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Honoring Sitting Bull
Dear Bruce,
When most people think of December, what comes to mind might be the holidays we celebrate, gathering with family, and the turning of the page to a new year at month’s end. In Lakota Country, unfortunately, the end of the Gregorian calendar year is also inextricably linked with a pair of troubling anniversaries. In solidarity with us, I hope you’ll make a little room to remember them with me today.
First, Dec. 15, 2024 is the 134th anniversary of the assassination of the great Hunkpapa Lakota Chief, Thatanka Iyotake, or Sitting Bull. I, too, am Hunkpapa Lakota, and I’ll say that Sitting Bull is one of our most celebrated ancestors for good reason. To learn more, I urge you to read (or reread) this blog, which I penned last year to give you more about Sitting Bull’s life, the context of his death, and an action you can take and share to rescind Medals of Honor granted to U.S. soldiers responsible for the second anniversary I referenced: the massacre of hundreds of Natives at Wounded Knee just days later, on Dec. 29, 1890.
Photograph of Sitting Bull by David Francis Barry, circa 1883.
Tied to both of those anniversaries, I’ve been doing research and thinking a lot about the unique, historic nature of policing in Indian Country. In general, cops have never been especially friendly to us — even when they are from our communities. They have always been in direct correspondence with and there to enforce rules made by American governmental officials and corporate institutions that we all face together, even today. In turn, those entities have frequently displayed genocidal intentions and undertaken endeavors, from the Wounded Knee Massacre and the murder of Sitting Bull to railroading pipelines through our sacred lands, meant to degrade or eliminate tribal nations (or, potentially, anyone demonstrating the will to defend American lands and waters).
In our last message, my father thanked U.S. Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland (Pueblo of Laguna) for her service over the past four years. Let it not be lost on anyone the importance of a Native woman occupying that seat, because for many years, her department was (and sometimes still is) a great nemesis to our communities.
And that brings us back to Sitting Bull. In 1890, the Indian agent James McLaughlin, overseen by the U.S. military and the Secretary of the Interior, ordered him taken into custody. As 43 policemen and volunteers arrived that sad morning at the chief’s house and announced his arrest, a crowd of community members gathered at the commotion and began to protest. 150 Lakota arrived to protect him, and his son then led a group who attempted to free Sitting Bull from police custody.
Bureau of Indian Affairs police lieutenant Henry Bullhead and police sergeant Charles Shavehead, who bracketed Sitting Bull to prevent his escape, were shot. Mortally wounded, Bullhead then murdered Sitting Bull, shooting him in the ribs. Indian agent Red Tomahawk, who’d been behind Sitting Bull, then assumed command of the police. The ensuing fight resulted in the deaths of six police and eight Lakota protectors. After Thatanka Iyotake’s assassination, his people fled to join Spotted Elk (the brother of Iron Eyes, from whom my family takes its name). Then the band fled toward Red Cloud and the Oglala at the Pine Ridge Agency — and soon thereafter came the massacre at Wounded Knee.
These events live on with us — not just, unfortunately, as histories. As an Oglala who lives on Pine Ridge, I have witnessed police abuse in the modern day. And I have heard direct testimony and firsthand accounts of abuse of power and undue violence by Indian police over the past few decades. One example, and this is something I plan to expand on for you in subsequent messages, was the Reign of Terror on Pine Ridge in the early 1970s, which ultimately laid the foundation for the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973.
There is much more to say about that, and there’s so much more we can do moving forward. I promise you’ll hear more from me again soon. In the meantime, please hold us close, as you would all your loved ones at this time of year. I’m so grateful to be able to share with you, and I know that, together, we can continue to make progress. We can and we must use the often harsh lessons of the past to understand the present and create a future we can be proud of for all human beings.
Wopila tanka — thank you for your friendship!
Tokata Iron Eyes
Spokesperson & Organizer
Lakota People’s Law Project
INDIGENOUS MATTERS
Zionism
FREE PALESTINE!
