NEW WORK, from upcoming book Ghost Rider Roads (Wild Embers Press, Dec. 2011)....collected/by antoinette nora claypoole
Prologue
by antoinette nora claypoole
Last night I slept on the sofa of a friend I met in graduate school many years ago, While dreaming. I became a breathe a comma between life's sentences. And here, then, there off the I-10 heading east from Los Angeles, somewhere between Whitewater Canyon and West LA two old friends I haven't seen in a very long time. Arrived. In classic American Indian wild west style. They came to me. In my dreams. Both used to live in Indian Country. That's where we met sometime before freeways were this crowded. An empty hotel bramble bush. Outside of a Safeway crushed soda can parking lot. Dave Chief. John Trudell. Both Lakota, both people I called family. Once. Before we inherited this peril called a 21st century.
The last time I saw Dave Chief was right after Mother's day 2005. He died suddenly soon after that. It wasn't the buffalo stew I cooked for him. Or anything. He had been having dreams of his own. About large camps of people and fields burning and messages from old timers. And suddenly it seems he joined them without much as a whisper about the leaving. So Indian. But here he was. Last night. Back from the slippery slopes of death. Here. In California in my dream. Like an old Mamas and Papas song. "all the leaves are brown". They were both dying. Or dead. Or someplace in that twilight space where only meteors and promises reside. A collision of time was inside of me. Dave Chief. With his beyond shoulder length graying hair, awoke. From his death. He got up slowly in his blue jeans and cowboy button shirt, no hat on, his hair down. Rugged. Just like he was born. On the side of a dirt road, the wagon pulling over while his mother brought him to us. Last night. No sage stick. No abalone shell. No shoobla doobla new age Indian stuff. No pipe bundle or altar and buffalo skull. Just him. Casually rising from his place of death. It's almost Easter for the Christians and I wondered for a minute, this morning, if I was actually having Jesus, Catholic girl flashbacks. Or something.
Resurrected icons on my mind.
Nonetheless I stayed with the dream. I hung out with Dave and didn't pull my eyes open into night. Like the shades covering neighborhood rappers. In this bedroom community. The full moon was swallowed by smog. I knew if I left Dave Chief even just to blink or paint his desert, his existence there would only be night, hollow emptied like the hollywood hills. I stayed there. Like a broken neon light where cigarettes are still the rage. There. In the room with Dave. He had been laying down and got up fully dressed, no crinkles in his jeans slowly, walked around toward me. I said something trite, like you need an ashtray, stumbling over myself like I often did in Indian Country. Something like "Dave, but you died. SO suddenly. You can't be here walking around, kid". I did call him kid occasionally. While we hung outside of some event or another. In Northampton, Mass. or at a Peltier rally in Oregon. Smoking Pall Malls if lucky. Me rolling organic American Spirit on other days.
"Dave. You are dead".
He didn't say much to that little proclamation. Just came around to me and started singing a Lakota song. He said "antoinette, Just wanted to teach you this song". Yep. I am serious. Nope. This is not an essay on how Indians are. This is an introduction for you, from me, about how my life with Indians has been. My trek inside the moccasin telegraph. And Dave was that, last night. Like he always was. Teaching young people the old songs. Back in the day.
But I am not young and about as far from Indian Country as I am from the old Ashland, Oregon mobile home. Oregon is a lifetime away from this gangland helicopter infested "inland empire" off the I-10 the Redlands side of San Grogorino. Still. Dave persisted like he always did. Cancer Sun, heart of rowdy denim and gruff warrior stance of an ancient Homerian legend. Dave sang a song. In Lakota. No drum. Sang and sang and I was home then. Yes well I can feel Sherman Alexie breathing down my literary neck. Right about now. If he is loathe to Barbara Kingsolve, r let's just hope he never reads me, right?
There is nothing I can do about it. This was my life for 25 years. In Indian Country. Dave came back and wanted to be sure I was singing with him. I did. I was the song he wanted me to learn and In those minutes he had me convinced he was back. We were back. In Ashland, We were back. Together. We were timeless and in a moment. Gone again. He laid back down to death. And sent in his old brother friend to see me next. I felt like I was in line at a movie show waiting for the autographs I already had collected. I accepted the continuance of crying for a dream. I moved up the hill of night like a lone wolf on an outmoded quest. Exit. Dave Chief, enter John Trudell. In my dreams. He is, alive in "real" life but in the dream he's dead, clearly silent, cold, laying flat on his back in an old sharkskin suit coat and jeans. No glasses on. I stared at him. Leaned over his cold body. My old. Lover. Whose words I had fallen asleep reading. An interview done with Trudell, an interview no one has ever read. I don't think it will be in this book, either. Words people may never see in print. Lucky or stupid enough to have copies of his muddled version of reality about Annie Mae Pictou Aquash, M'ik M'aq (1945-1975/6) a member of the American Indian Movement who was found murdered in 1976. A woman for whom my first book was written and published. Long after her death. I was reading Trudell's version of murder, his reality as repeated to one of Leonard Peltier's lawyers. Once. And then I fell asleep.
