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Warriors First

By Bernie Hunhoff

The World War I doughboy statue at Rock Creek.

Rock Creek is not a forgotten place. A town must be discovered before it’s forgotten, and most Americans — even most South Dakotans — have never heard of the town on the Standing Rock Reservation. Rock Creek is a dot on the state road map but it’s listed as Bullhead. The U.S. Postal Service still calls it Bullhead (zip code 57621). And road signs on nearby U.S. Highway 12 still point motorists to Bullhead.

“They changed the name to Rock Creek years ago,” says Joseph Montana, commander of the Brough-Brownotter American Legion Post 82, perhaps the most active organization in town other than the elementary school.

Montana believes the change occurred because Bullhead was the name of the man who shot Sitting Bull in 1890. Neither he nor any of the other 300 residents seem to mind what a visitor calls the town. They aren’t likely to correct you, even if you’re writing a story for a magazine.

The people of Rock Creek are busy enough with daily living. Visit on any weekday morning and you’ll hear the happy shrieks of children playing at Rock Creek School. Cowboys might be loading saddled horses onto stock trailers for a trip to the tribal pasture. A young career woman — perhaps a teacher or a nurse — may be fueling her small car at the only gas pump in front of a tiny, old store as rooster pheasants scurry through tall grass on the banks of a nearby creek.

“They know it’s hunting season,” laughed Ivan Brownotter, a community leader and historian, when we asked about the pheasants.”Hunting’s not allowed within a mile of town and when the shooting starts they know enough to come to town.”

Joseph Montana and Ivan Brownotter fly flags on a butte above the little reservation town of Rock Creek.

Posed in the center of Rock Creek is a life-size image of a man with a rifle, a tribute to local soldiers who fought in World War I. Indiana artist E.M. Viquesney sculpted the infantryman and eventually produced more than 100 copies for courthouse squares, city halls and parks across the United States. He titled it The Spirit of the American Doughboy.

South Dakota’s only Viquesney doughboy is the one in Rock Creek. It was placed there in 1935, when the town was still Bullhead, after a $1,600 fundraising drive that culminated when Corson County Sheriff Charles Martin gave $500. The statue has been lovingly maintained in a tiny park with a bomb shell displayed over the entrance. Brownotter and other members of the Legion post recently transplanted ash saplings from the river to create a shady border.

Rock Creek has another unusual sight: Numerous tall steel flagpoles, created by a local welder and planted in cemeteries on the north and south ends of town, mark the graves of every deceased veteran since World War I.

The United States government has had a troubled relationship with Rock Creek and other towns on South Dakota’s nine reservations.Many residents trace their ancestries to Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull, two of American history’s most famous warriors who fought the U.S. military, and were killed — martyred in the eyes of the Lakota — as their people were being banished to hardscrabble prairies.

But their deaths and many other atrocities, disagreements, broken treaties and conflicts that divided the Lakota and the federal government have not deterred South Dakota’s Native Americans from signing up with the U.S. military, sometimes joining the very same units that wreaked destruction on their Native culture.

That’s not a mystery for Brownotter, who served in the Army in the 1980s and now devotes much of his spare time to the Legion post’s activities. He sees no contradiction to being a Native American in the military.”We love our country and we go to war to make sure our families are protected and so we can protect our culture and our heritage,” he says, while guiding us around town with Joseph Montana, his first cousin.

Montana came home to Rock Creek after serving in the U.S. Army and then living in Spokane, Washington. “My dad was Lincoln Hairy Chin and he was the commander when I was a boy,” he said.”He did all the work of painting and decorating the doughboy and he was the one who put the bomb up at the gate.”

***

The tradition of military service among Native Americans dates back to the Revolutionary War, when some Indians fought with the colonial army while others sided with the British. Indian men also served as scouts and trackers for the Union during the Civil War. In 1898, four women from the Standing Rock Reservation served the War Department as nurses in the Spanish American War. They belonged to the Congregation of American Sisters, a Catholic convent for Native women started by Father Francis Craft, the first priest ordained in Dakota Territory by legendary Bishop Martin Marty. Father Craft, who had Mohawk ancestry, spent 16 years in the territory and survived the 1890 Wounded Knee Massacre; he was attempting to defuse the conflict when the shooting began.

