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The Road to Lame Deer
By Jerry Mader UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS
Copyright © 2002 Jerry Mader
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8032-8886-7
CHAPTER 1
And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time.
T. S. ELIOT
I knew it was the last time. I knew it the way you know, long before it is declared, that a love affair is over; or the way you know, long after the burial, that the one you have loved is completely and utterly dead. That kind of knowledge makes you do queer things — things you do so you won't have to face the facts of death and failure.
And so, within that certain knowledge, I protracted my last journey to Lame Deer. I dawdled all the way from Missoula, pausing along the road at odd places, unconsciously avoiding the memorable ones where I'd stopped the car and rushed into the landscape to capture an image on film before the particular motivating light shifted and inspiration became yet another scenic postcard.
It was the first trip to Lame Deer I'd made in the complete absence of Tom Weist or Henry Tall Bull; one or the other had always been in the front seat with me or waiting at the other end. I dawdled through each of the 450 miles like a child on his way home from school to an empty house.
I didn't want to hear the story. I didn't want to hear it as much as I knew I had to listen. And I recognized, as I drove across Lame Deer Creek that morning, that this kind of necessity had generally characterized every journey I'd made to the reservation, a necessity whose unique imperatives were somehow heightened each time I entered the world of the Cheyennes. This time the story and its truth were already known, and facing that truth was going to be more painful than just knowing it. I knew that facing all the stories was, in the end, why I had journeyed in the first place. But that morning was different. I was by then a part of those stories. Henry Tall Bull was one I'd loved, and he was dead, and I had to listen to his wife, Irene, tell the story of his dying. And although I knew it wasn't true, I felt that somehow I had failed him.
I drove slowly past the Lame Deer Cafe and the IGA and thought about the traditional Cheyenne response to death. Since the time before the reservation, their answer has been the same: death is but one more confirmation of the unity of spirit in all things. And their belief continues in spite of Christian influence. For the Cheyennes, death reaffirms kinship within the people. Any death is an influence upon all relationships; no death is limited to a single family. No one dies alone.
The old ways said that when death comes, the lodge of the bereaved and its contents must be abandoned. Only personal items that would be interred with the deceased were to be kept; everything else was given away. The home might remain empty for months, sometimes for a year, before the family returned; often they never did.
When a child or a spouse died, members of the immediate family (usually the surviving spouse or the parents) slashed their forearms, legs, and faces or sometimes cut off the tip of a finger. Widows often cut their hair short. Then followed, after the burial and "giveaway," a period of wandering from lodge to lodge, where tribal kin fed and generally assisted those in mourning. At every stop the bereaved told the story of their loved one's death and confirmed again and again their homelessness and grief.
The wandering often continued for many weeks or months, sometimes as long as a year, before the family settled into a new home. Then relatives and friends came, bringing all the necessary articles and provisions for homemaking as the newly configured family was reabsorbed into the tribe.
The experience of the deceased was believed to be parallel to that of the bereaved. Like the mourners finding their way back into the community of the living, the spirit of the dead one needed to find its way into the world of all spirits — an indeterminate journey requiring frequent rest and sustenance. The grave, therefore, had to be above ground, the body wrapped in blankets or skins and covered with stones placed so the spirit might enter and exit with ease. Favorite articles from life were placed around the body: clothing, tools, sacred objects, tobacco, and food. The spirit within the food and tobacco would feed and calm the spirit of the deceased as it made its way to its place in the spirit world. Without this nourishment and occasional rest within the grave, the spirit risked exhaustion and its own death — a finality too dark for contemplation.
From the beginning of the reservation period, self-wounding and open-air interment were systematically suppressed by missionaries and Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) officials. But, as with all white influences, the Cheyennes yielded without essentially rejecting the old ways. Few now wound themselves, and white-style cemeteries have replaced open stone graves, but the essentials of traditional mourning remain: the giveaway, occasional relocation, and storytelling from house to house.
In front of Henry's house that morning, I sat inside the car for a long time. Curtains covered all the windows. Wind spun the ubiquitous red Lame Deer dust across the empty yard. The small front porch still sported three tattered dinette chairs and the rough oak table that had supported countless deer carcasses while Henry artfully butchered them and pitched scraps to the crowd of reservation dogs that belonged to everyone and no one, who lived everywhere and nowhere. Henry's house looked closed, but I knew Irene was waiting.
The neighborhood, always quiet, seemed overtly hushed and somehow expectant. The houses were in the typically unplatted arrangement of most Cheyenne neighborhoods, reflecting clusters of kinship rather than urban geometry. Everyone knows who is at home at any given time, even though no one seems to be watching. And so I knew that behind the closed doors and drawn window shades, inside their quiet homes, inside the singular stillness of that day, they all knew I was there.
