Tekst 34: Livet i reservatet i 1900-tallet

Følgende er John Fire Lame Deers (1900-1976 – der er lidt usikkerhed om fødselsåret, nogle kilder siger 1903) erindringer fra hans opvækst i et reservat i South Dakota.

Uddraget er fra bogen Lame Deer: Seeker of Visions, 1972, gengiet i Peter Nabokov: Native American Testimony. Penguin Books, 1999, s. 311-313.

There were twelve of us, but they are all dead now, except one sister. Most of them didn’t even grow up. My big brother, Tom, and his wife were killed by the flu in 1917. I lost my own little boy thirty-five years ago. I was a hundred miles away, caught in a blizzard. A doctor couldn’t be found for him soon enough. I was told it was the measles. Last year I lost another baby boy, a foster child. This time they told me it was due to some intestinal trouble. So in a lifetime we haven’t made much progress. We medicine men try to doctor our sick, but we suffer from many new white man’s diseases, which come from the white man’s food and white man’s living, and we have no herbs for that.

My big sister was the oldest of us all. When she died in 1914 my folks took it so hard that our life was changed. In honor of her memory they gave away most of their possession, even beds and mattresses, even the things without which the family would find it hard to go on. My mother died of tuberculosis in 1920, when I was seventeen years old, and that was our family’s “last stand.” On her last day I felt that her body was already gone; only her soul was still there. I was holding her hand and she was looking at me. Her eyes were big and sad, as if she knew that I was in for a hard time. She said, “Onsika, onsika – pitiful, pitiful.” These were her last words. She wasn’t sorry for herself; she was sorry for me. I went up on a hill by myself and cried.

[…]

But in 1920 they wouldn’t even allow us to be dead in our own way. We had to be buried in the Christian fashion. It was as if they wanted to take my mother to a white boarding school way up there. For four days I felt my mother’s nagi, her presence, her soul, near me. I felt that some of her goodness was staying with me. The priest talked about eternity. I told him we Indians did not believe in a forever and forever. We say that only the rocks and the mountains last, but even they will disappear. There’s a new day coming, but no forever, I told him. “When my time comes, I want to go where my ancestors have gone.” The priest said, “That may be hell”. I told him that I’d rather be frying with a Sioux grandmother or uncle than sit on a cloud playing harp with a pale-faced stranger. I told him, “That Christian name, John, don’t call me that when I’m gone. Call me Tahca Ushte – Lame Deer.”

With the death of my mother one world crumbled for me. It coincided with a new rule the Government made about grazing pay and allotments. Barbed-wire fences closed in on us. My dad said, “We might just as well give up.” He went back to Standing Rock, where he was from. He left my sister about sixty horses, forty scrub cows and one bull. I had about sixty head of broken saddle horses and fifty cows. My dad turned me loose. “Hey, I give you these horses; do as you please. If you want to live like a white man, go and buy a car till you are broke and walk on foot.” I guess Dad knew what was in my mind.

I started trading my stock for a Model-T Ford and bought things that were in style for the rodeo-fancy boots, silver spurs, gaudy horse-trappings, a big hat. I followed the rodeo circuit, but I wasn’t too interested in competing as a rider. It was just an excuse to travel to different reservations. My life was changed and I myself was changing. I hardly recognized myself anymore. I was a wanderer, a hippie Indian. I knew nothing then. Right or wrong were just words. My life was a find-out. If somebody said, “That’s bad,” I still wanted to experience it. Maybe it would turn out to be good. I wasn’t drinking then but soon would be. My horses and cows were gone. Instead I was the owner of a half-dozen wrecked jalopies. Yet I felt the spirits. Always at night they came down to me. I could hear them, something like the whistling from the hearing aid that I am wearing now. I could feel their touch like a feather on a sore spot. I always burned a little sweet grass for them. Though I lived like a hobo, I was visiting many old medicine men, trying to learn their ways.

I didn’t need a house then or a pasture. Somewhere there would be a cave, a crack in the rocks, where I could hole up during a rain. I wanted the plants and the stones to tell me their secrets. I talked to them. I roamed. I was like a part of the earth. Everything had been taken from me except myself. Now and then, in some place or other, I looked at my face in a mirror to remind myself who I was. Poverty, hardship, laughter, shame, adventure – I wanted to experience them all. At times I felt like one of those modern declawed cats, like a lone coyote with traps, poisoned meat, and a ranger’s gun waiting for him, but this did not worry me. I was neither sad nor happy. I just was.

I knew an old Indian at this time who was being forced to leave his tent and to go live in a new house. They told him that he would be more comfortable there and that they had to burn up his old tent became it was verminous and unsanitary. He looked thin and feeble, but he put up a terrific fight. They had a hard time dragging him. He was cursing them all the time: “I don’t want no son-of-a-bitch house. I don’t want to live in a box. Throw out the goddam refrigerator, drink him up! Throw out the chair, saw off the damn legs, sit on the ground. Throw out that thing to piss in. I won’t use it. Dump the son-of-a-bitch goldfish in there. Kill the damn cow, eat him up. Tomorrow is another day. There’s no tomorrow in this goddam box!”

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