questioning the meaning in the lines of the Tao te ching verse, and embrace death with your whole heart, you will endure forever. I cannot find it to say I embrace death with my whole heart. Initially, it seems kind of morbid, kind of Goth, fingernails painted black. It's not about wanting to die or suggesting suicide. Death, in my imaginings, here has to do with living without attachments to this life, this body, emotions and mind. The self that activates this body is the self that lives on after the body falls away. If you stay in your center, the center one's innermost self, may be the higher self, or consciousness, what have you. I like to call it consciousness, though it gets confused with consciousness associated with the fore-brain  that we like to think separates us from the animals. I think of it a word with two distinctly different definitions. like tear and tear. Somebody with a PhD in psychology would more than likely tell me I've got it all wrong. No doubt I do. I'm not giving instruction in absolute truth. I'm telling it as I understand it. At this moment, here is how I understand it. Maybe a year from now I'll see it another way. Maybe if I read some books on the matter, I'd see it an entirely different way. I don't care enough to study it academically. I have enough of a sense of it to have my own names for my own understanding. I'm not spreading it as truth, just admitting my limitations. In this illusion that is not even a vapor or a hologram, but a dream in each one of our minds, each dream is radically different from any of the other dreams in this world of more than seven billion embodied souls. A majority of us dream staggering poverty. 

sigmar polke

This is where I get my joy reading accounts of how others than myself see this world we live in, how other people experience this world, multiple points of view. This is where I find the benefit of reading. I can read Wendy Salinger's LISTEN and feel as another feels in a beautifully written memoir that is a joy to read for the writing in itself. A biography, SITTING BULL, by Robert Utley, is an entirely different experience from my own. Thanks to someone who took on the research and writing what he found looking for Sitting Bull's central core, Sitting Bull the man as he lived, I can see into the mind of someone who has something to say to me. Sitting Bull, the man, opened a new dimension in my life. I found that his values are my values. He seemed like somebody I already knew, somebody I knew well, whose values I shared, or they came from association with him I don't understand. I painted a simple portrait of him that hangs on the wall to the right of where I sit. For me, it seems to have touched his spirit somehow. I doubt any Lakota who saw it would say that. Doesn't matter. It's for me, not anybody else. I painted it because I wanted him on the wall the way some people keep a picture of Martin Luther King on the wall. A reminder, memory, of the values this individual represents. I'd never have known of Sitting Bull's life if I didn't take an interest in points of view other than my own. Knowing someone like Sitting Bull through learning his story adds a very great deal to my well being as a human being. I have refused to give my mind over to corporate brain-drain. I can be aware of the world I live in, but don't have to be of it, don't have to give it my power. I don't give over my power because somebody wants it. My power is for mastering myself, according to this verse in the Tao te ching, knowing yourself is true wisdom, mastering yourself is true power. These are my conundrums the last few days.   

sigmar polke

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THE KILLING OF CRAZY HORSE

whitehead

I had put aside the history/biography The Killing of Crazy Horse just before the time came when the Army soldier following orders so shamefully bayonetted him in the back twice. After he had been promised six times he would not be arrested when he was invited to the fort for a talk. He had his feelings and his dreams that told him in advance, but he went by a white man's word. I'd been reading in this beautifully written history. Fascinated as some people get with a Patricia Cornwell story, when it came time for Crazy Horse to be betrayed the last time, I thought I'd take a break, get into something else, Inside The Neolithic Mind. Read half way into it in full attention, every page a treat, I felt it was time to dive back in and see what happened to Crazy Horse, how the historian writing it, Thomas Powers, would find completion for this great big story he told of the Indian Wars from both the Lakota side and the USArmy side. He told the killing in You Are There detail pieced together from newspaper accounts and diaries, one of the diaries by the soldier whose bayonet did the trick; he never felt anything but despair over what he'd done all the rest of his life.

I have a liking for books about the Indian Wars like some have about the Civil War. And my interest in the Indian Wars was with the Indians. My interest in the Civil War was with the South, but that just generally. It was the Indian Wars that interested me all my life. When I first found out about Indians I wish I had been born an Indian. I felt like they were my real people and I'd been born with white skin; none of my people would recognize me now in the skin of the enemy. That was that. I never made any attempts to connect with any Indians. They have their own world. I feel tremendous sorrow for their circumstances in concentration camps policed by the FBI over a hundred years. Then I wonder if the Indians now are the souls of the people that were in on the killing of their ancestors. Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse I have held up high as long as I've known about them. They were warrior chiefs, Sitting Bull also a shaman, who held out against the white tsunami to the very last. Sitting Bull wanted it noted for the record that his rifle he was turning over was the last rifle taken from a Lakota.

