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A Musical Bridge

By John Andrews

Bryan Akipa is a self-taught red cedar flute player who also makes the instruments in his home near Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation. Akipa has joined the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra for several performances in South Dakota and Washington, D.C.

Delta David Gier was among five finalists to be the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra’s next music director in 2003. When the search committee asked why he was interested in moving from New York to Sioux Falls, he said,”I’m looking for someplace to build something significant.” Gier won the job, and his innovations have elevated the orchestra to national prominence, elicited praise from the nation’s most respected music critic in the pages of The New Yorker and earned him the 2022 Ditson Conductor’s Award, presented by Columbia University to conductors who demonstrate an extraordinary passion for advancing American music.

But perhaps his most important contribution to the people of his new home state has been the Lakota Music Project, an endeavor that seeks to heal relationships between Natives and non-Natives through music. Since the idea germinated in early 2005, it has blossomed into multiple performances, recordings, workshops and, most importantly, relationships that might never have developed had music not served as the bridge between two cultures that have long been mired in mistrust.

‚ÄãGier arrived in Sioux Falls with a solid musical background. After earning a master’s degree at the University of Michigan’s School of Music, a Fulbright Scholarship allowed him to begin a career in professional conducting in Europe. He completed an apprenticeship with the Philadelphia Orchestra and then spent 15 years as an assistant conductor for the New York Philharmonic, the last five years dovetailing with his appointment with the South Dakota Symphony.

‚ÄãAs Gier planned his inaugural 2004-2005 season, he also wanted to gain a sense of how the orchestra fit into the fabric of Sioux Falls and South Dakota. “The one thing that was an unknown for me was how the orchestra was really serving its community and what the potential was for that,” he says.”During my first year, I was assessing — other than just playing concerts in the Pavilion — what else the orchestra was doing and what else could be done.”

‚ÄãAt a reception one evening, Gier met a young African American woman who was involved in the city’s Martin Luther King Jr. Day activities.”I suggested to her that maybe we should do something together, because a lot of orchestras have MLK concerts and bring in Black composers and Black artists,” Gier recalls.”She smiled and nodded and said, ‘If you really want to talk about racial prejudice in South Dakota, you should be talking to the Native Americans.’ After 20 years of living in New York, my jaw hit the ground.”

‚ÄãThe seed was planted for what became the Lakota Music Project. The SDSO hosted a lunch for about a dozen Lakota and Dakota leaders at the Falls Overlook Cafe in the spring of 2005. Gier remembers the undercurrents of mistrust that seemed to waft through the room as he spoke.”I came in with all kinds of ideas on ways we could collaborate, and that was my first lesson in learning to shut up and listen,” he says.”They didn’t need yet another white man’s program coming in and trying to help. That wasn’t anything that would be helpful to anybody.”

The orchestra welcomed the Creekside Singers to the Lakota Music Project. Pictured are (back, from left) SDSO music director Delta David Gier, John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear and SDSO principal oboist Jeffrey Paul and (front, from left) Brent Spoonhunter, Hanna Gasdia and Ari Black Bear.

Fortunately, Barry LeBeau was intrigued. LeBeau was a veteran lobbyist in Pierre for United Sioux Tribes, but he also had a background in theater.”I think he had an understanding for what the arts could do in terms of helping to generate understanding across cultures,” Gier says of LeBeau, who died in 2020.

The two of them began traveling to reservations across the state. Their first stop was Mission on the Rosebud Reservation, where tribal elder Robert Moore — who is also a classically trained singer — brought them into a tribal council meeting.”He gave us a five-minute platform to talk about what we’d like to try to do. That was the first stamp of approval that we got.”

They also sought input from Ronnie Thiesz, a longtime professor of Native Studies and literature at Black Hills State University in Spearfish, author of several books on Lakota music and culture and a founding member of the Porcupine Singers. Moore and Thiesz began traveling with Gier and LeBeau.”In talking with Ronnie, we really fleshed out what kind of a program would be meaningful to people,” Gier says.”Those relationships became the most important thing and helped to shape our initial tour and program.”

In the meantime, other orchestra members were doing their own groundwork. Jeffrey Paul, who is entering his 20th season as the symphony’s principal oboist, had also been traveling to reservations with the Dakota Wind Quintet, a small group of orchestra instrumentalists that performs concerts in smaller settings around the state.”My first time out with that group was in Pine Ridge,” Paul says.”It was just so clear to me that we needed to be listening and communicating and developing lasting relationships. So, we started opening the doors to other conversations. ‘What’s important to you? What kind of music do you listen to and how does music play a role in your life?’

“On some of our tours, we’d have a discussion and a jam session where we might talk and learn about the function of music in each other’s traditions and play some of the music that fits these functions back and forth. As you might expect, there was a lot more commonality than difference. It was kind of serendipitous that David took an interest in that as well.”

Paul was uniquely situated to help develop the Lakota Music Project. A native of Thousand Oaks, California, he studied at the Eastman School of Music and the University of Southern California, earning two degrees in oboe performance while also playing and learning piano, saxophone, guitar, bagpipes and even Irish whistles. He also developed a strong interest in the folk music of other cultures, likely because of trips he took as a boy to visit his grandparents in Nova Scotia, Canada.”Back in the old days they used to say that Scottish culture was more preserved in Nova Scotia than it was in Scotland because there was so little traffic in and out,” Paul says.”When I was in the throes of studying classical music really intensely at one of the conservatories, a Scottish musician came in. It was just his voice and a guitar, but it really struck a chord in me. It was just beautiful music, profound in its simplicity and tradition. For me, that kind of tore down those conservatory walls because it affected me so much.”

That new perspective helped as he visited with elders and musicians, exploring the nuances of indigenous music and how it might blend with traditional orchestral music. Paul had written a piece called Desert Wind for electric guitar before moving to South Dakota. Gier heard the piece and asked him to expand it for chamber orchestra and to explore how to incorporate it into the Lakota Music Project. He performed it for Melvin Young Bear, keeper of the drum for the Porcupine Singers.”It dealt with feelings of being alone in both positive and negative connotations, and he said it went really well with a song that he had written for his granddaughter,” Paul says.”He said he had these same feelings when he held his granddaughter on his knee, and then she went home.”

Organizers spent four years traveling and talking to tribal elders, musicians and cultural leaders before the first Lakota Music Project performance in 2009. Since then, the group has staged concerts around the state, launched workshops and recorded an album.

Paul and Young Bear began working on an adapted version of Desert Wind that included Young Bear’s Harmony’s Song. That collaboration became the hallmark of the Lakota Music Project.”We were learning as we were going, how to listen to people and how we might actually build this thing together by listening to elders and musicians and cultural leaders. That building together became the key, and still is the key, to the Lakota Music Project,” Gier says.

