Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions

Tahca Ushte (Lame Deer) was a Lakota medicine man from a land now known as South Dakota (“Sioux” is a white name that insults the Lakota).  His government-issued name was John Fire.  He was born some time between 1895 and 1903, and died in 1976.  His parents were of the last generation to be born wild and free.  Two of his grandfathers had been at the battle of Little Big Horn, Custer’s last stand, and one of them survived the massacre at Wounded Knee.

Lame Deer’s early years were spent in a remote location, where they had no contact with the outside world.  He never saw a white man until he was five.  At 14, he was taken away to a boarding school, where he was prohibited from speaking his language or singing his songs.  The class work never went beyond the level of third grade, so Lame Deer spent six years in the third grade.  He eventually gained renown for being a rebellious troublemaker.  When he was 16, he went on a vision quest, and discovered that he was to become a medicine man.

Sons destined to become medicine men were often removed from school by their families, because schooling was harmful to the growth of someone walking a spiritual path.  One father drove away truancy officers with a shotgun.  For medicine men, the skills of reading and writing had absolutely no value.

When Lame Deer was 17, his mother died, and the family fell apart.  The white world was closing in, making it hard for his father to survive as a rancher.  He gave his children some livestock and wished them good luck.  By that time, the buffalo were dead, their land was gone, many lived on reservations, and the good old days for the Lakota were behind them. 

Lame Deer straddled two worlds, the sacred path of Lakota tradition, and the pure madness of the “frog-skinners,” — people who were driven by an insatiable hunger for green frog-skins (dollar bills).  The frog-skinners were bred to be consumers, not human beings, so they were not fun to be around.

Lame Deer spent maybe 20 years wandering.  He made money as a rodeo rider, clown, square dance caller, potato picker, shepherd, and so on.  He always avoided work in factories or offices, “because any human being is too good for that kind of no-life, even white people.”  He enjoyed many women, did more than a little drinking, stole a few cars, and shunned the conventional civilized life.

Between jobs he would return to his reservation and spend time with the elders.  During World War II, just before Normandy, he was thrown out of the Army when they discovered that he was 39, too old.  Soon after, he abandoned the frog-skin world and became a full time Indian, walking on the sacred path of a medicine man.

For the Lakota, the Black Hills were the most sacred place in their world.  To retain possession of them, they surrendered much of what became Montana, Wyoming, and the Dakotas.  The treaty declared that the Black Hills would remain Indian territory “for as long as the sun shined.”  Soon after, whites discovered gold in the Black Hills, and flooded into the holy lands with drills, dynamite, whiskey, and prostitutes.  The Lakota were horrified by the behavior of these civilized Christians.

The frog-skinners exterminated the buffalo, and replaced them with livestock.  Buffalo were beings of great power and intelligence.  They even had a sense of humor.  Lame Deer said that if buffalo were used in bullfighting, the cocky matadors would promptly be trampled and gored into extinction.  Cattle were dullards that had the power bred out of them.  Sheep and goats would stand calmly while you cut their throats. 

To provide additional vegetation for the dim-witted livestock, the prairie dogs had to go.  Ranchers launched an intensive poisoning campaign that also killed more than a few children and pets.  With the prairie dogs gone, there was far less prey for the wolves, coyotes, bobcats, foxes, badgers, hawks, and eagles.  A diverse, thriving prairie ecosystem was replaced with monocultures of destructive sub-intelligent exotic species.

Sheep were amazingly frail.  They often fell over, with their feet in the air, and couldn’t get back up again.  If the shepherd didn’t rescue them, they would bloat up and die.  Lambs often had to be hand-raised because their mothers didn’t recognize them or feed them.

“There was great power in a wolf, even in a coyote.  You have made him into a freak — a toy poodle, a Pekingese, a lap dog. … You have not only altered, declawed, and malformed your winged and four-legged cousins; you have done it to yourselves. … You live in prisons which you have built for yourselves, calling them homes, offices, factories.”

In the 1880s, the Indians of the west were in despair, and the Ghost Dance movement was spreading from tribe to tribe.  It was a grand magic act intended to bring a new world into existence via sacred song and dance.  The dead would come back to life, the buffalo herds would return, the whites would get sent back home, and the civilized world would be rolled up like a dirty old carpet — the cities, mines, farms, and factories.  This would reveal a healthy unspoiled land, with many teepees and animals, as it once had been.

Dancers were not allowed to possess things from the white world: liquor, guns, knives, kettles, or metal ornaments.  They would dance for four days.  Whites feared an armed uprising, so they attacked the dancers.  Hundreds of unarmed Indians were murdered at the Wounded Knee massacre. 

The magic dancing did not succeed, but today many can see that a great healing is badly needed.  Obviously, the madness cannot continue forever.  Lame Deer was clear: “The machine will stop.”  He said that a young man would one day come who would know how to turn it off.  “It won’t be bad, doing without many things you are now used to, things taken out of the earth and wasted foolishly.”  We will have to learn how to live more simply, and this will be good for one and all.

Lame Deer asked Richard Erdoes to help write his story, to pass along important information.  He included several chapters describing the sacred culture of the Lakota.  He wanted hold up a mirror for us, to give us a different perspective, to feed a sane voice into our lost and confused world.  “We must try to save the white man from himself.  This can be done if only all of us, Indians and non-Indians alike, can once again see ourselves as part of this earth.”