Observe Orient Decide Act. Echoing, memorizing my night.
Not believing John was dead. Because Dave Chief had just defied death and I thought I was becoming a fast learner. I was right. My once dream lover suddenly opened his eyes. I did nearly jump out my dream jamies, nearly rolled off the sofa in fright. He glared at me. He had no song to teach. Not a word. Only a glare, a stare and I was happy he was here, in this world of dreams, He looked. Like he always did. Skiddishly. Into my soul. I knew I had to be. Truth. There is nothing left untold. And then I sang him a lullaby. There is nothing you need to do, sleep sweet baby, sleep. It seems he listened to me, like he once did, we the homeless strays who together. Imagined blue corn cakes, one fine day. I was telling him there was nothing he could say. It was up to me, now.
This morning I did the make black tea, babysit my friend's daughter while mama attended a writer's group, chatted with my daughter about her seeing Barack Obama in person, up in Oregon and just did all the early spring things. A Saturday in S. California brings. Then. Late in the day I phoned a lady in Las Vegas. About a writer's conference. She immediately told me a story about selling her as yet unwritten book to a publisher. It is a murder mystery. She said "even the most unlikely things can happen. If you are open to telling people how important your story is. And why it is so unique." I had only phoned to find out the schedule of events. I wasn't looking for happy ending tales of writer's can make a living, too, stories. But there it was. Her story forced me to visit my story. I opened the Indian Essays folder on my mac laptop. The book I started 5 years ago. I had been sifting through the files all week, truth be told. Wondering whether to try one last time, to find a publisher for these words, these people, these ways of life that I have had the misfortune to watch die, in one way or another, as each essay, interview and poem went to print.
Indian Country is no longer the dusty road to lodge I met nearly 30 years ago. When I trekked from Pittsburgh, Pa to the west. To Oregon. To Coos Bay and Seven Devil's Road. Oh no. This is not the same world for any of us. But ride that bus, I did. I must. I must not bury the stories away. That is what the dream explained. I must have the courage I had when, with my 7 year old daughter, I packed an old army navy, heavy green canvas bag and boarded the greyhound to start a new life in the west. In 1981. I must have the courage to simply tell the stories. Of how Indian Country has died for me and how it brought me life.
For so long a time.
I am not afraid to say as a hippie, finding the Indians was the next best thing to living on a commune in Vermont, free school, vegetarian kitchen and all. Back in 1973. Yes. Indians were living connected when I met them. And our lives intersected. A sweat lodge I went into, not long after Freedom of Religion, signed by Jimmy Carter in 1978, gave me this story today. Up near Pilot Rock in Southern Oregon, before the horribly controversial SunDances of that land, up there Wallace Black Elk told my pregnant with second baby self, when he could see I was ready to drive away in my 1960 volvo rather than ask him for healing sweat for my baby's arrival. Wallace saw my trepidation, my white shy silly girl look, or something. Because before I drove away he came to my car and said "we are glad you are all here. there are prophecies about all this. A time would come when the ancestors of those who killed our people would arrive. Their children would help roll back the carpet of blood which covered this land. It rolled out from east to west. The prophecy said you would come. And help. Roll back the bleeding Earth, back from the west, back to the east. That you would come here, to the west."
Not we shall be released. More like listen and become. Wallace Black Elk continued: "And we are all four nations. All four colors of skin. Come to live together here. Your coming here today makes us feel the prophecies are ready. We are all here. Red, yellow, white, black". Wallace said that, and a few years later Corbin Harney gave me the same story. Like that. I know. Perhaps passé these days, but true. Wallace Black Elk had me, like Rene Zellwiger in Jerry Maguire. He had me at hello.
Not we shall be released. More like listen and become. Wallace Black Elk continued: "And we are all four nations. All four colors of skin. Come to live together here. Your coming here today makes us feel the prophecies are ready. We are all here. Red, yellow, white, black". Wallace said that, and a few years later Corbin Harney gave me the same story. Like that. I know. Perhaps passé these days, but true. Wallace Black Elk had me, like Rene Zellwiger in Jerry Maguire. He had me at hello.
All that was a long time ago.
And today Indian Country is more like there are triplet strip malls where nasturtiums used to grown. Wild. It is not. Paved is not. A place I stop, I visit, I take to. It is not the barefoot place of my youth. Nor the feast of giveaways inside my middle years. Indian Country is an old growth clear cut for government roads. And I shall do my best to, no, not plant trees. But to stretch into multi dimensional realities, hand you a kaleidoscope and cut the frayed tethered rope which harnesses a past which is neither glorious nor gone. Neither lost nor fruitless. Neither hapless nor pranna for nirvana. It is a dream. I share with you. One which has many endings. And is not defined by beginnings. It is a dream which sings a song from other worlds. Welcome. As I tell it I travel the place of bronzed flower revivals. Whether or not my feet are scorched by the asphalt of a parking lot where once a ceremony fell, like shooting stars, from a sky into a lake. Inside a desert wired for sound by birds who warble night.