He and the four sisters worked at a military hospital in Jacksonville, Florida, and then were transferred to Havana, Cuba, where life must have seemed very foreign from the reservation prairie.

The Rev. Mother Mary Anthony, the leader of the sisters and a granddaughter of Chief Spotted Tail, died of tuberculosis in Cuba and was buried there with military honors by the Seventh Cavalry, the same regiment that was decimated at the Little Big Horn in 1876 and then killed 300 Indian men, women and children at Wounded Knee.

Holidays for veterans highlight the social calendar at Rock Creek. Major Tim Reisch (back row, second from left) marched with Larry Zimmerman, the state Secretary of Veterans Affairs, in a Veterans Day pow wow.

A generation later, U.S. military officials reached out to tribal leaders during World War I, asking them to encourage young men to join the fight against Germany and its allies. Robert Dunsmore, the veterans’ service officer for the Cheyenne River Indian Reservation, says oral history suggests that a general visited with a chief from the Standing Rock Reservation.”Then the chief sent runners to all the other tribes and told them it was OK for the men to go fight,” he says.”We were not even citizens of the United States at that time.”

The federal government had forbidden Indians to conduct traditional religious and cultural practices, such as the Sun Dance, and discouraged them from speaking their native language. Ironically, it was partly their language that captured the attention of some military leaders, who sought out bilingual Indians to transmit secret messages.

Little information can be found on the number of Native American soldiers who died during World War I, but among the 12,000 who served was Moses Clown, a young army private from Thunder Butte in Ziebach County. Forty-two years before Moses joined the army, his father, Amos, had fought Custer and the Seventh Cavalry at the Little Big Horn. His mother, Julia, was the sister of Crazy Horse, who said he would”fight to stay free (or) die a free Lakota if it comes to that.”

Crazy Horse’s death is well documented. Far fewer details are available of his nephew Moses’ death in 1918, but we know it happened during a battle in France, and that he received a hero’s burial in South Dakota.”None who witnessed the scene will ever forget it,” wrote the editor of the Dupree Leader.”The father, mother, brothers and sisters of the dead soldier, together with a large number of their friends, had gathered to await the coming of the train and as it came slowly to rest and the flag-covered coffin in the express car came into view, a great wail of sorrow went up from the waiting throng. As it was unloaded, the grief-stricken Indians gathered around with loud lamentations, laying hands and heads sadly and pitifully upon the flag.”

The next morning, Pvt. Clown’s body was buried several miles north of Thunder Butte, along a peaceful stretch of the Moreau River. The Dupree editor described the scene:”To the visitors it looked like a canvas city as their cars came into view over the summit of surrounding hills and descended to the river bank. In the center was a great teepee that had been specially constructed to contain the body. Its outer side was adorned in Indian fashion with illustrations of the tribal history and Old Glory floated beside at half mast.”

Many descendants of the young soldier still live in the shadow of legendary Thunder Butte — a promontory important to the Lakota and a natural landmark that mountain man Hugh Glass supposedly used to keep his bearings on his 1823 cross-country crawl to survival after being mauled by a grizzly bear.

The Cheyenne River Indian Reservation community of Thunder Butte, named for the nearby peak, has a few dozen houses, a church and school. Most of the residents are Clowns, and many of the grave markers in the cemetery bear that family name, which translates to heyoka in Lakota, meaning a wise person who teaches or leads by communicating in unusual ways.

All the Clowns of Thunder Butte know the history of the soldier who died in 1918, even 18-year-old Arnelle Clown who works as a nurse’s aide in Eagle Butte. She heard stories from older relatives, and has visited Moses’ grave in a small, private family plot several miles from town.

***

Moses Clown’s uncle, Crazy Horse, was killed in 1877 by U.S. soldiers at Fort Robinson in Nebraska. Thirteen years later, Sitting Bull was shot when a contingent of 39 tribal policemen tried to arrest the old warrior and holy man at his cabin because the U.S. military feared that he might join the Ghost Dance movement. Sitting Bull and his teenage son, Crow Foot, died during the botched arrest on Dec. 15, 1890 near the village now called Rock Creek.

Arnelle Clown and her extended family know the story of their ancestors’ war history dating back to Crazy Horse.