Robert Utley's biography of Sitting Bull brought him so much to life in my imagination that I felt like I had known this man well. His values were my values. That's where we connected. He could ride a horse as good as a horse can be ridden. In warfare, he was fierce and fearless. He had wounds all over his body. He had a limp from being shot in the foot riding his horse full tilt. He could ride his horse into a herd of stampeding buffalo, riding bareback, no hands, and shoot a running buffalo in the right place to make it fall in place. To fall off your horse in such a moment is death as soon as you hit the ground. He was one rugged individual. He'd done the sun dance several times. A short time before he was killed, he was out walking in the land beyond the concentration camp of log cabins the Indians were living in outside the fort. Out there under sky from horizon to horizon in all directions, Sitting Bull heard a meadowlark singing and interpreted it that the bird was telling him he would be killed soon by his own people. They were scouts for the Army sent to arrest him. Bullhead shot him in the chest and almost simultaneously Red Tomahawk shot him in the back of the head. I doubt he felt a thing.

The deceitful ways they were killed was in proportion to the regard the generals and soldiers had for both Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse. They hated them unto death. These guys were a dreaded enemy, powerful influences on their people. Much as I have low regard for the killing of both these men, I'm also glad they both were not allowed to grow old. Pictures of Red Cloud in his old age are images of despair. When I ask myself the question I never ask myself, what historical figure that I know of do I look up to as a man or as a woman with full admiration? Sitting Bull is the automatic first answer. He's a man like in the Bo Diddley sense, that's spelled M - A - N. He was a good hunter, a good warrior, a man of wisdom. He was something of a Robert E Lee of the Indian Wars. By the end, Sitting Bull had become the hub of the remaining Lakota. He was also untameable as mountain lion. He might go to New York and Paris in a Wild West Show, but when he returned to his land, he was still part of it.

Crazy Horse was a wild man on the battlefield too. They were not the only warriors with SuperBowl rings. They were 2 warrior chiefs among a great number of them. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull became legends because they were the hardest to catch and held out the longest. They were my childhood heroes that continue as heroes of my lifetime. Both have become even moreso after reading well-researched and well-written biographies of them. They were what I call true human beings. That's not to say they're the only ones. There are many true human beings about. I read of these people and the people they lived among, their women, their tribes, their families, their way of life, and feel respect all the way around. They didn't leave a lot of trash. I'll go on now and read what happens after Crazy Horse was murdered, or assassinated. I think about a letter to the editor April Holcomb Joines wrote some years ago likening the wave of people from Away moving to the mountains and pushing the mountain people out, to the white take-over of all the Indian land. Then, it was done with guns. Now, it's done with money.

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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.

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SITTING BULL

bullhead

Magnificent mountain. It is the mountain you see at the far end of town driving through Sparta on 21 going from Twin Oaks toward Cherry Lane. It is the landmark of SE Alleghany County. Many years ago with Don Smith I walked deer trails along Bullhead's ridge from the Parkway on out to the second peak. It was a great deal longer walk than we'd anticipated. First and only real problem was we didn't think to take water. On our other walks we always came up on springs and creeks. No springs along the ridge of the mountain. There was a period of time when it got to us pretty bad, but we chose to walk on. It's a long ways there and it's a long ways back. Either way, we're thirsty all the way. We chose to get used to it and we did. Remembering the walk, the thirst isn't even involved in the memory except remembering it for itself. Walking Bullhead's deer trails was a kind of happiness in itself. The trees on top of the peak that rises above Hwy 21 are broken and twisted by the wind current through there. Big tree trunks with shattered edges. Not a lot, just a few. All the trees lean with the wind, so it looks like the wind is blowing up there when it's not, like the flag on the moon.

Several generations back a man named Woodruff owned Bullhead Mountain. The story I got from his granddaughter was that he found the skulls of 2 bulls with long horns locked together where they'd died. They had long horns in that time. Everything was very different from how it is now. Better or worse is not the issue, too relative. Also, a Lakota Indian working with the US Army named Bullhead was sent with another Indian Red Tomahawk to arrest Sitting Bull from the cabin his family was staying in outside the fort. They meant to take him in and kill him like they did Crazy Horse, a bayonet in the back, but one of the Indians in the settlement shot Bullhead, who pulled the trigger in reaction on his gun pointed at Sitting Bull's heart. Red Tomahawk shot Sitting Bull in the back of the head simultaneously. A few days before, a meadowlark had told him some of his own people would kill him. He must have fallen like holding a towel up by one corner and letting go.

It's all bad enough as it is, but immediately after killing the man of the house, a man with a box camera comes along and lines up Sitting Bull's wife and daughters along the side of the cabin, after soldiers killed Sitting Bull's boy who was 14, immediately after they'd killed Sitting Bull. Mayhem, gunshots, Sitting Bull dead, the boy killed and the women lined up to be photographed. Their picture haunts my mind, the blank far-away look the Indians gave the white man, refusal to make eye contact. The absence of emotion in their faces and eyes looks like they could have been photographed by somebody getting pictures of Indian families. Learning from biography and history the story behind the moment the picture was taken, I get a creepy feeling when I see it. I know the grief, the fear, the immensity of their sorrow, alone, helpless in the hands of the white Army that killed their way of life and nearly everyone they knew. They'd been on the run for years in Montana and Canada, getting through cold winters with little provisions and heat. They surely imagined next thing after the picture taking would be a firing squad.