- The Love Life of Clams
- The Siege of Gaza
- The U.S. Army – Day One, 1960
- The Vermont Railroad – front page news
- Thinking About Doing
- Three revolutionary white male US political leaders gone b4 their usefulness was exhausted
- Throwing Away
- To the Town Librarian
- Tools of Palestinian Terrorism
- Town Hall Commentary
- Travel
- Tribes
- Tryst with Death – Gina Puorro
- Ubud
- Uncle Sol
- Valentines Day in Israel
- Vermont Railroad – Back Page
- Vermont Railroad – Let Them Eat Moon
- Vermont Railroad – The Ecological Revolution
- Vermont Railroad – Weathermen
- Vermont Railroad – Weeds
- Vietnam
- Village in the Clouds
- Wellfleet – Another Universe
- Wesley Williams
- What I Found
- What I Left
- What The Stones Say
- when spring arrives ice flows out of the bay
- Whispering Among The Gods
- Willow
- Winter Fog
- Women
- Work and Love are What Really Matter: a reunion poem for the BHS class of 1958 reunion
- Yoga in Bagan
- Zionism
Glacier Speaks
Humans – hear me!
I speak for the glacier beings:
ice and gravel, crevasse, snowbridge,
rushing water.
Watch how we move. May watching bring you peace.
Think of the making of mountains, gorges,
ponds, rivers without end.
That is how we move.
Bonded together, turning over time,
great and lasting forms.
Our glacier ways are the old ways.
We are kin to the dew on the grass, the icicles
hanging from your gutters, the irrigation for your”
farmlands, the bubbles in your fountains.
Crystal and vapor are beautiful ways
we touch the face of the earth.
Two-legged beings, frantic and sad ones,
follow my path downstream from the mountains,
cascade and river current, flowing through marshes
and out to sea. Taking that journey over and over
I pass by you as cloud and rain and snow.
You are the frozen ones, believing yourselves
apart from each other and other life forms.
With your hearts, listen for the voices
deep inside the glacier. They will teach you songs of
the power of melting.
– Anne Wescott
Poetry
Failing and Flying
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
It’s the same when love comes to an end,
or the marriage fails and people say
Everyone forgets that Icarus also flew.
they knew it was a mistake, that everybody
said it would never work. That she was
old enough to know better. But anything
worth doing is worth doing badly.
Like being there by that summer ocean
on the other side of the island while
love was fading out of her, the stars
burning so extravagantly those nights that
anyone could tell you they would never last.
Every morning she was asleep in my bed
like a visitation, the gentleness in her
like antelope standing in the dawn mist.
Each afternoon I watched her coming back
through the hot stony field after swimming,
the sea light behind her and the huge sky
on the other side of that. Listened to her
while we ate lunch. How can they say
the marriage failed? Like the people who
came back from Provence (when it was Provence)
and said it was pretty but the food was greasy.
I believe Icarus was not failing as he fell,
but just coming to the end of his triumph.
– Jack Gilbert
Poetry
December 15, 2024
I have come to the conclusion that I have entered a new phase in my life, and that I am trying to adjust my behavior and expectations so that they are realistic and age-appropriate. I characterize this phase as preparing to die, and this involves an immense amount of acceptance as well as personal growth. While my consciousness and intellect seems to still operate at what I would call an adult level, my body is very clearly diminished in its capacities. God forbid I would have a fatal disease and a terminal diagnosis and this would all be more urgent and real. But the fact is that I am 84 years old and significantly weaker, limited, and slowed, and sooner or later I will stop breathing, lose consciousness, and no longer exist as a self-aware person occupying space on planet Earth. I have even come to imagine that there is some aspect of my being that is present in me, that preceded and existed before there was a me as such, and that actually may continue as an energetic entity without there being this Bruce as either consciousness or as an embodiment. Soul or spirit is what this entity is popularly referred to as, but those words really don’t have specific enough meaning for me to use them casually. But it is something beyond individual molecules, although if molecules turn out to be “alive” and energetic, which they must be, then I really have no idea what I’m talking about.