Historians believe the first bullet to hit Sitting Bull was fired by Lt. Henry Bullhead, the police leader who was also shot in the melee and died several days later. The community was later named in his honor, possibly by James McLaughlin, the longtime agent for the Standing Rock Reservation. A nearby town bears the name of McLaughlin.

Sitting Bull’s cabin was hauled away in 1893 for an exhibit at the World’s Fair in Chicago. Today a simple sign marks the spot along the Grand River, a few miles south of the community previously known as Bullhead.

The residents of Rock Creek never made an issue of their town’s former name — they just changed it and went on with life — but the history of the tribe over the past 150 years is complicated and contentious. Lakota leaders still clash with the U.S. government over health care, housing, education, law enforcement, taxation and the environment. A text of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which lists the Black Hills as part of the Great Sioux Reservation, is posted on the tribe’s website. In 2016, Standing Rock Reservation officials led a well-publicized protest over an oil pipeline in North Dakota. But it seems that neither historic nor current disagreements stifle the warrior mentality of serving and defending the homeland.

***

Rock Creek’s social calendar revolves around soldiers and veterans. On Memorial Day, the Brownotters, the Montanas and other veteran families hold services at six nearby cemeteries. Flags are hoisted on every veteran’s grave and an honor guard fires a salute. The second weekend of August is dedicated to a VJ Day pow wow, remembering the 1945 Japanese surrender that ended World War II.

The celebration includes Native dancing, races, tug-of-wars and other games. Teenagers re-enact the raising of the flag at Iwo Jima, and the Legion and auxiliary prepare several feasts.”We barbecue a whole cow for each meal,” says Brownotter.”We call it a waechujpi, which kinda means you should fill your plate more than once and then take some home with you.”

Adjutant General Tim Reisch experienced the reservation-style patriotism when he and several other officers of the South Dakota National Guard helicoptered into Rock Creek to participate in last year’s Veterans Day pow wow.”We saw great pride in the military,” he says.”The government conquered them and put them on reservations, broke the treaties, killed the buffalo herds and didn’t even provide them food. You could expect there’d be great animosity, but we see no animosity.”

Reisch agrees with Brownotter and others who credit the patriotism to a warrior culture.”Serving in the military fits their history where the warriors were highly revered. I know that a lot of Native Americans will go to active duty and then go back home, a veteran for life. They are proud of their service.”

Reisch served as sheriff of Miner County and head of the state Department of Corrections before assuming command of the state’s National Guard.”Back when I was in corrections I learned about the over-representation of Native Americans in our prisons, which is pretty disturbing.”

He hopes there may be opportunities in his current position to create more positive statistics.”Even before I had this job, the Guard was big on diversity. But we’ve really focused on it,” he said, pulling from the breast pocket of his uniform a plastic card that lists his nine priorities. Near the top — following family support, readiness and safety — is”Embrace Diversity,” which he describes as not just recruiting Native soldiers but going to great lengths to help them succeed.

A sign in Memorial Park at Rock Creek still refers to the town as Bullhead, its former name.

“Every member of our organization needs to feel that they can make it to the top,” he says.”But if you look at the wall of pictures of generals and senior commanders in our headquarters and nobody there looks like you then you will feel you can’t be in one of those positions.” Under Reisch’s command, the number of Native American guardsmen and women has grown from 100 to 142, a 42 percent increase in seven years. The number of officers has grown from four to seven.

Most of the growth has occurred in the Army National Guard, probably because it has units in 22 towns, including many rural communities near reservations. The Army Guard has also worked on visible projects on the reservations, including hauling timber from the Black Hills for firewood, infrastructure missions and medical support.

Based in Sioux Falls, the Air Guard doesn’t have those outreach opportunities.”The Army Guard has two dozen recruiters and they are spread around the state. The Air Guard has two recruiters in Sioux Falls, and you end up recruiting people like the body of people that are already there — so we have to continue to make an effort to expand from that,” Reisch says.

Despite the Army Guard’s recent successes, Native Americans are under-represented: they constitute 8.9 percent of South Dakota’s population, but only 4.5 percent of the Guard. Native American participation appears to be slightly higher in the Army, Air Force, Navy and Marines based on figures from the state Department of Veterans Affairs indicating that 6.2 percent of the state’s 72,030 veterans are Native American.