Sitting Bull's name in his language was Tatanka Iyotake. His great-grandson, Ernie LaPointe, is the grandson of Sitting Bull's daughter, Standing Holy, by his wife, Seen By Her Nation, the two women on the right side of the picture. The other two are Sitting Bull's second wife, sister to his other wife, Four Robes, and their daughter Lodge In Sight. They are the picture of hopeless desperation, lined up to get their pictures taken by people who thought nothing and cared nothing for their humanity. Ernie LaPointe wrote his stories he'd been told down through the generations in the family of Sitting Bull's life. It's called SITTING BULL: His Life And Legacy. I had the good fortune to hear him talk on a Sunday afternoon NPR radio program On Being. This show has a website and the piece about Ernie LaPointe is in the easy access archives, if it's of any interest to you.

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SITTING BULL'S GREAT-GRANDSON

snowy day


What seems like 4 to 5 inches of snow fell yesterday and in the night. Snow on limbs and pine needle clusters, an even blanket of white on everything. In the warmest time of the day when it was 18 degrees I went out and made a few photos close around the house. Big gusts of wind blew snow in clouds that flew over the ground. Now that it's dark the wind is picking up, wind chimes going, and by morning the snow will be blown out of the trees and settled in low places, like deer hoof-prints and tire tracks in the road. In the morning we'll know how easily this snow makes drifts. It's powdery, easy to drive on, easy to walk in. It offers no resistance to foot traffic. If it weren't so bitter cold, it would be a pleasure to walk in. It's 15 degrees now.


Reading SITTING BULL: His Life And His Legacy by a great-grandson named Ernie LaPointe, son of Angelique Spotted Horse, daughter of Sitting Bull's daughter Standing Holy by his wife Seen By Her Nation. It's the story of Sitting Bull as told down through the family over time. I've read a good bio by the wasicu (white man) historian, Robert Utley, twice, which brought Sitting Bull to life for me. It may not be authentic to read a wasicu version of an Indian's life, but there aren't many Indians writing about him. Until Ernie LaPointe's testament I don't know that there are any. I heard him in Krista Tippet's Sunday afternoon radio show on NPR called On Being. It's something I hear every once in awhile. Turned it on about 10 minutes after it started and there was Ernie LaPointe talking about Tatanka Iyotake, Sitting Bull. Tatanka is bull and Iyotake is translated sitting.


I listened to LaPointe talking with wide open ears, taking it all in. Sat with Caterpillar on my lap and listened to the rest of the hour. Not often to do I do that. This small book of 127 reading pages and appendixes with b&w photos throughout of individual Indians, one picture of him holding the pipe with One Bull, a traitor who ultimately was responsible for the killing of Sitting Bull by two members of his tribe working for the Army, bringing him to the office for being a nuisance. A ruckus started, the two Lakota tribal police shot him at once, one in the head, one in the heart. One was named Bullhead, the one that shot him in the heart. Not long before, he had walked to a special place to pray. On the way back a meadowlark called to him, The Lakota will kill you. Sitting Bull was a medicine man as well as a chief, psychic would be what we call now some of his powers. Someone else hearing the same meadowlark at the same moment would only hear the bird call, Sitting Bull heard it speaking to him. Lakota killed him.


Reading LaPointe's Life and Legacy is very much like a testament, a gospel. Gospel meaning the life story of a spiritual Master, which Sitting Bull indeed was, in his own culture. About three-quarters through it, I'm feeling more and more reverence for the book itself as a gospel. I feel a spiritual closeness to it, to Sitting Bull, Tatanka Iyotaka, the last of his people to surrender his rifle. He was hired to have a part in a couple of Wild West shows as "the killer of Custer," though he wasn't even in the battle. He charged a couple dollars for an autograph in the cities they visited. He gave his money to the ragged white poor children in the streets. He never understood how the white people could neglect their children. There was much he never got, like the US gov never honored any treaty.


This gospel of Tatanka Iyotaka's life his great grandson wrote has a lightness of being about it. I could keep it on the shelf next to the TaoTeChing. It has a spiritual lightness where no words are wasted, where what is said is clear as daylight. It has the information of a biography, though Ernie LaPointe's life of Sitting Bull is told from the inside, from the Lakota perspective by kin. I can't help but think of it as a holy book of the life of a holy man. Sitting Bull was regarded by his people a holy man for the manner of his everyday life, who he was, not for what he said. It caused them to pay close attention when he spoke. Sioux was a name white man gave the Lakota, which meant the enemy. They liked being called the Enemy and identified happily with the name. Sitting Bull was a childhood hero for me who remained a hero throughout my life, even more a hero as time went by and I learned more about him. He is a man I look to as a true human being. He is not my enemy.



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