“Orchestras are good at programming and implementing. That’s what we do. We’re not good at being flexible, and this kind of cross-cultural stuff was totally new. There was plenty of Indianist music that could be played. These are white composers who were truly inspired by Native American culture and seeking to honor that, but this is not something that was going to accomplish any kind of cross-cultural understanding. This cultural appropriation discussion wasn’t as heated a topic 15 years ago as it is now, but it became really evident that this was something that we needed to avoid, so we’ve never implemented that music in any of our Lakota Music Project tours. It’s always been original music that was created together.”

Members of the orchestra, tribal elders, scholars and musicians met, talked and played for more than four years before the inaugural performance of the Lakota Music Project was staged in 2009. The two-hour concert, featuring the orchestra and the Creekside Singers, explored how each culture experiences love, war, grief and celebration.”We would go back and forth. The drum group and orchestra would play examples of music that expressed each of the four themes,” Gier says.”It demonstrated not just the musical but the interpersonal relationship that we were developing between our orchestra and these Lakota musicians.”

The Lakota Music Project then took the show on the road, performing on the Pine Ridge, Rosebud and Lake Traverse reservations, Sioux Falls, Rapid City and at Crazy Horse Memorial on Native American Day in 2010.

All the work culminating in that first performance and tour is now considered the first phase of the Lakota Music Project. The second phase, spanning 2012 through 2016, included a new partnership with the South Dakota Humanities Council and the world premiere of WaktÈgli OlÛwa≈ã (Victory Songs) by American Indian composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate. Its five movements each honor a Lakota warrior: Red Cloud, Gall, Crazy Horse, Two Strike and Sitting Bull.

There were performances at Crazy Horse Memorial, Pierre, Eagle Butte, Sisseton and Mobridge. A fourth commissioned work, Pentatonic Fantasy, combined the talents of Paul and Bryan Akipa, a cedar flute player from Agency Village on the Lake Traverse Reservation.”We spent some time on Clear Lake near Sisseton getting to know each other and talking about the instruments,” Paul says.”He demonstrated a lot of cedar flute traditions, how he makes them, and the symbolism involved. It’s been a wonderful friendship with him for many years. I wrote him an entire concerto to play with the orchestra, but the second movement, ‘Wind on Clear Lake,’ seemed to grow legs and turned into its own piece.”

John Mesteth, Emmanuel Black Bear (the Keeper of the Drum) and Ari Black Bear perform as the Creekside Singers.

Akipa is a self-taught musician and flute maker who began studying the instrument as a student of Oscar Howe at the University of South Dakota. He received the prestigious National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts for his work preserving the flute and its music. The lifetime honor is the country’s highest award in folk and traditional arts.

He is heartened by the diverse audiences that have seen Lakota Music Project performances.”For the traditional flute, it’s relaxing music, but it’s almost like you are talking to the people,” Akipa says.”You are communicating with them and you’re telling a story with the song. You’re playing a song that could be sung. That’s for one type of audience. The orchestra has a much different style, and you’re bringing those two audiences together.

“For me, it was good to get more exposure for the flute. The traditional red cedar flute is really important to the culture, but maybe to other people it’s like a new age thing, or just a fad or something. Playing with the symphony helped other people take the music and the flute more seriously. The flute, and what it can do and the sound it can produce, really gets their attention. Some people might even have a spiritual experience. It’s just the way they interpret or feel the music.”

The third phase, from 2017 to 2019, included a chamber music program series of concerts in Washington, D.C., featuring Akipa and Emmanuel Black Bear, a traditional singer and drummer from Pine Ridge and two-time winner of a Native American Music Award. Jerod Tate (the orchestra’s composer-in residence in 2017) also launched the Music Composition Academies, week-long workshops every July in Sisseton and Black Hills State University in Spearfish open to students of all musical skill levels. They work with three composer mentors — Jeffrey Paul, Michael Begay and Ted Wiprud (composer-in-residence in 2018 and 2019).”It’s maybe one of the most important things to me that I do musically in life,” Paul says.”We do maybe a little bit of teaching but that’s not the primary focus, which is to draw out pure musical ideas from students.”

In September, when members of the orchestra are back on contract, they return to Sisseton and Spearfish and perform the world premieres of the pieces written by the young musicians. Gier says the experience can be cathartic.”These kids are dealing with deep emotional issues. They’re writing pieces of music about suicide because they lost a friend in school, or about missing and murdered indigenous women because this young woman lost an auntie. They’re processing this through the music they’re writing.”

Unfortunately, while the student academies have continued operating in Sisseton and Spearfish, other aspects of the Lakota Music Project have temporarily fallen silent. Like many initiatives in the arts world, much of the symphony’s programming is reliant upon grant funding, and in 2022 there has been little to none. But Gier and the other musicians who have invested 17 years into the one-of-a-kind endeavor are hopeful for brighter days.

“I went into it maybe crazily but with the idea that this is something that the South Dakota symphony should be doing. There are nine Indian reservations here, there’s a history of racial tension to put it mildly, and so rather than ignore it we could embrace it. My hope was that it would become so much a part of the fabric of who we are as the South Dakota Symphony Orchestra that when I’m gone it would continue, that the relationships between us and the Native community across the state would be so rich and meaningful on both sides of the equation that there would just be no question that this would continue, that this is who we are.”

That would certainly be something significant.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the November/December 2022 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Somber Anniversary

By John Andrews

An estimated 146 of the roughly 300 Lakota men, women and children who were killed during the Wounded Knee Massacre of 1890 lie buried in a mass grave. Survivor Joseph Horn Cloud traveled the country raising funds for a stone marker that was placed at the grave site in 1902.

We were about 30 minutes late getting to Leonard Little Finger’s house because we had gotten lost on the Pine Ridge Reservation. After nearly bottoming out our Chevy Impala on a road that could barely be described as minimum maintenance, we knew we were on the wrong track. We headed back to Oglala, where some friendly youth at a school told us that Leonard was their Lakota language teacher. They kindly gave us directions, and soon we found Little Finger in his home just on the edge of town, patiently waiting for us.

The first things we noticed upon going inside were photographs — dozens of them — hanging on his walls. Grandchildren and great-grandchildren smiled down at us. But there were also black and white images, and they were clearly very old. One was a photo of his paternal grandfather, John Little Finger. Another showed his maternal grandparents, Joseph Horn Cloud and Millie Bald Eagle. Next to that was a photo of Horn Cloud’s brothers, Daniel White Lance and Dewey Beard.