***

Stories from Rock Creek and other reservation communities further illustrate why Native Americans embrace the warrior culture. Robert Dunsmore, the Cheyenne River Reservation veterans’ service officer, hears them daily.

“If not for code talkers in World War I and World War II and Korea, the U.S. might have lost those wars,” he says.”They were sworn to secrecy, and they kept their words so they never talked about it. We’ve heard there were at least 200 code talkers from South Dakota, but we’ve only identified 70 of them. That’s a part of our history we’ve lost.”

Ron Eagle Charging of Eagle Butte says his father was a code talker who never spoke of the experience but instructed his children on the warrior’s duty.”Boys in the family are taught to fight for those who can’t — the weak, the women, the less fortunate. Even if you have differences among warriors you still fight together. Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull never got along but they shared a purpose.”

Paul Lawrence (left) and Ron Eagle Charging of Eagle Butte say Native American veterans struggle for access to health care.

Eagle Charging, 69, is one of several hundred Vietnam veterans on the Cheyenne River Reservation. He began his Vietnam tour as an ammunition specialist.”All I did was put the weapons together. We screwed the rocket heads on and loaded the helicopters.” Out of boredom and curiosity, he volunteered to be a door gunner on a helicopter, a position with a famously short lifespan.

Eagle Charging says he and other door gunners bolstered their courage by smoking marijuana laced with opium.”It made you so you’re not afraid to die,” he says, and it helped temporarily. But he came home with a severe case of post-traumatic stress disorder and diabetes, which he blames on Agent Orange.

Paul Lawrence, a fellow Vietnam veteran and a friend of Eagle Charging, lives with prostate cancer and diabetes. He says Native American veterans face special challenges, especially regarding PTSD.”They (Veterans Administration officials) like to blame the PTSD on the poverty and problems on the reservations instead of what happened to you in the war.”

Eagle Charging laughed in agreement:”To me PTSD is misnamed. Politicians made me sick. The P should be for the politicians.”

On the day we met the two Vietnam vets, they were planning to attend a meeting that was called to examine why the veterans clinic at Eagle Butte had suddenly closed. The story circulating around town was that the contract for the clinic had expired without any prior notification from the VA.

***

Cecilia Brownotter has received two Gold Stars from the U.S. government as recognition of family members lost in battle. Her brother, Joseph Hairy Chin, was killed in World War II, and a son, Dean, died in Vietnam in 1967. Five of her seven sons joined the U.S. military.

A deceased soldier’s marble headstone stands among several hundred graves that lie in a church cemetery at Thunder Butte. Wood crosses, many with names erased by the ravages of time and weather, mark most of the burial sites.

Cecilia, 89, lives with relatives in a small house near Rock Creek’s doughboy. For years, her husband, Clayton, a World War II veteran, and his cousin Lincoln Hairy Chin tended to the statue. Clayton, a tribal councilman, was known as the guy who could raise the funds, while Lincoln preferred the more solitary work of brushing red, white and blue paints on a picket fence that surrounded the doughboy.

Today, the fence is gone. Now the little park features the sacred circle of the Lakota, formed in cement blocks painted white, yellow, red and black. The ash trees from the river valley are starting to grow.

Children at the school watch as adults show respect to the warrior vets with tree plantings, flag raisings and pow wows. Veterans also talk to the youth about the benefits of joining the military.”I tell the kids that you get to see the world,” Ivan Brownotter says.”You learn a trade and you have benefits that will help you further your education.”

He suspects his preaching probably has less impact than the annual events, especially the VJ Day re-enactment of Iwo Jima.”We always give the teenagers plastic guns and helmets and camouflage shirts,” says Brownotter.”We shoot fireworks as the flag goes up on the hill. There are always a few girls who join in. It’s impressive to watch.”

The re-enactment was started long ago when Lincoln Hairy Chin was commander of the Legion post in Rock Creek. Montana, his son, revived it when he returned from Spokane a few years ago to work with the local Head Start program. Montana also founded a group called Band of Brothers that organizes holiday dinners, dances, movie nights and other events for the people of Rock Creek.

