Sundance the Robert Sundance Story

by Robert Sundance, Marc Gaede (Editor)

This powerful and disturbing book demonstrates that one man can change the system. Robert Sundance (1927-93), a Lakota from the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation in South Dakota, was introduced to alcohol at an early age. After spending nearly twenty-five years on skid rows across the American West, Sundance decided to reform the system that incarcerated homeless street alcoholics. His efforts led to radical reform of the treatment of public inebriates and helped create the process of alcoholic rehabilitation.

"A kind of Lower Depths set on the Northern Plains."—Thomas McGuane

"Describes his harrowing odyssey through bars, whorehouses, alleys and jails all over the West. . . . Sundance pulls no punches. He tells of the wino's life—its casual violence, its ceaseless wandering, the terrors of delirium tremens—in blunt, convincing terms. . . . No saint, he showed that even an ordinary person can enlist his flaws in the service of an astonishing empowerment."—Los Angeles Times

300 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 1994

Reviews

[Eric]

By the far my favorite book for the year.

Robert Sundance made his mark on the world by filing hundreds of habeas corpus writs from a jail cell over the course of 10 years that would, ultimately, call out Los Angeles and the LAPD for the way they colluded in abusing and exploiting drunks on Skid Row and lead to a landmark case (Sundance Vs. Municipal Courts) that would transform the way the U.S. justice system treats alcoholism and alcoholics.

But before that, Sundance had already led an incredible life in skid rows from the Dakotas through Montana and Arizona, hopping railcars across the U.S. He outlines all his adventures in detail in this autobiography, coming off as a kind of hard-living, heart-of-mud Bukowski character come to life. Sundance was born in extreme poverty on a Sioux reservation. His family faced double exclusion, as the Native American descendants of a well-known (and much-despised) Indian agent of the federal government. He underwent a brutal childhood at a boarding school that tried to educate the Indian out of him, before moving on to fight in the Pacific in World War Two. Not long after, he slowly descended into a 40-year bout of addiction that took him from town to town and city to city, usually at whim and often un-remembered. Sundance describes in incredible detail the casual, extreme violence and day-to-day struggles of street alcoholism. His stories are raw, frequently stomach-churning adventures of getting by while being chased by the ever-present threats of arrest and DTs (delirium tremens), both of which emerge as otherworldly, recurring characters that chase him through his exploits, catching up to torture him for a time, before disappearing back into his consciousness.

Particularly haunting are his incredibly vivid, almost cinematic, memories of the hallucinations he experienced when coming out (usually being forced out) of bouts of alcoholism. A chapter describing time in a Montana prison, where he witnessed (and tacitly participated in) a riot in which prisoners took control of the prison and ultimately forced change in how inmates were treated, could have been the whole book in itself.

A Native American "Journey to the End of the Night" meets "Notes of A Dirty Old Man" meets "Beggars of Life," Sundance's is a quintessentially American story that has been overlooked for too long.

Someone bring this back into print!

[Tammy Adams]

Okay book.