They were all survivors of the Wounded Knee Massacre, which took place on Dec. 29, 1890. We had come to Pine Ridge to find people just like Leonard: descendants of Wounded Knee survivors who could tell us stories that their ancestors passed down about that day. Little Finger was the first person we met and held by far the strongest connection to the massacre.”I had 39 relatives there at the time,” he told us.”Only seven survived.”

In all, roughly 300 Lakota men, women and children died at the hands of the U.S. Army’s Seventh Cavalry. They were members of Chief Big Foot’s band, who fled the Standing Rock Reservation after Sitting Bull’s death on Dec. 15. They were traveling to a peace conference with Chief Red Cloud at Pine Ridge when the cavalry met them near Wounded Knee Creek.

The Little Finger family name stems from an incident that occurred during the massacre. According to family oral history, as soldiers explained their plans to bring the Lakota to Pine Ridge, one cavalryman said he would show them what would happen if they tried to run. He shouted a command and another soldier lowered his weapon, which they claimed was not loaded.”When he pulled the breach back, my grandfather saw a bullet go in there, and it locked,” Little Finger told us.”Then he barked again, and they all came up.” That’s when the 14-year-old John Little Finger swung and knocked the soldier to the ground, breaking his little finger. The boy ran, and soon gunfire erupted.

We also met cousins Ingrid One Feather and Fred Stands. Their great-grandfather, Peter Stands, survived the massacre and lived with several others in a cave for much of the following year. One Feather said she knows that Stands’ wife and two of their children were killed, but he rarely talked about that day because he feared reprisals from the government.

Myron Pourier is the great-grandson of the Lakota holy man Black Elk, who also survived the massacre. Much of Black Elk’s recollections were published in a book, Black Elk Speaks, in 1932, but one story not recorded in those pages tells of Black Elk’s encounter with Red Willow two days after the massacre. A soldier, still pursuing Lakota warriors, shot Red Willow’s horse from under him. Black Elk lifted Red Willow onto his own horse and together they rode to Red Cloud Agency.”We’re still close to the Red Willow family,” Pourier said.

These families, and many more, will forever remain connected by the tragedy. Dealing with it in their daily lives can still be burdensome, even after 129 years.”Let’s say you look at time as a cloth,” Little Finger explained.”Then along comes some violence and tears it. You can stitch it, but you can never tear the threads that consist of that fabric. I come to that every day. I already know the impact that it had, but it can be historical trauma if you don’t understand it and know what it was. There’s a spiritual side to it. There’s no one person who represents this fabric. It just depends on who you talk to. One is going to be very historically traumatized, and the other is going to say, ‘It happened. It’s over, and we have to get on with life.’ And all in between.”

December in South Dakota can a joyous month for families gathered to celebrate the holidays. But it also marks a somber anniversary for the men and women who still live with the effects of our state’s darkest day.

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Naming Jett

Story By Roger Holtzmann

Photos by Keith Hemmelman

A tipi was erected atop Snake Butte near Lake Oahe for the traditional Lakota naming ceremony of Mike and Donna Stroup’s son, Jett.

Children are guided along paths laid out by their parents. That is the natural order of things, but for one Lakota family it may not be the only way.

Donna and Mike Stroup, of rural Pierre, welcomed a son, their second child, into the world on Sept. 25, 2013. They named him Jett, and he was about a year old when Donna was approached by Violet Catches, her close friend of many years.

“Violet had seen Jett after his birth and always commented on how he was a ‘real’ Indian baby,” said Donna.”She said, ‘He needs a spirit name.'”

Sometime later,”Violet told me she had a dream in which she came upon an old-time Indian camp,” said Donna. Their tipis were gathered in a circle, with children playing all around, and when Violet entered the circle she saw Jett.”He turned and saw [Catches] and ran to her with arms outstretched, and said, ‘Grandma! I’m so happy you’re back in my life!'”

Clark Zephyr (left), a Fort Thompson medicine man, officiated at the naming ceremony for Jett, shown being held by his father, Mike.

Catches grew up on the Cheyenne River Reservation, in a traditional Lakota family, one in which the old ways were her first ways.”My first language was Lakota,” said Catches.”My first teachings in life were in the Lakota culture. My grandmother told me stories about our culture, and it wasn’t just for my ears. It was for all the kids in the house — my older sister and younger brother, and a cousin we called older sister.”

Lakota kinship is different,”more complex,” than the American system, said Catches. Relationships include the bonds between immediate and extended family members, but they can be equally close and meaningful beyond those traditional ties.”In life, you feel really connected to certain people,” said Catches.”That’s how I feel about Donna and Mike and their children.”

That connection to the Stroup family, and her Lakota background, moved Catches to see her dream as more than a simple dream: it was an invitation to help her friends recover a pearl of great price.”I asked Donna and Mike if they would permit me to have a naming ceremony for Jett,” said Catches.

Native children receive a given name at birth, as Jett did, but naming ceremonies — in which another name is bestowed and celebrated — have long been a part of the Lakota, Dakota and Nakota traditions. Names sometimes pass from parent to child, or within a tiospaye (extended family), according to Mike. This may happen when the christened is young, but they can be conferred at any time from the teenaged to gray-haired years.

Names can also be original to an individual, as when they reflect a unique spiritual vision, or recognize some significant achievement or service.

“My wife and I didn’t seek out a name,” said Mike.”Violet saw Jett early on, and had a connection with him. She didn’t know why.”

Donna, Mike and Violet prepared for the naming ceremony by visiting the sweat lodge at Wakpa Sica Reconciliation Place outside of Fort Pierre (Jett would have participated if he were older). In that place of purification and prayer they offered thanks for the honor accorded Jett and their family, and asked for guidance.

The inside of the ceremonial tipi.

On the appointed day, friends and family gathered at the Stroup home 5 miles north of Pierre, near the top of Zuze’ca Paha (Snake Butte) overlooking Lake Oahe. Clark Zephyr, a medicine man from Fort Thompson, performed the ceremony. Chris Mexican, of Pierre, served as the drummer and singer.

Mike had erected a ceremonial tipi, adorned with sacred symbols, which will be Jett’s to keep throughout his lifetime. The naming ceremony began inside, with Jett, Zephyr, Mexican, Donna, Mike and their older son Spencer present. (Violet was unable to attend because of family obligations.)

A naming ceremony can vary somewhat from one medicine man to another. Zephyr began with three traditional songs, sung to the cardinal directions; these served as the ceremony’s foundation for they appealed to Jett’s living and dead relatives to guide him in the coming years.