In any event, in the same way as if I had a terminal illness, I have a terminal is-ness and I know it, can feel it, appreciate it, accept it…and almost welcome it. I have separation anxiety, but not really non-existence anxiety. The universe is simply too immense in all dimensions, but especially time, for me to expect that my personal self-consciousness has any likelihood of persistence beyond my extinguishment. The drop of mist or spray that momentarily appears as an independent entity on the crest of an ocean wave and then falls back as H2O united with the great oceans is still the clearest analogy I can find to the notion of what my individual existence is. It’s actually a nice feeling when I perceive it in that manner.
And so I lay abed a lot, reading, listening to music, eschewing politics, challenged by how to fill the time, irrelevant and unproductive, comfortably breathing, knowing, being, appreciating. I am almost happy.
JOURNAL ENTRIES
Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads
Don’t fall in love with a woman who reads,
a woman who feels too much,
a woman who writes…
Don’t fall in love with an educated, magical, delusional, crazy woman.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who thinks,
who knows what she knows
and also knows how to fly;
a woman sure of herself.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who
laughs or cries making love,
knows how to turn her spirit into flesh;
let alone one that loves poetry (these are the most dangerous),
or spends half an hour contemplating a painting
and isn’t able to live without music.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is interested
in politics and is rebellious and
feels a huge horror from injustice.
One who does not like to watch television at all
Or a woman who is beautiful
no matter the features of her face or her body.
Don’t fall in love with a woman who is intense,
entertaining, lucid and irreverent.
Don’t wish to fall in love with a woman like that.
Because when you fall in lov
with a woman like that,
whether she stays with you or not,
whether she loves you or not,
from a woman like that, you never come back.
~Martha Rivera-Garrido
Poetry
my brain and heart divorced ~ john roedel
my brain and
heart divorced
a decade ago
over who was
to blame about
how big of a mess
I have become
eventually,
they couldn’t be
in the same room
with each other
now my head and heart
share custody of me
I stay with my brain
during the week
and my heart
gets me on weekends
they never speak to one another
– instead, they give me
the same note to pass
to each other every week
and the notes they
send to one another always
say the same thing:
“This is all your fault”
on Sundays
my heart complains
about how my
head has let me down
in the past
and on Wednesday
my head lists all
of the times my
heart has screwed
things up for me
in the future
they blame each
other for the
state of my life
there’s been a lot
of yelling – and crying
so,
lately, I’ve been
spending a lot of
time with my gut
who serves as my
unofficial therapist
most nights, I sneak out of the
window in my ribcage
and slide down my spine
and collapse on my
gut’s plush leather chair
that’s always open for me
~ and I just sit sit sit sit
until the sun comes up
last evening,
my gut asked me
if I was having a hard
time being caught
between my heart
and my head
I nodded
I said I didn’t know
if I could live with
either of them anymore
“my heart is always sad about
something that happened yesterday
while my head is always worried
about something that may happen tomorrow,”
I lamented
my gut squeezed my hand
“I just can’t live with
my mistakes of the past
or my anxiety about the future,”
I sighed
my gut smiled and said:
“in that case,
you should
go stay with your
lungs for a while,”
I was confused
the look on my face gave it away
“if you are exhausted about
your heart’s obsession with
the fixed past and your mind’s focus
on the uncertain future
your lungs are the perfect place for you
there is no yesterday in your lungs
there is no tomorrow there either
there is only now
there is only inhale
there is only exhale
there is only this moment
there is only breath
and in that breath
you can rest while your
heart and head work
their relationship out.”
this morning,
while my brain
was busy reading
tea leaves
and while my
heart was staring
at old photographs
I packed a little
bag and walked
to the door of
my lungs
before I could even knock
she opened the door
with a smile and as
a gust of air embraced me
she said
“what took you so long?”
Poetry