The legacies of Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull may be partly responsible for a strong military tradition on the reservations, but the present-day service of Montana, Brownotter and their generation plays an even bigger role in how today’s Indian youth view the world that surrounds Rock Creek and zip code 57621.

Editor’s Note: This story is revised from the May/June 2017 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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Bullhead Remembers the Doughboy

By Michael Zimny

South Dakota’s only Spirit of the American Doughboy sculpture, in honor of America’s World War I infantrymen, is found in Bullhead on the Standing Rock Reservation.

Though they often go unnoticed, “doughboys” are a staple in America’s small town squares. Not the Pillsbury creation but the ubiquitous, if barely noticed, monuments to American soldiers who fought in the so-called, “war to end all wars.”

The term “doughboy” originated as in-group military slang, working its way out into popular culture. It’s a strangely jolly sounding word for the people to which it referred, given where they’d been, but it stuck.

After the war, as millions of veterans returned to their communities, there was a drive to memorialize the doughboys. Doughboy statues popped up in hundreds of towns. Artists competed to capitalize on the trend. Many were made of cast bronze. Then an artist named Ernest Viquesney, of Spencer, Indiana, developed a mass-produceable number he titled The Spirit of the American Doughboy that became the most widely proliferated.

“The original model was made out of pressed copper, so it was cheaper than ordinary bronze,” says Les Kopel, who has compiled decades worth of Viquesney doughboy research on his Doughboy Searcher website. “A lot of towns that couldn’t afford a monument could afford one from Viquesney.”

Viquesney’s doughboy is no Michelangelo’s David. For a work that’s supposed to portray a soldier stepping into the hellfire of No Man’s Land, his visage is more like that of a man about to walk the dog. His pose is rigid, a grenade held aloft in an unnaturally stiff right arm.

“If you view the statue from the side and you view the Statue of Liberty from the side, the pose is exactly the same,” says Kopel. “I’m not sure he got his idea from that, but that’s my idea anyway.”

For all the doughboy’s lack of realism though, like his name, he radiates a sense of calm in the face of adversity. The art establishment panned Viquesney, but people didn’t seem to care. There are still 140 of Viquesney’s Doughboys around the country, not including copies.

The only one in South Dakota is in the tiny town of Bullhead, on the Standing Rock Sioux Reservation.

Wilma Tiger was born and raised in Bullhead and says the town’s annual Doughboy pow wow has long held an important place on the local cultural calendar. “It started with a pow wow by one lady that had it every year, Agnes Long Elk,” Tiger says. “She kept it going and of course I had grandmothers that were also on that. Now, it stopped for a while but then it was picked back up. And it’s been happening ever since.”

Among the names of Word War I veterans listed on the base of the memorial are Tiger’s grandfathers.

“A lot of the veterans in this community started way back in World War I,” says local American Legion post commander Joe Montana. “A lot them volunteered to go. It kind of went down the line from then, from families. Like my father was in Korea, and I kind of wanted to serve too because he served.”

Why such a strong tradition of service in Bullhead?

“I think it’s because a lot of them consider themselves warriors and braves,” says Montana. “They want to defend the country and they know they’re defending their people. Their people also live in this country. This country was established way back, way back before anybody came here. There was Native Americans, millions and millions of Native Americans that used to live here and everything else. So, just to defend the country and keep that mentality of being a warrior or brave that carried down from generation to generation.”

Though Bullhead was smaller, perhaps poorer, than most of the towns in the market for a doughboy, Montana says people pooled their money to get one. “They were like five hundred dollars short for the doughboy,” he says, “so a [rancher] out of McIntosh donated the last five hundred.”

As the Legion post commander, Montana is the doughboy’s caretaker. He recently painted the memorial to match the colors of uniforms in old photos.

Though the real doughboys of Bullhead are all long gone, the annual pow wow is still a draw. “We do turnip soup,” Montana says, “papa soup, tripe soup buffalo, beef, fry bread. A lot of the people living in Standing Rock too, they kind of know when the Doughboy is going to happen, because they start calling right away, start calling the district office here and asking about the pow wow.”

Veteran’s Day of 2018 marked 100 years since the armistice that ended the “war to end all wars.” But war is still with us. Maybe it always will be. After World War I, people wondered what it all was for. Now as then, people still remember their doughboys. Or at least they do in Bullhead.