When they emerged from the tipi Jett was placed on a buffalo robe. Zephyr tied an eagle feather into his hair and Mike and Donna proclaimed his name for the first time: OyÈ Aku,”One Who Brings Back Tradition.”

“Jett’s spirit name came to Violet while she was at Sun Dance before the naming ceremony, and it was a pretty fitting name,” said Donna.”When I was pregnant Mike and I discussed ways to expose Jett to as much of our culture as we could after his birth.”

Purifying sage smoke wafted around the sacred circle while the assembled company lifted their voices in an honor song for the family. Mike and Donna served water and wasna — a mixture of dried chokecherries and buffalo meat — to their corporeal guests, and left some on a nearby butte for those of the spirit realm. These elements have been used in naming ceremonies”forever,” said Mike,”reflecting that water and the buffalo have been around since the beginning.”

Webster Two Hawk, an Episcopal minister from Pierre, offered a prayer of thanksgiving over the feast that followed. This brought the ceremony to a close, and began the many years of patient teaching it will take to help OyÈ Aku understand the significance of his name.

“For us to accept that name, to allow him to accept that name, is a great honor, but a great burden as well,” said Mike.”It kind of sets the direction of his life because it becomes his responsibility to bring back tradition.”

Jett was just 2 when he received a Lakota name meaning, “One Who Brings Back Tradition.”

Before they can teach and guide their son, Mike and Donna must first reconnect more deeply with their own pasts. They are both Lakota, enrolled tribal members on the Lower Brule and Cheyenne River reservations respectively, but they didn’t come of age in traditional families, where their ancestral culture and language were woven into daily life.

“Neither one of us is fluent [in Lakota],” said Mike.”We know a lot of common words, but not much more.” Like many Lakota their age, the Stroups’ grandparents were all native speakers. For a variety of reasons the essential language link between old and young was never made during their formative years, making them part of what Mike termed”a lost generation.”

They do have one decided advantage going forward: both of the Stroups have extensive experience in education. Mike started his career teaching at Flandreau Indian School, then moved on to White River, Rosebud and Sinte Gleska University, before returning to his hometown of Pierre as the high school principal and district superintendent.

After graduating from college with a degree in psychology and early childhood development, Donna’s first position was with the Pierre Indian Learning Center. Stints with the Department of Social Services Child Protection Services and Department of Human Services Division of Developmental Disabilities followed; she is currently the Director of Indian Education for the Pierre School District.

OyÈ Aku and his siblings could hardly be in better hands. They will grow up in a home where education is valued, with parents who will be learning about their treasured Lakota heritage as they teach it to them.

“Our responsibility will be to give OyÈ the opportunity to dance, to sing, to learn about and carry on those traditions,” said Donna.

In this task they will, fortunately, have Catches to support them.”I am going to be helping them learn some of the larger concepts of Lakota culture,” said Catches. One of those is mit·kuye oy·s’in, a sacred term that should be used only in prayer,”at the right time and the right place. What it means is we are all related. Not just to other human beings, but to the earth, the sky, the water, the animals.”

And our precious past.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the July/August 2016 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Native Patriots

Our May/June issue includes a story on our Native American residents’ rich history of military service. Bernie Hunhoff visited the Standing Rock Reservation to visit with its veterans and their descendants. He took several photos on his trip — too many to print. Here are some of his extras.

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From a Vision

By Michael Zimny

Anthony Horse Road is drawing inspiration from his great-great grandfather’s vision to revive the art of Lakota doll making.

For 11 years, Anthony Horse Road struggled to bring the ceremonial doll he calls Waki-ƒça Hey Wa-na into being.”I couldn’t do it until I approached it through ceremony,” he says.”I went to the buffalo calf pipe and I asked to do that doll. They gave me a vision of what they wanted. This is the first doll here.”

The”they” he refers to are “spiritual qualities.” His drive to bring Waki-ƒça Hey Wa-na to life harkens back to a vision seen by his great-great grandfather, Arnold Iron Shell, relayed to Horse Road through his mother.

The vision as told to him goes like this: Arnold Iron Shell was out, alone, with a wagon team at a timber reserve on the Rosebud Reservation, digging up ponderosa pine stumps he could burn for heat, when he heard a familiar sound — the percussive rhythm of a traditional crew of four working a stretched buffalo skin. Then he heard a shrill laughter that put him into a trance.

“When he sat up, he said the land was all different and the sky was a rainbow. Everything was different. His horse and team were gone. There was no timber reserve. Then he said whatever was in the south that made that shrill laughter behind him threw something north. Then something caught it in the north and same thing — shrill laughter and threw it back. And doing that, coming closer,’til finally he could see them. And he knew who they were, because back then everybody knew these ceremonies. Over the eons they passed them on. So he knew what was going on.”

The women in his vision were practicing the rite of the Tapa Wanka Yap — throwing of the ball or ball-throw. They explained that they wanted a certain ceremony done.

Horse Road participated in a traditional ceremony to help create this doll, a project 11 years in the making.

“He knew what that ceremony was. They explained to him, ‘These are the people to go to, and they’ll know what to do.'”

Arnold Iron Shell returned to his family and told them what he’d seen. They helped him to erect a tipi at the site of his vision and conduct a ceremony.

“They had a drum group sitting on the right hand side when you go in the tipi, singing these ball-throw and hoop ceremony songs. These songs are made to entice these goddess maidens. So when that goes on, all the people that participated had little dolls of their own — little horse dolls, little dog dolls, little human form dolls. They [the dolls] all jumped up and started dancing around. And when they did that, [the people] quilled really fast. If they started a pair of moccasins, in no time it was done. So pretty soon there was a pile of quill work in front of the tipi.”

The quillwork ceremony had a practical purpose.

“The spiritual quality said that all the quill work that was finished goes to the elder, the orphan, the dependent and the suffering — those four. That’s how we dealt with poverty and long sicknesses. Throughout the ages, they did that. Up to today. And those four are the victims here. They’re being victimized on these reservations. So that’s why we’re getting back to this again.”

Anthony Horse Road has been doing quillwork and working in other mediums, including doll making, for many years. His drive to create the ceremonial dolls needed to recreate the quillwork ceremony of Arnold Iron Shell’s vision has launched him on a long creative and spiritual journey. He says the methods required for the task have been revealed to him through ceremonies designed to entice six spirit-world maidens believed to control the arts — as well as the seventh, the White Buffalo Calf Maiden, holder of the sacred pipe.

“In order to do quality work you have to entice them into your life. And then they show you things. They taught me how to read quillwork.”

