The Trail Of One Thousand Tears-With Val Kilmer’s Thunderheart In Mind

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

They were waiting on a sign. That news had been given to them by an ancient tribal elder, Sammy Eagle Feathers, before he passed to the next life, given to the desperately spiritually poor (and every other which way too) Lakota Sioux who were waiting, waiting on a sign that the avenger of ancient wrongs was to come among them. Waiting for a few generations now impatiently for a leader, a righteous shaman to take their hurts away. Waiting always in forlorn hope in the rugged rural squalor of the reservation that they had been pieced off on by the‘great white father. Always waiting sitting in half-baked trailers and make-shift lean-tos. Places almost as primitive as those ancient dream teepees and sweet peyote hogans. Old wrecks of automobiles carelessly strewn around their sacred land like they were the new totem. Waiting on the side of the road, fellahin waiting on their haunches, looking for rides into town to buy the white man’s liquor (firewater for those addicted to those old time black and white cowboy and injun movies), some cheap untaxed cigarettes (useful for a little black market trade with the white man), and some super-processed food to fill tired and worn-out stomachs. Waiting too at Jimmy Two Feathers’ Gas Station for some major job to be finsihed on that broken down 1961 Chevy truck that needed to get a few thousand more miles on it. Waiting any way you described it.

The list of hurts in need of avenging, white man hurts, was endless from the time he set foot on the sacred land but they were looking for more immediate revenge for modern hurts, the killing of their tribal leaders, the jailing of their militants, and the grinding down of their slender hopes into powered dust. And always, always that unforgotten festering hurt of Wounded Knee told to every child almost before he or she understood any other ways of the world. As so one day Billy Three Crows came thundering into Red Cloud.That is a town in the nowhere Western tablelands on the reservation just east of Rapid City in the Dakotas, up in high Lakota Sioux country, country where the native population made the white man cry his fill for a while, before he then took exterminating angel revenge.

Billy Three Crows came to town though not as the shaman avenger but just on a routine job working for the dreaded Bureau of Indians Affairs. What did they call him in the BIA office in Rapid City, oh yah, a cigar store Indian. Even he laughed at that one, laughed to think that a quarter red skin would be able to solve the civil wars going on among the tribal factions exploding on the scene now that high grade shale, shale that sweet gas could be pulled out of making everybody, even the injuns, rich just as long as they saw it the big company extractors’way and granted the drilling rights to plunder the land once again (or somebody granted the drilling rights, maybe Sammy Eagle’s Nest, one the white man’s favorite kept Indians, and his confederates). And so Billy was to be the new sheriff in town, if he lived long enough.

But a funny thing happened to Billy once he got among his people, got to see that he had denied his heritage for the white man’s pot of porridge, denied his Native American heritage to say it properly these days, and little by little as he saw and heard what had happened he went “native.” That turn of events came to a point of no return one night, one moonless night, at the tribal dance of the new moon, a most sacred rite in timeless lore. An old medicine man, a man who had seen it all on the reservation since about Wounded Knee to hear the elders tell it, slipped a couple of peyote button into the new sheriff’s coffee. And that was when he had his vision, his previously denied connection to his past.

Now in the time of Billy Three Crows, the time we are talking about, the late1970s, these tribal dances were attended by all kind of people who were encouraged to be there by the elders as source of revenue for the tribe, a big source then. Especially at the summertime Dance of the New Moon which was held over several days (until that new moon came). So the night in question along with most of the Lakota Sioux who could get there, there were white garbacho tourists and a slew of hippies who had deserted the cities to go back to nature living in rural communes all over the West. And they, mainly young, as young will do, brought their own instruments to play along with the tribal drums, beads and sticks. A couple of guys, one calling himself Captain Midnight and the other Black Jack, had flutes and fiddles. Everybody was gathering around the huge camp fire which had an important symbolic presence in the dance as it lit up the canyon walls behind the crowds.

Once the tribal drums started, slowly and in synch at first, getting louder a little later, some strange images started to appear to Bill Three Crow against the multi-layered canyon walls. Strangely several others commented on them, including Captain Midnight and Black Jack who started playing their instruments, at first a little out of synch with the tribal drums but then catching up. Billy Three Crows then got up, got up as if possessed, and starting dancing like the images on the walls. As the music droned on those images got clearer and one and all, one and all who wanted to see, could see the outlines of some ancient warriors preparing for battle, getting their courage up, getting their spiritual affairs in order before their ancestors by a collective dance.

The music picked up, and Billy went into a trance around the camp fire. The walls appeared to become one great fire dance. Then a few moments later almost as quickly as they had appeared the images vanished into the canyon night. Billy kept on dancing for a bit, then suddenly stopped. At that moment he knew, knew as the on-looking elders knew, that he was the avenging shaman that his people had been warrior waiting for. And wherever that knowledge might lead, whatever hell was ahead, just that moment Billy Three Crows knew what it was like when fearless ancient warriors roamed those hills.