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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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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Dancing in the Sacred Hoop

By Jerry Wilson

Kevin Locke plays a courtship melody he learned from Lakota elders on a traditional cedar wood Lakota flute.

He enters the powwow circle, and like a magnet draws all eyes. He is vigor and smile, a muscular man in long black braids. He wears an aqua ribbon shirt, beaded moccasins, a breechcloth over shorts. A duffel bag balances on his shoulder. He strides to the center and slides his load to the floor as the master of ceremonies announces his name: “Ladies and gentlemen: Kevin Locke.”

The audience stands and claps as Locke opens his bag. He extracts a traditional Lakota cedar wood flute from its leather wrap and begins to play. The song is a heart-opening courtship melody that Locke inherited from generations of elders, an intricate piece that softens the heart, mellows the spirit.

The tune comes to its end and tenderly he lays the flute aside. From the duffel bag he withdraws a big handful of four-colored hoops — red, white, yellow and black. He arranges the hoops on the floor before him. Four men around a big hide-topped drum begin to play. Locke picks up the beat of the drum, and the dance begins.

If the wistful notes of the flute had calmed the soul, the blood is riled to boiling by the dance to come. A whirling dervish, the veritable soul of a whirlwind, Locke scoops up the hoops, one by one, with his toe. They spin about his ankles, rise to his knees, then to his hips to meet his hands. Clockwise he spins, but in the blink of an eye his motion reverses. Around and around he whirls to the beat of the drum, the throbbing nucleus of the circle of humanity of which he has assumed the center.

The figures Locke creates in his dances are constructed of red, white, black and yellow hoops, symbolizing the interrelatedness of the human races.

Above his shoulders a delicate flower blooms from the hoops, only to metamorphose into a fluttering butterfly, then stars and moon and sun. As the dance goes on an eagle extends its wings, madly spiraling, calling forth the love, courage and intelligence of our hearts.

Long having passed the normal bounds of human endurance, the final movement of Locke’s dance at last begins. In this final symphony, a fabulous interlinked structure defines itself, the flower, the butterfly, the eagle and the heavenly bodies evolve to an orbiting globe of human diversity — 28 interlocked hoops, a picture of the unity of humankind.

The dance at its end, Locke bows low and thanks the audience for its thunderous applause. Carefully he extracts his body from the structure he has built and presents it to his audience on the floor. Though he is wet with sweat, his incredible stamina and athleticism belie his 46 years and his 20 years on the road. Hardly winded by the 20-minute, non-stop performance, he projects the words that his dance has spun.

The four-colored hoops represent completeness and unity, he says, the four human races, four directions, four seasons, four winds. “God wants us to reach,” he explains, “reach for more light, feed our roots and blossom. We are all branches of the great human family tree. We can soar like the eagles, give off fragrance like the flowers.” But we can realize our beauty and our potential only as we set aside our divisions, our distrust, our prejudice and fear of one another, he says.

His homily ended, Locke drags another 70 hoops from his bag and spins them across the floor to the people who form the circle. They step forward to embrace the hoops — Indian girls in jingle dresses, grandmothers in shawls, men in feathers and beads, others in jeans or suits — and the enchanted assembly joins the dance.

When that dance is done Locke gathers the hoops again, thanks the dancers and drummers, and offers thanks to God/Wakan for holding us in the palm of his hand as we walk with strength this beautiful road of life.

This is Locke’s second of three performances this day — the work around which his life has revolved for two decades. His performances have helped to revive the traditional Native flute, and he is among its top players in the nation, with 11 recorded albums of his music. And he is perhaps the premier living hoop dancer, having performed in 70 countries around the world.

Firmly rooted in Lakota culture, Kevin Locke has become a missionary for human harmony and global unity. Though South Dakotan by birth and by choice, he is also a cosmopolitan citizen of the world. But Locke didn’t plan to spend his life dancing around the globe. In fact, his formative years were passed in close communion with an elderly traditional uncle, Abraham End of Horn, who spoke Lakota and trained the boy in the traditions of his culture.

Locke grew up near Wakpala on the Standing Rock Reservation. When he left home in the early 1970s, it was to pursue a somewhat standard professional career. By the end of the decade he had completed the course work for a doctor’s degree in education at the University of South Dakota and was planning to study law. But then his calling came.