By learning to read quillwork, he could see a Lakota cosmogony in the quilled patterns on a historic knife sheath he found pictured in an old Smithsonian quarterly. Similarly, the porcupine quill patterns on each element of clothing worn by Waki-ƒça Hey Wa-na tell a story. Creating quillwork for a 4-inch doll demands precision. Horse Road uses a method in which tiny pieces of quill are fastened to the leather through a sinew hitch that doesn’t pierce the front side of the hide.

“In ceremony, they [quills] become a life of their own, and if you do not entice the maidens, it’s really difficult. It feels like you’re handling a ton of lead. When the medicine leaves the quill, it’s really hard to work with. But once you start initiating these [traditional] methods, it gets a lot easier, to the degree where you’re quilling really fast.”

By using a (secret) traditional method for tanning the buckskin (the doll is made entirely of artist-harvested buckskin or hair), Horse Road renders the leather silky smooth, and shrink-proof, on both sides. The doll wears seven feathers to represent the seven sacred rites believed to be brought by the White Buffalo Calf Maiden.

He holds a functional, miniature ceremonial ƒçha≈ãn˙≈ãpa (pipe) made of deer antler and ash, with two carved hoops around the stem. He has intricate tattoo work on the left side of his face.

Waki-ƒça Hey Wa-na — a temporary name — is the first in a family of dolls Horse Road needs to accomplish to bring back the quillwork ceremony as envisioned by his great-great grandfather and himself.

“I could never make a doll that size. That’s something that I did through ceremony, fasting, praying. And I pierced flesh to do this doll.”

He hopes that he can sell this doll to finance the creation of the complete set.

The only material difference between Waki-ƒça Hey Wa-na and the final, ceremonial version is that he is not stuffed with buffalo hair.”Eliminating the buffalo hair makes him a piece of art. If he were made [according to] the traditional method, with buffalo hair, he would dance in the ceremony.”

He hopes that by resurrecting the quillwork ceremony — and the vision’s counsel to help the elder, the orphan, the dependent and the suffering — he can help young people who are at risk.

“I created [Waki-ƒça Hey Wa-na] because of the suicides taking place here. By preserving this, we’re going to educate the youths to get away from suicide as a threat to the future generations.

“If we initiate this, it’s only going to take one maiden to pull her ceremony off to change everything. If they pull this particular ceremony off, that’s going to empower us as a people — to grow gardens, to hunt, to get back to health again.”

Michael Zimny is the social media engagement specialist for South Dakota Public Broadcasting in Vermillion. He blogs for SDPB and contributes arts columns to the South Dakota Magazine website.

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A Farmer’s Story

By Bernie Hunhoff

Johnny Cloud, a colorful Sisseton farmer, has many descendants in Roberts County. They include his daughter, Marlene (left) and a grandson, James Cloud.

When South Dakota Magazine began publication in 1985, we hurried to interview some of South Dakota’s elder statesmen because we wanted to collect their stories firsthand. Ben Reifel and Sigurd Anderson were two such leaders. Reifel was born in a log cabin on the Rosebud Reservation in 1906 and became the first (and only) Native American to win statewide office in South Dakota.

Anderson was born in Norway in 1904, and served as governor in the early 1950s. Although Anderson and Reifel were Republican office-holders of the same age and era, they told very different stories. There was one exception: both mentioned an Indian boy from Roberts County who wanted to be a farmer.

They each spoke of him when we asked about race relations in South Dakota. Neither seemed to know any details about the boy, and the story was almost too cute to be true — like the feel-good anecdotes that politicians like to tell. We figured that one of the old pols had heard it from the other, so we gave it just a few paragraphs in Reifel’s feature article in 1989. However, I did repeat it on occasion when I was asked to speak at various events.

Anderson and Reifel told the story like this: the boy grew up on the reservation speaking only the Dakota language and a little German. His teachers told him he must learn English if he wanted to be a farmer.”After all,” said one teacher,”you don’t know how to farm, so you’re going to have to ask.”

That made sense to Johnny. He worked hard at English and other subjects. Years later, he was able to rent a patch of land in Roberts County. He decided his next step would be to meet the neighbors, who gathered for coffee every morning at the local grain elevator.

In farming country, a grain elevator is like the country club to an advertising executive or insurance agent. That’s where a farmer goes to”network” with his associates. The young Indian boy didn’t know the meaning of networking, but he intuitively understood the concept. So he bravely walked into the grain elevator and sat down at the table, ready to learn.

Imagine his surprise when he found that — after years of learning to speak English — the farmers were not speaking English, but some other language. He wasn’t sure what tongue it was, but it wasn’t German or English or Dakota. He wondered if his new neighbors were intentionally snubbing him. He didn’t know what to do. So he went home.

A few days later, Johnny mustered up the courage to confide in his nearest neighbor. He went to the man’s farm and blurted out his confusing experience at the grain elevator.”I spent years learning to speak English so I could be a farmer, and when I went to meet the other farmers they were talking something else,” he said.

The neighbor explained that nearly everyone in the community spoke Norwegian. He said the farmers at the elevator certainly didn’t mean to slight him.”They just weren’t thinking,” he assured the young man.

The two came up with a plan. The young Indian already knew three languages. Surely he could learn a fourth. A few weeks later, Johnny and his new friend returned to the grain elevator. They sat down at the table and Johnny, the Dakota Indian, introduced himself in Norwegian. Imagine the looks of surprise on his new neighbors.

Speaking in Norwegian, Johnny clumsily explained that he always had wanted to be a farmer. That his teachers told him to learn English so he could talk to his neighbors. That he still wanted to be a farmer, and he knew he needed their help and advice. And that he would help them whenever he could.

Before he could speak any further, because his Norwegian was so torturous to hear, they all welcomed him with handshakes and offers to help — offers spoken in plain English. And Ben Reifel said that was the last time anyone spoke Norwegian at the grain elevator, because they realized they had been excluding their non-Norwegian neighbors. Anderson and Reifel said the Indian boy became a skilled farmer and community leader, and all lived happily ever after.

That was their story. Whenever I told it in public, I admitted that I didn’t know the Indian boy’s name or the community where it happened. And, of course, I wasn’t even sure it was completely true.

A year ago I was asked to speak at the Center for Western Studies’ annual Dakota Conference in Sioux Falls. Wanting a feel-good conclusion to my talk, I told the story of the Indian boy from Roberts County. As I spoke, I could see that Wayne Knutson was paying close attention. He is the retired Dean of Fine Arts at the University of South Dakota and a patriarch of the arts across South Dakota.