Henry had taught me the Cheyenne way of visitation, and his pedagogy was also in the old way — by example and stories, never through injunctions or explanations. He admonished me only once. We had spent an hour in conversation with some older Cheyenne men on the steps of the Lame Deer Cafe, and I had offered a cigarette to just one of the men before lighting up myself. "If you don't offer to all, they will think you're stingy!" I waited in the car and gave Irene time. I too needed to prepare for the story she was going to tell. I had brought a gift — the portrait I'd made of Henry, which he'd enjoyed showing to visitors, each time announcing, "Look, Charles Bronson!" As I stepped out of the car, a red dust devil spun through the front yard and collapsed at the edge of the road.
Henry's car was still parked where I'd left it over three years before and had achieved permanent status as part of the landscape. Almost two years had passed since I'd visited Lame Deer, and now all the hesitation that had colored my return was attacking my legs. I leaned on my car, fumbled for a cigarette, started to light it, then put it away. I looked at the hill behind me and tried to remember how many afternoons we had spent sitting on the porch watching the colors change on that hill. And with that, I felt another reluctance. I didn't want to remember everything, but I knew that whatever she said, each of her words would release the memories, and I would have to face them all again. At last, I gave up and walked to the porch. My hand rose and completed one knock just as the door moved under it.
Irene's oval face looked up and around in the small opening and regarded me as one expected but sorely overdue for a visit.
"Oooh Jerry — come in, come in!"
I entered and stood awkwardly in the half-light. My eyes struggled to find her as she brought a dinette chair for me and then moved through the room with short arthritic steps to her place in the center. We sat opposite, and I kept my eyes from her as she took a set of photos from her purse.
As she prepared to speak, the shaded windows and walls seemed slowly to fall away, leaving Irene and me alone at the center of Henry's obituary. She sat straight. Her black eyes, fierce against the tears, looked directly into the void around us. Her arthritic forearms and hands seemed more twisted than ever, her deformed fingers oddly placid atop the stack of Polaroid photos in her lap.
As her soft measured tones marked each detail of the story, she handed a picture to me. Each snapshot presented a different point of view; all of them displayed Henry in his coffin. Her meticulous narrative progressed; my hands filled with photographs; and I slowly lost the continuity of it all, her voice finally a gentle buzzing at the periphery of the circle of shade around us. At last I choked on my own breath, startled by my sudden awareness of amnesia and the silence.
We had been silent for a long time. Irene, with her eyes still fixed somewhere beyond Lame Deer, was rocking slowly and humming a peyote song just above the horizon of audibility.
I was embarrassed and ashamed. I had disappeared under the monologue and retreated into some insulated internal place where the story couldn't reach me. When consciousness returned, I struggled for words within my cowardice. I was appalled by the poverty of responses available to me. What I was able to say seemed worse than platitude, but I was unwilling to offer the typical clichés celebrating the grieving process and eternal life. Those responses, typically so repressive, hide a deeper unwillingness to come to terms with death at all; we speak as if, through artful deletion, the specter will finally just go away, so we can all go on pretending that death isn't real.
Irene was secure in the Cheyenne way. And so she could tell the story, and tell it again, until his spirit found its way and hers found comfort after there was no more telling to be done.
Henry had died in the ambulance on the way from the Forsyth jail to the hospital — or so it was said. The reports were confused. Some said he had lain unconscious in jail for three days before the police called the ambulance. Others said he'd been badly and expertly beaten, the way certain thugs and some policemen know how to beat a man so that there are few external signs but massive internal damage. The police said he'd fallen into an alcoholic coma after he was arrested for fighting in the street. There was no autopsy. There was no inquest.
When I handed the Polaroids back to Irene, I realized that in all our time together I had not managed to make a photograph of her. And I knew that that possibility, along with many others not realized, would be committed to oblivion that morning. She managed a smile when I gave her Henry's portrait. "I'm going to live in Ashland with my sister. My arthritis is getting bad. He said the only time he had fun was when you and Tom came down."
The first time, we had driven from Missoula along the ragged edges of January, and Tom filled each mile with a virtually seamless monologue that blended Cheyenne history, his wife's anthropological fieldwork on the reservation, his work with Henry Tall Bull on the writing project, all manner of photographic possibilities for me, and his reiterated willingness to stop the car at any time should I see something worthy of a picture. And as each new subject was launched, he paused and insisted, "I usually don't talk this much."
But he couldn't stop himself. Tom's enthusiasm for Cheyenne culture was unrestrained, and so he went on for at least two hours, apprising me of his involvement with cultural activities on the reservation.