Locke projects an image of human harmony with this whirling chain of interlocked hoops.

A North Dakota brother, Arlo Good Bear, offered to teach Locke the hoop dance. Kevin would travel many places, meet many people, be an emissary from the Lakota people, his friend told him. Good Bear offered one lesson now, and promised more in the future. The two got together and Good Bear introduced Locke to the dance of the sacred hoop. A week later, Good Bear was dead. Locke was among the men who carried him to his grave.

Back to the traditional career in education or law, Locke thought. But then the dreams began. Not once, not twice, but again and again, he met his friend in his dreams. And there were others too, people from across the generations, people from around the globe, from many other tribes, Europeans, Asians, Africans. In the dream, Good Bear danced designs of nature, birds, flowers and rainbows. Locke saw that his brother had kept his promise. The lessons were continuing, and with them, a clearer definition of Kevin’s role. He saw that he must carry this thing forward, create patterns of beauty that would unite peoples around the Earth.

As his dreams foretold, Locke has traveled and lived among the tribes and peoples of the world. His heart has sponged the spiritual visions of all, his mind their wisdom. He has studied the spiritual quests of man, and conclusions have grown: At bottom, and properly interpreted, the great spiritual visions of humankind are the same. They lift our spirits, give us hope, unite our dreams, extend our arms around each other. This unifying vision Locke has found best expressed in the words of the 19th century prophet Bah·’u’ll·h.

Locke grew up under the influence of both Christian and Lakota spiritual traditions. But his personal vision coalesced when he found the teachings of Bah·’u’ll·h, a Persian nobleman in Iran who in the middle of the 19th century gave up the comfort and security of his princely life to seek and teach a vision of global unity of humankind. Bah·’u’ll·h taught that there is only one God and only one human race, and that all religions have been stages in the revelation of God’s will and purpose for humanity. “The earth is but one community,” he wrote, “and mankind its citizens.”

For Locke, the Bah·’i Faith is a logical extension of the teachings of Lakota culture. The family and tribal unity symbolized by the sacred hoop of the Lakota is broadened to include the entire family of man. Bah·’i incorporates the missions of transcendent visionaries such as Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad, finding unity instead of conflict in these separate visions. Now humanity has come of age, endowed with the collective capacity to see the entire human spiritual panorama as a single evolutionary process. It is that which calls Kevin Locke to be a global wanderer, an international envoy for peace, a prophet of unity.

Locke helps Lakota youth learn traditional songs and dances every summer at Milk’s Camp, a retreat on land that once belonged to Chief Milk in Gregory County.

Thus Locke has embraced the challenge of the new millennium we have now begun. “We must create a circle of humanity,” he says. “We must move out of our ‘boxist’ mentality, our tendency to categorize each other. In a hoop or a circle,” he notes, “there is no back row. Everybody has a front row. We must work to strengthen ourselves, links in a mighty circling chain, to overcome violence, addictions, racism and hate. ” More than the world’s most renowned hoop dancer, more than a leading reviver of the classical Native flute, Locke is intermediary for unity to the world, Lakota ambassador, proclaimer of peace to humankind.

“Global unity is inevitable,” he says. “Peace is inevitable. It’s a rendezvous that we have, and there’s no getting around it. But at the same time, potent forces of disintegration and chaos confront us. Our challenge is to connect ourselves with each other and with the powerful forces of cohesion in the world. The Bah·’i community is committed to random acts of kindness, to senseless acts of beauty,” Locke said. “But it’s systematic, a way of life.”

While Locke labors for unity and peace on the global front, he has not forgotten his native state. “I’ve seen a lot of progress toward racial reconciliation in South Dakota,” he said. “Of course it’s frustrating sometimes. I’d like to see things move faster. But there is movement, toward sobriety, toward recognition of spiritual unity, toward validation of our unique individual contributions. Today is part of a process, and hopefully we can measure progress as we move systematically down the path to reconciliation, from darkness to light.”

Watching Locke dance, absorbing the sweet melodies of his flute, listening to his uplifting words, it is hard to imagine pain behind his smile. Yet, like everyone else, Locke encounters negativity and conflict. “But I try to be non-confrontational,” he says. “I seek a positive avenue or attitude, and negative things evaporate and disappear.”