As soon as I finished speaking, Knutson hurried to the front of the room and said to me,”That’s Johnny Cloud! I knew him. He was a big, tall Indian farmer from Sisseton who always greeted us with a god dag!” Wayne, it turns out, was born and raised in Roberts County. He said Johnny Cloud was one of the most memorable characters from his childhood in the 1940s.”Most of the Native Americans seemed more reserved, at least when they were downtown, but Johnny was a gregarious man with a hearty laugh that drew me to him,” Knutson said.”And he loved to show off that he could speak Norwegian. We’d heard that he had learned the language so he could do business with the Norwegian families,” he said.

Knutson remembered Johnny Cloud delivering”little Norwegian speeches” to the clerks in Stavig’s Department Store on Main Street.”Then he would laugh his big laugh, because it tickled him so much. I can still hear his laughter ringing out.”

I could hardly believe my ears, as Knutson brought Johnny Cloud back to life. My estimations of Anderson and Reifel — though already immense — grew still higher. Why had I doubted that the story was true?

As soon as I returned to the magazine office in Yankton, I looked in the Sisseton phone book for the Cloud name. I found James Cloud and dialed his number; James promptly answered. I asked if he knew Johnny Cloud, and he said both his father and grandfather were named John.

When I told him my story, he said his grandfather was the tall, successful farmer who spoke Norwegian.”I’m looking out my window at the land he farmed,” James said. He invited me to stop by on my next trip to Roberts County.

Sisseton, a tidy little city of 2,600 people, sits on flatlands just below the Coteau Hills. Sometimes in the winter, the sun is shining in Sisseton while a fierce blizzard rages in the hills west of town. Atop the Coteau, three markers have been erected to memorialize three separate incidents involving travelers lost in such storms.

The Sisseton area has a lot of variety for its size. The Lundstrum family’s religious ministry is headquartered there, as is the Schiltz family’s goose farm and factory, which processes 100,000 geese a year.

A glacier slid across this land a mere 20,000 years ago, creating dozens of pretty little lakes that are now ringed by cabins and resorts. The Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate Sioux Tribe runs a bingo hall and a community college just south of Sisseton. The tribe has a rich history. Its people, starving and denied supplies in Minnesota, battled the Minnesota militia in 1862. When the hostilities ended, 38 Indian warriors were hung on Christmas Day. It is called the largest mass execution in America’s history. Chief Gabriel Renville led the tribe into the 20th century, and many of his descendants live in Roberts County today.

Johnny Cloud and Bessie Derby were married at Sisseton in 1912.

Northwest of town is the West’s smallest and prettiest forest, a 900-acre state park known as Sica Hollow. Hikers, horse enthusiasts, photographers and bird-watchers frequent the place, and sightseers come in the autumn to marvel at the hardwood trees’ golden foliage. Who could blame Johnny Cloud or any young man for wanting to make a living here on the land?

Driving into Sisseton on a weekday morning, I wondered if anyone other than James would remember Johnny Cloud. It was too early to call on James, so I stopped at the Cottage Restaurant on Highway 10 for coffee and eggs. Ken Erdahl, a longtime Sisseton banker, was seated in the next booth. We struck up a conversation, so I asked him if he knew Johnny Cloud.

ìHe was a big, tall guy,” answered the banker.”He was kind of husky. He was a good customer of ours, and a good farmer. When he wasn’t farming, he liked to hunt on Buffalo Lake. He liked to be called Goose Hunter.”

Erdahl recalled that Johnny spoke Norwegian, but he hadn’t heard the story of why he learned the language. He wasn’t surprised that Anderson and Reifel might have known the Indian farmer.”Johnny was well respected around here and very sociable,” said the banker.”He hung around Mel’s Diner for coffee. He was a very nice fellow.”

Erdahl was working at the Roberts County National Bank when Johnny borrowed $1,400 to buy his first new tractor, a shiny red”M” Farmall.”He sold it 20 years later for $1,500 and he was very proud of that,” said the banker.

Everywhere we went in Sisseton, old-timers remembered Johnny Cloud. They didn’t know of his encounter with the neighbors at the grain elevator, but their memories of his good nature, his intelligence and his passion for farming all supported the Anderson/Reifel story.

At the Roberts County National Bank, the Torness family paged through their local history books and found some specific information on John Melvin Cloud. He was born on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana in 1891 and came to the Sisseton area as a teenager to live with relatives. His ancestry, like many Indians in Roberts County, traces to Chief Renville. Johnny married Bessie Derby in 1912 and they began a small farm on land just north of Sisseton.

Late in the morning, I drove north of town to the old Cloud farm. James, a short and slender man with jet-black hair, said he was young when his grandfather died in 1968.”I do remember helping him to feed the chickens, and if you didn’t do it right he would get after you,” he laughed.

ìCome in the house,” he said.”My mother knew him.” There in the living room, lying in a hospital bed, was James’ mother, Goldie. She was injured in a car accident in 1974, and has been confined to bed ever since. She was already the mother of 10 young children when the accident happened. Today, nine of the 10 still live in the Sisseton area and James says they all help care for mom, but he is there constantly, attending to her needs.

Goldie, despite her paralysis, is a happy and content woman. Her living room is filled with pictures of grandchildren, and she looks out a big picture window at the fields that her father-in-law once farmed. She remembers him as a big, friendly fellow who loved his neighbors and his family.

She married his only son, John Jr., in 1947. Goldie’s nearest neighbor is Marlene Campbell, her sister-in-law and Johnny’s daughter. Marlene lives less than a quarter-mile down a gravel road. We knocked on her door, and she was happy to answer our questions as well; but she noted that her husband had died two years earlier, and the shock affected her memory. Still, she had good recollections of her father.”A lot of the farmers would come to him because he could speak German and Dakota,” she said.”He probably learned it in Montana before he moved back here. He was always happy to translate for people.

ìHe helped people out, and he loaned machinery to the neighbors,” Marlene said.”He also would go to the jail and take the prisoners for a day or two. They were always so glad to get outside and work in the fresh air.”

None of the Cloud family remembered a specific story of Johnny learning Norwegian to speak at the grain elevator. But they agreed that it sounded a lot like him, and they confirmed his passion for farming. Marlene says her father built a barn even before he built a house.”He loved his farm and he was very successful,” she says. The big red barn was recently torn down, but a grove of trees and his old granary still stand on the Cloud farm.

ìHe encouraged all of his children to go to school,” said Marlene,”but I was the only one who went to the university.” She earned a master’s degree in education, and taught at Sisseton High School and the Sisseton-Wahpeton Tribal College.

Cloud family members have worked in education, health care, religious ministries and other professions. Because a boy wanted to farm — and possibly because a neighbor helped him learn a little Norwegian — his family took root in Roberts County. The benefits to the area continue to multiply, as does the Cloud family; as we visited with Marlene, her granddaughter came by the house with the family’s newest member, a three-month old baby called Azriel who has the bloodlines of a great chief and a fun-loving farmer.