Here find interviews, essays and stories which re-present Indian Country as I found it. When I arrived. Indian Country as it comes to me still, In dreams. Renegades. Founding members of the American Indian Movement (AIM). Men and women who ran weapons to defend the right to sing and drum. Women and men who died in that fight. They once became my friends. And now. Some children have grown to burn books written by hippies who once tasted the same desert rain. As they. Now. Dreams. Are where we really live.
antoinette nora claypoole
Redlands, Ca. April 2008
Nottingham, New Hampshire
Nov. 2011
"Decades of Deceit" by antoinette nora claypoole
Jan. 24, 2011. An old hotel where "movie stars" have stayed, an Indian Reservation where women are still found frozen to death. A fancy bronze sculpture of an "Indian warrior". Bars and Courtrooms. That's Rapid City, South Dakota. In a line: a colonizer's town where the Indian Wars were never quite ended.
Today, after years of fighting Extradition from Canada for the murder of his friend Anna Mae Aquash, John Graham, for whom this blog was begun, faces sentencing in South Dakota State Court. He was found guilty in Dec. of "kidnapping leading to murder", found not guilty of pre-meditated murder. And sentenced, today, to "life in prison". His daughter, his friends and family have always believed his innocence. And today he spoke, after not having taken the witness stand during his trial.
According to witnesses, John Graham faced Anna Mae's daughters, in the courtroom today during sentencing. And explained. What had said to me in my interview with him. What his family and friends know. He never murdered Anna Mae Pictou Aquash. When I attended his 2005 extradition hearings in Vancouver, B.C., stayed at a "support house" in the city, I learned alot about John Graham, the love his people have for him, and about the man himself. A gentle demeanor, his was not accusation nor anger, vindictiveness nor hate. It was sorrow at having been targetted by people he considered his "friends".
"Once in the 80's", he told me in a funky coffee shoppe not far from where he checked into parole each day, " Once John Trudell and Dino Butler were facing some heat in the States. THey needed to hide out. I gave them a safe shelter here in B.C. until things cooled off. Why would Trudell turn on me?? And tell lies." Graham said this over coffee, in a near whisper. Perplexed. "I cared about him. He was my brother". Shaking his head, looking for the creamer as a distraction to the pain.
Trudell, in fact, had "identified" Graham for the FBI, and his statement was KEY in the extradition of John Graham. In Court, before I left back for the States, the Judge confirmed reliance on Trudell as key in the decision to uphold extradition. (search this blog and you'll find the details). And. What else COULD he do? The Federal Government has pathways to their version of truth. And taking their route is often, the only option out of the woods. Alive.
It is not only the loss of a father, activist and friend which has struck Vancouver, B.C. and White Horse Junction up in the Yukon, but also the deep scars of betrayal which were ripped open as not one old AIM person defended John Graham. With neither a statement nor a testimony, a letter or a song. In fact, when Floyd "Red Crow" Westerman was still alive, he HAD planned a great benefit/event in San Francisco for John Graham. That was during the Looking Cloud trial, back in 2004. Trudell was initially going to be there, with Floyd. But the day after i broke the news on KPFK Pacifica Radio, Westerman "cancelled" the event. When asked why he/Trudell claimed "it was just too controversial" to support John Graham.
Today, Graham's daughter Naneek, a strong and devoted woman, was quoted in the Rapid City Journal as standing by her father. Naturally. "Believing his innocence."
Anyone who has met John Graham, talked with him and considered the circumstances of his arrest stood with Naneek in that courtroom, awaiting another mandate by "justice". Graham's lawyer plans an appeal, Anna Mae daughters--their vendetta persisting-- continue to call for more indictments of old AIM they claim "ordered her murder". And I. Wonder at all the people I have met in the American Indian Movement over the past three decades. Feel all those I have known. Some dead. Many whom I have loved. I feel the heartbeat of lying as a way to save one's life. I read and re read the FBI affadavits about "Annie Mae Aquash" alive in Jan. 1976, a month after people claim Graham Killed her. I recall the first person who told me about Paula Giese, a friend to Annie Mae, how Paula saw Annie Mae after the date people say Graham killed her. And how Giese died, how Annie Mae's husband Nogeeshik died after "finding out who killed her".
In my mind. Many AIM lives have been destroyed. Because the United States has yet to cease the Indian Wars. And all these murdered. And all those alive, but dead, nonetheless. Are now joined. As a song around the "old days" drum. Variant shrills of war woven with love of the Earth. Pounding into our hearts. To become One was the dream. To connect with all things truth. These ways are all but gone. Otherwise, John Graham would not have been sitting in a white man's courtroom. With Indian "children" looking to big daddy "justice" to dish up mercy. Something in the entire fates of Nations. Of Human Beings. Has gone terribly wrong. John Graham's "sentence" and conviction are the mirror within which we all must face "the truth of the lie".