Watching the power and elasticity with which he dances, it is also hard to imagine that he will ever stop. Yet, at age 46 he knows he can’t maintain this pace and speed forever. “I plan to continue this particular spiritual mission as long as I feel I can make a contribution,” he said. “Or until I see a different path for myself.”

Kevin Locke gathers the last of his things, brushes back the strands of graying long black hair that have worked their way loose from his gyrating braids, and offers his hand. He is off to his third performance of the day, for a group of children at the middle school. Probably they’ve seen him already, on public television’s “3-2-1 Contact.” But they are about to encounter in person a man they will not soon forget. A man whose vision for their future could alter their lives.

Editorís Note: This story is revised from the January/February 2000 issue of South Dakota Magazine. To order a copy or to subscribe, call (800) 456-5117.

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A Fresh Look at Lakota History

By Katie Hunhoff

Yes, I can write a short sketch of my life, but there would not be very much, just a continual chain of duties day in and day out, always on a ranch, lonely and far from other habitations… Took care of ten children that came to me. I studied history of our own people to keep my mind occupied.

Josephine Waggoner wrote those words in 1932 to Frank Herriott, a professor who was trying to help her publish her writings of Native American history and life. Despite the work, the”chain of duties” she endured, she never stopped collecting the stories of her people. She wrote at night after her family members were asleep, and the cabin on the Standing Rock Reservation was quiet.

She began writing in the 1920s because she worried the history and culture of the Lakota were being lost as elders passed away without handing down their knowledge in the traditional way. She also wanted to correct untruths written by white journalists and scholars. Waggoner started to interview chiefs, elders, tribal historians and, unlike other white or Indian writers, she also interviewed women.

Although she never saw her work printed during her lifetime, it was finally published in 2013 thanks to Emily Levine, an independent scholar, author and editor in Lincoln, Neb., who took on the messy job of compiling Waggoner’s writings into one book, Witness: A Hunkpapa Historian’s Strong-Heart Song of the Lakotas.

Waggoner was born in 1871 at Grand River Agency, at the confluence of the Grand and Lakota rivers. Her father, Charles McCarthy, owned a trading store on the east side of the Missouri. When she was 10, Waggoner volunteered to be a part of a group of Indian children who went east to finish their education. She attended Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute in Virginia. She returned home after her schooling to work at St. Elizabeth Mission at Wakpala. Waggoner met her husband while working at another mission a mile south of Fort Yates. She married Frank Waggoner on Thanksgiving Day in 1889. Her husband was in the Army, stationed at Fort Yates. It was during her time at Fort Yates that Waggoner began to document what was happening around her, as well as conducting interviews and recording tribal stories.

Levine organized the documents into two parts. The first part contains stories of Lakota/Dakota history and culture and Josephine’s own story. The second part contains 60 biographies of chiefs and other Indians. The book starts with the oldest of the Sioux legends.”The oldest stories refer back to the stars; then stories of kingdoms; then next in line come stories of the ocean, water, animals, and tropical animals.”

She writes that the North American Indians once lived in Central America, before Aztecs. The Aztecs came from the north and conquered the people in the south.”Stories are told of tropical animals that never existed here in North America. The work with feathers and quills, the pottery and basket weaving were arts that were first learned in the south country, where civilization once reached a high standard,” she wrote.”Whether our people are of Mayan or Toltec descent can still be found out someday, perhaps, by someone who can make a deeper study of customs and languages. In the meantime, every true Indian that dies believes that his spirit will journey to the land of his forefathers by the same route that brought them north, the starry pathway called the Spirit Trail. The Milky Way is called the Spirit Road. The Sioux believe that that trail will take them back to where they came from.”

Unfortunately, she never had a chance to understand her contribution to preserving her people’s history. She once wrote to an editor, George Will:”You know Mr. Will I didn’t do much for my race after receiving an education at their expense. I got married and lived on isolated ranches living only for myself and family.” If only she could see Witness, a new, fresh look at the history of Native Americans during the tumultuous early 1920s and long before.

Witness (824 pp, hardcover) was published by the University of Nebraska Press in Lincoln. To order call (800) 848-6224.