While driving away from the Cloud farm, we thought that Azriel deserves the opportunity to know about her Norwegian-speaking great-grandfather. He overcame the gulfs of not just two, but three cultures — and he did it with laughter and good cheer. So, with apologies and appreciation to Ben Reifel and Sig Anderson, we’ll continue to tell the story of the Indian boy who wanted to farm.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2008 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Between the Reservations

By John Andrews

Bennett County, sandwiched between the Pine Ridge and Rosebud Indian Reservations in southwest South Dakota, is the home of one of the country’s most noted Indian scholars. Visitors can still see his old haunts, and while they are there they can observe wildlife found in few other places in South Dakota or see our state’s version of the sandhills that Nebraska has made famous.

Vine Deloria, Jr., was born in Martin in 1933. Before his death in 2005, Time magazine had named him one of America’s greatest religious thinkers. His literary contributions included God is Red and Custer Died For Your Sins, leaving no doubt where the author stood regarding the history of Native and non-Native relations.

Martin greatly impacted Deloria’s thinking, as he wrote years later.”My earliest memories are of trips along dusty roads to Kyle, a small settlement in the heart of the reservation, to attend dances where people danced as if the intervening 50 years had been a lost weekend from which they had fully recovered,” he wrote.”The [Wounded Knee] massacre was vividly etched in the minds of the older reservation people but it was difficult to find anyone who wanted to talk about it.”

Vine Deloria, one of the most celebrated Indian scholars of the 20th century, grew up in Bennett County.

Deloria’s father was an Episcopalian preacher who served congregations in Allen, Porcupine, Vetal, Batesland, Wanblee and Tuthill. After attending reservation schools and serving in the Marine Corps, the young Deloria studied at Iowa State University. He earned a degree in theology at Lutheran Theological Seminary; but rather than follow in his footsteps as a pastor, he chose a path as an activist educator and writer. He was the executive director of the National Congress of American Indians in the 1960s, and during that period he wrote Custer Died For Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto. The book, published during the turbulent years when America was coming to grips with civil rights, challenged readers to reconsider cultural stereotypes, generalizations, patronization and even historical inclinations.

He earned a law degree from the University of Colorado and then taught at the University of Arizona in Tucson from 1978 to 1990, when he returned to Colorado to teach at Boulder until retiring in 2000. Along the way, he wrote and published 20 books and gained a reputation as a gifted orator and scholar.

The historic Inland Theater in Martin was added to the National Register of Historic Places in 2013.

Fewer and fewer of Martin’s 1,000 residents remember the word warrior, but life continues here just as it did during Deloria’s childhood. Situated on Highway 18, Martin is part of the Oyate Trail, a 395-mile route through southern South Dakota that stretches from North Sioux City to Edgemont. Services are still held every Sunday at the church built by Father Deloria. The rectory where the Delorias lived is standing but vacant.

Zane and Dorene Zieman’s little bookstore on Main Street has a copy of Custer Died For Your Sins on the shelves. Down the street, the town library has four of Deloria’s books. Marsha Fyler, the library director, says they are popular.”Anything with a Native American theme is in demand here, especially his. The Native American population knows about him.”

Bennett County is young compared to its 65 counterparts. It was organized in 1909 and named for Granville Bennett, a justice of the Dakota Territory Supreme Court, delegate to Congress and probate judge in Lawrence County. The land, once belonging to the Oglala Sioux people, was ceded to the federal government and opened to settlement in 1912.

Waterfowl may not jump to mind when discussing Bennett County, but it is home to South Dakota’s only wildlife refuge west of the Missouri River. Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge was created in 1935 as a refuge and breeding ground for migratory birds and other animals. Since its establishment, the refuge has grown to encompass over 16,000 acres in the shallow Lake Creek valley 12 miles southeast of Martin. It helps sustain sandhill cranes, shorebirds and other migratory waterfowl, but its primary mission is to provide wintering habitat for trumpeter swans. The birds were hunted nearly to extinction in the 19th century because their feathers were in demand for quill pens. In 1960, 20 cygnets were released at Lacreek. They were the seed for the High Plains Flock of trumpeter swans that now includes about 600 birds. The best time to view the swans is October through March.

Trumpeter swans, once on the brink of extinction, have been successfully reintroduced at Lacreek National Wildlife Refuge.

Lacreek lies on the northern edge of the sandhills, a geologic formation that Nebraska has made famous but which begin in southern Bennett County. Just take Highway 73 south of Martin. You’ll pass by farms and fields, perhaps wondering if you’ve yet reached the beginning. You’ll know when you do. The switch from what locals call”the hardland” to the sandhills is literally a line in the sand. They can’t be missed.

Jim Buckles is a third generation rancher in the Bennett County sandhills.

“There’s nothing like it in the United States, except maybe very locally along barrier islands, a few hundred yards off the East Coast, and in southern California,” says Dr. Perry Rahn.”Certainly nothing to the extent that you find in Bennett County and on into Nebraska.”

Rahn, a retired professor from the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology in Rapid City, says the history of the sandhills dates back 2 million years to the Pleistocene, or Ice Age.”The glacier never got to Bennett County and western Nebraska, but the wind from that era might have blown away the topsoil and exposed the sand.”

Though the sandhills have been intensely studied over the past century, scientists remain uncertain of their origins. As the glaciers melted about 11,000 years ago, the dunes took shape. Some call them a”desert in disguise” because the geology is much like dunes found in hotter climates. However, thanks to an average rainfall of 15 inches a year, a thin cover of vegetation makes them look more like Ireland than Africa.

So Bennett County’s sandhills aren’t necessarily a desert, but the county does have the unusual distinction of being the farthest spot from a coastline in North America. Officially called the North American continental pole of inaccessibility, the spot is specifically 7 miles north of the town of Allen.

A group of college students share encouragement and wisdom with an instructor at Wingsprings.

Bennett County is also helping build bridges between Native and non-Native people. Ten years ago architect and anthropologist Dr. Craig Howe began building Wingsprings on his family’s land north of Martin. It is home to the Center for American Indian Research and Native Studies (CAIRNS). Rapid City native Eric Zimmer, a doctoral candidate in American History at the University of Iowa, says CAIRNS brings together a coalition of scholars, teachers and area residents to bridge the cultural and historical gaps separating Native and non-Native people in South Dakota.

“CAIRNS acknowledges the troubled history and current tensions between many Native and non-Native peoples,” says Zimmer.”It builds bridges through education and stands to improve not only the quality of life but to strengthen the common bonds that hold the diverse residents of this land together.”

