Winter Counts

by David Heska Wanbli Weiden

But standard sex assault cases, thefts, assault and battery—these crimes were usually ignored. And the bad men knew this. It was open season for raping any Native woman, so long as the rape occurred on Indian land. When the legal system broke down like this, people came to me. For a few hundred bucks they’d get some measure of revenge. My contribution to the justice system.

Back in the time before Columbus, there were only Indians here, no skyscrapers, no automobiles, no streets. Of course, we didn’t use the words Indian or Native American then; we were just people. We didn’t know we were supposedly drunks or lazy or savages. I wondered what it was like to live without that weight on your shoulders, the weight of the murdered ancestors, the stolen land, the abused children, the burden every Native person carries.

Just a few years ago, a group of middle school kids from Pine Ridge had gone to a minor-league hockey game as a reward for making the honor roll, but a group of fifteen white men sitting in a corporate box above them poured beer on the kids and shouted nasty slurs at them. The children were humiliated and left the arena in shame. They identified the men that did the deed and charged one of them—just one—with disorderly conduct. To no one’s surprise, the jury acquitted the man, and the kids learned a bitter lesson in how the justice system works in the good old USA. And people wonder why Natives want to stay on the reservation.

Few of these people knew they were traveling on sacred ground, lands that had been promised by treaty to the Lakota people forever but were stolen after gold was discovered in the 1860s. Adding insult to injury, Mount Rushmore had been carved out of the holy mountain previously known as Six Grandfathers as a giant screw-you to the Lakotas. Kind of like Indians building a casino in the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem.

In reality, a large number of wasicus had gotten reservation land during the allotment years in the late 1800s, when the federal government passed a law dividing most reservations into 160-acre parcels, awarding the majority of the plots to Natives but giving a sizable number to—surprise—white farmers and ranchers. So much for “This land shall be yours as long as the grass shall grow.”

“The US had this deal for white settlers, called, ah, depredation claims. Turns out, if you were one of them settlers moving to Indian Country and you got attacked—got your horse stolen, cabin burned down, whatever—you could file some paper with the government and get paid back. In full.” “Yeah, so?” “Well, I been thinkin’. What about an Indian depredation claim? Why don’t we submit some claim sheet asking for what’s been taken from us? Our land, our kids; shit, what about the buffalo? Waylon told me the wasicus killed fifty million buffalo! Buffalo we needed to survive!

A long time ago, an Indian named Wovoka had prophesied that, if enough Natives performed the ceremonial dance, all evil would be swept from the earth, the white people would leave North America, and those wearing the sacred shirts would be bulletproof. The Ghost Dance swept across the country, scaring the shit out of the US government, which sent troops to stop Indians from taking part in the ceremony. And the Natives who believed they’d be safe from the soldiers’ bullets? They learned otherwise.

Lakotas buried in the mass grave. Right after the massacre in 1890, the army simply dug a pit in the ground and just tossed in the corpses—men, women, children, and babies. It’s a sad place, not only because of the innocent victims but also because it represents the end of the Indian era, when Natives lived freely on our traditional lands. After the so-called battle, soldiers rounded up the last few hostile bands and shipped them all off to reservations. The end of the dream, and, as Black Elk said, it was a beautiful dream.