Lame Deer, John (Fire) and Erdoes, Richard, Lame Deer, Seeker of Visions, Washington Square Press, New York, 1994.

Neither Wolf Nor Dog



One of the most tragic stories in human history describes the spread of civilization into the lands of the wild and free.  This story has countless variations, in every region of the world, and they rarely end happily, with the wild and free expelling the invaders.  Instead, what usually happened was that the civilized people proceeded to kill or enslave the natives, and then destroy the ecosystem, which eventually doomed the civilization.

In New England, the European invaders tried to transform the Indians into submissive, hard-working Christian farmers.  This plan enjoyed little success.  In the 19^th century, the strategy changed.  Indians were herded into concentration camps called reservations, or gunned down if they resisted.  The Indians were hopelessly outnumbered and outgunned.

The first wave of my Norwegian ancestors immigrated in 1879 and settled in the eastern regions of Iowa and North Dakota — recently the home of the Lakota and vast herds of bison.  This was three years after Custer was defeated at Little Big Horn, and eleven years before the last group of free Lakota was exterminated at Wounded Knee.  The world would be a happier place today if everyone had stayed at home, spent time with therapists working through their superiority and domination complexes, developed effective family planning systems, and learned how to live in harmony with their land.

Kent Nerburn’s book, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, presents the Lakota perspective on the European invasion, as seen through the eyes of “Dan,” a 78 year old elder (1913-2002).  It’s a perspective that white folks are rarely exposed to, unfortunately.  Dan had many important ideas that he wanted to pass along to the younger generations of all peoples, and Nerburn compiled them into a book.  The format of the oratory was very laid back — riding around Indian country in an old Buick with two elders, a big dog, and a cloud of cigarette smoke.

Dan was a traditional Lakota who had no affection for white government, white religion, or white people.  He had been angry all his life at what the whites had done to his land and his people.  The conquest provided no benefits for the Lakota, it was a complete disaster, a toxic explosion of greed, craziness, and injustice.  Yet white historians described the conquest in glowing terms — brave pioneers conquering and civilizing an untamed wilderness — progress!  God bless America!

The perspective in Lakota country could not be more different.  In their eyes, the conquest of America resembled something like the 2011 tsunami of east Japan that erased everything in its path.  The bison were exterminated, the forests were eliminated, the prairies were plowed, and contagious disease killed millions.  They shot the buffalo just to kill them!  They had no respect for the land or the beings that lived there.

When Indians killed “innocent” white settlers, the whites howled about barbaric savages and bloody massacre.  But the Indians had little choice.  The invaders intended to completely erase Indian society, even if this included exterminating every Indian.  The whites relentlessly advanced.  The soldiers were young men who had been hired to kill the “animals” that stood in the path of empire, and many of them took pleasure in killing.  There was no possibility of negotiation, because the invaders broke every agreement they made.  There was nowhere to flee to.  Surrender promised cultural obliteration. 

For the whites, the land was not alive and sacred — it was a treasure to be seized and exploited as quickly as possible.  The Lakota saw the land as their sacred mother, and they treated her with great respect.  Dan could never understand why, despite their good treatment, mother had gotten angry and punished the Lakota with invasion, diseases, and harsh winters.  Dan wondered what she had in store for the whites, who have shown no respect whatsoever.  We’ll surely find out.

One day, Nerburn drove Dan through his village on the reservation, an impressive scene of rundown houses, junk cars, and trash.  White people typically drive through and perceive nothing but “a bunch of shit.”  Dan asked Nerburn what he thought Indians saw when they visited a white city.  “We say the same thing.”  “You see a dirt path with a pop can next to it and you think that is worse than a big paved highway that is kept clean.  You get madder at a forest with a trash bag in it than at a big shopping center…”

White people are fascinated with the idea of freedom, because they have so little freedom in their lives.  Dan saw that whites are confined in a world of cages — their fenced property, their permanent home, their rulers, their bosses, their laws, their religious beliefs.  Indians have always enjoyed great freedom, and they had no desire to become farmers and join the whites in their world of miserable cages. 

This is why the whites had Sitting Bull murdered.  He didn’t want to sign treaties, because that would turn his people into blanket Indians.  They would turn white.  Sitting Bull said “I do not wish to be shut up in a corral.  All agency Indians I have seen were worthless.  They are neither red warriors nor white farmers.  They are neither wolf nor dog.”

After Sitting Bull was gunned down, many of his people fled to Wounded Knee, with soldiers in pursuit.  The weather was frigid, but they didn’t dare make fires, fearing that they would be discovered.  They were cold, hungry, and weak when the soldiers caught them.  The Indians were disarmed, then all of them were mowed down with machine guns — men, women, children, and the elderly.

The climax of the story came when Dan and Nerburn spent a night at the Wounded Knee cemetery, in a realm of powerful spirits.  Throughout his life, Dan had remained in close contact with the spirits of his ancestors.  The invasion had filled his life with pain, rage, and sorrow.  The injustice was unbearable.  Why did the Creator allow this to happen?  His ancestors had died running. 

Dan prayed for healing.  He was sure that the passage of generations would eventually bury the anger.  Peace would eventually return.  This is a book I will never forget.

 

Kent Nerburn, Neither Wolf Nor Dog, New World Library, Novato, California, 1994.  Due to popular demand, Nerburn wrote a second book about Dan, The Wolf at Twilight (2009).

A 2017 Interview with Nerburn (HERE)

Neither Wolf Nor Dog movie trailer (HERE)