If Vine Deloria could see it, he’d surely be proud of his home county.

Editor’s Note: This is the 17th installment in an ongoing series featuring South Dakota’s 66 counties. Click here for previous articles.

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Remembering Wounded Knee

By Katie Hunhoff

Arthur Short Bull’s diptych Interpretations of Wounded Knee explored the 1890 massacre and the 1973 occupation. His 1890 scene appears on the cover of the November/December 2015 issue of South Dakota Magazine.

The massacre at Wounded Knee occurred when our state was just one year old, yet the effects of that cold winter day still reverberate throughout our state and our country. Dec. 29 marks the 125th anniversary of Wounded Knee. To remember, we dedicated much of our current issue of South Dakota Magazine to the tragedy.

We began by visiting Pine Ridge to find descendants of Wounded Knee survivors. We met Leonard Little Finger, who lives near Oglala. Both of Little Finger’s grandfathers, along with more extended family were survivors of Wounded Knee. He is a direct descendant of Big Foot, whose band was decimated in the massacre. Little Finger had 39 relatives at Wounded Knee. Only seven survived.

Before the massacre, Big Foot and nearly 400 men, women and children were living on the Cheyenne River Reservation. Some were from Sitting Bull’s band, and had fled to Big Foot’s camp after Sitting Bull was killed farther north on the Standing Rock Reservation. Black Elk, in Black Elk Speaks, recounted that only about 100 of the almost 400 were warriors. The rest were women, children or elderly. But all were starving and cold. Big Foot was ill with pneumonia, but still decided to meet with Oglala Chief Red Cloud on the Pine Ridge Reservation to help work on a peace agreement with the federal government.

Soldiers had heard they were on the move and were on lookout. Big Foot’s band was known to have embraced the Ghost Dance, a new religious movement circulating among tribes. White soldiers saw it as a sign of disobedience and trouble because federal law prohibited any exhibitions of Native religion on reservations. But the weak, cold and hungry people that those soldiers met on Dec. 28 were not rebellious. Big Foot was taken by ambulance to the cavalry’s camp on Wounded Knee Creek, and his band was escorted to a nearby valley and instructed to set up camp.

Soldiers seized guns from the Lakota the following morning. The Lakota complied, but the cavalry believed that there were more guns that were being hidden and a search was ordered. Warriors gathered in the camp’s assembly area, and the soldiers began to individually search them. Although there are various stories on how the massacre began, our managing editor John Andrews writes that it is widely believed that it began when a young, deaf Lakota named Black Coyote held his gun over his head, proclaiming it had cost him money and he wasn’t going to give it up. As a soldier tried to seize the weapon, a bullet discharged. Both sides panicked, and the massacre began. It is generally believed that over 300 Lakota died. About 90 were men; the rest women and children. Most of the men were killed in the assembly area, but soldiers pursued the Lakota relentlessly as they tried to escape camp.

Little Finger believes it is a responsibility of tribal elders to pass on the traditional knowledge of what happened, and that the knowledge of each generation can formulate a response to the tragedy.

“Let’s say you look at time as a cloth,” Little Finger told us. “Then along comes some violence and tears it. You can stitch it, but you can never tear the threads that consist of that fabric. I come to that every day.”

It’s not easy to search for meaning in something like the Wounded Knee massacre, but it was in that spirit that we collected the stories for this issue. Besides seeking stories from descendants of Wounded Knee survivors, we also asked Native American leaders Elsie Meeks and Craig Howe to discuss what Wounded Knee means today. We explore artistic interpretations of Wounded Knee and wrote a travel guide for our readers who might like to visit Pine Ridge. We also pored through photos of the massacre aftermath, debating which we should print and if they were too shocking. John Andrews studied the massacre from many sources and points of view to create the best accounts I have read of what happened on that terrible day.

In the end, I hope we did some justice to the Lakota experience and that we provide perspective on our state’s greatest tragedy.

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Do The Job And Come Back

By Chris Vondracek

Several years ago, Francis Whitebird revisited Vietnam and sat on the hill where he was injured 40 years ago. “It was so peaceful,” Whitebird said, from his home in Pierre.

He’s traveled much since Vietnam. He earned a master’s in education at Harvard University. He has been to the Wall in Washington, D.C. He has taken radiation treatment at Seattle for cancer he thinks was caused by Agent Orange.

A member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe, Whitebird has been living in Pierre, where he was appointed Commissioner of Indian Affairs by Gov. George Mickelson. He now focuses his energy on preserving the culture and language of his Lakota ancestors.

His journey to Vietnam began in the St. Francis Mission School that he attended for nine years. He graduated from the Flandreau Indian School and enrolled in South Dakota State University. Agriculture was his major; he dreamed of becoming a rancher. The Army got in the way. “I went to a dance in 1967 and I saw this one kid get a war medal and I thought, ‘I want one of those,’ and the only way you could get it was going to war,” Whitebird said.

He enlisted, and the Army made him into a combat medic. He was stationed south of Da Nang, the second largest city in South Vietnam, with the 196th Light Infantry Brigade. His duties included a mix of going on patrols, radio watch and lugging a 90-pound rucksack. In the jungle, he dispensed malaria pills, made morning calls to sick soldiers, and regularly treated heat exhaustion. When firefights started, he had to switch his mindset. After a year, he decided he’d go back for more. “I couldn’t leave my guys behind,” Whitebird said. “I didn’t trust anyone else to look after them.”

He only remembers the nicknames of comrades. But Whitebird repeats again and again that they were a family. “If someone had a sore back over there, they wouldn’t tell you. They become brothers over there, we’re still brothers,” he said. Often, because he knew the infantry soldiers were less than forthcoming about their injuries, he had to be aggressive. If a guy was hurting, but mute about it to Whitebird, he would often kick the guy to the rear of the formation.

Whitebird witnessed not just the physical strain on his men, but the emotional as well. When men received”Dear John” letters from home, he would often send the men back to camp to get drunk for a few days. They weren’t fit for combat with the contents of the letter weighing on their minds. “If we kept them in the field, they might get themselves or someone else killed,” he said.

Some of his brothers never really left Vietnam. “They lost their spirit,” he said, and mentally they are trapped in the past.

Whitebird doesn’t understand why he and others adjusted from the horrors of war and others still suffer. Nightmares were common for him. When he first returned to the States, he stayed up nights and slept days. But he managed a return to routine.

Whitebird is now retired from government service and has two sons who have served in the military. It’s tempting to ask him about honor and service through several generations, but Whitebird will have none of that. “You went over there to do a job, did it and came back,” he says.”That’s that.”

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the September/October 2006 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.