After Tobie's fieldwork was completed, Tom's parallel interests had earned him several invitations to help the tribe with educational projects. The newly formed Northern Cheyenne Research and Human Development Association had received a grant from the Johnson-O'Malley Foundation to collect stories and songs. These would be preserved as audio recordings and then put into book form. Also, under the 1964 Equal Opportunity Act, many educational projects had been started, including a bilingual program in the Busby school district. Tom's understanding of Cheyenne history and his writing skill made him an attractive choice as adviser and writer for many of these programs. He was currently involved in the production of booklets of traditional children's stories and a much-needed history of the Cheyenne people for use in the schools.
After Tobie accepted a position at the University of Montana, Tom began commuting once a month from Missoula to Lame Deer for cultural association or writing project meetings. The 450-mile drive can be daunting, and he was grateful for my company.
His talk was welcome. We didn't know each other very well yet, and in truth I had few purposes beyond my own curiosity and hope for fresh photographic subjects. At least that's what I told myself. And yet, as we pressed on toward the center of the state, an unspecified uneasiness began to fester in me. I was suddenly aware of the wider implications of what I was doing, and the midwinter sky only seemed to sharpen the contradictions implicit within Indian and white history in Montana. Those contradictions loomed larger as we got closer to our destination and I realized how little I had considered my intentions for this journey.
By the time we reached Livingston, halfway to Lame Deer, my uncertainties about where or for what purpose this road would or should take me were breeding claustrophobia in my guts. I could feel it rising toward my throat as the car windows began to crowd in around me.
I asked Tom to stop the car. I didn't tell him what I really wanted, which was to turn around and go home. Instead, I pointed to the mountains and reached for my camera. He found a wide spot, and I jumped out just ahead of my panic. I walked a few paces from the car and pretended to frame a photograph.
The sky was shifting toward whiteout. A blizzard was coming. The mountain wall was shrouded in veils of cloud still transparent enough to make ghosts of the peaks. In the lull before a blizzard on the high plains, the approaching storm pushes warm air out in front of itself — a springtime too brief to fool anyone. I let it blow over me and hoped it would ease my inner turmoil.
It failed. At the eye of the storm within, I found little beyond ignorance and a determination to photograph people as they were, unguarded, without pretense. That's what I told myself. But as I stared into the vastness around me, it was obvious I had no idea what I was doing. The distance between anything and everything else in Montana, including its inhabitants, achieved metaphorical precision as I confronted my ignorance. There were seven Indian reservations in the state, and I had seen none of them. I had no reference experiences to call upon, just the vague sense of repressed guilt most white Montanans share as the consequence of our painful history with Indians.
And so, as the first gust of the storm bit my cheek, I found the source of my angst. As a white man with a camera, who could be so easily perceived as just another white man once again invading, once again wanting to take something, I had a lot of context to build if I were to learn anything at all, let alone make photographs.
By the time I returned to the car, the Crazy Mountains to the north had disappeared inside the whiteout. We still had over two hundred miles to go, and the storm was going to chase us. We didn't slow down except for a quick fuel stop in Billings. And then, as the road climbed out of the Yellowstone valley, skirted the edge of the rimrocks above the city, and turned to the southeast, the storm threat relaxed, the sky opened, and I was awakened to a landscape I'd only read about.
This place had been the preferred hunting ground for Sioux, Crow, and Cheyenne. When Lewis and Clark approached the upper reaches of the Missouri River in 1803, this place was marked "Terra Incognita" on their maps. Seventy-five years later this was the place where the Sioux and Cheyennes lost their freedom on the great plains. As we headed away from Billings toward Hardin and the town of Crow Agency, the power of that landscape captured me, and it was easy to understand why the Plains tribes had wanted to live here forever. It was as if we drove perpetually at the edge of the world, balancing, delicately poised atop the line dividing earth and sky.
The sun was low when we at last turned off I-90 onto U.S. 212 at Crow Agency. Tom drove slowly as we passed the Custer Battlefield. I tried to see the white stone markers on the hillsides, but they were buried in snow. Tom, of course, had his own commentary about the place.
"Many of the Cheyennes who eventually reported the fight said Custer's soldiers panicked and shot themselves. Whoever actually killed Custer is still unknown, although White Bull, Sitting Bull's nephew, claimed he did it. Nonetheless, as the eyewitness reports came in over the decades, the so-called last stand turned out to be more propaganda than fact. Two Moon, a Cheyenne chief, said the whole thing lasted about as long as it takes a hungry man to eat his dinner."
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Road to Lame Deer by Jerry Mader. Copyright © 2002 Jerry Mader. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF NEBRASKA PRESS.
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